Its been nearly a year+ a little rant

Well, very nearly a year...not exactly since I last blogged. A lot has happened since then: I got into my third year elective- Communication design, I worked at Cue newspaper for a second year in a row and finished up my (rather eventuful) year as Editor-in-Chief of Activate, the student newspaper at Rhodes.

But I know I have been a bad blogger *slaps self on wrists* I solemnly promise to post at least one post a day here!

In other news *rant alert* a new student newspaper will be starting next year...with an "Oppie flavour" to it...

Now, normally I would welcome a new newspaper on campus- the view I always took was that the more voices there were the better in terms of newspapers and there were two others during my my time as editor (the Edge which died and currently a mag called Excess) Both of these publications made no official statement to the effect that they were actually in opposition to Activate. Instead they chose to appeal to other markets on campus and we all co-existed together.

Enter Lionel Faull and Innes Schumacher

Now before you judge me too much on what I am going to say about these two and their ideas I want to give you some background on my experience interacting with them...just for a bit of context and I think its time to come clean about this whole thing.

I met Lionel on the first day of my editorship- he was appointed as the Features editor and was a newcomer to the team. In his interview with Bianca, my deputy editor, and I he offered us help if we needed it in running the newspaper...excuse me? Without sounding too arrogant, I want to make it clear that I feel I was appointed becausei could do the job and the way Lionel went about "offering his help" was very strange indeed. I continued to have problems with Lionel throughout the year as his section members complained about his leadership style a lot.

In my opinion, he does not have much in the way of people skills.

Lionel then applied for the position of editor and was turned down for numerous reasons, reasons I am not going to go into here. We then offered him the position of editorial consultant which he accepted but later resigned on some quite confusing grounds...I am really not sure of the whole story there.

Innes, I met when she demanded to meet us and questioned the authority of the executive committee at Activate. I was highly irritated by this and her personality continues to. Lionel and Innes are romantically involved and she was a member of the features team under him (excuse the pun). This might not have been a problem if it hadnt affected the way Lionel ran his team...

Innes then applied for Features editor and was turned down after much heated debate among the selection committee- it was a tough decision and I stand by that, even if she thought we were only trying to make her feel better by saying that.

So neithe Innes and Lionel got the jobs they wanted...so what do they do? They make plans to start a new student newspaper on campus.

Like i said before, I really wouldnt have had a problem with this if they had gone about it in the right way- if you really look at it they arent really in opposition to Activate as they want to cater for Oppies and "others" and they want to look "outside of campus" rather than reporting exclusively on the Rhodes community.

I also question their motives for doing this...there seems to be an immense amount of sour grapes about the whole thing and the fact that they are keeping quiet about how they are actually going to do this makes me wonder if they even know themselves.

Running a newspaper isnt easy...and it seems they are going to find that out the hard way.