Having something ‘to show mum and dad’ means student papers will survive

June 9, 2012 - 2 comments

In the world of media there is no hotter debate than the one raging about the future of print.

Ones to Watch’s resident blogger Caroline Mortimer argues that, while student media has to keep up with the changing landscape, its non-profit student-orientated service means that print editions of student newspapers will survive:

While the world’s media solemnly awaits the death of the print sector as it is slowly driven along in its digital hearse, student media’s own print machine still lumbers on somewhat haphazardly.

It is true that student media’s online presence has exploded in the past five years, and more and more university papers are seeing the merits of going ‘digital first’. As Lizzie Edmonds, editor of Leeds Student, argued earlier this week; student media has more room and the talent to experiment with innovative new forms that the professional media doesn’t have the leg room for. However, outside the cloistered world of the newsroom it’s only a small band of editors and writers who dedicate more hours to student journalism than is probably healthy; there are often hundreds of casual writers who are just contributing to the newspaper in order to see their names in print, rather than to advance their careers.

Caroline Mortimer

The lure of having something to show mum and dad when they come to visit after your first term away from home is one of the biggest draws for getting the casual student interested in student media. Therefore print has to survive because of the kudos attached to seeing your name appearing in a publication with limited space, as opposed to the wide open spaces of the internet where anyone could write something.

Student organisations are fundamentally different from the rest of the media in this sense because they exist for a very different purpose. As they are not constrained by the bottom line, their reason for existing is to serve the students that want to contribute to and read the paper, and these needs necessitate the continued existence, in some form or other, of print. Whereas professional media are selling their finished product, student media is selling a role in the process of making news – and tangible evidence of that role is of the utmost importance.

Whether or not this is a good thing is open to debate.

Given the ruinous costs of running a full print operation, and the money this inevitably draws away from other societies, moving completely to online would allow for a more flexible and much cheaper student newspaper as well giving students more chances to contribute. It is ironic that, despite the average student writer’s view that writing an online piece is somehow ‘lesser’ than print, in reality online work is far more important for showing off to parents/friends from home/future employers because it is more visible and allows you to appear as though you are involved in a professional-looking organisation. For instance, having written over 200 articles during the two years and ten months I have been a student journalist, I’d say 60-70% (perhaps more) of my work has been exclusively online.

However most people get writing for emotive reasons, and the desire to show off or get something off your chest bears little relation to impressing future employers with your online presence three years down the line. So whilst student media is creating genuinely sparkling and innovative online developments, it cannot ever fully move away from its printed roots. Ultimately it is ‘student first, media second’.

About the author

Caroline Mortimer

Blog Co-ordinator

Dave

Provocative stuff, and not helpful to editors desperately trying to convince their student unions that print media is still worth publishing in the current economic climate.

I can only speak for the publication I wrote for, where I also was News Editor and, finally Editor-in-Chief. However, the general experience I had was that print was still a very important component of what we offered to students. Despite innovations on the website, which has won ‘publication of the month’ on this very site, it still remains a print-leading publication, and this is why:

Our role as a magazine was to serve the interests of students, and the best way of reaching students was, still, a printed publication that they could pick up on the way to lectures, food, society meetings, socials in town, etc. Despite our high web traffic, I firmly believe that we still reached students most successfully through print copies.

But don’t believe my assumptions – we decided to ask students themselves in a survey of all media on campus. Electronic only media such as radio and TV were much less recognised than the student magazine was, with its physical presence on campus and in student areas. Even more tellingly, when asked directly whether they would prefer to read the publication in print or online, 9% of students said online, and 63% said in print. When asked what the publication should be doing better, the most common response was ‘distribute it more widely’ and ‘make more copies available’. It may be a dying medium in some quarters, but that doesn’t mean students should be artificially inducing that state when there is still demand.

All student media should have an online component – it’s the only way of effectively doing news, or live events, in my view. It also gives the opportunity for more people to get involved as you say. And I have no ‘in principle’ objection to student media going either e-only, or e-leading, but it shouldn’t be done because ‘that’s what all the cool kids are doing’. It should be done based on what your customers (ie students) want, not because the editorial team of the day wants to be able to talk about their drive towards electronic media when they go for an interview.
Nigel Canham

I am confident there will always be room for print even within the commercial news sector. Our weekly, the Mid-Devon Advertiser series for which I report and take photographs, is fairly buoyant as are many other locals. Reading a paper rather than a screen is an exercise many people enjoy and find convenient. A local rag provides some of the social glue and sense of place that a virtual alternative does not. And just as students like to have something to show mum and dad, excited children of the e-generation still ask when I attend events: ‘Will we be in the paper?’ Of course the adjustment to a multi-platform media has resulted in newspapers losing sales and some fairly rash knee-jerk reactions from publishers. But most of us are still here and I believe will be indefinitely.