300 Issues of The Oxford Student
From its first days as a struggling fortnightly, The Oxford Student has swayed from serious broadsheet to lurid tabloid and back, has endured threats of legal action and countless long nights, and has broken in the innumerable enthusiasts, who have thrown degree and sleep aside, united only by the desire to establish Oxford's 'other' paper as its best.
The OxStu, as it is more fondly known, cannot boast the heritage of the long established Cherwell, but it has enjoyed a turbulent history in its successful quest to provide Oxford students with an alternative weekly newspaper.
The twelve black and white pages that formed the very first issue stand in sharp contrast to the 52 pages of this, the 300th, as do the "puny, creaking Apple Macs" that Karl Smith, Editor in Trinity 1994, had to deal with (see article, left), compared to the powerful but equally cranky machines over which the current staff still slave.
As a fortnightly student union publication, the early issues of The Oxford Student may not have betrayed greater ambitions, focusing on predominantly 'student' issues, from financial hardship and loans to student union politics.
Whilst such themes persisted and still grace The Oxford Student's pages today, the passing of the years saw the splashes get bolder and the accusations more biting. From corruption, sex attacks and dope-smoking tutors in 1995 to college wars and anarchy in 1996, The Oxford Student steadily established itself as a page-turner.
The harbinger of this new era came in 1993 in the form of a seemingly innocent dig at the then Prime Minister, John Major. The Oxford Student's own satirist, Magpie, revelled in an entire column of PM-bashing, scorning the legal action by Major's solicitors against publications such as the New Statesman for their 'revelations' of an alleged affair between the PM and one Clare Latimer.
Thus Magpie wrote: "I mean, simply by writing, say, JOHN MAJOR HAD AN AFFAIR WITH CLARE LATIMER in big letters, I could now be issued with a bloody big Downing Street writ... See you in court, John." And then came the writ, and the half-page retraction.
The late 1990s saw a softening of the headlines and a toning down of the deathly green that had steadily infiltrated the paper, with a growing focus on college news providing a safer groove for a year or two.
But not for long. The green trim turned blue not long before the millennium, the long-standing and popular arts section, Review, became Ox2, and the strident headlines returned.
In 1994, The Oxford Student was nominated for Guardian Student Newspaper of the Year for the first time; in 2001, the paper won. This year The Oxford Student has again been nominated.
The paper's comparatively concise history means that its alumni offerings are perhaps not as impressive as those of older publications, but many graduates of the inevitable and taxing all-nighters are steadily carving out their own promising careers.
With former editors and contributors climbing the ladders of The Times, The Independent, the Financial Times, The Guardian and the BBC, to name but a few, the cynics may yet be silenced.
Mark Henderson, Science Correspondent of The Times writes:
In eight years as a reporter at The Times, I've not lacked stories with buzz. I've covered two general elections, the hilarious flop of the Millennium Dome, the completion of the Human Genome Project and missions to Mars. Yet for sheer sweat and adrenaline, it'll always be hard to top the long Tuesday nights of Michaelmas 1994 - the term when I edited The Oxford Student.
James Mackintosh, Motor Industry Editor, Financial Times writes:
We had a mission: The OxStu was destined to have a near-naked picture of Claudia Schiffer on the front page. The right-on Wadham Student Union decided we had debased journalism and that pictures of Ms Schiffer were profoundly damaging to 'wimmin's rights'. The college cancelled its subscription and recycled hundreds of copies that had been delivered. Luckily for all the would-be journalists involved with the story, this secured us coverage in The Times and the Evening Standard and even Italian newspapers.
Tuesday night was production night. We'd roll in around lunchtime and spend the next 18 - really, 18 - hours, cajoling the newsies into giving us something that resembled a splash, swearing at our puny, creaking Apple Macs until we had something that resembled a newspaper..
If we were lucky, most of it was done by 3am. If we weren't - and for at least the first five weeks, we really weren't - we'd all be there until well into Wednesday, arguing over headlines, cursing each other's technical ineptitude, and sullenly smoking on the stairs of the labrynthine OUSU building on Little Clarendon Street, as we pondered what the hell was going to go on page three. And then, when it was done, some poor bugger had to go to a repro house to output the pages, in the form of shiny, hi-resolution photographic bromides, and them cart them to the printers in Bicester.
There was no internet, no email and, hardest of all, no mobile phones. Keeping track of a couple of dozen reporters and section editors without any way of getting hold of them other than pigeon-post was tricky, to say the least. And when someone went awol, tempers frayed.
But when it all worked, it was the most satisfying thing I did at Oxford. Taking a paper from nothing to the finished product every week, being involved at every stage from the first features meeting to the placement (and even sometimes the sale) of the adverts, to the headline on the splash, is something few people get to do until well into their careers, if ever.
And there is a curious parallel with my work now. On the Student, then and I suspect since, there was a permanent struggle over what sort of paper we wanted to be. We all loved the idea of being the super soaraway Student - but we realised that risked turning it into a disregarded rag. And now, ten years later, my paper, the Independent, has spent the last year wrestling with exactly that dilemma as it's reshaped itself and in the process revolutionised the newspaper market. And, thanks to The Oxford Student, I feel all the better prepared for the challenge.
The Oxford Student was but a mewling infant when we were at the helm; although it had started to prove itself a worthy rival to Cherwell, there was still work to be done to cement that position when Will Stenhouse, Jess Connors and I edited the paper 11 years ago.
Reviewing our efforts now, the eight issues still stand fair comparison with any other student offerings: although our use of colour was pedestrian (aside from the hilarious idea of using a shaded blue box to illustrate the listings for Derek Jarman's film of that same colour - which then printed more akin to indigo), the papers are laid out clearly and the production standards are good.
We did not have many 'big-hitting' stories: there was an interview with an Opposition politician called Blair who said comparatively little of note, I wrote a contrived splash about lesbians getting the cold shoulder from reactionaries in the Union. I also managed to reveal my taste for Phil Collins in print, to many chuckles no doubt.
We were very strong on our advertising: ad-rich supplements aplenty and swathes of the paper devoted to publicity, which, as I recall, pleased the VP (Finance), Alan Beattie, himself now a journalist with the Financial Times. So it was not so much the brilliance of our journalism - although it was more than competent and the range of opinion and insight remains impressive - but the enthusiasm and dedication of the people who produced it that comes flooding back.
The sharpest memories are principally of those long all-night vigils in Little Clarendon Street, just the three of us, sustained by fizzy drinks and chocolate and by the sheer love of it, bleary-eyed at around 9am when finally the disk had to be sent off to the printers. We did witness a break-in across the road at an ethnic crafts shop one night, but that was only a short diversion - and it filled a NIB!
Regarding my own career, I have worked at The Times since graduating in 1996, starting as a detail sub-editor with the sports desk and since becoming Online Sports Editor and Assistant Sports Editor before my present position, Sports Production Editor. I also worked for The Australian in Sydney during 2002.
6th Oct 2004