Why people involved with Woroni should decide its editors

- Daniel Rose

My nightmare scenario:

John A. Citizen (sorry) is a rather outgoing and well-connected student at ANU. He has grand designs for his life, probably including becoming a member of parliament or a lobbyist. John is your typical ANU student politico. John has submitted the required three pieces to Woroni to be nominated for the board of editors (they were of poor quality and therefore never published). Luckily for John, he also lives at one of ANU's residential colleges. When a position opens, John is nominated, and being the cunning politico that he is, he campaigns heavily at his college to have everyone cast a vote in favour of him, thus electing him to the board.

Jane B. Cool (worst) is a dedicated and talented sub-editor for Woroni. Jane lives in a share house in Braddon and values her position at Woroni greatly. She has written for Woroni for a couple of years and many of the writers look up to her. Jane does not, however, have college connections or a political career in mind. When a position opens Jane is nominated – but as she doesn’t campaign for the votes she probably deserves, she is beaten by John A. Citizen.

What I am trying to show here is that by allowing open membership, we will not be getting the best possible editors for the publication. Rather, we will more likely elect students who live on campus and are not afraid to campaign heavily for votes. I know of a couple of very talented contributors this year who did not run for Woroni 2011 either because they were “townies”, or because they were not lucky enough to be painted with the golden “Young Labor Left” brush that wins the ANUSA election every year.

Do not underestimate the power of the college vote. Especially if the voting will be electronic – all one needs to do is log on to their computer, navigate to a website and cast a vote in favour of who the poster in their hallway told them to.

This argument stems from my anxieties over the fact that the board of editors could become just another apparatchik circle-jerk, and likely deny a fair opportunity to those hard-working subbies and writers who would, in a sane world, be elected for their merits.

If the “fair-go” argument doesn't sell you, let us look at some analogues. Do most ANU clubs and societies have membership requirements, whether it be a fee or even a piece of paper that you sign to say that you want to be a member? The answer is yes.

What about our large corporations? Does every Australian get to decide who runs Rio Tinto? No, only the shareholders do.

So, if you haven't already set course for my college to drag me out of my room and throw me off a balcony for being undemocratic, I want to suggest a solution to the dilemma presented. Simply put: to vote you must be a contributor to the publication. A contributor is somebody who regularly submits publishable material, not a letter-writer, nor somebody who half-arses a few articles to meet a quantifiable standard.

Those of you who might feel cheated, or are screaming “ELITIST”, step back, and think about this. Do you really think that you, an outsider, has the knowledge to elect a competent editor? Or perhaps do you think that the only people who have the real insight into who the next editors should be are the writers, those who have worked with the budding editors?

Furthermore, North American university publications all have strict requirements for those who are eligible to vote. If we are trying to copy their successful model, why are we dismissing a very large aspect of the way they operate, the way those publications elect their leaders?

Let me also ask you, if you were a writer (as some of you no doubt are), would you feel comfortable working under some politico hack who wants to pad their resume, or working under a former colleague who you had a great say in electing?

Careful thought over the election process of the board of editors would surely lead to a competent and harmonious board of editors. I hope your comments will set a mandate for the drafters of the new Woroni constitution.

Why Woroni needs a dedicated web editor

- Jamie Freestone

When I hear about anything, I look for its website. If it doesn’t have a website, I don’t think about it ever again. That goes for companies, events, artists, organisations and especially: publications. If someone Googles Woroni and all that comes up is a note about a coming website, they might be forgiven for thinking it’s not a serious operation.

And that’s the real point of my article and indeed all recent discussions about Woroni’s future. At the core of all debates over independence, the constitution, format and online presence — at the centre of all these debates is the question: how serious of an operation is Woroni? It’s an open question, but my feeling is that it’s quite serious. It’s not super serious; it’s not Harvard Crimson serious, but it is website serious.

