Selling off Student Media
Anya Poukchanski delves into the seemy underbelly of the privatisation of student media.
The first sign that Macquarie University’s student services organisation, U@MQ, was out of its depth came when its staff decided that students would be offended by swearing.
And certainly when the word ‘fuck’ was blotted out of the first edition of student newspaper Speculum, something offensive was taking place. The insult, however, had less to do with excuse-my-french linguistic impropriety and more with the stifling level of control that U@MQ was trying to exert over the paper it had promised would be independent, run for students and by students.
“We said ‘this is ridiculous, students can deal with a bit of swearing’,” says former Speculum editor David Abkiewicz. Not according to U@MQ, which, as Speculum’s parent organisation, threatened to withhold pocket money until the editors brought the publication into line.
It took half a year for Speculum’s editors to understand exactly where that line of acceptability was – and when they did, the five of them resigned immediately. It became clear that, for U@MQ, funding a student newspaper was a marketing exercise, designed for little more than to promote their services on campus and create a feel-good image for the organisation. Born out of the spectacular collapse of Macquarie Uni’s student-run union, U@MQ is run entirely by full time, professional staff, and was barely willing to go through the motions of student involvement.
“Right from the start their idea of student run and our idea of student run were two different things,” says Ben Landsberry, another former editor. “They just wanted some puppets to put out their publication that would be full of their ads.”
But although it had been brewing all year, when the showdown with U@MQ finally happened at the start of second semester it was farce rather than tragedy.
Photos of women with a cartoon tuba, a joke advice column and the description of childbirth as “excruciating” were all deemed too offensive to publish and U@MQ demanded that the editors cut half the content of that week’s edition of Speculum, or it would not go to print. Somehow, U@MQ had missed the satire in an article called “The Pope’s Guide to Sex,” and called for it to be heavily censored, including removing the reference to the pain of childbirth – because “many women want to have children” – and the line “Never have intercourse with a man as you would with a woman. It is abhorrent. Clive Owen is no exception.”
“They said ‘Who’s Clive Owen? He’s going to sue us’,” says Abkiewicz incredulously. “We thought they might think the article was offensive to Catholics, and we were ready to talk about that. Instead we got this. We told them, ‘Well when Clive Owen gets his weekly copy of Speculum lets see how he feels’.”
Speculum stands out as an example of splutteringly misguided censorship, but student newspapers all over Australia are facing the same scenario as campuses switch into corporate mode to cope with Voluntary Student Unionism. Most student-run unions have been replaced with commercial services providers that are staffed by professionals and need to make a profit to survive. Selling beers and sandwiches is profitable. Handing out newspapers is not – unless they’re full of advertising.
Honi Soit is one of the last student papers in the country in which content doesn’t have to be approved by a Marketing Department before it goes to print. Elsewhere, student papers have either died out or been transformed into glossy leaflets publicising (paid) campus events and sponsors’ products. President of the National Union of Students Angus McFarland agrees that revenue-raising and student journalism make for an uneasy compromise. “Student media is meant to be provocative, it’s meant to push boundaries,” he says. “It’s not exactly going to reflect the values of a middle aged marketing manager.”
At UNSW, the student services provider Arc requires that its Managing Director be afforded an immediate right of reply whenever the organisation is criticised in the student paper, Tharunka. Editor Chantel Cotterell concedes that while Arc is generally supportive, she and her colleagues are aware there are limits to what they can say about the company that funds them. “There’s a bit of a trade off in the sense that we can still publish the articles we want, but we don’t necessarily push boundaries.” Some years ago Tharunka got itself into a legal stoush by criticising a food outlet on campus. Nowadays, says Cotterell, such comments probably wouldn’t go to print.
A mysterious zine called Your Day has appeared on the UNSW campus in a seeming effort to upend this complacency. No one knows who is publishing the one page zine, but it is happy to lay into Arc where Tharunka cannot.
It appears that the post-VSU generation of student unions are facing an identity crisis. On one hand, their purpose is to develop university communities and give opportunities to students. But to keep afloat, most are being run like businesses and want to create a slick image that keeps students interested and paying their fees. It would take exceptional self control for the union managers to keep their hands off a publication that they are, after all, paying for. So should organisations cede full journalistic independence to their student papers and fund them with no questions asked, or should they demand a return on their investment?
