The Student Review turns one year old
| February 7, 2012 | Posted by Elliot Davies under features |
The editors, from left to right: Oliver Nott, Sep Gohardani, Elliot Davies
Happy birthday! One year ago today, on February 7th, 2011, The Student Review started the presses and published its very first set of articles. It’s amazing to think how well we’ve done in that year. I don’t think anyone back then quite knew how things would turn out, or if we’d even be around to celebrate an anniversary!
Let’s start things off with a few incredible numbers. In the 365 days since we launched, we’ve published 378 articles. That’s just over one article a day every single day for a year that the editorial team has cajoled, bribed and bullied out of our wonderful writers. We’ve had around 57,000 views in that time, and right now we’re being viewed a little over 200 times a day. Our most popular article, for whatever reason, has been Private Peaceful with 1315 views. Our longest – although some people seem determined to contest the title – was our brilliant Leeds Festival review, at 9403 words. We currently have six awesome weekly columns, with at least one more soon to be added. And we’ve received almost 500 comments from readers.
Here at The Student Review we have always stood by our founding principle that if someone is interested enough in a topic to write about it, there will be someone else interested enough to read about it. This has given rise to the policy we delight in telling new writers about: at TSR, you may write about whatever you wish. As a result, we’ve published articles on an incredibly wide range of topics. We particularly excel at reviewing books, films, games and music – to date we have 100 articles tagged in our reviews category in addition to several dedicated series such as A Guide to the Classics, A Guide to Cinema, and Should I Read… ?
We have also stuck to our ethos of democracy. Anyone writing ‘full-time’ for the paper is eligible to take part in discussing any major decisions, whether it be moving to a new website (as we did in May) or deciding how best to express our opposition to internet censorship bills (as we did last month). We keep an open forum so writers can contribute ideas, suggestions or criticisms about any aspect of the paper, and we try to be as open as possible about the editorial process; for example, we recently published our own style guide so that writers and editors can work from the same set of rules. We are currently in the middle of elections for the position of Editor-in-Chief, which we have promised to hold annually.
So, what’s planned for the future of The Student Review? First things first, you can expect to see more of the same great quality content that you’re used to reading every day. In fact, that’s something we don’t ever plan to change no matter how much we continue to grow.
One thing we would like to improve is our interaction with our readers: you. TSR is your paper after all, and we want to make it even easier for you to get involved with pretty much any and every aspect, from suggesting topics you’d like to see us cover to helping us spot and correct mistakes. The Guardian is notable for being the first major paper to have a readers’ editor, an independent member of staff responsible for talking directly to readers and helping to enforce corrections. Well, we want to be a readers’ newspaper. If we’re doing something you think could be improved, we want to know about it. It’s your paper!
I’d like to conclude with a thank you to some of the individuals who make TSR possible. First, to Oliver Nott; ostensibly our political editor, he also takes it upon himself to handle large amounts of copy-editing and has been working to organise the editorial election as a neutral party. Second, to Sep Gohardani, our cultural editor whose many late nights and hard work behind the scenes help TSR produce some amazing pieces of work, and whose advice on everything from grammar to web advertising has been invaluable. Third, to Georgie Tindale, our sub-editor who not only somehow keeps coercing a rabble of poets to send in their work and assembles it into our Poetry of the Week collections, but who has also recently taken on responsibility for the works of fiction we’ve started accepting. And finally, of course, a huge thank you goes out to all our regular writers who volunteer their time, energy and creativity to produce such fantastic articles week after week.
Congratulations everyone. Here’s to another year!
I can add another section, if you’d like?
Still, everyone should sing ‘Happy Birthday’ very loudly and very drunkenly.
It’d be a bit narcissistic to thank yourself, Elliot, so I’ll do that for you – I’m sure everyone will agree that you’ve been a fabulous Editor-in-Chief, and well done for keeping TSR afloat for the last year! (how crazy) I also disagree with ‘bullied’ but yes, thank you for being a great editor/boss eeeek! And that also applies to the rest of the editorial team, you’re all amazing, wonderful and just incredible (albeit slightly insane).
-AJ