For 40 years, minority groups at UCLA have used newsmagazines to tap into the power of the press and make their voices heard on campus.
Established during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, in 1968, Nommo was the first student newsmagazine at UCLA, and it provided a forum for issues concerning the black community.
In the epigram of their original proposal to Student Media, they quoted the CEO of Time Magazine saying that there could not be freedom of press without diversity of press, said Arvli Ward, director of Student Media and former editor of Nommo.
“You had an interesting situation where these kids on campus who might have been described as “˜black militants’ at the time took a quote from a person who was at the center of corporate publishing in America,” Ward said.
It was this proposal that propelled Nommo from its status from a independently published magazine to a Student Media-sponsored publication.
“There’s a critique there that says the Daily Bruin wasn’t covering their community well enough and that they felt like they had the right to express themselves,” Ward said.
Ward pointed to the heated social, political and cultural climate of the 1960s as important contributing factors to the creation of newsmagazines like Nommo.
“Self-determination, identity politics, these were important issues of the ’60s all over the country, and they had a particular manifestation at UCLA,” Ward said.
Over the next 10 years, publications sprouted from within Student Media representing Jewish, Asian-Pacific Islander and Latino student interests, as well as issues pertaining to the feminist movement and the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
La Gente de Aztlan, a newsmagazine concerned with issues in the Latino community, followed Nommo in 1971 and shares its roots in social equality and activism.
“It sprang out of this need to have a voice for Latino issues during the Civil Rights Movement,” said Brenda Yancor, co-editor of La Gente.
However, for a generation of students bred on the ideals of diversity and equality, the role of newsmagazines on campus have changed a great deal since the ’60s.
Some magazines are struggling to maintain the kind of readership that they enjoyed during their early years, while others have failed to produce issues this year at all.
In addition to these social changes, insufficient funding and support lay at the core of the recent decline of UCLA’s newsmagazines.
OutWrite, the LGBT magazine, does not have an editor recognized by Student Media this year and has been unable to publish thus far.
It is the longest running LGBT newsmagazine on any college campus, said Rhiza Dizon, a second-year English student.
Dizon said that having a strong newsmagazine still gives minorities the assurance that there is an established community at UCLA.
“OutWrite helps to show that UCLA is a diverse place. However small the community, it ensures that they always have a voice,” Dizon said.
Danny Torres Lopez, a third-year political science and Chicana and Chicano studies student, said that OutWrite is a vital means of expression for the LGBT community, providing critical resources that newspapers cannot.
“It will help people to know there is a voice out there. If we can spread the magazine throughout campus, it might help someone with the coming out process,” Torres Lopez said.
“They can use art as a form expression to relieve stress,” Torres Lopez added.
Continuing the tradition of cultural relevance, Al-Talib emerged in 1990 to provide students with accurate information about Islam.
The main goal of the publication is to correct the mainstream media’s assumptions about Islam in the United States, said Al-Talib Editor Mustafa Siddique.
“Our role at UCLA is to educate students on campus and correct some of the misinformation about Islam. We offer a very different perspective,” Siddique said.