Student Newspapers Editing and Proofreading Services

A student newspaper is a real publication produced by people learning to be journalists, in an institution that funds it and would frequently prefer it did not exist in its current form. The paper's most important stories are the ones about the institution — the accommodation dispute, the staff who left, the disciplinary process, the money — and those are precisely the stories where the editor is a nineteen-year-old being telephoned by a communications director. Student journalism is where people learn whether they can hold that line, and they learn it from whatever guidance exists.

We edit what student newspapers, campus media and school journalism programmes produce — editorial policies and codes of conduct, sourcing and verification guidance, guidance on naming students and staff, legal and defamation awareness material for student writers, complaints and corrections procedures, relationships and agreements with the institution, funding and editorial independence documentation, contributor guidelines and style guides, training material for new writers and editors, handover documentation between editorial teams, safeguarding guidance for reporting on vulnerable students, social media and republication policy, and advertising and sponsorship policy. Our editors work on the guidance rather than on individual stories.

Guidance on naming students is the document these papers most need and least often have. A student journalist reporting on a disciplinary case, a protest arrest, a mental health crisis or a sexual misconduct allegation is making decisions about someone their own age who will be in a seminar with them next week, and whose name will be searchable for the rest of their life. We write these so the default is not naming, with the reasons for departing from it stated as a test the editor applies rather than a judgement they improvise; so the distinction between a student acting in a public role and a student who is simply involved in something is explicit; so the question of consent is addressed properly — that a distressed nineteen-year-old agreeing to be named is not the end of the analysis, and that consent can be revisited before publication; and so the handover document carries the decisions previous editors made and why, because the paper's standards otherwise reset every year. We also write the correction and takedown position, since these papers receive requests years later from people the internet has not let move on.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished material and correspondence with your institution. We are editors rather than lawyers, and we offer no view on defamation, privacy, contempt or any legal question — student publications should have access to proper legal advice. What we can do is make your guidance clear and usable by an editorial team that changes every year.