The thing about websites, though, is that they generally don’t get built. When they do get built, they generally fall into ruin pretty quickly. In fact, even print editions of Woroni, have, let’s face it, been pretty hard to produce over the years. I can tell you that recent editors Fletcher, Wiblin; Dawson, Lee; Brereton, Cubis and Gratton have all experienced the struggle involved with maintaining momentum over the course of a year, trying to extract a fortnightly piece of writing from undergraduate students. If it weren’t for the especial dedication of the editors themselves, the print edition obviously wouldn’t get off the ground. That’s not to say that writers and section editors are lazy, but they simply don’t have as much invested in the product as the elected editors.

That’s the main reason I like the idea of a larger group of editors. If nothing else, it increases the pool of people who are completely dedicated to getting the edition out there. Editors pull all-nighters, spend their own money and frequently sacrifice their studies to get something done for Woroni. This is why I’m convinced that the only way to ensure a well maintained website is to have one of these editors designated as an editor of online content. I’m not wholly convinced of the exact breakdown of duties outlined in the draft constitution, but the one role that should be cordoned off, just to guarantee results, is the online editor.

People talk of expanding Woroni. I like ambition, but in a university with a not so large undergraduate population and no journalism program, it seems unrealistic to presume the print edition can expand significantly beyond its current scope. If Woroni is to expand its influence, then it will be as an online identity. The target for those who seek to make Woroni bigger should be to make the website a hub for students, a website they look at every day along with Facebook and their emails, just to stay in touch with what’s happening. For it to be this important to students’ lives, it must be updated daily. It must reach into the ANU community (and that means halls and residences) to provide ultra-local news and events. It must contain all the information a student would want, to keep apprised of what’s happening on and off campus. It must link closely to the ANU website and perhaps also contain a certain amount of room for users to get involved. Only by creating a Woroni web community will the amount of people who are interested in Woroni appreciably increase.

This vision of an ideal website is crudely drawn here, but even if it is in fact a pipedream, a website is needed for Woroni because it’s currently 2010. It will soon be 2011. That is enough of a reason to insist that a website is crucial. And from excruciating experience I can testify that a website will not spring into existence as some kind of spontaneous phenomenon emerging from the good will of Woroni’s editors and writers. For this reason one of the editors must shoulder the responsibility themselves, if not for building the website, then at least for maintaining and updating it throughout the year.

A bit of background

Most of this stuff isn't new. Most of it's been said a few times. Here are some links to some of the better stuff that's been written. There's also a link to something I wrote.

Here's Melissa Wellham earlier this year. Well worth a read.

And here's Rob Wiblin last year.

And here's me, also last year.

A quick guide to the draft constitution

On the right-hand side of this page is a link to the draft constitution. I think a quick guide to it is in order.

As you read, please keep in mind that it's a draft. Talks about it so far have already led to some changes. The terms, for example, are going to be for 12 months rather than the draft's 18.

The original draft is up at the moment just so everybody is starting from the same place. But as this process goes on revised versions will go up so that - like little Karl Popper disciples - we're arguing about the best current model. The second draft (with the changed term limits and a few other things) should be up this weekend. And revised drafts will keep going up over the next few weeks with posts outlining what's been changed.

Because it's so long, I think it's worth flagging some of the hot-spots - the points that really need to be debated. To begin with, I think the focus should be on the editorial board.

- How many people should be on it? The current draft has eight editors. Is this a good number?

- Should the editors have prescribed powers and if so what should they be? The current draft has three prescribed roles. Is this enough, is this too much?

- Should the board be hierarchical? The current draft is, with a veto vote given to the Editor-in-Chief. Is this helpful, is it unhelpful?

I think that's plenty to start with, but in time the election process and the transition from the current model to the new model will need to be discussed.

And of course if you have other ideas, write in.

What this blog is about

- Will Glasgow

I suppose I should just be upfront about it. This blog is about reforming Woroni. 

Everyone, first years aside, has the right to find that sentence ghastly. “Haven’t we done this before?” Well, yes, we have.

And everyone, first years included, has the right to think, “How boring”. Which, of course, it is.

Still, a debate about reforming Woroni needs to happen. As we were told many times during the last campaign for its editors, Woroni has a structural problem. And it's a problem that still needs to be sorted out.

