At the beginning of this academic year, this editorial team pledged to be really, really annoying to the powers that be at the Union and UCL (CG 88).
We hope to have done that job to the best of our ability. This year, we have consistently broken impactful stories holding power to account and stood up for student interests without fear or favour. We are immensely proud of what The Cheese Grater and its team have achieved this year, having been named Best Publication in London at the Student Publication Association awards, among many others.
We owe our success this year to our readers. A heartfelt thank you all 40,000 of you who visited our website more than 100,000 times, all 20,000 of you who saw or liked our social posts, all 350 of you who subscribed to our newsletter and tuned in for our weekly radio talk show, and hundreds more who picked up a physical copy of our print edition across five issues. You helped us prove our case to the Union that we are a publication worthy of funding, and to UCL that we are not something they can ignore.
We know that we’ve probably pissed off a fair share of people along this journey. Nonetheless, for all the trouble we’ve caused, we sincerely hope it has at least been good trouble that, in the long run, would prove beneficial to the UCL community. This paper has been firmly behind calls for greater transparency in student democracy and media regulation, having pushed for the adoption of the industry-standard IPSO Editor’s Code of Practice and helped create a culture of political scrutiny at the Union. We think that’s a greater legacy than any of the awards we won.
It’s been encouraging to see that the Union is finally taking student media more seriously this year. We’ve long argued that the press serves a vital and irreplaceable role in building a student-led community by ensuring we’re all in the loop about what’s happening on campus at any given moment. With your help, we hope to have demonstrated that UCL has both the talent and the demand for quality campus journalism.
There is, of course, still a long way to go. Student media at UCL doesn’t get anywhere near the same amount of funding as our national rivals, something that always surprises student journalists at other universities. Cheese Grater Magazine Society presidents and treasurers in particular have been creating budgetary miracles for two decades, running three concurrent operations — The Cheese Grater, our sister zine Women’s Wrongs, and sketch group Graters — with one pot of money. Rachel Reeves, take notes!
Aside from funding, running a student publication takes an enormous amount of time and effort. As we have discovered the hard way, being an editor is practically a full-time job. Over the course of this year, we have published over 200 articles, including many exclusive and breaking stories. It is absolutely true what they say in Hong Kong about the qualities of a journalist: having the legs of iron, the eyes of a horse, and the stomach of an immortal (鐵腳、馬眼、神仙肚). As editor, I have only caught a glimpse of this world.
The Cheese Grater is far from perfect. We still print nowhere as much as we would like and are prone to making silly mistakes every so often. It’s an unfortunate outcome for everyone involved that this rag sheet named after a common household item is the closest thing UCL has gotten to a regular campus paper in over a decade.
The Union must recognise that it cannot begin to build a coherent student community if campus remains a news desert. UCL deserves a fully-funded Union newspaper informing students of the happenings in both the Bloomsbury and East campuses with free and regular prints. Until that day comes, The Cheese Grater will continue to fill this space, doing what little we can.
Thank you for sticking with us, and we hope we can count on your support for many years to come.
This article appeared in CG92
