Recently, our content has been a part of some interesting debates between staff and students. We at Glass welcome constructive and productive debate. We love to see ideas being thrown around. However, we want to clear a few things up about why we’re here and what we represent.
We are one of the youngest student media platforms in Australia. With just 18 months of tenure behind us, we don’t have a history like Semper (UQ), Farrago (Uni Melb) or Catalyst (RMIT). We are still working on what Glass means for QUT and the QUT Guild, and that is a challenge. However, it is also an opportunity. We are not shrouded in a history that defines us, we are defining ourselves right now.
The 2020 team loves what the 2019 team created. They published hundreds of students in their magazine and built Glass from the ground up. However, you may have noticed that in 2020, we have taken a turn for more objective writing, focusing on student issues in our online space. We love the art and poetry and short stories, but we are looking to marry that with strong reporting that brings accountability to those we write about. We’re still working out a framework on what stories we need to bring you as editors and what stories to publish from our contributors.
Glass aims to share student media independently and act as an important channel for accountability. We discuss QUT Guild initiatives, University issues and current events that affect students.
Student media is here to spark debate. Case in point is a recent article we worked on and published, written by Guild Treasurer Liam Blair. Liam’s piece was about late assessment policies and his words were completely his own. The piece caused a stir, with lots of people chipping in on StalkerSpace and in comment sections. Overall, it was one of the strongest responses we have seen to an article this year and we loved to see students being so active in their opinions of University policy. However, some people misconstrued us publishing Liam’s piece as the Guild’s official opinion.
Nope. You can see here that Liam’s post is an opinion piece. If you’re looking for official QUT Guild correspondence, you can find it on their Facebook page or website. Despite it not saying so in our constitution (yet!) Glass, as student media, is here to be independent of the QUT Guild, to share student’s opinions, report on what the Guild is doing and build a community that is centred on authenticity, transparency and the desire to spark conversation. That is what we hope to do every time we publish an article.
We are proud to be a part of the student media sphere, and it is incredible to see what QUT Glass has become in only a year and a half. There’s still a full semester to go, and we hope to continue to bring you the issues that matter and share your work with the wider QUT Community.
Words: Em Readman and Jasmin Graves
