The more things change, the more things stay the same

Wow, a real cliché title isn't it? but it's okay because it's a really thought provoking one. I wrote an article for The Courier a few weeks back, for those of you who don't know The Courier is Aberystwyth's Student Newspaper/Magazine, it's also been a huge part of my university life. This post is in some ways a follow up to that article which you can find a link to down the page (read on!).

Humble beginnings
It all started back in 2005, my best mate Dave instantly roped me into writing for the (then) magazine, I ended up pretty quickly become the web editor, basically re-designing the website. I wrote some articles and at the end of the year decided (thanks to Dave mostly) to run for News editor, little did I know what I was actually letting myself in for. The second year began, to be honest pretty badly for the editorial team, putting together a freshers edition with no internet and no writers was probably beyond us and was not helped by a massive lack of advertising. We muddled on producing a second edition but by this point we had hit crisis point, no money, few writers and an editorial team well out of it's depth. Juliet the editor resigned and in the following election I decided to take the plunge and won!

Editor
This is where my degree really began to suffer and the magazine thankfully began to rebuild. We managed one more edition in my second year and I had to make a pretty hard breaking decision to scrap another due to a lack of advertising. I'd learnt tons and luckily had started to gather people together and build a bit of a team, for the third year I ran for Editor once more and we had a strong team ready to get moving. The year started well and despite plenty of ups and downs we really formed a strong team, the magazine took over my life but it was worth it. We ended the year in a reasonable position, financially messy but with a well briefed team ready to take over.

President
I spend the following year as the Guild president and had a fairly limited interaction with the magazine, one editor quit and money continued to be a problem, the same problems... just a different year. I guess now this brings us to today and returns to my original point in posting, the Courier has been reborn, this time as a Newspaper with plenty of help from ex-president Jon Antoniazzi the man who very ably took over from me at the Guild.

In the process of started this blog I also submitted an article for the first edition of the paper and am proud to hear it's been published, the ideas in the article are similar to the ideas in this post, the more things change the more they stay the same, you can read it on their website. The Courier goes on with no doubt similar problems to the one's I experienced just like the housing crisis in Aber goes on this year like is has in countless other ones...