An upstart rival is taking on a university stalwart

The Herald Scotland

7 hours ago

And so it was with gleeful curiosity that I learned of a newspaper war breaking out in the rather more genteel habitat of Glasgow University. Until late last year the sylvan territory around Gilmorehill and Hillhead was the exclusive preserve of the hallowed Glasgow Guardian, one of the best and most influential student newspapers in the UK. Its pages launched the careers of dozens of Scotland's top journalists.
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It's still a splendid publication with comment and culture sections that would do justice to the national, paid-for prints. Yet, I'd been failing in my paternal duty to these young scribes if I didn't point out that having 30 or so editorial executives and one reporter (as listed on their back page) suggests they might need to, you know … get out a wee bit more.
Since November last year though, the Glasgow Guardian has faced stiff competition from an upstart rival called the Hillhead Review, launched by two of its brightest student journalists. The battle for the hearts and minds of Glasgow University's sprawling student body may not have the Brylcreem and Kensitas ferocity of the 1960s Glasgow print wars but it's intense all the same. The split was rooted in concepts as old as the history of the printed word: freedom of expression, censorship and challenging power.
The battle took another twist last month when the Hillhead Review, with far fewer personnel and a fraction of the Glasgow Guardian's resources was voted Student Newspaper of the Year in The Herald's prestigious Student Journalism awards. Their Editor-in-Chief, Odhran Gallagher added Student Journalist of the Year to the paper's accolades. This is some going for a publication that's barely six months old.
Mr Gallagher and his co-Editor, Katherine McKay are telling me rather bashfully of the story of their success. We're in that imposing big edifice at the foot of University Avenue called the James McCune Smith Learning Hub, which I should also point out has a hearty cafeteria where a chap like me can get all of his five-a-week in one sitting.
It all started with 'that abortion story' as I clumsily describe it. They tell me 'that abortion story' is somewhat more nuanced than this.
'There's a society on campus called Glasgow Students for Choice, a pro-abortion group who raise awareness and funds for their cause,' said Mr Gallagher. 'They'd received some match tickets from Partick Thistle, who were keen for more students to attend their games.'
At this point, Ms McKay tells me she's very pro-abortion and had considered joining this group. It seems though, that Glasgow Students for choice raffled the tickets off to raise cash for an abortion charity. Partick Thistle got wind of this though, and said they didn't want to be associated with it and that besides, the tickets were a free donation and not for fund-raising.
The Herald Student Journalism Award winners (Image: Mark F Gibson)
'We understand that some Catholic students had informed the football club,' they say. Ms Gallagher says they wrote the story up for the Glasgow Guardian, having solicited comment from both Thistle and the Abortion group. 'It was a straightforward news story, containing no bias and we wanted to publish it. But someone contacted the editor anonymously, claiming it wasn't true. We were then told not to run with it.'
The pair had also wanted to run with a story about Sandy Brindley, the embattled chief of Rape Crisis Scotland who had connections to Glasgow University. 'But the editors killed that story quickly too, insisting it was 'anti-women, which it certainly wasn't. I thought it was in the students' interest to run it, says Ms McKay. 'Of course it's a sensitive issue but we're supposed to be about publishing stories about sensitive issues.'
'That's when we told them we were leaving the paper because we weren't happy about them killing stories. We both still wanted a platform to write and we both still had ambitions of getting into journalism.'
In the course of a single weekend, they built a news website; purchased the domain name and published their first story on-line: a belter about a bloke who'd exposed himself in the University library which was picked up by the nationals. 'We got a decent following right away and many requests from students wanting to write for us.' Some of them, it seemed, had been rather intimidated by the rarefied atmosphere around the Glasgow Guardian with its 30 editors.
'Print is very expensive,' says Mr Gallagher, 'but both Katie and I had part-time jobs and had just enough to self-fund an initial 12-page print run of 400 copies which were quickly snapped up.' Their first splash in the middle of last November was another belter about students using paid essay-writing services on the Chinese social media app WeChat to plagiarise assignments.
This young pair are far sharper and more switched-on than I was at their age. I tell them of my own experience at the hands of the Glasgow University Guardian as it then was in the early 1980s. I had a part-time job at the Theatre Royal and pitched a review of Puccini's Manon Lescaut. The editor had looked down his glasses at me and laughed, before asking me if I played a musical instrument, to which I'd replied No. but resisting the urge to tell him that if I did he'd be getting chibbed with it.
I ask them about the perception that some universities have become captured by contrived ideologies bearing little resonance to the lived experience of the majority of students. 'Am I just being an old curmudgeon out of touch with what progressive young people think,' I ask them.
They both re-assure me I'm no such thing (though I do still wonder). 'In February, I wrote a piece about Glasgow Students for Choice, though not deliberately aimed at them,' says Mr Gallagher. There was an interview with them in the Glasgow Guardian discussing sex education in Scotland. I disagreed with some of it, including the expressed view that working-class people didn't understand sex properly. I asked why people from Glasgow should listen to drivel from an overseas student.
'There's a class element to this. When you went to Glasgow there was probably around 70-80% who came from the West of Scotland. Now, there are a lot more overseas students, which is great. But there's a wealthy, middle-class cohort who have a certain attitude to working-class students from the West of Scotland and I wanted to push against that.'
At this point, they're wary of saying too much on the record. Women especially, are subject to intense levels of online abuse when they venture onto this terrain.
'At the Hillhead Review,' declares Ms McKay, 'we want to give people an opportunity to express different views from outside that narrow echo chamber that's become dominated by the Far Left. Her colleague adds: 'All some people want to write about is Palestine and trans rights.
'A lot of this is coming from middle managers. I don't think many of the senior academic staff believe any of this and nor do a lot of students. It's all about ideological capture by people who don't want a debate or scrutiny. We don't want to be told what to think and to be free to speak.'
These are the principles on which the University was built and it's reassuring that some of our brightest and best young people still cherish them. I'm also delighted that Scotland's mightiest university in its newspaper capital has two excellent titles scrapping for news and readers like the old days.
Kevin McKenna is a Herald writer and columnist. He's fiercely proud of never having been approached by any political party or lobbying firm to do their bidding.