Often, I try and suppress the pedant in me, but some things are so vile and pathetic, that I simply can't help but pour scorn upon them.
Yesterday, I was introduced to a local student rag, fresh off the printing presses. It is called The White Lady and is named after a legendary ghost that allegedly resides in St Andrews Castle. The paper certainly captures the essence of its namesake. It is scarily bad; it is haunting its readers with its ghoulishness, both typographically and in the amount of journalistic faux pas it treads. It has a callous disregard for not only basic page design, but a style guide, grammar, punctuation and copyright.
Anyone with an interest in journalism, writing or artistic creation in general would be offended by the pigheaded brashness of the copyright infringement indulged by the paper. As far as can be seen, every word in one of the paper's lead articles, featured on a page-wide-spread, is lifted from the Daily Telegraph online, and in fact, the plagiarist has such little respect and enthusiasm for the work he is producing that when he copied and pasted the words written by Telegraph journalist, Alex Spillius, without even attempting to replace a single syllable. The plagiarist couldn't even trouble himself to rid the final edition of the emboldened blue hyperlink that stains page five of his paper so guiltily.
The mere idea that it would even try to report international news seems a futile effort, seeing as how the content would be out-dated, ill-sourced and unoriginal. How can a small student-run paper possibly offer anything to compete with a real news source on an issue taking place thousands of miles away?
Additionally, and bizarrely, the paper contains no bylines. It appears that one thing the editor is prepared to rewrite for himself is the rule book on journalism. I read the second week's edition of The White Lady, in which the editor tries incoherently to explain the bamboozling decision not to credit the people who have helped him produce the paper, providing, that is, that anyone else was even involved. Unfortunately, the editorial does little to explain...anything.
The paper also contains a slender style guide, which is presented to the reader beneath the flagging and fatigued pun "Suit you, Sir!" I dread to see the pun used in this section for next week's paper. The style guide itself is to the world of fashion what this newspaper is to the world of journalism; an embarrassment. The section regurgitates the exhausted concept of fashion 'dos' and 'don'ts' and showcases a snobby adve-rticle for Barbour jackets. However, the low point for unoriginality is clearly the slating of beanie hats - "they look like a tea cosy being used as a hat" - the kind of joke that wasn't funny even when your beloved nana told you it 10 years ago.
The White Lady falls at the first hurdle of weekly journalism-attempting to deliver news as though it's a website. On the back page (This is for sport, Dear Editor) comes the music section, which delivers the earth shattering news that college rock impresarios R.E.M are to disband...almost a week after it has happened. Within the first few paragraphs, the author writes "The band just announced their split on their official website." But of course, 'just' for the writer, is last week by the time the paper falls into the hands of the reader. But it's the headline of this article which irks me the most: When studying journalism at college, we were told that the most important thing about writing a headline is that it conveys vital information in the space allotted by the editor. Puns come second if at all depending on house style. Yet here, caught in a smelly, unwashed halfway house between informative and punny, emerges the headline "It's the end of R.E.M as we know it," with "it" stranded solo and dangling perilously on the line below the preceding words.
The paper's online presence is impressive, with a ".co.uk" suffix and a fairly glossy website, but the material plastered onto the walls of the web are bitter and cynical. The author of one article attacks the existing student newspaper of St Andrews, The Saint, gleefully pointing out that it has won a mere two of a "possible 35" student media awards with the Glasgow Hearld. What the awards it failed to win and what it did win are an apparent mystery-perhaps it won best student paper of the year in 2009 and 2010? The opinion piece then lines up contributors of the well-respected paper and assassinates them all individually, with attacks on the substance and quality of their journalistic work. It is a coldly controlled demolition of the paper and doesn't so much conjure feelings of ballsy journalism, as it does feelings of shameless bullying.
It is an injustice that while the writers of The Saint are attacked for their work individually, the faceless, nameless hacks at The White Lady remain shrouded in a cloth of anonymity.
It is anti-journalism, but simply put: it is a very bad newspaper. 'Rag' is a term I would like to use, but it is more like toilet paper. Imagine, if you will, a beautiful feast of words, crafted by a journalist at the Telegraph as it is snatched from his hands, before being chewed, swallowed and digested by a gluttonous sloth, who rubs his excrement all over a few sheets of paper and has the audacity to call it his creation.
