Honestly, it's not a question I'd really asked myself until someone forwarded me this piercing story for SCCC's current student publication, the Central Circuit.

But where the Circuit came from, why it's self-consciously fluffier and less newsy than its doomed predecessor the City Collegian, and how that newspaper was slowly undercut by school officials is the subject of this careful (and coolly mournful) story by SCCC student Casey Jaywork.

Some choice sections:

But there are other Collegian stories from Wyman’s tenure which might have embarrassed the college and Student Leadership and plausibly motivated intensified administrative involvement. For example:

• Its coverage and criticism of the Associated Student Council’s (ASC) controversial decision to use $465,000 of student money toward the opening of the Science and Math (SAM) building, purchasing furniture that the school had failed to budget for. To celebrate Evans, the ASC attempted to name the SAM’s Learning Center after her; in response, Collegian Managing Editor Chris Bruffey disparaged Evans as “the equivalent of [a] live-in lobbyist.”

• Its coverage of two consecutive Seattle Central security managers who both allegedly violated the federal Clery Act by failing to accurately record and report campus crime. Both resigned.

• Its coverage of the (still ongoing) strategy by administrators to fill budget holes by courting international students, who pay much higher tuition than domestic students.

But the main bone of contention that year was whether to require paid Collegian staff to register for a minimum of 10 credits per quarter, rather than simply be a registered student. Wyman and Swedish held that the burden of 10 credits would effectively prevent quality student journalism: between keeping up with class and working a second job to make rent, editors would have little time for their Collegian duties.

And this evocative little nugget might be my favorite:

It is not clear what other members of the PubBoard thought, because—in violation of state law—there are no public records of its meetings... When I suggested to Chesneau that Mansfield might have had a conflict of interest serving as both chair of the PubBoard and head of college Public Relations, he was skeptical.

Sometimes, when newspapers are too critical of powerful people, they're dramatically shut down. Other times, they're slowly starved to death—their thornier writers are edged out, their sharper critical edges are sanded down. It sounds like the Collegian suffered both kinds of attack. As Jaywork reports:

According to the Circuit’s first editor in chief, Cassandra Piester, the magazine was envisioned as less hard news and more culture and opinion. Piester insisted on keeping most of what she told me off-the-record for fear of reprisal, but when asked point blank “Did you feel like you had the journalistic freedom to investigate the history of the Collegian without interference?,” she replied, “No.”

Go read the whole thing and then check out former Collegian faculty advisor Jeb Wyman's account of what happened.

The fate of a Seattle community-college newspaper might not seem like a huge deal if you live in, say, Chicago—but it reads like a little microcosm drama of the insidious, smiling, candy-coated forces that are fucking up journalism all over America.