(above) Art courtesy of Karl Boardman. See more at hellsgnaw.tumblr.com.

At the end of 2010, Matt Town released the first issue of Speedball, a local zine with raw and edgy aesthetics, influenced by graffiti, tattoo design and skateboarding.  Town describes the zine as a visual stimulant and a literary depressant.

Now, three issues later, the zine can be found in places like Anthem Tattoo Parlor and the Civic Media Center. Town serves as the publisher and editorial director of the zine, and with the help and support of his friends Nicholas Luvaul, Jason Henry, Karl Boardman, Carlos Jaramillo, Tyler DuMais and Margaret Dodds, the magazine enjoys a local reputation for its creative release parties and unique content.

While skateboarding serves as the backbone of Speedball, Town also aims to showcase local art and to highlight topics that might otherwise go uncovered by the mainstream media.

“It’s a cool way to express ourselves without censorship,” he said.

Although he gets inspiration from printed magazines like Lowcard, Thrasher, and Vice, Town said Speedball is a project unlike any other.

“We focus on visual aids rather than literary. Sure, there are going to be awesome interviews and articles to read, but I want to keep the idea that a picture says a thousand words.”

As for the future of Speedball, Town and his friends agree they want to reach a greater audience and expand their content geographically. Town’s goal is to create a tight-knit community of friends, artists and musicians but always tie the zine back to Gainesville.

“He’s not trying to show off,” Carlos Jaramillo, a photo contributor, said in reference to Town. “He’s not trying to become famous. He’s doing it because he loves it.”

The zine is released quarterly, and you can view past issues, videos and photos that didn’t make it to print at http://speedballmagazine.tumblr.com/.

For the Civic Media Center, Gainesville’s alternative library and reading room, the uncertainty has meant planning ahead. Enter the SpringBoard fundraiser.

Started in 1999, five years after the CMC was founded, it started the SpringBoard fundraiser as a dinner event. Guests pay between $10 and $20 on a sliding scale and are treated to fare catered by local restaurants and cooked by volunteers.

“It’s got a ‘punny’ name in that it’s our board fundraiser organized in the spring, but it’s also a financial springboard for us to survive the summer,” said Jimmy Schmidt, coordinator at the CMC.
In addition to food, there are raffles, silent auctions of art by local artists and a guest speaker.
Previous years’ guest speakers have included National Public Radio commentator Diane Roberts and the founder of Equality Florida, Nadine Smith.

This year, the CMC welcomes retired U.S. Army Col. Ann Wright as the event’s guest speaker. She is best known for having resigned in opposition to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and her involvement in antiwar activism, including acts of civil disobedience.

“She is someone who was very much on the inside of things. She brings to the table a tremendous military background and a real window into the workings of the system,” said Joe Courter, board member with the CMC and head of planning for the SpringBoard fundraiser.

The CMC requires about $1,000 a week to cover operating costs and keep its doors open. A substantial portion the center’s budget is covered by $10 annual memberships, but fundraising events such as the SpringBoard are essential in ensuring the CMC’s continued existence.

“We can raise that money in the spring and fall, as well as throughout most of the winter, but in the summer it’s hit or miss,” Schmidt said. “Especially in tough times like the past few summers.”
The currently unfavorable economic climate presents nonprofit organizations like the CMC with a challenge, as donations to charities and nonprofits are among the first places many people cut back spending, Schmidt said.

“The CMC is a totally independent community sponsored organization,” he said. “Even though we’re a tiny fish in the nonprofit world, it’s a tremendous feat of grassroots organizing to keep this place sustained.”

The notorious UF budget cuts have brought opportunity to another institution.
While the cuts have affected every college in the university in some way – some more than others – they’ve had a particularly interesting effect on UF’s award-winning Documentary Institute, which will permanently close its doors at the end of the spring semester and move to Wake Forest University.
Among the long list of accolades for the Institute are five documentaries aired nationally by PBS, as well as multiple Student Emmy and Student Academy Award nominations and wins.
“They were an excellent program,” said John W. Wright, dean of the College of Journalism and Communications at UF. “[But] we had to make a choice.”

