THE STAGE. The smashed wine glasses. The drunken blathering that passed for a speech. Winning last year’s Guardian Student Media Awards was the surreal fulfilment of all I had imagined when I first examined the elegant application forms that materialised in my magazine’s intray last February.
Four years previously, such fancies seemed a pipe dream. Stumbling into a chaotic meeting of wannabe hacks at my first Impact magazine meeting at the University of Nottingham, my only desire was to write music and film reviews. Why, I thought, would I want to do anything else? But things changed. Ambition grew out of control. In my second year I found myself interviewing bands, in my third I was a film editor and by my final year I had become an associate editor and features editor on two universities’ publications.
Now I look upon my years as a student journalist with a nostalgic tear in my eye. There will never be a situation like it again. Within reason I could write anything I wanted. Having gained the trust of my editors, more or less by proving I had the ability to string a sentence together without making them look stupid, I took it upon myself to try everything. Before long I had stalked author Zadie Smith for an evening, interviewed John Peel in his Radio 1 studio, and asked Ann Widdecombe questions which were probably downright rude.
Then I got more serious. Comparing the stacks of magazines and newspapers I consumed every month with student rags full of boozed-up morons and tat about housing, I realised that although students had an outlet to write anything they wanted, few had really attempted to do investigative pieces on big issues. So I went out and tried to buy a gun, I watched heroin addicts shoot smack in their groins and talked at length with distressed refugees.
And sometimes my new-found zeal drew fire. While working on my asylum seekers piece I was accused of threatening a council employee and I was also made to expunge portions of an interview with the ex-Sunday Sport editor, Drew Robertson, by the NUS legal team because of some dubious comments about ‘adult’ publisher David Sullivan. In truth I was scared witless, but I found the effort brought tremendous rewards, despite the cringeworthy mistakes. Thankfully student journalism allows you to learn such painful lessons in an environment where your livelihood is not on the line.
In fact, I put so much toil into my burgeoning media career that graduation was an unexpected bonus. My degree could not compete with the exciting opportunities, both social and editorial, that my magazine and later Nottingham Trent’s student newspaper, Platform, offered. Every day I would ritually spend hours on the Impact sofa, flicking through back issues, critiquing them constantly, eat a sandwich dinner and waste time on the internet. At lunchtime the place would be crawling with other staff members similarly engaged... in nothing. And we would watch the food wrappers, torn newspapers and crumpled press releases gradually pile up until we were knee-deep in filth.
When copy weekends arrived, often when we had hardly any of the magazine written, the degeneration of hygiene and general wellbeing would escalate. Copy weekends became copy weeks. In my last year we failed at every attempt to get the magazine off to the printers on a Monday. Reduced to zombie-like wrecks, we printed off and proofed until we collapsed on the floor. To keep ourselves going we made repeated coffee machine breaks (but only when the alcohol had run dry). Sleep was for the weak. When we could take no more editing, games often filled the small hours, the most memorable being a frisbee game where we smashed 3,000 free internet CDs by flinging them at a target on a wall.
& When Impact’s combined entry into the 2000 awards was bungled and did not arrive in time, the disappointment was crushing & Then when we won the magazine award in 2001 it was a validation confirmation that we hadn’t wasted our time by working our guts out in what were really full-time roles. In fact, it showed we had done a bloody good job.
& And I know there are still sore-eyed student hacks all over the land, hunched over dirty old Macs, producing papers and magazines that are worth their time and ours. Student journalism has always surprised me with its wit, insight and professionalism. There is, undoubtedly, a fair amount of lazy and boring claptrap but on the whole it is a training ground like no other with responsibilities and opportunities that you are unlikely to find anywhere else. I certainly had the time of my life.
Just realise, no one says you can’t write as well as a Nick Davies or a Gary Younge. No one can say your work is of no value just because you are a student writing for free. The awards are here to recognise that endeavour and are respected enough to make potential employers sit up and take notice.
The truth is you won't know how good you really are in the grand scheme of things unless you submit your articles for scrutiny. And to be honest, I didn't know until I saw my name flash on the stage's blue TV screen. If you see your own name appear during this year's ceremony: you will feel euphoria, you will feel shock, but most of all you will be glad you filled in the application forms all those months before, when thoughts of clutching a chunk of glass and ripping the microphone off a TV presenter to drunkenly thank the world and its dog were merely a twinkle in your mind's eye.
‘Sleep was for the weak’ is an edited version of the article which first appeared in Media Guardian, 4 March 2002. Reproduced here by kind permission of the publishers |
