Like it but I agree with Beth. The Orbital did cover the £11,000 story as and when the facts were in. It included details that The Founder missed out, for example. There was no scandal about being editorially compromised. Though, I must admit that The Founder was in a much better position to report on such a scandal due to it's complete independence. But The Orbital is still editorially independent and is only libel checked by VPComCam. In the last issue the main change was to add a drink aware warning to a cocktail recipe. Such changes hardly compromise the paper and are far outweighed by the facilities, cash and mandated participation that an SU publication enjoys.

The Founder is a welcome addition to journalism at Royal Holloway but I don't think it is the only or the necessarily the superior route. Student journalism needs variety and support. If independent media can exist then it will be richer as a result but SU publications should not be written off. Instead, both publications bring something different to the mix.

The Founder is fortunate to have a good exec editor who ensures that the money is coming in year after year so that editors can focus on content. I'm not sure this is necessarily the most appropriate model for student papers. Most people want to write and edit rather than trawl round advertisers. So, a purely independent student media is definitely worth pursuing but it's all a matter of funding. I'd be interested to know how much editors have felt limited by their SUs. I know that London Student is now independent of ULU's President and Vice...

Elephant sounds interesting too. Sounds very much like the work being done by www.lsjsn.co.uk. Worth uniting perhaps?

Interesting article, good to read stuff like this and nice to know people are thinking about it in a critical way. Surely it is through this kind of discussion that new media can move forward.

I’m Beth, the current Editor of The Orbital. I got elected late April and produced our first issue with our new board early June. Firstly, I’d like to clarify that The Orbital was in no way ‘ditched’ at any point by Royal Holloway. It faced a few years of changing shape and form but it has remained as the official Students’ Union publication.

I ran for the Editor position on the basis that I believe I could provide and editorship that was fair and representative of students at Royal Holloway. I ran on the manifesto that The Orbital would hold an impartial editorial line and that we would hold sabbatical officers and elected representatives to account. With Sarah Honeycomb as VP Comm Camm elect, I have no doubts that I will be able to run The Orbital in a way that it is not merely propaganda for the Union but that is a quality publication serving the students at Royal Holloway.

At the time that the story of the £11,000 loss broke, the editorial board of The Orbital had disintegrated and the board previous to me did not cover the story. However, Matty, I’d like to point you towards page 4 in our latest edition (my first issue as editor) which had an update on the losses: http://issuu.com/theorbital/docs/june2011 - so to say we didn’t cover the story is unfair. We reported it in a fair and unbiased way. In the way I will be reporting any SU news such as this in the future. It can be done.

I definitely agree that objectivity is essential in student media, but independence, isn’t always so easy. The Union should be responsible for having a publication to inform its Students. Our Students’ Union want students to be engaged, and with some of the apathy at Royal Holloway, it would be stupid not for the Union to invest time and effort into finding a suitable editor and a board that can as you said, disconnect themselves from their own views; to be absolutely objective.

That is the key here, having people who are responsible to produce quality and who are obliged and committed to understanding how journalism works.

Thank you for this interesting article.

I think, however, it is misleading insofar as it appears to suggest a mutual exclusivity in being reliant on Students’ Unions for funding and producing independent journalism. I don’t believe this to be the case and, as has been noted already, union publications are often safeguarded constitutionally anyway. The Al Jazeera analogy is a little draconian in this respect, then!

I also think your article deals somewhat unfairly with the question of students as stakeholders in order to cohere into your overall argument. Whilst an individual can establish his or her own media outlet, appoint themselves as editor and employ others they feel are talented, and then go on to produce some absolutely sterling work, Students’ Unions are run in a more democratic manner. This does not mean, however, (and this is the key point) that the paper’s journalists are suddenly going to start seeing things differently, take to wearing revolution or Conservative t-shirts, join in with the chanting and ‘create news’. That is an irrational leap.

The example of The Founder is an interesting one and I agree about its excellent journalism. However, drawing on Sam’s points about TF being forced to delay or cancel publication due to lack of funding or openly backing election candidates, I think it undermines your argument more than it supports it, whilst simultaneously underscoring the usefulness of Union funding. Moreover, we passed into the new London Student regulations (LS is, of course, a partially Union funded paper) a prohibition on the paper openly backing a candidate during ULU elections, which I’m sure you will agree is the more independent stance. So clearly TF being financially independent hasn’t meant it has been more electorally independent in terms of reporting or bias.

Even the brilliant journalistic exposé of the £11,000 missing does not support your argument, unless you can provide evidence that The Orbital tried to print the same story but were prevented from doing by the Union. That would be the serious case of censorship which would genuinely threaten independence. Otherwise, it’s really just a case of The Founder having better investigative journalism in this instance. (I don’t know any suggestion of TO being prevented from printing such a story, but I’m happy to be proved wrong).

