It could have all been so different. On October 25th 1993, gair rhydd published probably its sparsest edition ever. There was no news; no sport; no opinion; no features. Just a plea for students to protest against suggested National Students’ Union reforms that would end funding for, among other activities, student media.
Then-Secretary of State for Education John Patten’s proposals failed in the face of opposition by the NUS and student media around the country. But they reminded students that their media were not certain to continue forever.
It’s easy, after 900 issues, to take gair rhydd for granted and to assume it’ll be there on the stands every Monday without fail. But, as a survey for the Leeds Student last month showed for the first time, student newspapers are finding it difficult to continue at the same levels they used to.
Almost half of the 13 newspapers asked had cut their print run or cancelled entire issues in the last year, and more than 60% had missed their advertising target. gair rhydd has been lucky, but not immune to this trend.
We haven’t had to cut our print run or cancel issues. But this has been the first year we’ve really had to make savings. The main way of doing this has been to decrease the size of the paper: a couple of years ago an issue could hit 50 pages; now it’s almost invariably 36.
Our revenue is around 50% from advertising and 50% from the Union, but, in the current economic climate, the advertising income is falling. As it falls, the budget for student media falls, and this means we need cutbacks. The loss of the TV section earlier in the year was down to the need to save money by saving space, and it’s likely that further sacrifices will be needed in the future.
Student media isn’t dying. gair rhydd isn’t dying. And there’s every reason to believe that \ will make it to 1,000 issues.
But there are undeniably problems for student media to face if they are to continue providing the same information, views and analyses to the same number of students in coming years. Student media has an advantage over other media by having unpaid staff, but the loss of income still has an effect.
gair rhydd has now existed for 37 years. That’s more than twice as long as the Maastricht Treaty, or nearly three times as long as UWIC (oooh!). It might be a bit tricky at the moment to run a student newspaper, but as long as there are the readers, writers, and editors, there will be student media.