The $250,000 a year that was allocated to the Institute accounted for 48 percent of the total available “expense” (or non-salary) budget for the entire college, Wright said, which was distributed by the state in the amount of approximately $525,000 before the budget cuts in public education. When the college lost this money as a result of statewide cuts, according to information received in an e-mail from Wright, it included the $250,000 allocated to the documentary program.
The department had several meetings with the program representatives to make a decision that was best for the college, he said. Every possible solution was considered, but in the end, everyone agreed that the decision to cut the Institute was the best one.

“Documentary programs are wonderful. They are essential, but they are expensive,” Wright said. “If the college still had funds, it would still have the Documentary Institute.”
But many of the Institute’s 20 students weren’t very supportive of the decision.
“The kind of administration we have doesn’t put much emphasis on the arts, and for me, that’s unfortunate,” said Jon Bougher, a graduate student in the Institute. “Obviously there was a recession countrywide, but people were looking at the recession as a cover to make cuts they wanted to make for a while.”

Bougher said that the documentary is crucial in the world of media, and by losing the program, the college will be losing something essential.
“How much do people really get from interviews?” he said. “Documentaries cover all different shades of gray that journalism doesn’t cover.”
But it is not only students who have protested against the closure of the Institute. Professors agree with the students that this was a bad choice for the college to make.
“I think it was not a good decision; this was a nationally ranked program,” said Sandra Dickson, co-director of the Institute who has joined the Wake Forest documentary program. “Anytime you eliminate a nationally ranked program, I think you lose something. It was not a popular decision, and I think people around the country were shocked.”

Dickson is not alone in her opinion. Churchill Roberts, a UF professor and co-director of the Institute, expressed similar thoughts.
“Another person once told me that really good universities protect their best programs,” Roberts said. “They would never get rid of them.”
While UF Institute students and professors seem upset, the professors at Wake Forest are thrilled to have the UF documentary program join their team. Professor Mary Dalton explained how grateful she is for having “the opportunity to take one of the top 10 programs.”
The UF program had a tremendous track record, Dalton said. She said the opportunity to bring a program of that caliber to Wake Forest was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“I’m happy that the program has found a new home and will continue to produce important work,” she said.

The documentary program at UF was a nationally known program, and any college that is looking to expand its reputation might be interested in it, Bougher said.
“Wake Forest was interested in making a mark for themselves, and they made a great choice,” he said.

When asked how Wake Forest acquired the documentary program, Wright responded by e-mail: “There was no auction or anything of the sort. The truth is that I don’t know any of the details of how the program landed at Wake Forest. I’m just delighted that they found a new home!”
Wake Forest is offering UF students a tuition deal that is hard to beat, Roberts said. They will only have to pay about $5,000 for tuition, rather than the $30,000 regular students have to pay.
“Looking back, it would have been better if the documentary program had been in a different college,” Roberts said. “I don’t think the new dean really understood documentary, and that’s unfortunate.”

I know that about three minutes into this, almost every man will shun away, click out of the blog post, close his laptop, and run. Don’t. Keep watching.

Staceyann teaches women to own their bodies and love themselves for being woman when history reminds of when women were pitied for not being born man.
“Pussy talk” as Staceyann likes to put it, isn’t just for women. Gender roles have evolved, and although the gap between men and women is shrinking, it still exists, and that affects society as a whole. Men are still paid more on average for the same job as women. Women are often expected to stay at home raising children rather than going into the workplace, and men are often looked down on if they choose to stay home with their children.
But the more women own their bodies, own themselves and know that they do not have to be subordinate to men – Know that they are not born a lower class than men – The more women speak this out, without fear, the smaller the gap becomes. And when women demand respect and equality from the world, they make it a more just place for everyone.