In sum, a paper can be both accountable to its students by covering the topics they want (and are essentially paying for) and also accountable to high journalistic standards by reporting accurately and fairly.

I like the essence of your article, but I believe it suffers from a false bifurcation.

Really interesting article! Also love what you've done with Elephant Student Media, and I think you've gained a lot with your impartiality with your coverage of the protests.

I'll hold my hands up and say I'm the opinionated sort, and I have been involved in protests I've eventually reported on - most notably Swansea University's stand against the proposed cuts to Modern Foreign Languages (they wanted to cut the dept. by 50%). I think this is partly why I decided The Siren should be a commentary blog rather than an impartial news outlet - students are angry and I was and still am angry, and being loudmouthed and opinionated, I've made it clear. On the other hand, when it came to the Sabbatical elections, despite our blog not being a union funded publication, I decided to play by the same rules the rest of the union's media outlets have to with regards to reporting on it. This made things decidedly more complicated for us, but I'm glad we went for that route. We even went as far as refusing to wear badges and suchlike, despite being friends with many of the candidates.

In short, I've been on both sides of the fence - maybe being so involved in the MFL cuts protest was a bad journalistic call on my part, but I felt strongly that the cuts were wrong and the best tool to hand was my pen (or my laptop) as well as a megaphone. So I can understand why some student journalists will have ended up 'making the news' by protesting rather than covering it. You've definitely given me some food for thought at any rate.

Well done, TK! Fascinating stance on student media. I never thought to compare it to Al Jazeera in such a way.

Hi TK,

Good article, and I would agree that you are most definitely right about The Founder's contribution of high journalistic standards to Royal Holloway.

However in my experience the way Union papers operate internally matters considerably more than the way in which they are funded when it comes to editorial independence. Paper’s editorial boards must have the confidence to grasp their union ensured rights to publish freely about any issue including their union.

As someone who has created a print student newspaper, it can be incredibly difficult to find funding and in places where student revenue is not greatly sort after. As long as the process with which the paper is governed guards your ability to print without union interference (which every union constitution I have ever come across does) I see accepting some union funding as no different from that of private advertising.

To say that student papers ran "free ads" for stop the cuts is, in most cases, an oversimplification. In the majority of cases it was SU's using their paid advertising as part of a funding agreement to promote something their student executive have voted in support of. In the Lion's case we ran a back cover poster which was in effect part of our agreed upon union advertising. It was an idea that originated in the union but was only agreed upon to be printed at the Lion's independent editorial board meeting. We also ran stories by people against the demonstration and against free education altogether. I also echo Sam in saying that as a popular talking point on campus, running specially coloured editions of your paper to cover the demo only serves to increase your circulation and doesn’t explicitly express your paper's support.

I agree that when papers become overly politicised biased can fester in their overall reporting, but again that is not a side effect of students union funding. I'd argue it’s more an effect of a few excessively politicised students attempting to coerce unions and papers to fit their agendas, a situation endemic to all student activities and one which can only be overcome with rigorous editorial standards.

In short when you have to make a physical paper you require a lot of money and occasionally that means having large funding obligations with one organisation. It is only a scary position when your paper does not have the internal stability and strength of editorship to print what is in their readers’ interest. When they are at their best, SU’s are silent investors in student media which, as they themselves are part funded by students, I find difficult to see huge amounts of conflict in it.

I like the article. It's interesting, I disagree with some of your assumptions though. Royal Holloway certianly hasn't abandoned The Orbital. They both shift the same number of copies per issue and The Orbital tends to shift more each year and because The Founder sometimes has to not print an issue because they don't have the money to do so. They are both quality publications and they have both broken stories that the other has had to follow on and both have held the Union to account when it's done something wrong. The only real difference I would say is that during sabbatical elections The Founder will openly back a candidate whereas The Orbital can't. More generally as well, almost every union funded student media outlet has a constitution which clearly states that it has complete editorial independent and that short of libellous content the Union cannot ask for anything to be removed, and even then it's only an ask, the union can never tell. Can you think of a single time when a story has been censored here? Even saying all this, I think to say that all papers are entirely Union funded is a bit of an overstatement, we get quite little from the SU compared to other universities (£20k to cover QMessenger, CUB, QMTV, Quest, online and everything else) but we bring in another £10k ourselves on average through advertising, without both of these sources of income we wouldn't be able to have everything we do and we certainly wouldn't be winning all the awards we have this year. You do have an interesting take on it though, like I said, good article.