Everything I learned Editing Salient for Three years
Students who started university in 2024 and are graduating this year probably don’t know this, but you’re not really supposed to have the same Salient editor for three years. The last person to edit the magazine for more than one year did so in 2000 and 2001. So, yes, it has been a while. And, thanks to a slightly strange series of circumstances that brought me back to the job in 2025, you very nearly got rid of me.
After three years in this job, I have learned a lot about journalism: how to deal with lawyers, deadlines, angry emails, anonymous tip-offs, university communications teams, and the peculiar psychology of people who send 1400-word letters to the editor. But the thing I have probably thought about most is politics, and what it means for a student magazine to be “political.”
Saying journalism should not be political sounds sensible until you try to work out what that means. If Salient investigates mold in university accommodation, we are writing about housing regulation and institutional responsibility. If we cover bus fares, student allowances, rent, sexual violence, international students, graduation rules, or cuts to university courses, we are writing about decisions made by institutions with power over people’s lives. Politics is not confined to Parliament; it is also about who makes decisions and who has to live with them.
That does not mean a newspaper should become a party pamphlet. There is an important difference between being political and being partisan. Journalism should still be accurate, fair, sceptical, and willing to make powerful people uncomfortable regardless of which colour tie they wear. But pretending there is some perfectly apolitical place from which journalism can operate makes less sense to me now. Deciding what deserves coverage is a choice, as is deciding whose complaint is worth investigating, which institution deserves another question, and when an answer is not really an answer.
The wider news industry makes those choices under increasingly difficult conditions. In New Zealand, the number of people employed in journalism fell from around 4000 in 2006 to 2000 in 2018, while between 2000 and 2020 the number of newspaper-publishing enterprises dropped by almost a third. Globally, only 18 percent of people pay for online news. Journalism costs money, and increasingly few people are willing—or able—to pay directly for it.
The result is an industry trying to produce journalism with fewer reporters, less money and more competition for attention. A journalist with three stories due by 5p.m. has less time to spend six weeks requesting documents from a university. A newsroom fighting for advertising revenue has to care about audience numbers. A publication behind a subscription wall can produce excellent journalism while still being inaccessible to someone who cannot afford another $20 a month. Those are the conditions under which modern journalism operates, and student media gets to operate under slightly different ones.
Salient is free. You pick it up outside a lecture theatre, flick through it while pretending to study in the library, then leave it underneath an Auraki cup somewhere. I think being free is one of the most important things about this magazine. A first-year student living on a student allowance should be able to read the same investigation as someone whose parents are paying their rent. An international student should not need three news subscriptions to understand decisions made by the university they are paying tens of thousands of dollars to attend. Accessibility is not a side benefit; it shapes who journalism is for.
Our funding model also gives us the unusual privilege of spending time on stories because they matter to students, even when they will never attract an enormous audience. Over the past few years, Salient has reported on an Everton Hall resident becoming seriously ill while living with mold; students waiting weeks for counselling and days for GP appointments; the University removing its advanced-graduation option; and the institutional response when a student was sexually assaulted by visiting foreign officials. These stories are different, but they share something important: they are about what happens when institutions make decisions students have to live with, and when somebody keeps asking questions after the first answer.
There is a tendency to describe student journalism as a training ground for “real” journalism. I have never particularly liked that description. Student journalists are often inexperienced. We make mistakes. Sometimes our writers are learning how to interview someone for the first time while conducting the interview. But the journalism itself is real. Student media can also see things larger outlets cannot because we live inside the institutions we cover. We hear about the course cancellation because our friend is taking the course. We know the mold problem is not an isolated complaint because three people at the same hall have emailed us. National media has later picked up stories originally reported by Salient, not because we have resources they do not, but because proximity is itself a journalistic advantage. Our reporters are already here.
The challenge is making sure proximity does not become complacency. Being a student publication does not mean automatically siding with students, just as reporting critically on the University does not mean assuming the University is always wrong. Sometimes the most useful thing we can do is discover that the story everyone is repeating is not quite true. Our obligation is not to validate our audience. It is to report for them, and that distinction has been one of the hardest and most useful things I have learned.
