There’s something for you here

On Sunday, the Jersey Journal, a newspaper that once covered Jersey City, shut its doors for good. Its closure ends 157 years of a paper that was once as “scrappy and gritty as the city it covered” and leaves Hudson County, one of New Jersey’s largest counties, without a reliable local daily news source.

Inside the Orange Bubble, however, things hum along. Every day, reporters fan out on campus to knock on office doors, interview students, and sit in on key meetings. Every night, from Sunday to Thursday, the ‘Prince’ newsroom buzzes with writers, columnists, designers, and editors who type up, rewrite, and pore over articles.

While the ‘Prince’ is a “newspaper club,” as then-Editor-in-Chief Marie-Rose Sheinerman remarked in 2022, it is also a real, local newspaper. Like any professional news organization, we live or die by readers’ trust in us, so it’s essential that we get the story right. And for many of us, including me, our time at the ‘Prince’ is only the beginning of a lifetime of reporting.

But in a world of dying local journalism and increasingly tenuous information environments, training a new generation of journalists for later isn’t enough. We need you to read our stuff, now.

And we have a lot of stuff: Deep dives into administrative decision-making around controversial protests. Scoops about the latest construction projects or eating club intrigue. Sharp analysis of the women’s and men’s basketball teams. Enlightening explanations of new lab discoveries. Or, you can play the best damn crosswords of all. My sincere hope is that the ‘Prince’ offers something for everyone — a place where anyone, whether they’re checking the app on the way to class or sitting in Coffee Club with the print edition, can learn something new about their campus.

And when you read us, I hope you trust us. Trust from our readers is what makes our reporting possible, and what makes our writing mean anything at all. We hope that you trust us to inform your day, and we hope that when you have a story that needs to be told, you trust us to tell it.

When we stay up all night to cover a protest or comb through thousands of documents for a data-driven story, we don’t do it because it will generate clicks. We do it because those stories are important to our campus and deserve to be heard by our audience with clarity and complexity, written by reporters who approach their subjects in good faith. This is the commitment the ‘Prince’ makes with every story, every line, every word we publish — because, above all else, journalism is a public service.

The devastating shrinkage of America’s local newspapers means that many of these stories have been lost: blockbuster investigations and scrappy anti-corruption reporting, but also everyday narratives and snapshots of life that matter to the communities they cover. While the ‘Prince’ doesn’t face the same financial challenges that have crippled both local and national outlets — we are financially stable, and independent from the University — we need your readership and participation as much as they do to carry out our mission: to highlight the big and the small, every single day.

So sign up for our morning newsletter. Add Daybreak to your daily podcast rotation. Look out for the print issue on Friday mornings. Come to our website when you have questions, and submit tips when you have information. If you want, apply to join any of our sections by Feb. 7.

And while you’re at it, support your local paper at home, too.

Miriam Waldvogel is the 149th Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Princetonian. She can be reached at eic[at]dailyprincetonian.com.