The Redbrick Report
When the University of Birmingham established a student paper back in 1936, it had a clear purpose to provide news for students, by students. It is one of the oldest student newspapers in the UK and continues to publish in print and online.1 But in recent years Redbrick has faced financial struggles and several other restrictions, making it harder to function and produce proper student journalism.
A Birmingham Dispatch article in March 2024 declared that the “the fight is on to save Redbrick,” as student journalists launched a gofundme page.2 After raising £5000 in donations, the paper announced in June that it was saved.3 However, in less than a year, another fundraising campaign for Redbrick would echo a similar plea for support from donors.4 In October 2025, a report on Sustainable Student Journalism at the University of Birmingham was published, written by Tom Cutterham, university lecturer and Dr. of History, and Tanshpreet Kaur, student of Natural Sciences, to address the ongoing struggles facing Redbrick. Now, in February 2026, I spoke with Tom for a more in depth review of the Rebrick crisis, and the positive effects the report can make.
In addition to his history modules, Tom also teaches a second-year course called Media in Practice which supports students to undertake their own journalistic projects. Sometimes, Tom would bring in student journalism from other universities and countries for his students to look at. “There are student papers and student media organizations out there that are doing a really good job,” he tells me. “And the truth is, they’re better resourced, and they’re better supported in many cases. It made me think, okay, can we think about how to improve what we have here at Birmingham, how to build on the kind of legacy of Redbrick?”
Tom has lectured at UoB since 2016, and in the last decade has noticed a decline in both Redbrick’s quality and regularity.
“When I first arrived here […] I would expect four or five issues of Redbrick a turn. Basically every other week. […] It wasn’t weekly, but it was way more regular than it is now, and in the last couple of years, I feel like I don’t even know when it’s going to come out, when the actual printing is going to happen. It could only be 2 or 3 times a year, it will be kind of a random, unexpected event.
“The other thing is about the content of the paper. I feel like I’ve witnessed a shift away from news and investigative content that is relevant to the university and the community we’re in […] I read a lot more reviews of video games and gigs. I read a lot more […] comment pieces, I read a lot more […] articles and items that could be in any paper anywhere that aren’t specific to the local context. Those are things that I think could be improved.”
I asked Tom why he thinks Redbrick’s content has shifted away from ‘proper student journalism’ and towards articles less concerned with UoB material. Was it that there was not as much to report on? I suggested.
“I don’t think it’s a question of there’s less stuff to report on. I think it’s a question of, it’s actually hard work doing that kind of journalism. Building up familiarity, building up networks of sources, being able to go out and talk to people and track down stories. That’s hard work, and it gets harder if the university or the organizations that you’re dealing with are secretive, or not willing to kind of engage with you, or answer emails.
“It seems to me [that] students have less time than ever. They are doing a lot more paid work. They are maybe commuting from home or whatever. There seems to be a lot more pressure on students’ time than there was even 10 years ago, which means that they’re not engaging in extracurricular work like student journalism as much as they maybe once did.”
I asked Tom about the Uni and Guild’s control over UoB’s presentation in Redbrick publications, but he was quick to point out that the two corporations are technically separate.
“Although,” he admits, “the university owns the building that the guild works out of, so […] they have to be related in some sense. The Guild is the publisher of Redbrick, so everything that Redbrick does kind of ultimately comes back to the Guild, which means that if they were sued for whatever, for libel, […] it would be the Guild that would end up paying up for that. So it is fair and right that the Guild must exercise some final say over what gets published in Redbrick, because they are the final kind of financial backers of the paper at the end of the day.”
“But I think there’s a question over exactly how they manage that, and whether they are currently going too far in limiting the scope of what can be published in the paper. I think that’s having a real damaging effect. The university doesn’t technically have any involvement in that, […] it’s not really the university’s place, but […] it seems likely, that part of the Guild’s strategy for managing risk is to just basically make it quite difficult for students to publish anything critical about the university. That means that the university doesn’t have any reason to interfere, or sue, or whatever. So I think it’s about a risk management strategy from the perspective of the Guild over what I might call an overzealous risk management strategy.”
