Danielle Webb

In defence of student media

Tonight, the students’ union at my alma mater made a bold proposal: cease print operations of The Xaverian Weekly, the student-run newspaper, and move it entirely online. Sadly, this isn’t the first time such a proposal has been made and never has the proposal come with logical reasons. This proposal isn’t about the evolution of student media, it’s about saddling it with fewer resources and greater expectations.

Student media is an invaluable resource on campuses for two reasons:

a) It provides the student body unfiltered access to the decision-makers at a university. It is often a student’s only window into how their institution is run, who the power players are and how they can be accessed. In addition, as many student media organizations are now realizing, their print readership and online readership are not comprised of the same people. To choose one over the other is to deprive a segment of the student body the access to decision-makers on campus they deserve.

b) Student media also provides professional learning opportunities for students interested in any aspect of publishing. StFX doesn’t have a journalism program. The Xav is the only way for a student at StFX to gain the experience they need to pursue a career in journalism. As a proud former editor-in-chief of the Xav, the skills I learned working at and running the paper led me to running a national wire service for almost 80 student newspapers across Canada with the Canadian University Press and then to a position as an online editor at The Globe and Mail. Other former Xav staff have found similar success reporting for the CBC or anchoring a city sports desk. The one thing we all have in common is that working at the Xav helped us achieve these goals.   

The Xav’s current web presence is terribly outdated. The management software behind the website is a generation old, the design is limited from displaying video or multimedia content and the update schedule is limited, at best, when it’s even working at all. Changing these limitations to run a proper online news site could be done, but it requires training and equipment for the staff, designers and developers who can work with the web and resources to properly reach students on their mobile devices. A major part of the reason the Xav has had trouble building an online presence up to now is a lack of resources. The students’ union’s proposal does not intend to give the paper these resources while they eliminate the print product.

While the students’ union sees the move to web as a way of cutting costs, the realities of moving a student publication from print to web is that it requires more resources, not fewer. The students’ union is trying to wash its hands of the Xav’s money problems without realizing this is a detrimental, and perhaps deadly, blow to student media at StFX.

The fact remains that all media requires investment. To deny this is simply bad business. Mainstream media supplement ad revenue with subscriptions and student media do the same with a levy from students. Like many newspapers in this country, the Xav has struggled to maintain pre-recession levels of advertising. I assure you this is not an issue unique to the Xav, and it is incredibly naive to think that taking away the paper’s resources will solve this problem.

What the move from the students’ union amounts to is a cowardly shot at reducing the amount of independent reporting available to students, hampering the career aspects of those students involved in local media, and preventing future growth and development from being realized. It’s shameful. And StFX will suffer because of it.

Almost a year ago to the day, the students’ union also proposed cutting the Xav’s budget. I wrote a letter of support outlining the importance of student media and why moving online will not save the money the union thought it would. Council decided to continue funding the Xav and to help the paper become autonomous, i.e. put the paper in charge of its own fate. Today’s initiative marks the failure of that promise. You can read my letter, dated April 6, 2011, here.

Here’s to a healthy 2012

I’m usually not one for New Year’s resolutions. They’re typically tacky and no one ever sticks to theirs (it seems). Why bother with promises you can’t/won’t keep? I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I would resolve, if I was the resolution-making type, and I decided to give it a try since I’m in a much more rooted, planning-for-the-future place in my life. So, for 2012, I resolve to focus on three aspects of my proverbial health.

Physical:

I’ve long wanted to get in better shape (who hasn’t?), but have yet been able to make a diet and exercise regimen stick. Not even my looming September wedding last year was enough to get me off the couch. I am now the heaviest I’ve ever been and rather than pledge that “2012 will be the year I get in shape” (because who has such an arbitrary goal ever worked for?), I will be setting two very specific goals for myself: lose two dress sizes and join a boxing club.  

I also plan on diving into this resolution pretty hard for the first two months, in part to help give myself a more realistic deadline than “by the end of the year.” So as of Monday, I will be going on a diet, cutting out all junk (including alcohol), and going to the gym three times a week. The only exception between now and March 1 will be my birthday, which happens to be my 25th, on Jan. 17. I figure if I can make a good go of things for two months and see some results, I’ll be better positioned to maintain my new lifestyle for the rest of the year.

Financial:

For any other recent university graduates out there, you know what piles of debt are like. Thankfully, both my husband and I are gainfully employed in this economy, and have developed a healthy budget for our lifestyle (and we’re not paying for a wedding this year!). Now it’s time to get serious about eliminating our debt. Our first mountain this year will be our credit card debt, which we have given ourselves five months to pay off before we turn our attention to opening an RRSP (or an equivalent savings account after speaking with our bank). These initiatives will put us in a much better position to seriously save for a house or apartment by the end of the year.  

Mental:

And, finally, the fun resolution! While honeymooning in Disney World this September, my husband and I decided it would be neat to watch all the Disney animated features in the order they were released. Luckily for us (as long as Disney keeps their current production schedule), with 2012 comes the studio’s 52nd animated feature. So once a week, for all 52 weeks this year, we will view and review one Disney animated feature and publish our musings over at this snazzy new website we’ve entitled The Disney Project.

There you have it, folks, my three-fold plan for a happy and healthy 2012. Wish me luck and let me know what your New Year’s resolutions are!

