A new slant on Australian student press

MICHAEL Hislop has a vision. It is of a national newspaper for all of Australia's 850,000-odd university students; a fair, balanced, independent and informative voice – a not-for-profit enterprise run by students for students.

The third-year politics student at the University of NSW also has a good sense of timing.

The federal Government is expected to seek the introduction of voluntary student unionism after it gains a majority in the Senate in July. Campus clubs, societies and organisations, including student newspapers, hold grave concerns about their viability should VSU be introduced.

It is expected a sharp drop in income will hit student newspapers hard: printing and distribution costs will take much larger bites of their budgets, so circulation will drop. When circulation drops, advertisers disappear. When advertisers disappear, publications perish.

To stay alive, the papers will have to take more advertising, which will stick in the craw in campus editorial offices, bastions of independence and irreverence.

This is where The Student Leader comes in.

Mr Hislop has no qualms courting big corporate names such as Vodafone, ANZ and Westpac for sponsorship and a team of volunteers is quickly bringing his vision nearer to reality.

The online Student Leader will be launched on February 21, during orientation week. The newspaper, a 32-page tabloid with eight colour pages, will follow in July.

"At this point in time were set up as a not-for-profit incorporated association," Mr Hislop told the HES.

"We're fully run and organised by students."

Mr Hislop, a supporter of VSU ("It might force student organisations to be more relevant to students"), is scathing about existing student newspapers.

"They are shocking," he said.

"Most of them are funded by the student guilds and student unions which are run by political factions; the student media inevitably becomes a mouthpiece for the particular faction that's in control.

"At best, maybe 10 per cent of the student community actually reads the student newspapers because it's not targeted to them, it's not balanced.

"We see that as an untapped market."

The Student Leader's business plan is predicated on the publication being fully financially viable and self-sufficient by the end of 2007.

Mr Hislop envisages a circulation of 214,000 by the end of 2006.

It will be the first national student newspaper since National U, the organ of the long-defunct Australian Union of Students, which folded in the early 1980s.

National Union of Students president Felix Eldridge can see the writing on the wall for the current campus crop.

"VSU would spell the end of student newspapers as we know them," he said.

"They are one of the few media outlets where anything can be published and it's real free speech in action but VSU would certainly spell the end of (that)."

Mr Eldridge said he expected many papers to simply disappear.

Better established publications, such as Farrago at the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney's Honi Soit "might stick around for a while", but an increased reliance on advertising would "change their character quite dramatically".

University of Sydney SRC president Rose Jackson said the effect of VSU would be immediate.

"[Honi Soit's] distribution would go down from 5000 [a week] to 1000, maybe 500," she said.

"We would be able to cover ourselves through advertising if we limited distribution, but once that happened, advertising would probably fall also because it wouldn't have appeal of wide distribution."

Honi Soit, which pays its 10 editors $70 a week, had already started taking more paid advertising this year, in anticipation of VSU.

"It's something that we don't want to do; we don't want to commercialise our paper because it is a voice for students," Ms Jackson said.

"The students write it, the students edit it and we don't want to have that compromise by increasing ads and decreasing space for students' contributions but we really don't have a choice.

"I do think it could be the end."

The Australian