The following is a reprint of The Daily Californian’s editorial, published 40 years ago tomorrow, declaring independence from the university after months of conflict surrounding a controversial editorial the paper published about People’s Park.

Tuesday, September 28,1971

It’s Your Newspaper Now

The Daily Californian is now an independent newspaper.

We are operating as a non-profit staff-controlled corporation. For funding, we will depend on our advertising and subscription revenue–without any subsidy from student fee money. We have left our campus offices and will operate out of new headquarters at 2490 Channing (corner of Telegraph), third floor.

Our independence means that we are free from control by the Board of Regents or the Chancellor’s handpicked Publishers’ Board.

Independence, of course, places greatly heightened responsibility on our shoulders, since we will no longer be under the protective apron of the University. But it also affords us an exciting opportunity to create a newspaper worthy of the campus.

In general, the best campus newspapers in the nation–the Harvard Crimson, Yale Daily News, Wisconsin Daily Cardinal–are those which function independently of the university framework.

We believe that in a community as vital and exciting as Berkeley, it is possible to create such a newspaper.

To do this, however, we will need your help.

We need your ideas to tell us what we can do to serve the campus community better. We need reporters to help us cover the area. We need your talents as columnists and letter writers to make our editorial page a true forum for the ideas of the campus community.

You can help us in other ways too, by encouraging out-of-town friends and parents to subscribe– or by the small act of taking only one paper so that there will be enough for the campus community.

We hope to hear from you. After all, the meaning of independence is that it’s your newspaper now.