For more vagina talk, check out our DIY this month, “Safe, eco-friendly products for your vagina.“

According to Jean Kilbourne, one of the main arguments of the video “is that advertising, as perhaps the primary storyteller in American culture, has the capacity to both produce and affirm the very fictions about women’s desires and identity that advertisers themselves often claim to be innocently tapping into and reflecting back at the public”. The film reveals the many differences between the fantasy lives of women in advertising and the actual lives that women lead in reality.

The film is great for understanding queer issues too! Mass marketing has turned to queers as their new market, according to the false believe that gay people magically have more expendable income. The stereotypical images of advertising pervade our culture and lives, and this video will be a great way to understand and learn more about how this happens. If you’re interested in identity politics you will definitely enjoy this film. It addresses issues about obsession with thinness, the idea of “woman vs. woman” (women competing with each other for men), images in advertising used to silence women, and much more. If you’re interested in the film, the website has even more information and a comprehensive study guide  with a lot of excellent discussion questions.

Myself being a member of QAC, I was pretty excited. Aside from the fact that the speakers were broken and we were forced to watch the video on the good old small screen, it went really well. It was even kind of cozy gathering around the TV/VHS combo to watch a Paper Tiger Television video about Queeruption and radical queers. The movie is about the event Queeruption, held in NYC in 1999. The event was a follow up to the first Queeruption which was held in London, and it ran pretty smoothly for such a large gathering. During the day there were about 350-400 people there attending workshops, learning how to bring back new tools to help them in their activism and also in their daily lives. The event also features live music and poetry readings, which were both pretty cool. The film also makes a point of exposing the capitalist agenda behind “gay friendly” companies and products. Sure, it feels nice to see an ad with two women drinkin’ some BudLight and holding hands or whatever, but…. I don’t want to be another consumer market. Not to mention BudLight sucks. A lot.

Tonight, the Civic Media Center (CMC) is hosting a “Radical Rush Social” to kind of celebrate the culmination of the 2010 RadRush. A band called Blair and the Boyfriends will be playing, and the guy Blair is actually a national slam poet champion and has played with the likes of Cat Power and Stevie Wonder. The social is free, and it will be awesome! If anyone sees this before 9, come out to the CMC! Oh, and the social is a potluck, so there will be plenty of food and refreshments.

For 35 years, Goerings Book Store has struggled to survive in Gainesville’s increasingly corporate market. Located on 1717 NW First Ave., behind midtown, it was a place for students, professors and Gainesville residents to meet, talk about literature and browse titles by local authors. In a few weeks, its shelves will be empty. By March, even the shelves will be gone, and its doors will close permanently.

Remy Boucias, a UF journalism junior who grew up in Gainesville, recalls tagging along with his mom to visit Goerings as a kid.

“I really liked the environment,” Boucias said. “It was better than, say, Borders or Books-A-Million. A lot of it had to do with the owner, Tom Rider. He’d always be at the front desk with quirky books to show me – stuff I wouldn’t have read otherwise.”

Boucias appreciated seeing work there by local authors.

“When you go to a chain store, you just get the New York Times best sellers list,” he said. “You don’t get exposed to anything from your community.”

In addition to providing work by local authors, Goerings held events, such as book signings, which created a sense of literary community. UF English Professor Padgett Powell, a local author himself, has patronized Goerings since 1984.

Powell and other professors like him supported Goerings each semester by sending the store exclusive textbook orders. He expressed frustration with the UF Bookstore’s poor quality of service and the fact that they only stocked a set percentage of books ordered by each professor to prevent overstocking the inventory.

“If you told Goerings you had 30 students, Goerings would order 30 books,” Powell said. “They handled our textbooks with a moment’s notice. We sometimes ordered books after classes began, the way it should be done, not as we’re doing it now, so far in advance that you forgot what you ordered for your classes.

