Letter to the Editor: The value of the Daily

My school day does not start without The Daily. The blinding smell of ink and the feel of feather-paper against my fingertips are familiar friends. A copy is always close by. I’ll argue with my peers about leads, raise my eyebrows at three-star reviews and quote columns at lunch. So much can happen in 24 hours.

It is thanks to a relentless team of student-journalists that Tufts has a strong sense of self. Student publications are living records of young people at the forefront of the times questioning the world around them. That’s the power of keeping record: we document what our passions and concerns are now. Years down the road, a student will dig through the archives and glimpse back at us — at our efforts at divestment, our disappointment with Oscar nominations and our unravelling of the university’s relationship with the Sacklers. This is who we are.

And Tufts students are not perfect. That’s another beauty of student publications — they make mistakes and learn from them. And this pursuit of knowledge, need for discourse and devotion towards documentation are what makes our campus news publications distinctive. So yes, exercise active readership by criticizing the Daily, but also continue to read and support it. Independent print news sources are quickly losing their footing in a world stooped towards living online. I ask you to consider how lucky we are to control what news we ingest, to know what journalistic standards to which our writers hold themselves accountable and to have a local news source untainted by big money interests. We don’t know the value of things before we lose them. For me, the Daily signifies a consideration of all things past, present and future: a capsule of autonomy that I can hold in my own hands, to be read with my own eyes.

Akbota Saudabayeva, sophomore and PoPro editor at the Tufts Observer