It has also taught me that institutions are not monoliths. I have spent a lot of time reporting critically on this University, but some people inside it have also been among Salient’s strongest supporters. Kristina in University Communications has worked with me for all three years, through more media requests, follow-ups, and last-minute phone calls than either of us should count. Kevin from Student Health not only spent an unreasonable amount of time answering my questions, but gave me a rental reference so good that my landlords offered me my flat almost immediately, which may be the most materially useful outcome of investigative journalism I have experienced.
Kent and Jackie from Legal, and really the entire University legal team, have endured my endless OIA requests with considerably more patience than I deserved. The current communications team, including Fee and Sarah, and the many people behind the scenes, have repeatedly found documents, tracked down answers, and dealt with questions that often arrived with tight deadlines.
I also owe a huge thank you to Baker at Touchprint, who for three years has been absolutely bulletproof when it comes to the fairly important final step of getting the magazine printed and onto stands. Producing a weekly magazine involves enough opportunities for disaster before the files leave our hands; knowing that once they reached Baker, they would somehow become a thousand physical copies of Salient has been one of the few parts of the process I never had to worry about.
And then there is VUWSA. Over the years, different executives and staff have backed me, disagreed with me, been investigated by me, argued with me, funded the magazine investigating them and, when I actually needed it, stood behind Salient’s independence. Not always, obviously. But enough that I learned something important from that relationship too: independent journalism does not require everyone you cover to like you. It requires the structures around you to tolerate being scrutinised when scrutiny is uncomfortable.
I cannot thank VUWSA, though, without thanking Matthew Tucker, despite the fact he will absolutely hate being included. Across the past three years, Matthew has been, unequivocally, my rock. He has helped me navigate managerial problems, talked me through being attacked by TERFs on Twitter, and sat beside me in not one but two lawyers’ offices—which is probably two more lawyers’ offices than most friendships should require. He also eventually convinced me to buy a motorbike, advice I will consider vindicated once he fixes the broken moped I subsequently dumped on him.
I call Matthew my dad, partly because it annoys him, but mostly because his support has been the kind I associate with family: unconditional, practical, and there before I had worked out how to ask for it. There are people who support the work you do, and then there are people who support you while you are doing it. I have been extraordinarily lucky to have both.
That is probably what gets lost when we talk only about “holding power to account.” Journalism sometimes has to be adversarial—but most reporting is also built on relationships. It depends on someone returning an email, finding an old document, explaining how a process works, pointing you toward the person who knows the answer, or trusting that even if they dislike the eventual story, you will represent what they said accurately. You can scrutinise an institution without assuming every person inside it is your opponent. Good journalism often depends on knowing the difference.
Student media often talks about “amplifying the student voice.” It is a nice phrase, but there is no single student voice. Te Herenga Waka has thousands of students with different politics, incomes, cultures, degrees, and experiences, and they disagree with each other constantly. The job of student media cannot simply be to decide what “students think” and print it louder. It is to give students the information necessary to argue with each other intelligently.
That means publishing things some readers will dislike. It means scrutinising VUWSA even though VUWSA funds us, and scrutinising the University even though we work on its campuses. During an election, it means asking uncomfortable questions of politicians we agree with as readily as politicians we do not. Fairness requires us to check facts, seek responses, represent disagreement properly, and correct ourselves when we get something wrong. Neutrality, if it means pretending every exercise of power is none of our business, would prevent us from doing journalism at all.
After three years, that is probably the biggest thing editing Salient has taught me. We are living through a period in which trust in journalism is fragile, newsrooms are shrinking, and people increasingly receive completely different versions of reality depending on which corner of the internet they inhabit. Student media will not solve that. But it can do something smaller and more tangible. It can tell a student why their graduation disappeared, ask why someone waited seven weeks for counseling, find out what happened inside a moldy hall room, and give someone with less institutional power the ability to put a question to somebody with more. It can do that while remaining free, because dozens of people—reporters, editors, student representatives, university staff, and people whose names never appear in print—keep making it possible.
I’ve spent a lot of time wondering whether doing those things made Salient “political.” I think I was asking the wrong question. Of course student media is political. Students’ lives are political. Housing is political. Healthcare is political. Education is political. Who gets listened to is political. The better question is whether we do that work well: whether we are accurate, independent, curious, willing to admit when we are wrong, and prepared to ask the same difficult questions regardless of who is answering them.
Three years is much longer than anyone is supposed to spend learning that lesson. I am very grateful I got to anyway.
