Yonsei newspaper goes blank in protest of budget cut
The front page of Yonsei Chunchu is printed blank to protest the school cutting the budget for the paper. Captured from the newspaper’s homepage
By Bahk Eun-ji
Student staffers of the Yonsei University newspaper published a special edition with a blank front page Monday, in protest of a budget cut made by the school that resulted from an order issued by the government last August.
“We will issue special editions in protest of budget cuts until our demands for normalization are met,” said Jung Se-yoon, 20, chief editor of Yonsei Chunchu.
Until now, the annual subscription fee for the newspaper of 5,900 won was included within school tuition fees under “miscellaneous costs.”
However, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology ordered these costs be separated from school tuition in August last year.
Consequently, students at Yonsei can now choose whether to subscribe to the newspaper or not. Only 17.9 percent of students on the university’s Seoul campus paid the subscription fee. As a result, the annual budget for the paper fell from 733 million won last year to 500 million won.
“We’ve already notified newspaper staffers of the budget cut that became effective from this semester. It became difficult to maintain financial support for the newspaper because of a tightened school budget and the ministry’s order,” a school official said.
However, the newspaper staffers said the school did not give them prior notice of the budget cut.
This is the second time that the newspaper has published a special protest edition in its 78 years of history. One was printed in 2007 when staffers then had conflicts with the school administration over editorial rights. They eliminated the paper’s masthead from that edition. Monday’s edition is on the paper’s Facebook page (
www.facebook.com/yonseichunchu
).