The controversy has come as far as Sydney University. Though USYD still has the most active student union in Australia it has not been spared the financial stress of VSU. The University of Sydney Union’s publications, including The Bull and literary journal Hermes, have been restructured almost every year since VSU came in, as the Union tries to get the right balance of writing, publicity and, of course, cost. Originally, the Union’s publications were required to write “In the best interests of the Union”, essentially ruling out any negative content. After a year that rule was removed with the recognition that it encroached too far on the journalistic integrity of The Bull’s writers. In that time, a number of articles about the political machinations of Union Board Directors were banned from publication.
Yet the expectation embodied in the “best interests” rule endures, perhaps unsurprisingly so; that the organisation which funds the weekly paper should have some say in what goes to print. But to judge at what point that ‘say’ becomes ‘censorship’ is also to define the identity of a student paper, a question that post-VSU unions are struggling to resolve for themselves. The current editors of The Bull were pulled into the debate when the Union suggested they devote an entire edition to promoting Snowball, the start of semester’s concert at Manning. Again this year, articles about Union Board Directors have been censored but under different and more obscure Union regulations. The Union may not be sure what exactly it wants from The Bull but it is evidently prepared to push harder than the student-run SRC, which publishes Honi Soit.
The few student papers which remain under the auspices of student-run organisations – and there are literally a handful of them – deal with a different sort of editorial pressure. As the traditional home of political activists, student organisations like Sydney Uni’s SRC are more attuned to the political message of their publications than their ability to sell out concerts and cappuccinos. So while Speculum could happily rag on anyone from socialists to Catholics, so long as it kept the U@MQ ‘brand’ clean, Melbourne University’s paper Farrago copped barbs for publishing a ‘Diary of a Young Liberal’ which was unacceptably right wing. But then, the cover of Farrago’s last edition was a huge colour photograph of about ten stark naked men cavorting around the Melbourne Uni campus. You could say the two organisations have different priorities.
Farrago editors Zoe Barron and Ben Riley say they drop the “C-bomb” all the time in their publication, though they’re conscious about using it in the appropriate context. They’ve never been pulled up for swearing or sexually explicit content. Their most controversial article this year was actually about “individuality”, but sparked accusations of racism for using the term “Asian dollar” to describe Melbourne Uni’s cynical pursuit of international students, as well as charges of sexism and homophobia. “Ironically,” notes Riley, “most of the complaints were coming from the white upper middle class activists in the student council.”
According to Barron and Riley, Farrago’s conflicts this year have been mainly with the far Left faction Activate. Farrago’s independence is a thorn in the side of the student council for a different reason to papers like Speculum: not because the editors fail to accept advertising but because they don’t adhere to any party’s political agenda. The political non-alignment of this year’s Honi Soit editors has attracted the same criticism. “Because we don’t claim to be explicitly Left, people assume we’re right wing,” says Riley. “Both the Left and the Right are accusing us of being partisan to the left and the right,” adds Barron with some satisfaction. “That’s a good sign, right?”
Nonetheless, fighting other students about ideas is probably healthier than battling managers for artistic license. The editors of Speculum knew the game was up when they heard the Managing Director of U@MQ say “this is not what I want in my publication” about an article they were going to publish. No matter the support the editors had from their peers, U@MQ was running on it own, self contained agenda. And according to their priorities, the editors simply weren’t doing a very good job.
“They were constantly saying ‘students aren’t going to like this’, but they were getting their information from people in their organisation,” explains another member of the former editorial team, Emiko Kinoshita. “They would take an issue and show it to all their staff members and if any of the staff members had a problem with it they would come back and tell us the students wouldn’t accept it.” It makes sense when Landsberry adds that the marketing department told him: “We asked everyone who works here who Clive Owen is and nobody knew.”
To McFarland, it all comes back to whether a student union sees inherent value in student-led activity, or whether it just wants to make a profit. Many of the services usually provided by student unions don’t rake in the cash, but they do provide opportunities that students would never have otherwise, like a newspaper they can own, produce, and print whatever the fuck they like in. McFarland sums it up when he asks “Do you want to read a newspaper your dad wrote, or one that your friend wrote?