We’re pleased to announce the moment everyone has been waiting for… SPANC Tickets are now on sale! We’ve put together a range of ticket options for SPANC18 to make sure everything you need is covered and you have a great weekend without worrying about any added extras. There are three…
The highlight of the student journalism calendar, the SPA Awards aim to recognise the very best in student media across both the UK and Ireland. The shortlist will be announced on Monday, March 20th at 7pm. Students and recent graduates are able to submit work across 19 categories, which will…
Student journalism often works best when it focuses on issues at the heart of its readership and when the stories can’t be read elsewhere. The most successful stories in the news section of a student publication are those which are original and have a clear focus on the institution at…
In 2012 the New York Times posted a story online that was different to anything that had been done before. They uploaded a long-read story that would inspire a whole new form of journalism and attract a new readership to their website. Now we’re asking: can student journalists do it…
The Executive Committee are pleased to announce the winners for the first ever North of England and Northern Ireland & Republic of Ireland regional awards. This year is the first year the SPA has organised regional awards and the committee would like to say a big thank you to everyone…
Last weekend saw another two successful SPARC events, this time taking place in London and Nottingham. The regional conferences sold more than 80 tickets between them and offered attendees talks from a wide variety of speakers. Among many other speakers, at the Midlands conference the former LA editor for the…
It was my day off work on Tuesday and overnight four “breaking news” stories were reported, including the Zimbabwe coup against Mugabe and a bomb scare at Hannover airport. Clearly, I picked the wrong time to be off – it’s been quite a week for news! And student journalism is no…
SPARC season got off to a flying start last weekend as Scotland and Wales hosted successful regional conferences. More than 50 people attended the day long conferences which saw talks given from a number of media industry experts including the BBC’s Ceri Dawn, as well as political reporter and pundit David Torrance. The…
We’re excited to announce that the bidding process for hosting the Student Publication Association’s Annual Conference 2018 (SPANC) is now open! SPANC is the biggest weekend in the SPA’s calendar. For three days, we gather more than 150 student journalists and editors from around the country to network, hear…
Editors are constantly stuck in the same predicament: should we focus more on news which is important, or should we focus more on news which our readers find interesting? Unfortunately, far too often these two criteria of a news story are not synonymous. A very important news story might break…