Addressing the difficulties about censorship and UoB’s reputation, Tom proposed that it might be in the universities interest that Redbrick is underperforming.
“University leadership and higher management, I think, are probably quite happy that student journalism has declined and doesn’t look as closely into these things as it once did.”
Given the fact that the university owns the Guild building and serves as its main financial donor, Tom suspects a large amount of indirect control and influence which plays a role in Redbrick’s presentation of UoB.
“Of course, it’s true […] the university would rather not have any record of student protests about Gaza, or of trade union strikes, or of disciplinary cases, or of parties gone wrong. They would rather not have those things in the public record. I couldn’t possibly say that they exercise any direct control to prevent that being reported. But […] I do think it’s kind of, unfortunately, […] in the interest of the university leadership for there not to be democratic accountability and a good paper. But that’s why students need to step up and actually do it.”
I then asked Tom why universities were focused so much on their image and legacy, now more than ever.
“It’s because the UK higher education system now operates as a sort of quasi-market, where universities’ main source of income is tuition fees, and they need to compete with each other for students. And competing for students mainly means competing over reputation. So, preserving your reputation is a massively important aspect of what a university does these days, unfortunately, which is why we see millions of pounds of our higher education money wasted on advertising campaigns and things like that.”
I probed him for some examples.
“When I first arrived at University of Birmingham in 2016, there was a multi-million pound advertising campaign in Euston Station in London, where I’d see the faces of some of my colleagues on these enormous posters. I was like, ‘How much are we spending on this?’ So managing reputation is way more important now in the era of tuition fees than it was when […] I first started university, back in 2006, which was just the very beginning of the tuition fee era. It’s a different world.”
Redbrick, at heart, is a paper managed, written and read by students. My follow up question was therefore about why Redbrick was so important for UoB students, and why students should partake in journalism at all.
“I think it’s really important for any kind of community, any discrete community, like a university, […] to have some kind of journalistic voice, and to have people who are paying attention and keeping a record of what’s going on. Those things are really, I think, just crucial to democratic life. It’s why I’m really glad to see the sort of minor revival of local journalism in general. […] You might have noticed the Mill Media kind of enterprise that involves a few different new local papers in different places, including in Birmingham, with The Dispatch.
“If we’re not holding city councils and university leaderships and so on to account, if we’re not reporting on what they’re doing and investigating what’s going on, then they’re just going to be able to do worse and worse things without getting any accountability. That’s one of the main reasons I think a proper student paper is important. There’s one other reason as well, which is that I think working as a student journalist and being part of a student paper is really important training for thinking in those critical journalistic ways.”
“To really […] critically understand the world that you’re in, journalism, practically doing journalism, I think, is one of the best ways of achieving that. I think a student paper should give all students the chance to do that, whatever their degree topic. And that’s one of the cool things about it. You don’t have to do a journalism degree to do journalism at university, because you can go and work for your paper. If we lose that, we’ve lost something real, I think.”
The Sustainable Student Journalism Report also included ideas to help support student journalists such as scholarships and programmes. On this subject, Tom explained how they might operate.
“What I would like to see happen is, for example, the College of Arts and Law, where most of the paper writers come from, but not all, could say ‘we’re gonna have 5 annual Redbrick scholarships, we’re gonna give a thousand pounds to each of those people, and if you want to get this thousand pounds, which is going to enable you to do more journalism instead of taking paid work, you should submit a portfolio of the work you’ve already done by X date, or whatever, and it will be judged by, I don’t know, some professional journalists that we might find and you can put it on your CV that you’ve won this scholarship, and you’re going to be expected to do X, Y, and Z job, or report at least 5 stories, or whatever it is, over the year that you hold the scholarship.
