The death throes of student newspapers

Eric says:

07:30am | 25/09/09

Thinks of it as practice for after graduation. Soon, people who write mainstream newspapers won’t be paid either.

Matthew da silva says:

09:51am | 25/09/09

Really good piece. Thanks and well done.

R says:

10:10am | 25/09/09

When I enrolled in university and was handed a bill for union membership, I asked why I had to pay for something which I would make no use of. I was told it helped subsidise costs of on-campus activity. I quickly found that it was cheaper for me to join a gym some 20km away than to join the uni’s gym. So much for that idea…

I became a big proponent of VSU. After all, why should union membership - at uni or at work - be compulsory? You should join if you think it will benefit you.

Furthermore, I never understood the concept of the university being some kind of miniature, socialist civilisation providing on campus facilities identical to the ones up the road. University should be seen the same way as high-school: a place where you go to get an education and make friends. My school did not provide anything beyond that and I didn’t expect uni to do so either.

And no, I don’t see the importance of university media. Again, it’s as though the university were an independent island with it’s own government and services divorced from the real world.
The next step would have been for each university to create its own currency…

Al says:

10:23am | 25/09/09

I don’t see why students should be forced to subsidise something they don’t want.

If the magazines are such high quality perhaps they should sell them for a price which reflects the cost of their publication rather than for a nominal price or as giveaways.

I studied my LLB externally while working full time and had to pay a fortune in union fees for a range of services I never used. I am now, years later doing a masters, also externally and don’t see why I should subsuidise the lifestyles and politics of full time students.

I apply this statement equally to the proposed service fees, which are VSU by strealth.

Ged says:

10:25am | 25/09/09

The editors interviewed in this article are on the money when they say they have to learn from the effects of VSU and make a better quality product. A majority of students aren’t going to be to happy having to pay $250 again (or for the first time) if they don’t see any returns on their contribution.  The old pre-VSU student publications were really political hack pieces but the production of more interactive and apolitical student media is a step in the right direction.

DJC says:

10:28am | 25/09/09

“To sit here thinking that I could have (an estimated) $15,000 in my bank account at the end of the year, for what I’ve done, is a dream. I don’t think it should be a dream, I think it should be a reality…”

And there it is. That quote, by itself, demonstrates exactly what was wrong with Compulsory Student Unionism and why the vast (but silent) majority of students never supported it. Why should dirt poor undergraduates have to dig deep into their pockets to subsidise the lifestyle and politically partisan ramblings of some second year Arts students so they can stroke each others egos over a bong in some hovel in Newtown for being published in a student rag that no one else ever reads? I know most students would prefer to use that money on items that may actually benefit their own academic progress - textbooks, journal subscriptions, rent, food….

And, as loudly as the Student Associations have been squealing it to anyone who will listen since 2006, the Evil Howard Government didn’t criminalise student unionism. Thats what the V stands for in VSU. “Voluntary”. If I WANT to contribute to the Lesbian Doof Feral Collective, I will. However, I shouldn’t be forced to under the threat of witholding my graduation if I don’t. Nor should anyone else.

BC says:

10:35am | 25/09/09

R,
I can not agree with you more.

I too was a huge proponent of VSU. Infact, I remember getting into a heated argument over the topic when a student union member tried to argue that university had to be more then just working your way through your degree. I am sorry but it is an educational istitution, which can lead to social interation, not the other way around.

I too dont believe in the requirement for a university to have its own student newspaper. If there was a need there for one, then students would be more then happy to pay for the service.  Which inturn brings me to the next point.

Profit is a measure of efficency.

If a student newspaper can not be made to cover the cost of the product it is ether grossly inefficent, or the need for such a service isnt warrented.

Im sorry to all the student journalists out there who may find this offencive, but this is how the world outside of university works.
Get used to it.

