WHAT EXACTLY is the UCL Sanctuary? Is it the “independant” [sic] voice for which UCL students have been crying out for years? Is it the sole source of hope for a new genera from outside interference? Is it heck. Although The Sanctuary may look like any other student newspaper, appearances are deceptive.
For starters, The Sanctuary is not a stand-alone UCL-based paper; it is in fact part of a group of ten Sanctuary papers at various universities across the country. Running the whole operation is one Tom Freeman, a young would-be media magnate, who in his own words is “the sort of sole evil corporate entity at the top, pulling all the strings”.
Freeman set up The Sanctuary during his final year at Nottingham University, and having made a small amount of money from advertising revenues decided to set up publications at other universities to expand his business. The premise is simple: Freeman appoints a managing editor for each paper, and a team of writers are recruited as volunteers from the student body at the university in question. Freeman himself remains some distance from the day to day operations of the papers and restricts himself to organising the advertising. So The Sanctuary functions like a franchise; some material is shared between papers but the content and style is tailored to the particular university by The Sanctuary’s writers, who are free to write what they like.
This, at least, is the theory. The reality is somewhat different, with Freeman keeping a much closer eye on content than he lets on. When The Cheese Grater approached Freeman posing as a potential advertiser, his remarks cast doubt on The Sanctuary’s supposed independence. He explained that he “can’t afford to lose advertisers” and that magazine editors are therefore kept on a tight leash. He emphasised the fact that he is “very responsible” with regard to the needs and interests of advertisers, and that he will move potentially conflicting articles away from adverts, or even remove them altogether. “Before print we vet all the editorial,” Freeman stressed.
It appears that as far as Freeman is concerned, the Sanctuary papers are little more than a money making venture; he essentially makes a tidy profit from advertising in newspapers which his student volunteers have produced for free. (Nice work if you can get it.) This would explain not only his willingness to do away with genuine editorial independence, but also his willingness to bend the truth. He claims of tens of thousands of students with his publications, which are “the widest read paper[s] on each campus” according to a remark on The Sanctuary’s old website. How the paper became so widely read at UCL and Warwick for example is a mystery, given that the paper has been banned on campus at both universities, something Freeman conveniently forgot to tell our ‘advertiser.’
What price financial independence? It is fair to say that The Sanctuary gives a number of UCL students a platform for their writing, some of which is actually pretty good. The tragedy though is that they are the ones losing out from their involvement with this latter day Rupert Murdoch, who makes easy money out of them and controls what they write. What price independence eh?
[Additional reporting Rene Lavanchy and Mark Ravinet]