Blogging strike!

The last days I have been on a blogging strike. Unfortunately, I don’t think anybody noticed. The strike is against too much nonsense on the internet, and in particular in mainstream media. So was one of the latest articles: “Breaking News – Hamster returns happy and healthy after two days disappearance”, it was a bit of a piss-take.
Slightly Paris Hilton like.
But again, big astonishment as nobody noticed.
Sometimes my science degree just breaks through – I can’t bear long articles with hardly any content nor intelligent thoughts. That’s probably why I hate Sunday papers – there are just too many words padded around the gist of an article, it’s so annoying.
If I ever meet George Orwell in any anarchist afterlife, which is very unlikely because of the reason that anarchists don’t believe in an afterlife, I am going to hold him to account about stressing the beauty of the English language aspect too much in his “Why I write” article, pointing out how much miserable content it caused me to ignore at least in The Guardian and The Observer.
Not sure if it would be possible to blame him also for the editorial policy of our student newspaper. They just won some awards at the Sunday Herald competition, and actually, I would really love to know how they have done it without bribing anybody.
I chickened out in about February after they begged me to write as much news as possible in December, and I wrote about four or five stories about some international student protests, some in Greece, one in Germany, and one in Cameroon/Ambazonia, one travel article about Nuremberg and then I got behind with the John Pilger review of his DVD boxset.
All these stories were dropped, the December edition was never printed and I was never given a reason nor any notice about it, and in the next edition, they just printed a complaint of a student that there weren’t enough news stories relating to our local university in it. Aaargh. There never were any editorial meetings of the student newspaper either, it was said that that’s not how it works in real life. I beg to differ. Not every student newspaper needs to model itself on the Edinburgh Evening News/The Scotsman.
So it was at least good to meet Irfan at the NUJ conference and hear that he had the same problem of his international and foreign reports getting dropped from the student press, too.
I am not sure why they dropped the Nuremberg travel story, probably because there was too much about the holocaust and the city’s history in it; it seems the travel sections only like good and positive stories, not the gritty, grey and dark corners of the world. Apart from that, I did a lot of research on it which I hoped to get displayed in extra little summary boxes, but our student newspaper was notoriously bad with layout and seemed to lose any information not displayed in whole sentences in article form. They even managed to print a review about a book without mentioning the title. I am unsure though if it was deliberate or not, as the title was “Get a fucking job”, and they might not have wanted to print the swearing.
So that’s the basic reason why I can’t send any articles off this year to any student media awards competition like the Guardian one. I would not mind putting in for the new podcast or the video category, especially now as the new little video: “How to catch a lost hamster” is finished.
It’s just uploading onto FourDocs and then I’ll upload it here and on Current TV, too.
But, like the CNN Blog awards, the terms and conditions exclude me once again, if it isn’t the age restriction, then it’s the condition to have to be a full-time student. Or to have at least three articles of each category in the student press.
So the only category I could make this year is this website (damn the design) – oh yeah, to complete the moan, the editor of our student media did not let me do the website for the paper either, as he prefered to put the paper out just as pdf documents. And also the uni does not trust students with access to the server in the capacity of installing and maintaining content management systems and database-driven, interactive web solutions, which would be necessary for a proper student newspaper archive with pictures and community function.
I could though try to put in for the reviews section – complete with the chopped book title article, but then “the Beauty of the English language” gets me kicked instantly.
Another problem is that the student paper has to offer both the postgraduates and the undergraduates a possibility to publish, and this isn’t easy because of the huge age gap. So, often the articles by and for undergraduates just seem so silly to the postgraduates, and the articles we write are probably too serious and boring for the youngsters.