MTV, Globe and other things

It’s been a busy couple of weeks! Last Monday, my esteemed colleague Erin and I were interviewed by MTV News for a segment on the rise in female enrolment. Despite it not occurring to both of us that this would be a filmed interview until the camera wandered through the office door, I think it turned out quite well. And I’ll certainly post a link once the video goes online.

I’ve still been blogging up a storm for Maclean’s On Campus (check out my Portfolio section for all the links), which has been a nice break from my regularly-scheduled days. I also picked up a freelance assignment from the Globe and Mail last week. It was published on Monday in the Report on Business section. You can check it out here.

Be sure to check out a few of my favourite Maclean’s posts, too!

Exercising my ‘bitching rights’

McGuinty’s solutions aren’t in China

HPV funding targets wrong age group

Twitter not the cause of higher GPAs

Last, but certainly not least, I’ve been applying for summer internships to fill my post-CUP days. Applications are now in at The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press. While I’ve thought a lot about starting anew in six months, I’ve only just realized this means actually leaving CUP for good. I have mixed feelings about this — while I’m ready to move on from the student press, it’ll be sad moving on from an organization I’ve poured my heart and soul into for the past three years. 

Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame

This is an actual course being offered at the University of South Carolina at Columbia this spring.

Two years ago she was the warm up act for an aging boy band and now she has a course at an accredited American University.

The Fame Monster certainly works quickly.

The only thing I don’t like about this article is that apparently the only other artist rivalling Gaga for YouTube views is Justin Bieber. Why is that guy famous again? I would argue that Gaga certainly has the more interesting rise-to-fame story.

New Batman 3 details

While I usually don’t even bat an eyelash at the mention of a new comic-book movie — not really my thing — I am anxiously awaiting Christopher Nolan’s third, and final, installment in his Batman series. While not a huge Batman fan, I am a fan of what Nolan’s been able to do with these movies.

So, naturally, coming across this article today got me excited. Apparently the new film will be called The Dark Knight Rises and it will not feature popular villain The Riddler, whom many anticipated would be included in this film. The movies’ IMBD page lists Det. Harvey Bullock as rumoured. While I’m not familiar with this character at all, a quick peruse of the Wikipedia page and he seems pretty interesting. He definitely fits in with the world Nolan has created. Plus it should give Gary Oldman a storyline of his own, which is never a bad thing.

Although, I’m still rooting for Catwoman to make an appearance.

(PHOTO COURTESY OF WARNER BROTHERS)

My other new project

On top of my busy year and new responsibilities, I am also planning my wedding right now. It’s been an adventure balancing everything and ensuring deadlines are met, which is turning out to be just as important in the wedding world. If you don’t book early, you might miss out!

We made some significant advances in the past couple of weeks that are starting to make everything seem more real. We booked a photographer and enlisted a couple of talented friends to help with day-of co-ordination and making the cake! More recently, we sent out e-Save-the-Date cards and launched our website. Feel free to peruse http://daniandwill.com at your leisure. We’re pretty proud of it.

Only 312 days to go!

New opportunities

Explosive revelations regarding hazing initiatives at a University of Alberta fraternity shocked and surprised the country within hours of the story going online last Thursday. But it’s far from the first time something like this has happened, and it’s becoming a bigger problem.

Just an excerpt from my latest project.

Today, I officially started a new gig with Maclean’s OnCampus. I will be regularly blogging there about national post-secondary issues and trends. While writing today’s inaugural post, I realized how much I missed opinion writing and how glad I am to have been given the opportunity to do it again.

Without any further ado, you can check out the rest of today’s post here — a look at how the recent University of Alberta fraternity hazing scandal, covered here so wonderfully by my friends at the Gateway, fits into North American college hazing history.

And I hope you continue to check out my musings on post-secondary life in Canada.

It’s good to be writing again

Last Wednesday I attended an interview and Q&A with best-selling author Jonathan Safran Foer about his latest book Eating Animals. I also got to have a few words with Jonathan afterward. It was a delightful evening, and also the topic of my latest article published to the CUP newswire.

You can check out ‘Eating Animals author introduces real meat’ here.

The Social Network: Myth vs. Reality

After a weekend spent out of town for work, the first thing I wanted to do upon arriving back home was to see The Social Network, the David Fincher-Aaron Sorkin drama on the founding of social networking giant Facebook. This movie intrigued me from the moment I saw the official trailer a few months ago. While I enjoyed the narrative dramatization, I was curious how much fact was mixed in with the fiction.

Here are three articles I found immediately after seeing the film. They provide some interesting insights and critiques of the movie. Vanity Fair’s David Kirkpatrick profiled the real-life Sean Parker in With a Little Help From His Friends, Jezebel’s Irin Carmon looked at the film’s portrayal of women compared to their role in the story’s actual history in The Social Network, Where Women Never Have Ideas, and Slate’s Nathan Heller takes a look at the inaccuracies in Fincher and Sorkin’s depiction of Harvard in You Can’t Handle the Veritas.

All this reaction is certainly proving that Mark Zuckerberg was right to not pay any attention to the film or worry what it would do to his reputation. With all the comparison articles coming out, the world is getting to know the real Zuck, too.  

(Photo: MERRICK MORTON/COLUMBIA PICTURES)