Today, April 2nd, marks an inconsolable day for Mission Viejo High School; our stronghold of a newspaper, The Diablo Dispatch, a publication that’s existed since the dawn of this school, is releasing their last issue onto this god forsaken world.
The principal problem is the rising costs of the newspaper; the printing costs have more than doubled since my time arriving at Mission Viejo High School due to a rising endangerment of the Pacific Yew, the only tree that is able to be turned into newspaper paper. Our capital has stayed stagnant, but the amount of these trees in the world halves every year.
In addition, we have had to deal with countless angry parents in the past couple years; just this past issue we had a mother who was livid that our cover article was titled “The Staff Takes The Students To School,” she sent us a 1,200 word email explaining that the phrase ‘taking someone to school’ would mean that we were assuming the students were not even smart enough to go to school and so they need to attend it so they can educate themselves on rudimentary topics.
Also, with the discovery of fossils on Mission Viejo High School grounds leading to a temporary relocation of students to Trabuco Hills High [read more about this in Tanya Cramer’s article], we don’t have a facility to run the journalism program. And, from our past experience with independent studying journalism, it is much harder to run the program.
It’s just all too much, and it climaxed with our recent kerfuffle with a restaurant.
An unnamed local food eatery, let’s just call them UL Sandwiches, has swindled, cheated, and defrauded us (The Diablo Dispatch). Initially we reached out to the company for a fundraising collaboration, and they gladly accepted, but once the fundraising event was completed we realized their scheme.
They used us as a ploy to bring in more customers, and in return gave us a mere 61 dollars and 59 cents, hundreds short of the amount of revenue, 20 percent, that we were promised to be given.
You may be asking how we know this valuable information, well we had a man on the inside. He meticulously counted all the sales of the day and calculated that our cut should have been 543 dollars and 23 cents, almost enough to fund the printing of a whole paper issue.
Our distinguished newspaper institution and staff would never stand for this level of tyranny, so we challenged them in the court of law.
A month after announcing our suit the court date arrived.
We hired the best lawyer that our limited journalism budget could buy, Vice Principal and Law & Order: SVA enthusiast Mr. Zides. With this talent, the case should’ve been shut and closed, but UL Sandwiches had an ace up their sleeve, Richardson Tweed of the Goodman firm.
Although Tweed was one of the most feared people in the lawyer world, Zides was still confident that his recent binging of season 6 of Better Call Saul was enough to win him the case.
Barc McCarthy, advisor for the Diablo Dispatch, and Umar & Larry Costanza, owners of UL Sandwiches, were the first to arrive in the courtroom. They glared in eachothers’ eyes for twenty minutes straight, only stopped by the judge’s commencement of the trial.
Tweed was the first to speak, and spewed out a lengthy (boring) speech stating that there was no contractual agreement between us and UL Sandwiches and blah blah blah. Then, in the middle of the speech, our lawyer bursted through the doors.
Zides, outfitted in his eminem-esque attire, broke out into freestyle with a beatbox on his shoulder, silencing Tweed and awestrucking the judge and the jury with his indisputable arguments of staying classy and never trashy.
As expected, Zides easily convinced the judge to throw out the case, we even got guided out by a couple of nice jury policemen.
Upsettingly, though, due to the dismissal of this case, we were swimming in legal fees (Zides is a very expensive asset), and are now unable to print paper issues, or spend any money, for the next 14 years.
All of these issues just piled onto each other; it’s near impossible to run in these conditions anymore. So thank you for the time you’ve spent reading these articles and we hope that Mission Viejo High School can somehow run without the integrity and genius of The Diablo Dispatch.
