by Sarah Carpenter & Brian Howey

For four tumultuous and exciting semesters, we’ve kept a close eye on the Peralta Colleges.

We’ve covered student movements fighting bigotry, homelessness, and deportation. We’ve celebrated the diversity of our community through our coverage of Black History Month, women and LGBTQI rights, and campus accessibility.

Together we kept a close eye on the Oakland A’s and the Peralta district as they considered a new stadium across the street from Laney, and the major changes that would come with it.

Our coverage may not have pleased all of our readers, but we’re confident it was honest and accurate. To us, this is an essential aspect of good journalism, and an increasingly rare find in this country.

It’s up to us as reporters and you as readers, listeners, and viewers to hold accountable those who make the decisions that affect us all. We are grateful to have been at such a passionate campus, full of stories worth covering.

We did not consider our time here to be practice for some “real world” at which we would arrive in the future. You are the real world, and you deserve hard-nosed, dirt-digging journalism.

As you move through your lives, remember that local news is in a state of crisis now. Please support local publications as much as you can — not only as its attentive audience, but also its most vocal critic.

Your voices are as essential to a free society as our reporting.

We would like to thank you, our readers, for sticking with us at the Tower. We appreciate your community participation, your words of encouragement, and your critiques of our work, all of which have shaped this publication into what it is today.

As we continue our careers as reporters in the Bay Area, we hope to interact with you and share your stories again.

So long, and thanks for all the news.

Sarah Carpenter & Brian Howey are co-editors-in-chief of the Laney Tower.