Not ‘only’ a local newspaper

by DR PETER THOMAS

THE Department of Social and Political Sciences at Brunel University London is proud to support the launch of this innovative new publication, The Hillingdon Herald.

Our department is a vibrant community of students, scholars and researchers working on some of the most pressing issues confronting the contemporary world. From political scientists analysing the upheavals of Brexit, to historians intervening in debates about the legacy of colonialism; from sociologists charting the uneven impact of the Covid pandemic on particular social groups and places, to Anthropologists grappling with the implications of climate change for the survival of human community in general; from Communications scholars casting a critical eye on the growth of social media to our Global Challenges team’s innovative focus on solving real world problems: whatever the different scholarly approaches we adopt, our work always aims to make a difference in the world beyond the university campus.

Produced entirely by the students and staff on the Journalism programmes in our Department, the Hillingdon Herald will also be a newspaper with a difference.

It will be produced by students at Brunel University London, but it will not be a newspaper ‘only’ for students. On the contrary, as the masthead on this first print edition states, it aims to be a newspaper ‘for all Londoners’; in particular, it aims to serve the local community close to Brunel’s campus in Uxbridge. The decline of local newspapers, rooted in the lived experiences of particular places rather than beholden to the dictates of multinational media conglomerates, has been a notable feature of the media landscape in the UK over the last decades. This is certainly the case in Hillingdon, which has not had its own genuinely local news outlet for quite some time. The Hillingdon Herald aims to fill this gap, and thereby to demonstrate concretely Brunel University London’s mission to be a civic University benefitting the communities and neighbourhood in which we work.

However, a publication produced by the students of one of the most diverse and international Universities in the country, serving a community speaking many different languages, could never be ‘only’ a local newspaper. Brunel University London provides an educational home to staff and students hailing from around the globe. In this sense, it has much in common with the wider Hillingdon community, which is similarly composed of people from a wide variety of backgrounds, cultures and religions. At Brunel just as in Hillingdon, the ‘local’ is always immediately bound up with the ‘global’. The Hillingdon Herald will aim to reflect these realities, and to draw upon the many different lived experiences that are represented at Brunel and in the wider local community.

Yet The Hillingdon Herald newspaper will also be different from many other contemporary newspapers in another sense: it will not be publishing “all the news that [somebody else has already decided] is fit to print”. Homogenisation of perspective, crass commercialism, easily digestible sound bites; as any commuter on the London Underground knows, there is not a contemporary lack of newspapers and other media outlets ready to tell us what we already know. This publication will instead aim to renew the tradition of high quality investigative reporting that is not afraid to ask troubling questions, that does not shy away from controversy, and that subjects the powers that be to critical scrutiny. Anything less would be failure to live up to the journalist’s historic responsibility to act as the ‘fourth Estate’ of modern democratic societies.

Finally, The Hillingdon Herald will be different from many other contemporary news publications in another crucial sense. The British print media today is not lacking in prominent reporters and commentators from older generations, more often than not drawn from remarkably similar social backgrounds very different from those of their readerships.

The students producing and writing in this newspaper, on the other hand, bring with them a wide variety of life experiences, in the local community and internationally. What they share is a youth that has been dominated by the tense debates of British and European politics of the last decade, and a pandemic that continues to visit profound tragedies upon so many communities and families. Their future is threatened by the increasingly grim realities of climate change. The Hillingdon Herald aims to give the critical voices of this rising generation a platform from which to intervene in and shape the agenda of social and political debate at a local, national and international level.

The Hillingdon Herald will appear in a print edition on a monthly basis, with regular updates posted on the newspaper’s website in real time.

We look forward to your support in the development of this exciting project.

Dr Peter D. Thomas is Head of Department

Social and Political Sciences,

Brunel University London