Every year the Woroni editors are elected in the (nasty, horrible, vulgar) ANUSA elections. Every year the newspaper is trashed by a team who have had no involvement with it and defended by a team who have. And every year the team who trashes it wins. And so every year the paper has a huge defection of staff, and every year the paper is rebuilt from scratch.

If you rebuild a newspaper from scratch every year, it can only be so good. Which is what all this is about.

Along with an inefficient smash-and-rebuild cycle, the current election process leads to a yearly over-correction of the newspaper’s style. If the paper is too newsy (as it was in 2008), it then swings to not newsy enough (as it was in 2009). If it’s not very interested in ANUSA politics (as it was in 2009), then it becomes far too interested in ANUSA politics (as it is this year).

I think it’s unfair and unhelpful to blame the individual editors for this. I’ve worked with all of them from 2007 to 2010 and they’re a pretty talented group of people. They’ve all come to the job believing that they could make a newspaper the ANU studentry would love. They've all tried - really hard. But despite their hard work, they've all found the studentry's love, even just its respect, tough to get.

That so many talented students have encountered the same problems suggests that the problem’s not with them - or at least it’s not just with them. As just about every past editor and the two current editors will tell you, the problem is with the structure of Woroni. Particularly the way Woroni elects its editors.

I mentioned earlier that you would be right to think that this debate had already happened. Last year was supposed to be the last time that Woroni’s editors were elected in the ANUSA elections. That's what the winning candidates Adam Brereton, Alex Cubis and Kate Gratton, who ran on an independence ticket, told us.

Why, despite their emphatic victory, independence hasn’t happened and, consequently, why editorial candidates for Woroni are once again going to have to contest the upcoming ANUSA election is a bit of a mystery. The editorial in the fourth issue of this year’s paper told us that the editors – now just Adam and Alex – still believe in this stuff.

“When running as The Big Woroni last year, we made Woroni’s separation from ANUSA the issue in last year’s ANUSA elections,” editors Adam and Alex wrote. “As part of our plans for top-to-bottom reform of the organisation, we continually pushed the idea that Woroni needed to stop being an extension of the editor’s personalities and again be able to contribute to the university’s vibrant student community.”

Wise words indeed. As I said, why these same editors haven’t made the newspaper independent is a bit opaque. They say they still want the newspaper to be independent. They won a huge mandate to make this happen at the last election. And the current ANUSA President Tully Fletcher, who they ran with, still supports Woroni's separation from ANUSA . It seems that the only reason that this hasn’t happened is that these three people now hate each other. Once again, the claustrophobic world of ANUSA has struck down friendship. It's very sad.

But it’s also by the by. As Adam and Alex wrote in that same editorial, “To move forward on the matter in good faith, and to make sure that Woroni is separated from ANUSA, the direction of the issue cannot rest in our hands alone.” An that's exactly what this blog is about. To use our new Prime Minister's favourite phrase, it’s about "moving forward" to make sure that Woroni is separated from ANUSA.

And we really are moving forward.

There is now a draft constitution for an independent Woroni (see the link in the sidebar on the right). Let’s debate it.

Which bits of the draft are good? Which are bad? Are you convinced that independence would improve Woroni? If you aren't convinced, why? For the next few weeks this blog will be debating these questions. You are all invited to participate either by posting, commenting or just by following what others have written.

The purpose of this blog is to attempt to create a consensus on a constitution, which will then be put to a vote at an Organised General Meeting (OGM) in the second semester of 2010. If a constitution can be agreed on, if it can pass at an OGM, if the Vice-Chancellor supports it, then we can be done with all this. Wouldn't that be nice?

To quickly recap: this blog's guiding principle is that Woroni has a structural problem - not a very controversial principle to hold. The challenge for this blog is to fix it by settling on a proposed constitution that encourages Woroni to function as the newspaper we all want. That's going to be harder. But, if we're mature, if we're polite, if we spend a little time on this, I think it's very achievable.

There’s no argument over what we want the newspaper to be – we all want it to be smart, to be funny, to be released frequently and regularly, to have an vibrant online presence, to house a variety of student voices and to attract new ones. But how Woroni becomes that newspaper does require argument. 

As I said at the beginning, reforming Woroni is boring, I get that. But it is worth doing, for one last time.