Something along those lines would be cheap, pretty simple, and I think would be a substantial boost to the paper. You could also do it where there’s a kind of editorial scholarship, so you say, the person who wins this has to be the person who’s been elected as a given editor […] to pay for their time. So there’s two benefits from a scheme like this, right? One is you are giving people money, to allow them to do journalistic work so they don’t have to do other kinds of paid work. And the other is, because they have to submit work in order to get the scholarship in the first place, you’re encouraging first-years to start producing journalism, so they can apply for the scholarship.
We moved on to the root of the problem: funding. Why was Redbrick struggling now, despite previous fundraising attempts, and what was it like before?
“It used to be that most student papers, university papers, were funded by their student units, and they got significant budgets from their student unions, and the budgets were used to do print runs […] more regularly. But those budgets have been slashed across the board […] all over the country. It’s one of the things we learned from doing this report. All over the country, in the last 10 years or so, student newspaper budgets have just been shrinking to absolutely nothing. And at this point, there is no budget for Redbrick, other than the offices and the media training that they get from the guild. And there’s many papers in the same position, where they used to have a £10,000 a year budget from their student unions, and now they’ve got nothing.”
So why were universities cutting their funding in the first place?
“Basically, [it’s] because universities in the UK […] have been squeezed financially over the last 10 years, they’ve been especially squeezed because of policies adopted by the Theresa May government, I believe, from 2016, which was to not increase tuition fees by inflation each year. So every year since Theresa May’s government, the value of tuition fees has gone down that little bit as money inflates, the tuition fee stays the same, and universities get less every year for each student. And so at the start of that era, they had quite a lot of money, and they were willing to spend it on things, like giving more money to the student union, and then the student union would in turn spend it on things like papers.
“But it would be lovely to return to a world where […] money was coming in from student unions to do this kind of thing. That would solve so many problems, and it would make the paper so much more prominent. If it could just come out every two weeks, on a Wednesday or whatever, like clockwork, people might actually start reading it, and there would be much more chance of people kind of getting involved. That regular publication schedule is kind of a foundational thing that we’ve lost that I would love to be able to return to.”
It was apparent that if the uni was to be more charitable towards its paper, despite the potential for scrutiny of its image, Redbrick would need justifiable value to the organisation. I asked Tom, ‘why should the university care about Redbrick?’
“I’d like to think that the universities might see the papers as a form of advertising, as a form of brand boosting. There’s quite a lot of people who have come through my office one time or another who have said I came to Birmingham because I wanted to be a journalist, and because Redbrick had a good reputation, and I wanted to work for Redbrick, and they’ve gone on to do their journalism masters, and they now are journalists.
“Redbrick did have a serious reputation as a strong student paper. We could use that, you know, we could rebuild that, and that could be […] something that’s part of what makes the university great. It would be a shame if the university decided that that’s not worth doing, partly because having a good university newspaper also means that the bad stuff they do gets exposed. Or there’s more debate about whether or not what they’re doing is good or bad.
“There is definitely some evidence to show, as I’ve already said, some evidence that the university leadership is happy for there not to be a good paper or for the paper to gradually die out. I hope that’s not the case. I mean, if you look at the elite institutions in the US – Ivy League colleges or whatever – mostly, their papers, their student papers. Firstly, they’re very good. They often publish daily, or every other day. They are absolutely full of news about what’s going on in those institutions. Quite often they get scoops before other places. So the student newspaper of Stanford University, for example, […] were the ones who ultimately forced the president of Stanford to resign because he’d committed fraud in one of his academic papers. The Harvard University paper was the one that discovered that Larry Summers was in the Epstein emails. But almost all of those are fully financially independent from the universities that they are in, in order to be editorial independent as well, so there’s no pressure or influence from the university over those papers, because they don’t owe the university anything.