The drawback is that exclusive orders leave students with fewer choices when it comes to where their textbooks come from. This would have been a serious problem had Goerings chosen to take advantage of the situation by charging more.

“The prices were very reasonable,” said Hanny Lane, a UF economics and math junior. “And the people there were very friendly.”

Naturally, the UF Bookstore had serious competitive advantages, such as its ideal location and its affiliation with the University.

Until 2000, UF owned and operated its own bookstore located at The Hub. The decision was made in 2000 to build a new bookstore and welcome center. The Business Services Division of UF contributed $10 million to the project. Follett Higher Education Group contributed $2 million. Student fees contributed $6.3 million.

From 2000 on, Follett owned and controlled the campus bookstore. For the first $10 million made by the bookstore in a given year, the university got 10.75 percent. If the profits reached $15 million, the university got 11 percent.

“All the money made at Goerings stays in the Gainesville community,” said Tom Rider, a co-owner of Goerings since 1981. “Most of the money made at the campus store goes back to Chicago, where Follett Enterprise keeps its headquarters.”

The UF Bookstore may have been run by a $2.5 billion dollar corporation, but they could not match the level of service that Goerings Book Store provided.

“I don’t go to the UF Bookstore,” said UF junior Lindsey Green. “They’re not as interested in serving students as they are in making money, as is apparent in their prices. And they have terrible customer service.”

So Goerings remained competitive, despite the factors stacked against them.

“As chain bookstores flooded in, small bookstores…began to close,” Rider said.

Rider said each chain store controls such a massive sector of the market that publishers can’t force them to pay for their books on time. The publishers then have to make up for this by tightening restrictions on independent stores, like Goerings.

Still, Goerings prevailed because professors chose to support them.

“I ordered all my textbooks for all my classes at Goerings before they stopped doing textbook orders this semester,” said Elise Takehana, a UF graduate student who teaches literature and writing courses. “Goerings had so many texts that you don’t see anywhere else. There’s also a level of service here that you don’t get at other stores.”

Why, then, did Goerings fail?

State legislation requires professors to post their textbook requirements online at least 30 days before classes start. This gives students more time to compare textbook prices and, if necessary, order textbooks online.

The University’s Office of the Provost is stricter about this than the state government. Professors are required to post their textbook requirements online two to five months before classes start. Otherwise, their departments get fined. The textbook information, posted online, can then be accessed by local bookstores. This effectively ends the ability of professors to place exclusive textbook orders, which were the life support of Goerings.

Goerings will clearly be missed by students and professors looking for noncommercial sources of literature and conversation. To prevent this sort of tragedy from happening again, Tom Rider suggests that sympathetic students do their best to venture off campus and support local businesses. After all, they may not be around for much longer.

Colin Whitworth started Moon Magazine, a free Gainesville alternative monthly that focused on local politics and entertainment, with four other journalists in 1990. He graduated from UF in the late ’80s and worked at The Alligator during his college years, which he described as a “very idealistic place when it came to journalism.” After graduation, Whitworth went to work at the daily paper in Leesburg. But he wasn’t happy with his job at the profit-driven news organization, so he and some friends decided to start Moon Magazine, where Whitworth could focus on the in-depth reporting that got him into journalism in the first place.

Jessica Newman: What inspired you and your cohorts to start Moon Magazine back in 1990?

Colin Whitworth: Each of us probably had our own reason for wanting to do it. A couple of us, when we were in college, talked about starting a magazine. We actually tried to devise an idea, and we just realized, we’re in college. There’s no way we can do this. After college, I was working in mainstream journalism at a newspaper. Two of the other people were out in Seattle, Matt and Mark, working in independent journalism and as canvassers for political campaigns and issues. I was living in Leesburg. I wanted to get out of town and do something different. I went back to the idea of having my own magazine. But it was kind of like, yeah right. I’ll do journalism for 25 or 30 years, and maybe someone will make me editor of their magazine one day. And I’m talking to Matt and Mark on the phone, and they’re like, well out here they have these small magazines everywhere–in Seattle, Washington and Oregon. So they sent me the stuff in the mail, and we just started talking about it. We had a meeting down at my house in Leesburg and said, what are we going to do? Everyone had done all this research because they had all these people like yourself and myself out in Seattle. They went to them and said, how do you start a paper? Personally, my desire mostly was I liked magazine journalism. They brought the whole political kind of advocacy, left-leaning journalism thing.

