Cherwell and The Oxford Student have announced their upcoming merger in a bid to create a gigantic student paper.
The merger will create the opportunity for the new paper to develop their focus on increasing the output of predictable comment pieces and news you’ve probably already seen. The merger will also allow for the expansion of the popular Puzzles section into a full pullout and for the creation of quizzes to discover which Oxford college you truly are (sorry, someone has to be St Hugh’s).
The new paper will also be launching a Tab-style Top 100 BNOCs of Oxford competition. Entrants will be ranked by hack level, the number of likes on their Facebook profile picture, and – the most important metric – the number of Oxfesses they have been tagged in. Whether the paper will also follow the Tab in launching a “Best Bums of Oxford” competition remains to be decided.
In order to decide the new senior editorial team for the paper, the respective teams from Cherwell and The Oxford Student will fight in a Hunger Games style battle in Christchurch Meadows. Tickets will be available soon but are expected to sell out quickly, with the main buyers being those who’ve had hit pieces written about them by the respective editors.
Trudy Ross, current Editor in Chief at Cherwell (and posh humanities student) commented: “The demand for student journalism is being grossly overestimated by posh humanities students. No matter how special Oxford thinks it is, it doesn’t need this many student papers. We’ll be doing everyone a huge favour by cutting down the number of publications they need to apply to at the start of each term, as well as saving them the awkwardness of having to cancel an interview at the last minute.”
OxStu Editor in Chief Isaac Healey said: “With the merger of our editorial teams, we have halved the time needed for article turnover and doubled our published output almost instantly. Pooling our resources has also freed up the budget to station our News reporters overseas, so readers can look forward to exciting reports from our new International Correspondents.”
“Best of all, this would cut my workload in half,” he added, before logging off and tapping in one of the other Editors to take his place.
Abigail Howe, Editor in Chief at Cherwell, was too busy rewording Oxford Mail articles to provide a full comment but, after being tapped in by Isaac, confessed that “as student journalism in Oxford consists of reporting on the same people getting into scandals and others regurgitating lukewarm takes they’ll eventually pitch to the Telegraph, a merger shouldn’t be a surprise. The next plan is to unite all student newspapers across the UK in a mega ‘Unipaper’. At least then I’d know who I was competing with when I sold my soul for a potential internship at the Spectator”.
In conjunction with the merger announcement, The Oxford Student and Cherwell are running a competition to select the name for the new paper. The competition is open to all Oxford students and staff, and the winner will receive merchandise featuring the current logos of both papers, expected to skyrocket in value after both papers cease to exist.
“We’ve already tried ‘The Oxford Cherwell’ and ‘The Cherwell Student’, but they aren’t very catchy and frankly, we have no idea how to proceed from here,” admitted Natasha Tan, Editor in Chief at OxStu. “Not to sound desperate, but it would be really nice if someone helped us out, and if you win you could probably feature this on your CV or something.”
Entries can be submitted via this link. The competition will run until April 2nd 2021, 23:59.
Cherwell would urge any concerned parties from OSPL or Oxford SU to check the date.
