“I don’t want to be a journalist.”
This is the pretty empty refrain I have told myself for the past three years. It becomes kind of impossible to really mean it when a huge portion of my time is dedicated to doing journalism, sometimes at the professional level, in the very newspaper I founded.
My Retrograde lore goes all the way back to our origins as The Mercury. When I was but a wee freshman, I had absolutely no interest in the student newspaper. I had seen their front-page during freshman orientation, entirely dedicated to cricket, and was simply not interested.
And then I picked up the Sept. 18, 2023 issue of our former student newspaper The Mercury. The picture of a cute orange cat is what first drew me in, and then I read the headline:
“Triumph over torture — A UTD graduate student was sentenced to six years in prison for animal cruelty. One cat died; the other lives on.”
What followed was a heart wrenching investigation into the torture Nimbus and Mango, two cats owned by Katheryn Montgomery, endured at the hands of UTD graduate student Shubhankar Kawle. After I finished reading Fatimah Azeem’s article, I knew that I wanted to contribute to a publication that was willing to do this kind of important and hard work. I filled out my application immediately.
Once my application was accepted, I was unfortunately consumed by the news spiral. Within a month I was already the News Editor of The Mercury, and in my first week I got to edit our news coverage over Student Affairs’ removal of the Spirit Rocks. By the end of my freshman year, I had become the Editor-in-Chief, with my first day just so happening to coincide with the May 1, 2024, encampment and its brutal destruction at the hands of over 60 riot police.
I joined The Mercury in a time of major campus struggle when our newsroom was smaller than ever before. And so, I just kept writing and never really stopped. The previous total article record had been set by our former Distribution Manager André Averion; he wrote 149 articles. Averion said it was “insanity” to keep up such a streak, and as the first person to break his record, at 188 articles, I agree.
I have read through thousands of pages of public records, interviewed hundreds of students and faculty, founded a 501(c)3 non-profit, sued the UT System, investigated everything from neo-Nazis on campus to UTD’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein and I have trained dozens of other writers to do the same.
I love journalism now, don’t get me wrong, but I would rarely describe this as work which is fun. There is no pleasure in interviewing professors for hours as they tell you about their brutal arrests and experiences in jail. There is no pleasure in talking to a sexual assault survivor about her experience and the abuse the university we both attend subjected her to in the name of “procedure.” There is no pleasure in getting fired because you decided to stand up for student press freedoms on campus. There is no pleasure documenting the near endless injustices done by administrators against students as our rights, and more recently our campus itself, erodes.
In my time, I led my publication through its destruction at the hands of Student Affairs and then through our immediate rebirth as something truly independent. We have received dozens of awards for the work we have done, for the documentation we have provided to our campus and the risks and obstacles we have overcome to do so.
It’s hard to believe that just two years ago The Retrograde was nothing more than a late-night scheme hastily scribbled on a Zenna’s napkin. In our first year of operation, we crossed 2 million views when we had never even reached 1 million as The Mercury. We dramatically increased our staff and managed to provide high quality coverage for our audience. We somehow became a real 501(c)3 non-profit and have permanently solidified our independent structure outside of the school. We can never be shut down by the university again because of this.
None of this would have been possible without the amazing team of management and staff that makes The Retrograde possible. We would be nothing without the work of every single person listed on our contributor’s page, volunteers that have gone out of their way to help carve out a journalistic and artistic niche for themselves.
So, do I want to be a journalist now? Ask me after I’ve slept for a month. While I won’t be the EIC anymore, I will still be around to help the new crop of student journalists whenever they need it in my senior year. Two years as Editor are more than enough for me. I need to actually go and study for the LSAT if I want to go to law school.
I hope each of our stories has been helpful to our readers in some way, be they informative or entertaining. I hope our documentation of campus problems is useful to current and future students. I hope that this attempt at bringing about transparency and accountability has done something to make campus better. And I hope that the next management team is able to keep building off the many successes we’ve already built for them. It is unusual for students to just inherit an entire non-profit, so I look forward to seeing how they make the most of it. I didn’t read hundreds of pages of IRS forms just for them not to use their newfound non-profit benefits.
Readers who have kept up with my news coverage might be shocked to hear this, but I am not optimistic about the future of our campus. I love UTD and the community that exists here, but the actions of those that reign above us just seem to keep making things worse. I have no doubt that the next year will be full of amazing investigative articles for all the wrong reasons.
To the new management and the students of UTD; good luck, we’ll need it.