JN: As you got more involved, when did you fall into the line of thinking that Moon would be the ‘anti-Gainesville Sun’? And when did you decide to forgo the mainstream model of objectivity for a philosophy of ‘fair but pointed’?

CW: When I worked at The Alligator, it was a very idealistic place when it came to journalism. People really looked at themselves as the eyes and ears of the people in a way that we all took our job very seriously and our goal was to do really good articles that really showed what was going on. Then you go out into the real world and you have all these old crusty people who are working for a paper that’s owned by a giant corporation. At the Leesburg paper, our publisher was heavily involved in influencing the news coverage, specifically the business part of the paper. I had also come to the realization that everybody has an opinion, no matter what, about anything. When you write an article, you can consciously try and edit out your viewpoint, but it affects every decision you make in preparing the story–what questions you ask, the people that you try to find to interview, the types of questions you ask to them and how you place that stuff into the story. I don’t think that you have to be objective in order to be fair. We stated from the outset in Moon that we were a left-leaning organization. Honestly, I became more political after I got fired from my temporary job at the City of Gainesville. [The city] redid the Downtown Plaza, and I wrote this thing about how I didn’t like the idea of them having to cut down all these trees. It was very beautiful. Apparently the city attorney, my boss’s boss’s boss, was friends with the people behind the renovations and saw that and through a number of steps got me fired. I wrote in another article about what went down and why they fired me. Then The Gainesville Sun did an article about it. They interviewed all the people involved. It made me look great; it made them look stupid.

JN: The stuff that you guys were writing about, this wasn’t stuff that Gainesville residents could get anywhere else, right?

Colin Whitworth and his children.

CW: Not as well. The Sun used to be a lot better, back in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. The Gainesville Sun got a new publisher, this guy John Fitzwater, back in the late ’80s, that radically transformed that paper. He came in and had the complete mentality of, “This is here to make money.” He squashed a lot of stuff. He really became our nemesis at the paper. The Gainesville Sun left a humongous void that people in this community were hungry for. That’s why we were successful; The Gainesville Sun made it easy on us.

JN: What about where we are today? How important are alternative media outlets like Moon in a world dominated by corporate, profit-driven media?

CW: I think it’s definitely important. I think media now has a business-down model versus an editorial-down model. What I mean by that, it used to be that the business side of a media organization existed to make sure that the newspaper could get published. It was there to serve the news interests of the paper. Now it’s flipped. Now the content is what it’s called, and that’s there to serve the larger goal of making the company profitable. I think in the long run there’s going to be a prolonged period of suffering and change in the news media but that eventually we’re all going to be getting everything through the Internet or on our phones or on some other device. I think what journalism is going to change into is hard to know. There’s a need to have reliable news-gathering organizations everywhere. We’re a bright species. I think that we’ll probably figure something out.

Singing newspaper woes

But what you won’t see in even the token liberal media like the New York Times or National Public Radio is an analysis of what “democracy” actually meant to the countries on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall. The fall of communism in these nations translated to a prime opportunity for American corporations to come in and privatize everything they could, from the labor market to the previously public utilities system to natural resources. For the citizens of the countries of the former Eastern bloc, democratization brought with it what Michael J. Jordan of the Christian Science Monitor calls a series of “negative consequences”, in his article about the nostalgia for communism in these countries.

“Each positive development of “democracy” ushered in negative consequences: Free-market competition brought soaring prices and joblessness; free elections brought extremist parties; free press brought incitement; free movement brought cross-border crime and westward ‘brain drain.’”

