Think print is dead? Not here. Every Thursday, you’ll see students, faculty, and staff all poring over the latest issue of The Good 5 Cent Cigar, the URI student newspaper founded in 1971. The paper’s dynamic stable of reporters displays all the hunger, urgency, and compulsion to find the truth that has always driven the best journalism.
In the past two years, thanks to a devoted staff and news-oriented leadership, the Cigar has become required reading for the University community, chock full of the kind of news that its campus readership can use. It’s published in print once a week and updated digitally every day.
We worked. I can’t stress that enough, the work we put into it—late nights, meetings over the summer, meltdowns around the newsroom table.
The leadership of Cigar editor-in-chief Allison Farrelly ’16 has been a driving force behind the rise of the Cigar. Her secret? “Hard work and luck,” Allison said. “We worked. I can’t stress that enough, the work we put into it—late nights, meetings over the summer, meltdowns around the newsroom table. But we got lucky because everyone involved wanted to make a huge difference.”
The work paid off. The staff constructed stories, in many cases after hours of late-night discussion about ethics and responsibility to the reader. Last year, the Cigar broke the campus news barrier, garnering attention from the Providence Journal and BuzzFeed with topics that reflected real campus concerns.
“They’ve made some amazing improvements,” said John Pantalone ’71, chair of URI’s journalism department and advisor to the Cigar. “The fact that they focused on University content made it relevant again. It’s the best it’s been in 10 years.”
This fall, the Cigar lost some key staffers, but gained others committed to its hard-news ethic. Emma Gauthier ’18, the paper’s web editor, is one: she aspires to be editor of the Boston Globe, but says that for now she couldn’t hope for better coworkers. “I don’t believe print is dying,” she says. “It’s changing, to tablets, phones, computers, but people are reading the news—and we need to produce content that’s accurate, concise and ethically sound.”
Managing editor and former sports editor Jake Marrocco ’16, who has been with the Cigar since his freshman year, is proud of the paper’s evolution. He has written about virtually every sport at URI—a personal mission for someone born with hemophilia. “I couldn’t play contact sports,” he said. “The next best thing is writing about them. I owe everything I am, and everything I will be, to the Cigar.”
The Cigar’s newsroom offices are decidedly old school, with 1970s-style desks and raggedy furniture, bookshelves loaded with references, walls covered with movie posters, and an old turntable next to classic LPs left by previous generations of staffers: Springsteen, Aerosmith, and the Eagles. Perhaps most telling is a grease board with a handwritten Tom Stoppard quote: “I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.”
The hard-working members of the Cigar staff believe in their work and are proud of their accomplishments. But it goes beyond that, said Allison Farrelly. “The best thing about it has been the relationships we’ve formed.”
Photo credit: Nora Lewis