“The reason they’ve managed to get there is because the US has much more of a kind of philanthropic culture. There are people who give money to their universities, and then to organizations like this. We don’t really have that so much in the UK. But I do think we might need to develop more of that culture in the UK, and we might need to start if student journalism is going to survive in the UK. I suspect it might be based more on this kind of philanthropy and private fundraising more than on expecting student unions to pay. Because student unions […] aren’t going to have any money in the foreseeable future.”
Another topic I was keen to address was the wider industry’s transition from printed paper to online media, and whether Redbrick should follow suit.
“I do think that is an important question. Partly because printing the paper takes up a big portion of the budget, and so when we’re talking about fundraising and money, this is a central question. I think the main problem is that once you remove the physical paper, you remove a lot of what is unique and kind of stands out and feels special about publishing in a student […] paper. Because basically, anyone can set up a website, and publishing your articles and your stuff on a blog or a website doesn’t have the same cachet, doesn’t have the same feel that having your name actually in print in a real printed paper has. And I think, from my conversations with the student journalists, […] that’s the feeling that they share with other writers.
“I think student media across the UK, student journalism across the UK, is still under threat. And there isn’t really an obvious solution inside. […] At the bottom of it, it’s the kind of energy and enthusiasm and commitment of the student journalists themselves that is enabling things to stay afloat right now. And long may that continue.”
To bring the conversation to a close, I asked Tom for his thoughts on what the report might achieve in the long run.
“Well, the main thing that I’m pleased has happened [and that] seems to have been an output of the report, is people getting interested and involved in this question, and starting to think more about how much they value, and in what ways they value, student journalism. I’m glad that that’s at least fostered some kind of conversation about the role and the future of student media. So that’s a good outcome from the report, even if we continue to get crickets from the university. That will still be a positive outcome.”
Redbrick may be in the midst of financial and censorship struggles but reports like Tom’s and Tanshpreet’s are indicators that there is a strong resistance against it, and a push for the continuation of student journalism which is an essential part of the university experience.
A Birmingham Dispatch article in March 2024 declared that the “the fight is on to save Redbrick,” as student journalists launched a gofundme page.2 After raising £5000 in donations, the paper announced in June that it was saved.3 However, in less than a year, another fundraising campaign for Redbrick would echo a similar plea for support from donors.4 In October 2025, a report on Sustainable Student Journalism at the University of Birmingham was published, written by Tom Cutterham, university lecturer and Dr. of History, and Tanshpreet Kaur, student of Natural Sciences, to address the ongoing struggles facing Redbrick. Now, in February 2026, I spoke with Tom for a more in depth review of the Rebrick crisis, and the positive effects the report can make.
In addition to his history modules, Tom also teaches a second-year course called Media in Practice which supports students to undertake their own journalistic projects. Sometimes, Tom would bring in student journalism from other universities and countries for his students to look at. “There are student papers and student media organizations out there that are doing a really good job,” he tells me. “And the truth is, they’re better resourced, and they’re better supported in many cases. It made me think, okay, can we think about how to improve what we have here at Birmingham, how to build on the kind of legacy of Redbrick?”
Origins
Tom has lectured at UoB since 2016, and in the last decade has noticed a decline in both Redbrick’s quality and regularity.
“When I first arrived here […] I would expect four or five issues of Redbrick a turn. Basically every other week. […] It wasn’t weekly, but it was way more regular than it is now, and in the last couple of years, I feel like I don’t even know when it’s going to come out, when the actual printing is going to happen. It could only be 2 or 3 times a year, it will be kind of a random, unexpected event.
“The other thing is about the content of the paper. I feel like I’ve witnessed a shift away from news and investigative content that is relevant to the university and the community we’re in […] I read a lot more reviews of video games and gigs. I read a lot more […] comment pieces, I read a lot more […] articles and items that could be in any paper anywhere that aren’t specific to the local context. Those are things that I think could be improved.”