In a perfect world, with a mass media that isn’t under corporate control and searches for the true story, maybe we would have seen a different type of story surrounding the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, one with a little less celebration and a lot more reality.

Don’t laugh… It’s my first time. I’m excited, but I’m also a little bit nervous. Will I look like a complete fool? Will my readers come back for a second go at it, or will they disappear and never call?

In the future, this blog will feature commentary from us, the editors of The Fine Print, on the future of journalism and the role of journalists in preserving democracy. We’ll also be providing criticism of mainstream media coverage and of ourselves. We’ll also use this as a platform to give The Fine Print’s perspective on the most important issues facing not only students and Gainesvillians today, but also the country as a whole.

So be on the look-out for new posts, and don’t laugh. It’s my first time.

During its printing run of a single school year (’68-’69), this alternative weekly was the mouthpiece of UF’s so-called radical students, who were dissatisfied with what they saw as the Alligator’s toothless and irrelevant coverage of campus events.

Many members of its staff had worked at the Alligator (Steve Hull, one of University Report’s ringleaders, had been an editor), but quit amid controversy and censorship by the administration. They produced the paper on an old-fashioned typewriter on their living room floor. University Report’s mission statement was, in part:

In response to the Faculty Position Paper presented to the Action Conference by Professor Corbin Carnell, a group of students has formed the University Report. This weekly publication intends to analyze issues significant for members of the University community as well as allow dialogue between students and faculty…

…There is a tendency on the part of university administrators to regard free expression of the students as a mere symptom of the student status, and to ignore it. If University education is not to become mindless mass-production, the student must not in this way become depersonalized. Student free speech must not be too easily discarded as the emotional intensity and fantasy of adolescents undergoing identity diffusion. Rather it must be seen as the validation of experience; the message–not that he is right or wrong but that he exists.

To that end, stories questioned the legitimacy of reforms touted by the administration (epitomized by the Action Conference, PR stunt orchestrated by UF President President Stephen C. O’Connell), exposed government spying on UF students (“Wee is Watching You” discussed an alleged informant named Palmer Wee), and tackled questions like campus race relations and the social acceptability of protests. One article explored why “The Third Floor Boys” – the Student Body President, the leadership of Florida Blue Key and the editor of the Alligator – seemed to lack the cajones to lead students in challenging the administration.

One issue featured a burning American Flag on the cover. Another featured shots of a nude co-ed strolling through what is now Library East, causing a stir that reached news wires around the state.

“We had a different idea of citizenship,” said Michael Abrams, who served as the papers second Executive Editor. “It didn’t occur to me that I would someday have to earn a living.”

In an editorial, UR took The Alligator to task for cutting its ties to student government. While the paper claimed the move helped preserve its freedom to print what it wanted, the UR editorial charged that rejecting student government funds (which came with some minor strings attached) took the publication out of students’ hands and placed it under the control of the Board of Student Publications, which was dominated by faculty hand-picked by the administration.

Less than four years later, the administration’s attempts at censorship forced the Alligator off campus, and students haven’t controlled their campus newspaper since.

The University Report may have been “radical,” and may have routinely criticized the administration in ways the Alligator never would, but it was published during a time when student protests would shut down University Ave. for days at a time and frats would drag couches onto the Plaza of the Americas for all-night parties fueled by kegs of beer and sheets of LSD.

As Abrams, put it in an e-mail this fall, “We were pretty small potatoes compared to everything else that was going on.”

A look at the paper’s supporters reveals a campus culture less socially divided than it is today. University Report was endorsed by the Student Senate, and its staff included members of Florida Blue Key. The Inter Fraternity Council was among its largest advertisers. Imagine half-page IFC ads in The Fine Print, urging our readers to come out for rush.

“It was a time of protest” Abrams said, “and our generation wanted to change the world and raise hell doing it.”