Drum roll, please. This is the first instalment of the Nouse editorial blog, taking you on a literary journey if not quite to the front line of cutting edge journalism, then at least to a nearby cafe where we can have a nice chat and a cup of tea. Blogs will be posted by me, the Editor, and by various other members of the editorial team. Our aim is to provide you with a virtual inside track on the workings of a student newspaper, and to shed further light on the stories we cover from edition to edition. You’ll join us on our all-night production sessions – watch us eating cold pizza at 5am, drinking Relentless by the bucket-load and descending slowly into caffeine-induced delirium. You’ll be with us as we probe David Garner – the University’s bespectacled, crustaceous and ill-informed Press Officer – for ‘dirt’ on the latest ‘scoop’; bravely foray with us into the intellectual powerhouse that is the SU building, and smash your virtual head against our nearly-tangible Mac computers when QuarkXpress crashes for the 40th time on production morning. Seriously, stick with us; it’s more fun than it sounds.

The last couple of weeks at Nouse have been nothing short of eventful; hard as that may be to believe for any resident of soporific old York. We broke a story which went national; found ourselves at the centre of a veritable eddy of media attention; had the distribution of the paper anonymously sabotaged, and became the centre of heated campus debate. More than anything, the events of the past weeks have begged the question: what is the role of the campus media? Are we, as we are given to believing, noble yet fashionably jaded hacks, burdened with the fearsome duty of exposing the truth at all costs, or are we, as one reader has recently called us “nothing but students in a campus society…let down by the odd ‘reporter’ whose disloyalty to fellow societies is deplorable; blinded by the simple desire to have a story published”? In the words of Big Brother: you decide.

What shall henceforth be referred to as ‘the OTC affair’ (or, better, ‘mock-execution-gate’) is a case in point. For those of you who haven’t seen the paper, I’ll recapitulate. Members of the York detachment of the University Officer Training Corps filmed a mock execution while on exercise and placed the footage on You Tube, not long after one Officer Cadet was chastised for arriving at a ‘German’ themed social dressed in the black and white pyjamas worn by concentration camp detainees during the Second World War. The initial question to be asked on uncovering such a story is, of course, ‘how big a deal is this’? Nouse, and the campus media in general, are regularly accused of wilfully sensationalising news items which would otherwise appear anodyne. In fact, I think many of our detractors would benefit from an afternoon spent as a fly on the wall in the Nouse office, not only for the ample opportunities it would provide for us to squash them, but also because I suspect they’d be surprised to observe the length at which we tussle amongst ourselves over these issues.

Surely the principle role of the media, amateur or otherwise, is to hold people accountable by establishing and exposing the truth about their behaviour, so that they think twice before repeating it?

Opinion was divided in the office over the OTC affair. Some felt that what we had uncovered was merely evidence of inevitable, if inappropriate, high spirits. A significant majority, however, felt that what the video represented something far more sinister. The fact that highly educated members of the Officer Training Corps, who are likely to be fast-tracked into positions of military authority, think it is appropriate to simulate an illegal act of extra-military brutality during an otherwise legitimate exercise, and further, to place evidence of the act on the internet, makes a mockery of everything the British Army purports to stand for. When viewed not merely as high spirits, but as a simulacrum of the genuine acts of extreme brutality which have been perpetrated in armed conflicts, most recently in Iraq, this is a grave matter indeed.

I quote, “if you name them it might make them look bad. It might make people on campus turn against them”.

Having established whether or not a story is genuinely news-worthy, a second question which must be asked is whether or not it is right and/or necessary to name the parties involved. In the OTC case, opinion in the office was once again divided as to whether we should name the perpetrators of the mock execution. Some felt that they ought to be exposed for their dangerous behaviour; others thought it would appear vindictive to name them, without adding anything to the story. Debate in the office was ultimately rendered academic when YUSU weighed in and told us we weren’t to name the students concerned because, and I quote, “if you name them it might make them look bad. It might make people on campus turn against them”. Well, no shit, Sherlock. But isn’t that kind of the point? Surely the principle role of the media, amateur or otherwise, is to hold people accountable by establishing and exposing the truth about their behaviour, so that they think twice before repeating it?

It sometimes seems that, as crusading student journalists on a valiant expository mission, all the odds are stacked against us. First, there’s not much to expose because, let’s face it, this is York and very little of interest actually happens here. Second, when we do uncover something worth reporting, we have to battle furiously to get it past the wilfully obstructive, Media Charter wielding, SU. Third, and this is a new one, once we do go to print, anonymous campus vigilantes are so intensely rankled by what we publish that they take it upon themselves to steal and dispose of 1,000 papers out of a print run of 3,000. It’s a wonder we don’t all throw in the towel, take a sledge hammer to our miscreant Macs, and join the rest of York’s student population down the pub.

However, just occasionally, something happens which gladdens the journalistic heart and reaffirms the belief that media freedom is alive and well in democratic Britain at large, for all it may be dampened by bureaucratic expectorations at this University. Joyously, the removal of 1,000 copies of Nouse proved vastly counterproductive when, almost as a result of the sabotage, hundreds of thousands of copies of the OTC story were distributed nationwide in the York Press, the Yorkshire Post, the Northern Echo, the Sun, the Daily Star and the Daily Sport following its syndication on Tuesday. And since Nouse was able to dig deep enough into its rather shallow coffers to reprint the copies which had been stolen, so that students at York did not miss out on the story, or indeed the other 43 pages of the paper on which upwards of 50 members of editorial staff had worked so hard, all was not lost on campus either.

Let me tell you, there’s nothing in the world more encouraging that seeing a story you broke nestled snugly between 8,000 pairs of over-sized breasts in the Daily Sport.

So, as I said, it’s been a more eventful fortnight than most, and at the end of it I feel reaffirmed in my belief that, on balance, what we do here is worthwhile. Let me tell you, there’s nothing in the world more encouraging that seeing a story you broke nestled snugly between 8,000 pairs of over-sized breasts in the Daily Sport. It makes it all seem so infinitely worthwhile. Before I sign off, I’ll extract my tongue from its habitual residence in my cheek and say just one more thing. There has been a great deal of debate about the latest edition of the paper, most of which has been conducted in the comments sections on this website; much of which is concerned with two reporting errors in our most recent news section. It is important that readers of Nouse remember that while, as I have said, our principle aim is to expose the truth, sometimes in the process of attempting to do this, errors will be made. When this happens, we are always deeply sorry, and always willing to print apologies, corrections and retractions. It is important, though, that the small errors we occasionally make are not seen to scupper the standard of reporting across the paper as a whole. Nouse is staffed by committed and talented journalists and editors, who work tirelessly to provide students with an informative, entertaining and edifying student newspaper, gratis. Nouse is a paper produced by students, for students. Like every publication in the country, sometimes we make mistakes. What is vital is that you keep informing us of our mistakes, keep holding us to account, keep debating and discussing the issues we raise and, above all, keep reading the paper. Nouse belongs as much to you as it does to us, and Nouse will always want to know what you think. And now I really will stop blathering, and sign off.

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