Sarah Stokely says:

10:46am | 25/09/09

Thank you Kelly, for drawing attention to the sad state of student publishing in 2009. I studied at Adelaide Uni a loong time ago (in the era when David Penberthy, Annabel Crabb and Sam Maiden were involved with On Dit)...  and I hadn’t even thought about student publications since I graduated - until I returned to uni as a teacher last year.
Last year I taught a session on online publishing for the Express Media conference for new student editors and I was shocked to learn that most student publications haven’t been able to move online in a significant way - I suspect largely because VSU has gutted their funding.
I teach publishing and communications at the University of Melbourne and it’s my view that universities need to provide avenues for their media students to get experience in print and online publishing, through student publications. I am still trying to figure out exactly how to solve the problem though!

jonathan says:

10:52am | 25/09/09

I paid my compulsory union fee at uni and the only benefit I ever saw was the free uni newspaper.  The quality of the journalism was okay, but never as good as the free street press which somehow managed to turn a profit.

The main thing that pissed me off about compulsory student unionism (apart from the young liberal/labor twats that campaigned every year) was the funding for ridiculous social clubs.  The Engineering Undergrad Society, by benefit of being the largest “Soc” at University of Queensland, received the most funding from the union fee.  This subsidised massive boat cruise pissups, barbecues, pub crawls, pissups, balls and pissups.  When paying the union fee means eating 2 minute noodles for the next 2 weeks, seeing this sort of excess is absolutely infuriating.

Andrew says:

10:55am | 25/09/09

The article just makes me realise that the Howard Government got it right with VSU. 

Basically, the argument here is that we need to have a compulsory student fee to fund “left wing” activism or as David Bennett from UTS says, “the target audience”.

Let’s all take a collective breath here. If the student newspaper was worth its salt and actually wanted to be read by the majority of the student population, they’d go out and seek some advertising to pay for the costs of producing it, not by collectively taxing each and every student to reimburse the costs. Just like the local papers do.

It’s simply outrageous to suggest that we should all have to pay for the largesse and bias of a student newspaper. 

RT says:

10:59am | 25/09/09

VSU has both its merits and disadvantages. The funds from student unionism no doubt paid for some silly and irrelevant activities. It also paid for real tangible student facilities such as good sports facilities. Without the funding of these through student contributions, the universities themselves have stepped up to take over the funding. This has diverted funds away from research and curriculum development. It’s not all a happy story.

Steve says:

11:23am | 25/09/09

Sydney Uni Union pays its retail employees $30+/hour and enforces an affirmative action policy (which has the duel effect of making them feel good about themselves and automatically culling a large number of applicants)

The coffee I usually get costs $4.95 on campus. In the CBD you can find places which do the same thing (with better coffee) for $3.

If the union gave a rats ass about students, halving the price of coffee (which costs around 20c to produce) and wages would be a great place to start.

PS: 98% of students would agree that cheeper coffee is far more important than financially supporting the “Palestinian solidarity group”.

Brian Ward says:

11:37am | 25/09/09

I have to respectfully disagree with Sarah when she says that “most student publications haven’t been able to move online in a significant way” due to funding. This is due to a lack of vision, not money. Anyone with access to the internet on campuses got online in the mid to late 1990s. I was the editor of the UWA Arts faculty paper in 1994; by 1997 I was the Postgraduate Student Association President and publishing a print newsletter, starting a PSA website and email news service and pushing the UWA postgrad journal Limina to abandon print and go online. The latter was stalled for years due to a stubborn refusal of the editorial board to give up the vanity of print.

Print was already dead a decade ago and student papers that have failed to make the transition to online should open their eyes to the reality that their vision, and their business model, has failed.

You don’t need a lot of money to deliver online news services, but you do need technical skills, some IT resources, creativity and initiative. These things are (or should be) plentiful on campuses.

Why have student papers not made the most of the opportunities of the digital revolution?

Sarah Stokely says:

12:16pm | 25/09/09

Hi Brian,
Students do plenty of creative online projects when they have control over the web infrastructure. I know this because I’m lucky enough to teach some of them. I suspect you underestimate the amount of control students have over both the allocation of funding and the technical infrastructure available to them.

Cheers,
Sarah

papachango says:

12:18pm | 25/09/09

Good to read some sensible comments about VSU - I remember the Northcote luvvies squealing like stuck pigs when it was introduced. You’d think Howard had murdered their children.

