Save the Inquirer
Fran Singh, Editor
The Inquirer is an independent student newspaper, run by students for students. It was set up to fill a gap at the university: to report without fear or favour, to give a voice to the students, to investigate why City is the way it is, and to expose some things that the university didn’t particularly want exposed.
Over the last two years we have reported on how political student groups were banned with the excuse that they might harbour ‘terrorists’, campaigned against plans to sell off the halls of residence, investigated a ‘dodgy donor’ who gave City £1m to shut down a local school and open a city academy, exposed the engineering department for taking half a million pounds from the arms trade, and lots more.
Printing costs £500 a month, making a total of £2,500 for the five issues of the academic year. This is literally our only cost: the dozens of students who do everything from writing the stories to handing out copies outside the university at 8am in the middle of winter do it for nothing. But unless we can pay this one cost, the Inquirer cannot continue to exist.
£2,500 is really not a huge amount of money, at least not to run an entire university newspaper for a year – the students’ union probably spends more on printing up flyers for funky house nights.
Surely in a university of more than 20,000 students – not to mention thousands of lecturers and support staff – we can find 100 people willing to give £25 to support independent, campaigning, political student journalism that holds the people who run this university to account when no-one else will?
If you read the paper, and you think it’s made any difference at City, then please, don’t let it die. Donate whatever you can afford, just this once – we’ll be more grateful than you can ever know for every penny.
