Vote for your Student Publication of the Year 2012

August 3, 2012 - 17 comments

Student Publication of the Year 2012 Every month since Ones to Watch launched in 2010 it has featured the student publication that has been the most impressive. After more than two years of celebrating these monthly successes, we feel it’s time to reward those who have consistently hit high standards of journalism with a bigger accolade.

Introducing the very first Ones to Watch Student Publication of the Year Award. And unlike other student media awards out there, you get a say in who deserves to win.

This isn’t the kind of award where stuffy judges who have never seen your paper decide the winner on the basis of a few recommended articles. We study over 70 student publications daily so when we say you’re the best, you can be sure of it.

But that alone isn’t enough. The most important part of any newspaper is its readership, so we want to see which papers are genuinely loved by their audience.

Shown below are the publications that made Ones to Watch Student Publication of the Month throughout the last academic year (2011-2012) and why they were chosen. We’re giving you a chance to vote for the one you think was the best. If yours is listed and you think it deserves the prize, then round up your readers/friends/mum/gran and get them to vote too.

But this is more than a simple popularity contest. When all the votes are in, Ones to Watch will announce the top three. Then the OTW team will then look in detail at the three with the most votes and decide which one has performed the best across the academic year. Once the team has made their suggestions, Ones to Watch’s editor will make the final choice.

The prize? We’d love to say we’ll shower you with money and gifts but alas we don’t have those sorts of funds. Instead, you’ll get to show off the glory of being our SPOTY2012 by using an exclusive logo on your website and/or newspaper for the next 12 months. You’ll also get a certificate for your newsroom and we might even throw a bottle of something fizzy in there too.

Ones to Watch has always aimed to show off the very best that this country’s student journalists have got to offer and we hope the Student Publication of the Year Award will be a celebration of the high standards student media can achieve.

Voting opens today, Friday, August 3, and will close Monday, August 20. The three publications with the most votes will be announced on Friday, August 24. The winner will be announced on Friday, August 31.

Without further ado, here are the Ones to Watch Student Publication of the Year Award 2012 contenders:

The Boar (University of Warwick) - Student Publication of the Month in February 2012. The Boar was chosen for being a great all-round publication, with an excellent comment section.

The Cambridge Student (University of Cambridge) – SPOTM March 2012. Chosen for its engaging content and great coverage of the suspension of a student who protested during a David Willetts speech.

Cherwell (University of Oxford) - SPOTM January 2012. Chosen for its high-quality writing, with so many good articles OTW couldn’t fit them all in.

Forge Today (University of Sheffield) – SPOTM May 2012. Chosen for consistently keeping the site updated with fresh and interesting material and its great live blogs.

Impact (University of Nottingham) – SPOTM December 2011 and June 2012. The only publication to be chosen twice this academic year, Impact was picked for its fantastic investigative features.

Leeds Student (University of Leeds) - SPOTM November 2011. Chosen for its great redesign and excellent coverage of a spate of serious attacks on students.

Palatinate (Durham University) – SPOTM April 2012. Picked for being consistently updated with high-quality news and interesting comment and features.

The Student Journals (national) – SPOTM September 2011. Chosen for its debates on serious issues from a student perspective.

York Vision (University of York) – SPOTM October 2011. Chosen for its investigations, coverage of a political scandal and minisite especially for Freshers.

***Voting has now closed. Thank you for supporting your student publication.***

About the author

Rosie Taylor

Founder

http://www.facebook.com/people/Matthew-Toms/1065908171 Matthew Toms

The Student Journals has by far been the best outlet for young budding student journalists this years. Not only are the team brilliant, but they offer immediate exposure to anybody who wants to be heard. Vote TSJ!
James Beavis

The Boar provides students with a highly entertaining and engaging read throughout the year. It has sparked many debates in my halls of residence kitchen and I look forward to reading what is has to offer within the new academic year. Although informative The Boar keeps an intelligent sense of humour that makes it such an enjoyable read.

The team thoroughly deserve to be rewarded as Student Publication of the Year 2012!
Erik

The funny thing is you’ve pretty much chosen the newspapers at each university which nobody cares about, either because they are union-run and have no independence or they are just stuffy and pretentious.
- Jess Phillips
  
  …apart from Vision at York – but then again, they won the Guardian award so probably won’t claim this one. Forge is decent and The Student Journals has some good stuff, especially as such a new publication, but Vision still leads the pack I think, from what I can see of their print content online. Impressive for newspaper with no sabb editor and little funding.
  - http://twitter.com/sirajdatoo Siraj Datoo
    
    Thanking for taking the time to check out TSJ, Jess Since we’re not affiliated to any university, we also receive minimal funding (only from sponsorship/ads) and have no sabb editor either. What I really like about TSJ right now is that this time last year, we had three members on the team. Now we have nearly 20, and with the summer we have members of the team working on the site from the UK (obviously), as well as USA, Pakistan, and France.
    Would love thoughts on how you think TSJ can develop to be a better platform – we’re always looking for ways to improve.
- Dave
  