I wasn’t really into politics at uni, so I’m still mildly annoyed that I forked over a couple of thousand to susidise mainly socialist/communist crap newspapers and other radical leftwing groups. I suppose it it did have one positive effect, I saw though the collossal thieving con-job that socialism is.

Supposedly some of it went to subsidise the food in the Melbourne Uni union building, but they shouldn’t have bothered - it was rubbish and nearby Lyon street was much better and cheaper, despite being unsubsidised.

AFR says:

12:37pm | 25/09/09

During my time at Sydeny Uni in the mid 90’s all the publications were rubbish. Full of art’s student self-importance, and taking pot-shots at college students.

stephen says:

12:38pm | 25/09/09

University is a training/thinking ground. Paying union fees encourages involvment in , not only student politics, but politics. Being a part of a group that wishes the best for those that contribute -and even those that DON’T - is a fine way to learn to share, and I think Universities can teach, as well as ‘pub’ skills, worthwhile social skills.

Josh says:

01:10pm | 25/09/09

stephen,
If Universities are a training/thinking ground, isn’t VSU the best solution?
Paying Union fees simply FORCES students to join these Unions, which, either by accident or design, encourage involvement in ‘left-wing’ politics.
If these places really are institutions that encourage thinking, I believe that having any fees be voluntary is more likely to precipitate this action, rather than simply making students pay for social groups and/or services that they have no use for.

TimT says:

01:10pm | 25/09/09

I went to Sydney Uni and the journals there were Honi Soit and UR (Union Recorder). UR doesn’t really exist any more, but Honi Soit does. I was surprised when I logged on to the Sydney Uni website recently to find that Honi Soit doesn’t have any significant web presence. They load up the PDFs of their print onto the web, but that’s it.

This is just silly. The editors could easily set up a wordpress page for free, and they’d have a lot of control over the format and the contentt. Why don’t they do this? Possible reasons:

a) Poor organisation
b) Lack of imagination
c) No sustained leadership (different editors take over each year, which results in - poor organisation)
d) Possibly an over-zealous approach to page design - an attitude that the way the print issue is designed should be preserved on the web.
e) Poor organisation.

As to the circulations of student publications being cut, well, in reality thousands of copies of the paper typically go unread each week, and must eventually be dumped - the publishers typically whack the publications in great boxes in campus buildings, alongside issues of street press mags, activity booklets and the like. It’s an inherently wasteful process, done more for the vanity of the editors, writers and publishers than any concern to connect with an audience.

Student editors can also be needlessly stubborn and unpractical - I remember once hearing one saying that they would *never* accept advertising from certain institutions, like the army, and maybe even corporations he disagreed with (McDonalds? can’t remember now). 

Anyway, main point, there are plenty of sensible ways of cutting costs and making student publications more sustainable in the long-term. Student editors should get onto it , before somebody with a bit more initiative does, or even starts up a better publication in competition to their own.

pippu says:

01:17pm | 25/09/09

paying student fees was always the ultimate irony… it was supposed to encourage uni life, but a lot of students spent hours working to just pay the damn things, along with text books etc.. so i always felt it was a subsidy for building up more affluent students social lives and resumes…. student press should learn produce a paper that can appeal to many, not their fringe interests, and get readership up and in turn get adverstising. it is not sucumbing to evils of capitalism, it is about learning to operate in the real world and how most media organisations operate…

Jasper says:

01:35pm | 25/09/09

To those who complain that University Guilds are “left-wing” organisations I have one comment to make: if they are left wing it is because the left wing students are more motivated and actually vote in Guild elections.

Instead of decrying the “obvious left wing bias” of the Uni Guilds, wouldn’t it be a better idea to get involved and try and wrest control? Or maybe the lack of votes for the more right-wing candidates is an indication of how committed to the political process right-wing students are.

And as for the fees paying for services that you may not use - welcome to the real world! For the whole of the Howard years I paid my taxes and received nothing in return, being single and without children there was no middle class welfare for me. I can’t really see what the difference is, at Uni there were students who used many of the services that the Guild provided and even though I wasn’t one of them I understood the general need.

