The Word is out... again
ALTHOUGH THE newspaper cannot substantiate the claim that 'the Word was God', it can confirm that Oxford's troubled newsmagazine The Word is back from the void. Its failure to appear last Trinity term was hailed with the proclamation 'The Word is dead', but its publisher, Nick Hackworth, has recently affirmed that the paper is alive and well, albeit without the The. He told the Oxford Student that at that time 'there was a temporary hiatus in the finances of the paper', which has since been remedied.
Hackworth, who has now left the university, is providing finance for the paper now with co-editor David Calhoun, 'until it gets back on its feet'.
Last term, the full-colour magazine-style publication ran into money problems and had been advertising for some time for a financial manager, seemingly without success. The two-fold funding from advertising and JCR subscriptions caused problems for the paper, which was heavily in debt and struggling to meet its print-run. As advertising revenue fell off, the obligatory four issues per term in the JCR contract could not be met and conscientiously the then editor, David Ferrard refunded their subscriptions.
The current publisher says that he has nothing against Ferrard and that all remaining debts have now been paid off. He also asserts that 'The Word never went bankrupt and is now controlled by the same company'.
The new Word preserves the old format, and e-mail address, but in other respects has made radical changes. Most conspicuously, the greatest advertising problem for the paper now seems to be how readers will manage to locate its articles, hidden as they are in a veritable forest of adverts. Further, the publishers have adopted a whole new tone, dispersing with the old 1,500 word articles in favour of a rather progressive layout.
One noteworthy article, Alienation (p. 16), scatters the page with cubes of text in a brave new experiment, which sadly this dull hack found quite unintelligible. Hackworth said of the style that it was aspiring to be a sort of student Face and hoped that the shorter articles would be 'more accessible'. In response to allegations of 'dumbing-down',
Hilary Scott, editor of the paper in Michaelmas term defended Word as 'being experimental and trying out new things'. She also denied suggestions that Ferrard had caused its financial downfall last term.
'Oxford does need an alternative publication', she says, but despite Hackworth's appeal for more student contrinutions, the fact remains that rather like Oxygen FM, it has been taken out of students' hands.
If he is, as he says, creating a more London-centred paper, will Oxford students read it?
7th Oct 1999