I asked Tom why he thinks Redbrick’s content has shifted away from ‘proper student journalism’ and towards articles less concerned with UoB material. Was it that there was not as much to report on? I suggested.
“I don’t think it’s a question of there’s less stuff to report on. I think it’s a question of, it’s actually hard work doing that kind of journalism. Building up familiarity, building up networks of sources, being able to go out and talk to people and track down stories. That’s hard work, and it gets harder if the university or the organizations that you’re dealing with are secretive, or not willing to kind of engage with you, or answer emails.
“It seems to me [that] students have less time than ever. They are doing a lot more paid work. They are maybe commuting from home or whatever. There seems to be a lot more pressure on students’ time than there was even 10 years ago, which means that they’re not engaging in extracurricular work like student journalism as much as they maybe once did.”
Image and Rep.
I asked Tom about the Uni and Guild’s control over UoB’s presentation in Redbrick publications, but he was quick to point out that the two corporations are technically separate.
“Although,” he admits, “the university owns the building that the guild works out of, so […] they have to be related in some sense. The Guild is the publisher of Redbrick, so everything that Redbrick does kind of ultimately comes back to the Guild, which means that if they were sued for whatever, for libel, […] it would be the Guild that would end up paying up for that. So it is fair and right that the Guild must exercise some final say over what gets published in Redbrick, because they are the final kind of financial backers of the paper at the end of the day.”
“But I think there’s a question over exactly how they manage that, and whether they are currently going too far in limiting the scope of what can be published in the paper. I think that’s having a real damaging effect. The university doesn’t technically have any involvement in that, […] it’s not really the university’s place, but […] it seems likely, that part of the Guild’s strategy for managing risk is to just basically make it quite difficult for students to publish anything critical about the university. That means that the university doesn’t have any reason to interfere, or sue, or whatever. So I think it’s about a risk management strategy from the perspective of the Guild over what I might call an overzealous risk management strategy.”
Addressing the difficulties about censorship and UoB’s reputation, Tom proposed that it might be in the universities interest that Redbrick is underperforming.
“University leadership and higher management, I think, are probably quite happy that student journalism has declined and doesn’t look as closely into these things as it once did.”
Given the fact that the university owns the Guild building and serves as its main financial donor, Tom suspects a large amount of indirect control and influence which plays a role in Redbrick’s presentation of UoB.
“Of course, it’s true […] the university would rather not have any record of student protests about Gaza, or of trade union strikes, or of disciplinary cases, or of parties gone wrong. They would rather not have those things in the public record. I couldn’t possibly say that they exercise any direct control to prevent that being reported. But […] I do think it’s kind of, unfortunately, […] in the interest of the university leadership for there not to be democratic accountability and a good paper. But that’s why students need to step up and actually do it.”
I then asked Tom why universities were focused so much on their image and legacy, now more than ever.
“It’s because the UK higher education system now operates as a sort of quasi-market, where universities’ main source of income is tuition fees, and they need to compete with each other for students. And competing for students mainly means competing over reputation. So, preserving your reputation is a massively important aspect of what a university does these days, unfortunately, which is why we see millions of pounds of our higher education money wasted on advertising campaigns and things like that.”
I probed him for some examples.
“When I first arrived at University of Birmingham in 2016, there was a multi-million pound advertising campaign in Euston Station in London, where I’d see the faces of some of my colleagues on these enormous posters. I was like, ‘How much are we spending on this?’ So managing reputation is way more important now in the era of tuition fees than it was when […] I first started university, back in 2006, which was just the very beginning of the tuition fee era. It’s a different world.”
Students
Redbrick, at heart, is a paper managed, written and read by students. My follow up question was therefore about why Redbrick was so important for UoB students, and why students should partake in journalism at all.