  You clearly don’t know anything about Impact at all, Eric. Union funded, yes, but not Union run by any stretch of the imagination.
David

I completely agree with Eric. All of these are union-ran and I can say with confidence that at least in Leeds, the impact of the Leeds Student amongst students is minimal. What about the rise of the Drop in Exeter or other stories of true journalistic innovation?
- Oxford Student Journalist
  
  I don’t know about the rest of them, but Cherwell is not union-run at all. In fact it’s independently funded and completely student-run!
- Carrie
  
  The readership of Leeds Student is at least 15,000 so I don’t know how you can say that’s minimal. In addition, the paper isn’t run by the Union – the content is created by students who are members of the society and curated by the Editor who was elected by the student body.
Durham Student

I’d say that Palatinate isn’t a student paper at all – the Vice Chancellor and the University Media department decide what does and does not go in it. The board get frequently threatened with libel action by the University and there are even senate minutes indicating that the VC would “publish an article”. Given all the problems and dodgy individuals at Durham, you’d think they would have a lot more to say. Alas, it’s just the University magazine.
- Notthecase
  
  This couldn’t be further from the truth. There is never any contact between the VC or the media relations department when it comes to deciding content for the paper. The Vice Chancellor believes he can exercise influence, write articles and lead content, but, in the case of Senate minutes for example, it’s empty rhetoric to massage his inflated ego. Sure. there’s pressure from the administration. Last December, when the paper legitimately criticised him and the University, he threatened to expel an editor from the university. Yet, it didn’t stop anything getting printed.
  - Ex Board-Member
    
    Have you read all the apologies that turn up whenever the University is not happy? In any case there are loads of things that didn’t end up in print that shouldn’t have, for instance Higgins’s suing a student’s Union and the NUS, the debacle that is the Mathematics Department (where the head bullies and harasses anything that moves – hence the ridculously high staff turnover), the Wikileaks (where they missed half the story) and so on. If they threatened to expel an editor, you think that itself probably should be on the front page along with “bye-bye Higgins”? There was also that brilliant email that Sam Roseveare sent around the board explaining that nothing that might upset the University should be published, due to the funding negotiations, which the board lapped up. Or the other email where an (past) Editor explained how they conducted all the journalism by asking the University, as they know best… Palatinate really is a joke.
    - ex
      
      Durham Student, you’re completely wrong. The VC thinks he can exercise power over what we print but he really can’t. We do however have to check what we print with DSU. we have to avoid libel, so while we might want to print riskier articles, we have to tread carefully and having the DSU media team helping us is the best way to do this. We aren’t self-funded – DSU makes up for the costs we don’t cover with advertising, so DSU’s financial involvement also implicates them in any mistakes we make. However this isn’t to say we aren’t editorially independent: the only time an article will be pulled will be because DSU is sure that we’ll get sued because the story’s claims aren’t substantiated, but because of our editing process, bad articles rarely reach the DSU’s check. Articles are never pulled simply because the uni might get upset. DSU and VC aren’t the same: the VC has no involvement with Palatinate whatsoever.
      
      Secondly, Ex Board-Member, the apologies are printed to show goodwill to the uni (usually it’ll be after incorrect information has been printed) and letters we print are put in to calm the people who send them in and show their opinion to the public – whether or not we agree with it.
      
      Do you really believe we could print ‘bye bye higgins’?
      
      Any stories we’ve missed lack enough evidence for us to write a proper article about them. Other stories aren’t printed because we don’t know about them. if you think you can deliver better news coverage, why are you not involved? Palatinate is open to everyone.
      
      How can you say that Palatinate this year has been a joke when you have not been involved during this year? Sam Roseveare? he was president over a year ago now! almost the entire editorial board has changed since then, along with our practices and our design. There have been 4 changes of editor-in-chief since Roseveare was president. You really can’t say it’s the same paper it was a year ago.
      
      I think it’s a shame that you’re so ready to deride the efforts of our editorial board of almost 50 people without having been involved whatsoever this year. It’s really not easy coordinating this many volunteers to produce 32 pages every 14 days. A huge amount of time and hard work goes into producing it. Personally I would say that your series of non-sequiturs is a joke. You’re coming from an outdated and misinformed point of view. Here at Palatinate we write stories based on evidence.
Pingback: Staff News | Vote Impact magazine Student Publication of the Year
ginger cat

voting for cherwell, that barbara speed is simply smashing!
Alisha Rouse

It would be really interesting to know how many of these are totally editorially independent, but I can say for sure that Forge Press is. And trust me, it’s caused us some problems but is the best and only way to serve students and come out with effective investigative journalism.
- http://twitter.com/sirajdatoo Siraj Datoo
  
  TSJ is editorially independent More than that, the editors aren’t allowed to impose a specific slant – all opinion on the site belong to the students who write and we’ll often have opposing arguments on the site at the same time.