The writes and wrongs of student journalism

The student newspaper is often the first port of call for the aspiring journalist. Bruce Arnold of the Irish Independent and Mark Little of RTÉ both began their trade writing for papers in Trinity College Dublin while anyone contributing to the UCD University Observer is following in the footsteps of Dara O Briain, editor, co-founder and comedian extraordinaire.
Ciara Guiry, editor of the UCC Express, says “student journalism is all about getting to know how to write and what you can write”. Guiry is currently on sabbatical from her English and Archaeology arts course, and is also active in the drama society.
“It looks fantastic on a CV, because it means you can meet deadlines and have organisation skills,” she says. “When you come to college it’s a great way to meet new people. It can be cliquey – it’s like anything on campus. But we don’t start a meeting with things we did over the summer or the weekend. Then again, cliques can’t really survive when we’ve the paper to put out,” she acknowledges. “Sometimes there’s a great week when everyone is talking about the paper for days. Sometimes there’s an awful week when it’s raining and you see soggy copies walked into the ground all over the Student Centre. Sometimes when you see copies flung around the place you feel a bit put off. But I still get a buzz seeing my name in print.”
One time the Express became the talk of the campus was in 2007, when a controversial article on gay cruising set tongues wagging. That’s the thing about student publications: they’re a love ‘em or hate ‘em fixture of college life. For every enthusiastic hack there always seems to be a cynic to proclaim that, rightly or wrongly, it’s all a waste of time. Guiry feels that most critics haven’t bothered reading what they’re criticising.
Sometimes, of course, student newspapers go horribly, gruesomely wrong. A few years ago Pirahna, the Trinity equivalent of Private Eye and of the now-defunct Slate, found itself in trouble when it called Muslims “stinking sand n****rs” in an attempted lampoon of over-reaction to cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. The sarcasm was evident to some but not others, and resulted in the college destroying all copies and fining those responsible. Other student newspaper disasters of legend include the time a college publication almost collapsed a murder trial by reporting the unreportable, and the time an over-aroused spellchecker rendered Coca Cola ‘Cock Cola’. Repeatedly.
Mishaps on the UCC Express, though, are of a less public nature. “People constantly text in with disasters – I’ve an essay, I lost my laptop – and because they’re not being paid, there’s a lot of tongue-biting involved. You’re students, you don’t have the support professional journalists have. We were working out of the designer’s living room last year, we didn’t even have an office.”
That’s part of the fun, though: for all the cut-and-thrust careerism and professional pretensions, at the end of the day it really is a DIY methodology of everyone mucking in to achieve the common goal. The cost of printing means that there are harsh financial lessons to be learned too. Most student newspapers receive partial funding from the college or the students’ union, giving staff an early lesson in the myth of editorial independence.
“We get a lot of support from the student union. We can’t be naïve, but there’s a good level of independence there. I don’t have them suffocating me,” says Guiry.“Other societies don’t have what we have – a group of people with completely different interests coming together from all parts of the college to put out a newspaper. I see the lovely side, but I also see the 2:30am side. If you get your break you have to go with it.”