“I think it’s really important for any kind of community, any discrete community, like a university, […] to have some kind of journalistic voice, and to have people who are paying attention and keeping a record of what’s going on. Those things are really, I think, just crucial to democratic life. It’s why I’m really glad to see the sort of minor revival of local journalism in general. […] You might have noticed the Mill Media kind of enterprise that involves a few different new local papers in different places, including in Birmingham, with The Dispatch.
“If we’re not holding city councils and university leaderships and so on to account, if we’re not reporting on what they’re doing and investigating what’s going on, then they’re just going to be able to do worse and worse things without getting any accountability. That’s one of the main reasons I think a proper student paper is important. There’s one other reason as well, which is that I think working as a student journalist and being part of a student paper is really important training for thinking in those critical journalistic ways.”
“To really […] critically understand the world that you’re in, journalism, practically doing journalism, I think, is one of the best ways of achieving that. I think a student paper should give all students the chance to do that, whatever their degree topic. And that’s one of the cool things about it. You don’t have to do a journalism degree to do journalism at university, because you can go and work for your paper. If we lose that, we’ve lost something real, I think.”
The Sustainable Student Journalism Report also included ideas to help support student journalists such as scholarships and programmes. On this subject, Tom explained how they might operate.
“What I would like to see happen is, for example, the College of Arts and Law, where most of the paper writers come from, but not all, could say ‘we’re gonna have 5 annual Redbrick scholarships, we’re gonna give a thousand pounds to each of those people, and if you want to get this thousand pounds, which is going to enable you to do more journalism instead of taking paid work, you should submit a portfolio of the work you’ve already done by X date, or whatever, and it will be judged by, I don’t know, some professional journalists that we might find and you can put it on your CV that you’ve won this scholarship, and you’re going to be expected to do X, Y, and Z job, or report at least 5 stories, or whatever it is, over the year that you hold the scholarship.
Something along those lines would be cheap, pretty simple, and I think would be a substantial boost to the paper. You could also do it where there’s a kind of editorial scholarship, so you say, the person who wins this has to be the person who’s been elected as a given editor […] to pay for their time. So there’s two benefits from a scheme like this, right? One is you are giving people money, to allow them to do journalistic work so they don’t have to do other kinds of paid work. And the other is, because they have to submit work in order to get the scholarship in the first place, you’re encouraging first-years to start producing journalism, so they can apply for the scholarship.
Funding
We moved on to the root of the problem: funding. Why was Redbrick struggling now, despite previous fundraising attempts, and what was it like before?
“It used to be that most student papers, university papers, were funded by their student units, and they got significant budgets from their student unions, and the budgets were used to do print runs […] more regularly. But those budgets have been slashed across the board […] all over the country. It’s one of the things we learned from doing this report. All over the country, in the last 10 years or so, student newspaper budgets have just been shrinking to absolutely nothing. And at this point, there is no budget for Redbrick, other than the offices and the media training that they get from the guild. And there’s many papers in the same position, where they used to have a £10,000 a year budget from their student unions, and now they’ve got nothing.”
So why were universities cutting their funding in the first place?
“Basically, [it’s] because universities in the UK […] have been squeezed financially over the last 10 years, they’ve been especially squeezed because of policies adopted by the Theresa May government, I believe, from 2016, which was to not increase tuition fees by inflation each year. So every year since Theresa May’s government, the value of tuition fees has gone down that little bit as money inflates, the tuition fee stays the same, and universities get less every year for each student. And so at the start of that era, they had quite a lot of money, and they were willing to spend it on things, like giving more money to the student union, and then the student union would in turn spend it on things like papers.
“But it would be lovely to return to a world where […] money was coming in from student unions to do this kind of thing. That would solve so many problems, and it would make the paper so much more prominent. If it could just come out every two weeks, on a Wednesday or whatever, like clockwork, people might actually start reading it, and there would be much more chance of people kind of getting involved. That regular publication schedule is kind of a foundational thing that we’ve lost that I would love to be able to return to.”
