About Us

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The Alarm! Newspaper is a weekly publication being formed in Santa Cruz, California to serve our community. The content of The Alarm! will consist of straightforward news reporting and investigative and interpretive journalism, emphasizing coverage of direct action on a community level.

Our Vision Statement:

To encourage the development of a fully-informed populace engaged in the deliberate creation of its collective social environment

Our Mission Statement:

To create a source for local, timely, engaged, accurate and impassioned investigative and interpretive newsreporting while providing a livelihood and vehicle for the voices, skills and passions of the Alarm! Newspaper collective and its associates.

Some other thoughts on our project

• We maintain a commitment to local news coverage to encourage and inspire direct, unmediated interaction with and intervention in our common daily civil experience.
• We are not “the voice of the people”—we cannot suppose that we can represent the views and opinions of all of Santa Cruz, or even a particular segment of its population, nor would we want to. And even within the Alarm! collective, we do not attempt to represent our collective voice, but to give voices to our presence as everyday social actors.
• We in Santa Cruz do not need an institutionalized representation of our voices. What we need is a community in which our voices and actions are of consequence and are not drowned out by the deafening ramblings of institutions which claim to speak and act for us. We would prefer that we did not have to amplify our own voices and actions to make them matter, and we hope that our voices and actions will bring us closer to a point where amplification is unnecessary. Like all the best anarchist projects, this one strives to make itself obsolete.
• Our aim is not to represent the community, but to inspire it; not to create a citizenry of fence-sitters through “objective”, “balanced” journalism, but to motivate community members to deliberate and organized participation in the creation of their social environment.