For 72 years, the Hillcrest Hurricane has been the training ground for aspiring journalists in our neighborhood.
It’s the student newspaper that made Steve Kenny, senior editor of the New York Times, decide to become a reporter. He considers the instructor Julia Jeffress to be the catalyst for his career.
“If I had not stumbled upon her, I don’t know what I would be doing now,” he previously told the Advocate. “I doubt very seriously I’d be in New York at the New York Times. I don’t even know if I’d be a journalist. She saw something in me and really encouraged me when I had doubts about myself.”
Kenny isn’t the only successful journalist who honed their skills at the Hurricane. Christy Hoppe was the Austin Bureau Chief of the Dallas Morning News for decades. Karen Blumenthal has worked at The Wall Street Journal for more than 25 years, and Sharon Jayson covers relationships for USA Today, just to name a few.
But the Hurricane’s longstanding success is in jeopardy because of limited funding. The newspaper’s Editor-in-Chief Delaney Shiu started a GoFundMe page to cover the costs.
“To meet our deadlines to produce the eight issues we do in  a school year, we had to publish our last issue with no money in our account, so we are over $500 in debt now,” she wrote. “We have three more issues to print this year, and we will still need more money for next year’s eight issues. Our department gets no funding from the school or district, so it is up to us to raise the money we need; the fundraisers we suggest have been repeatedly denied and we have no other way of getting money at this point in the year except from donations. Some of the staff members’ parents have had to step in and donate the $570 we need to print each issue due to lack of funds. A traditon as historic as this one is not something that should dissapear due to lack of funding, so please help us by donating to our cause.”
The campaign already has raised $2,720, exceeding the students’ goal in one day.
