STUDENT NEWSPAPER

[IR-PG]

I'll be coming to St. Andrews this year and want to know more about the student newspaper. I've got the basic story from wikipedia and The Saint's website, but it all seems a bit dated. Can anyone tell me more about it? i.e. have the editors etc. for the coming year already been assinged? how much room is there for external submissions? who do I contact about getting involved?

info. would be appreciated.

cheers.

[munchingfoo]

I've got two words for you, "Top Deck".

[IR-PG]

I've got two words for you, "Top Deck".

might I have, say, twenty more? preferably not the words "Top Deck" ten times over.

[jollytiddlywink]

Well, I'm not sure about the editorial structure (although I suspect that will have been largely settled already), but I do know that the Saint has a stall at the Fresher's Fair, which is at the end of Fresher's Week. Every society and sports club have a stall, and you can go along, join up and ask any questions. That's when everybody joins clubs and societies, so unless you have any burningly urgent questions about the Saint, you can safely wait until the Fair and ask then.

[Cain]

The Saint is best enjoyed with a red pen in hand.

[Guest]

Email: thesaint@st-andrews.ac.uk

New website: thesaint-online.com

[Jono]

The Saint is the principal student newspaper in St Andrews. In the past, some people have attempted to set up rival publications which have all fizzled out after a year or so, if not earlier.

The Saint is independant of the University and the Union, which gives it the editorial freedom that every good newspaper needs. Since last year it has been a freesheet funded entirely by advertising revenue.

The Saint is broken up into several different sections; news, opinion, lifestyle, etc. All these are made up of student contributions. The editorial staff are elected every year, and anybody can run.

The Saint may not be perfect, but its a valuable part of the university community. The hostility towards The Saint, this, in my opinion is due to a combination of some legitimately bad articles (a minority, but some really bad ones have been published in the past), and people unhappy with the coverage they or their causes have received from the paper (i.e. not oozing, uncritical praise; publishing the actual numbers who attended the protest rather than the shamelessly inflated number put in the press release). A St Andrews without a free press to cast light on the shadowier corners of the university would be a much worse one.

[schmod]

I've always got the impression that The Saint has been wildly inconsistent throughout the years. Most of the time, there's some group that is Not Pleased with the way the newspaper does its reporting.

As with most student-run newspapers, its staff changes frequently enough that its viewpoints tend to shift, in light of the fact that The Satint (admirably) does not explicitly subscribe to any one doctrine, while St Andrews students tend to be rather opinionated.

If you don't like The Saint, there's always The Sinner, which (for better or for worse) captures the unfiltered opinions of all the hopeless masses who wander through its doors.

[Hennessy]

I admit the only reason I pick up the Saint is to look for the spelling mistakes, which I find is a sort of achievement in itself. I mean, surely there are word processors with spellcheck facilities at the level of journalist - sub editor - editor which can all pick up these mistakes and yet nearly every article has some glaring miscarriage of grammar or erratic spelling.

Labouring the same point in an article over and over again also seems to be a big thing for the Saint's journalists, I remember reading an article some years ago now where the author had used the word "unique" at least eight times in a 400 word piece. Handy Hint No. 328 - Word also contains a thesaurus, should you need to revive a point you made earlier at least do it without boring your audience into submission with inarticulate use of language (a tactic all too devastatingly deployed in the monolithic god-bothering debates on the sinner by certain ne'er do wells)