But it all boils down to involvement: if you don’t like the Guild reps - then vote, if there is no Guild club for your interest - create one. Just don’t deny the opportunity to others to have a full and involved university life just because you can’t be bothered getting involved yourself.

And yes, I was a poor self-sustaining student for 5 years and I paid my Guild fees for all of those years.

Margaret Gray says:

02:19pm | 25/09/09

“...left wing students are more motivated…”

Hardly.

More likely safety in numbers and a desperate cry for group acceptance.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are too busy developing a high paying career for the comrades in the sewing circle to bitch about to be embroiled in the petty and juvenile partisanship of university ‘politics’ (LOL).

“...For the whole of the Howard years I paid my taxes and received nothing in return, being single and without children there was no middle class welfare for me….”

Save an overwhelming sense of entitlement.

It’s not all about YOU, Jasper.

But then:

“...I understood the general need…”

Except when you were ‘paying’ taxes to a “right-wing” government of course.

Brian Ward says:

02:58pm | 25/09/09

Thanks TimT for some common sense. Print as the only method of distribution of not for profit content like student newspapers was better than nothing when noother options existed, but was still far from ideal.

Now we have had the internet on campuses for over a decade there is no excuse for student papers not having been online for years, and more recently for not including interactive feature like article commenting, continuous updates, UGC submissions, mobile access, etc.

The barriers to entry and costs are close to nothing. Print is economically unviable, environmentally unfriendly and slow.

I think the real myth is that all smart young people are digital natives. I’ve met many who are actually clueless. Perhaps the hipster student journalists can get some much needed advice from the computer club geeks about the interwebs?

Myriam Robin says:

03:16pm | 25/09/09

It is inexcusable that student media has been largely only in print form for so many years. That said, I can offer an explanation based on my own experiences.
Fear of defamation charges and the like (not unheard of, as the Rabelais case demonstrated) make most unions uneasy with giving editors and other student volunteers complete control over web content, as it is far harder to control than a fortnightly/monthy print magazine. That said, unions tend to be understaffed post-VSU, and cannot hope to maintain/supervise a website of news, opinion and general under-grad humour on top of their regular duties. So we have a deadlock - where editors are able to provide a website, but are not allowed to, and where the union wishes an effective publication, but cannot afford the time.
At the University of Adelaide, it seems a compromise has been reached for a website in 2010.

Brian Ward says:

03:30pm | 25/09/09

It comes back to motivation, initiaitive and organisation. All that is needed is for one student to start an ‘unofficial’ campus site or blog using a free CMS like Wordpress and, if it was done even moderately well, it could be huge. Surely there must be some examples in Australia already? The hyperlocal model used by Fitzroyalty, The Worst of Perth, RiotACT and Darlinghurst Nights is highly applicable to university campuses.

Jasper says:

03:42pm | 25/09/09

Thanks Margaret, for completely misrepresenting my views.

The phrase “...I understood the general need…” was in the same paragraph as the statement about Howard’s middle class welfare therefore is part of the same point. That means that while I didn’t agree with the level of spending going to those of median income, I understood that there is a general need for some form of support for families.

“It’s not all about YOU, Jasper.”
Exactly, hence my statement about the general need but I don’t see even the slightest indication of this acceptance of a general need coming from the opponents of Guild fees.

You should also notice that I put both “left-wing” AND “right-wing” in quotation marks - this should have indicated to you that I believe that accusations of bias in the Guilds (and the media for that matter) are about perspective and not necessarily related to actual bias.

“Meanwhile, the rest of us are too busy developing a high paying career…” Interestingly, all of the friends that I met at uni with high paying careers (corporate lawyers, doctors & engineers) were involved with the Guild. A career and being involved in the society around you are not mutually exclusive.

So again it comes down to a wish to get involved and who knows, it might lead to a lifelong habit.