Defence
It was apparent that if the uni was to be more charitable towards its paper, despite the potential for scrutiny of its image, Redbrick would need justifiable value to the organisation. I asked Tom, ‘why should the university care about Redbrick?’
“I’d like to think that the universities might see the papers as a form of advertising, as a form of brand boosting. There’s quite a lot of people who have come through my office one time or another who have said I came to Birmingham because I wanted to be a journalist, and because Redbrick had a good reputation, and I wanted to work for Redbrick, and they’ve gone on to do their journalism masters, and they now are journalists.
“Redbrick did have a serious reputation as a strong student paper. We could use that, you know, we could rebuild that, and that could be […] something that’s part of what makes the university great. It would be a shame if the university decided that that’s not worth doing, partly because having a good university newspaper also means that the bad stuff they do gets exposed. Or there’s more debate about whether or not what they’re doing is good or bad.
“There is definitely some evidence to show, as I’ve already said, some evidence that the university leadership is happy for there not to be a good paper or for the paper to gradually die out. I hope that’s not the case. I mean, if you look at the elite institutions in the US – Ivy League colleges or whatever – mostly, their papers, their student papers. Firstly, they’re very good. They often publish daily, or every other day. They are absolutely full of news about what’s going on in those institutions. Quite often they get scoops before other places. So the student newspaper of Stanford University, for example, […] were the ones who ultimately forced the president of Stanford to resign because he’d committed fraud in one of his academic papers. The Harvard University paper was the one that discovered that Larry Summers was in the Epstein emails. But almost all of those are fully financially independent from the universities that they are in, in order to be editorial independent as well, so there’s no pressure or influence from the university over those papers, because they don’t owe the university anything.
“The reason they’ve managed to get there is because the US has much more of a kind of philanthropic culture. There are people who give money to their universities, and then to organizations like this. We don’t really have that so much in the UK. But I do think we might need to develop more of that culture in the UK, and we might need to start if student journalism is going to survive in the UK. I suspect it might be based more on this kind of philanthropy and private fundraising more than on expecting student unions to pay. Because student unions […] aren’t going to have any money in the foreseeable future.”
Printing
Another topic I was keen to address was the wider industry’s transition from printed paper to online media, and whether Redbrick should follow suit.
“I do think that is an important question. Partly because printing the paper takes up a big portion of the budget, and so when we’re talking about fundraising and money, this is a central question. I think the main problem is that once you remove the physical paper, you remove a lot of what is unique and kind of stands out and feels special about publishing in a student […] paper. Because basically, anyone can set up a website, and publishing your articles and your stuff on a blog or a website doesn’t have the same cachet, doesn’t have the same feel that having your name actually in print in a real printed paper has. And I think, from my conversations with the student journalists, […] that’s the feeling that they share with other writers.
“I think student media across the UK, student journalism across the UK, is still under threat. And there isn’t really an obvious solution inside. […] At the bottom of it, it’s the kind of energy and enthusiasm and commitment of the student journalists themselves that is enabling things to stay afloat right now. And long may that continue.”
Concluding Notes
To bring the conversation to a close, I asked Tom for his thoughts on what the report might achieve in the long run.
“Well, the main thing that I’m pleased has happened [and that] seems to have been an output of the report, is people getting interested and involved in this question, and starting to think more about how much they value, and in what ways they value, student journalism. I’m glad that that’s at least fostered some kind of conversation about the role and the future of student media. So that’s a good outcome from the report, even if we continue to get crickets from the university. That will still be a positive outcome.”
Redbrick may be in the midst of financial and censorship struggles but reports like Tom’s and Tanshpreet’s are indicators that there is a strong resistance against it, and a push for the continuation of student journalism which is an essential part of the university experience.
- Cadbury Research Library ↩︎
- The Fight is on to Save Redbrick ↩︎
- Redbrick Newspaper Saved: Community Raises Over £5000 ↩︎
- Ink & Impact – Redbrick, Just Giving ↩︎