- 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.
