HERE AT UCL, we don’t go in for media in a big way. Down at Imperial, in addition to the official college paper, the IC Reporter, there are three weekly newspapers and a well-kept news website, Live! Whereas we at UCL have Pi Magazine (the Union thing) and UCL News (the college thing). Unfortunately, Pi is unable to cover news, being monthly, and UCL News is controlled by a bunch of nar- row-minded staff. The sole purpose of this largely empty paper, printed on expensively black paper for no ap- parent reason, is to aggrandise the activities of the Provost and his staff, however trivial they may be. And so student news goes unreported. In April, The Times’ website reported that Bartlett student Dan Brady had had an architectural model bought by millionaire art collector Charles Saatchi. Incredibly, UCL’s futile media relations office didn’t notice. UCL News was too busy telling us about how they’d given Lynne Truss a fel- lowship. Well, hooray for Truss; I bet she desperately needs recognition with that bestselling punctuation book.
Last term, then media and communications sabb Andreas von Maltzahn tried to start an independent UCL newspaper. He failed, because College refused the money. Well, we have an idea. According to an estimate from Bam UK, Pi’s printers, UCL News costs about twelve grand a year. How about scrapping that black white elephant and using the money to fund a newspaper that takes some notice of student achievements?