Paul Montgomery says:

03:43pm | 25/09/09

I am a former student newspaper editor myself, mine being Catalyst at RMIT in 1996 when the VSU furore was hot after the Shoplifting article, which indirectly led to funding for Catalyst being slashed halfway through the year. During my time, there was a fair amount of activity in shoveling print content from student newspapers onto the Web, albeit in a haphazard fashion. But TimT is right in that the lack of continuity in editorship - also reflected in “management” of course - means an almost complete lack of long-term direction.

I am torn on the issue of whether student newspapers should be digital only. Yes, it makes economic sense. It reflects changing media structures, so it may actually be better training for budding journos than print, especially if they branch into video or audio. It even speaks to environmental issues, with no trees having to give their lives (though the politics of computer component production are dodgy). However, I still feel that it would be a shame to lose the community aspects of having a communal publication lying around in uni cafeterias and social hotspots for students to talk over and share. The student newspaper gives a university a character, and reflects its values, for better or worse.

I don’t think it should be an either/or thing. Student publications should have multi-user Wordpress blogs as adjuncts to their print form. Blogging doesn’t cost any more than a print publication would, as you’re already paying editor wages (presumably). If the editors don’t have the skills, then they should learn, that’s part of the job.

RT says:

03:45pm | 25/09/09

Margaret Gray, your sneering and inaccurate putdown of Jasper does you no credit. I think his point is well made. Compulsory student fees were similar to taxation in that they provided services available to, but not necessarily used by, all.  I couldn’t see ‘a sense of entitlement’ or a reluctance to pay taxes to a ‘right wing government’ in the comments.

But you clearly are hypersensitive to the merest suggestion of a criticism of the side of politics you so faithfully serve,  aren’t you?

TimT says:

03:49pm | 25/09/09

I agree. At the very least a website is a cheap and easy insurance policy against the threat of the print issue going under. Also a good insurance against other threats to print runs of newspapers: for instance, at Murdoch Uni, METIOR editors recently sprung a member of the uni’s executive management dumping large amounts of their paper in the bin. He may have been doing this for months…

http://www.guild.murdoch.edu.au/services/metior-magazine/

Interesting to hear that experience with unions, Myriam. A good insight into the internal workings of student publications, I think!

Margaret Gray says:

05:45pm | 25/09/09

“...A career and being involved in the society around you are not mutually exclusive…”

Never said it was.

Happily, one can have a financially rewarding career without being involved in the amorphous world of “left-wing” dominated undergraduate politics.

And being involved in “the society around you” is a pretentious and sophistical argument and certainly not judged by the amount of self-congratulatory volunteer work you do or how much money you give.

Let the rabble at Rabelais eat cake.

Student unionism is a farce and a ruse.

Ask the VSU if paying for buses to ferry ‘students’ to a protest march is an appropriate use of union fees.

But then I expect the blame for introducing HECS is still viewed by the VSU as part of an ongoing “right-wing” plot to stack campuses with the rich and privileged.

Hilariously, most of these ‘editors’ are the progeny of wealthy parents and recipients a private school education.

The irony is m a g n i f i c e n t.

Ziggy says:

07:32am | 28/09/09

In my youth I was national President of The Students Union. I can attest, with some authority, that these bodies are a collection of wankers who use the funds for their own petty, irrelevant causes that are far removed from the best interests of all students. Student newspapers only meaningful use is to light fires or wipe up spills or as wrapping for presents etc. Voluntary membership must remain so that students get the union they deserve. As is evidenced by todays results.

MFS says:

05:12pm | 09/10/09

The media often refer to VSU as some kind of Howard imposed evil.  The fact is, VSU is the right to decide whether or not you join a union.  Workers enjoy this right and so should students.  I was heavily involved in student politics in WA during VSU under the state Court government.  Corruption and mismanagement were absolutely rife.  As were born-to-rule mentalities from private school socialists. 

The hypocrisy of the left, who complain about fees for degrees on one hand, and fight to defend annual up front fees or the other hand, is disgusting.  Compulsory union fees at some universities used to be over $500.  The fact is, students don’t want to be in the union.  If they did, they would have joined under VSU when it was cheaper.  As low as $75.