TheCheeseGrater The Other Student Magazine of University College London Union
No. 17 March 2008
THIS MONTH Pressing matters
‘If we lie about it, will they. go away?’ wonder UCL Press Office p.2
The life of Pi
Down Your Union
People actually believe there’s a ‘right-wing’ conspiracy at UCLU p.7
Elections Bitch
Get ready for another batch of charming Sabbatical officers . p.8
Pi is badly written, designed and managed. At every level it is unfit to represent UCL. We ask: how much waste can one magazine produce? Hannah Hudson ‘INFINITE MONKEY THEOREM’ refers to the idea that if you sat a load of monkeys at typewriters, they would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. Now imagine what would happen if you gave the monkeys a university education and a grant of £10,000 a year? It turns out that this is a real social experiment and it’s called “Pi Media”. We’re still waiting for our masterpiece.
The grandiose title, Pi Media, is the umbrella term for Pi Magazine, Pi Squared and Pi Matrix (the website). Unfortunately it seems that when Pi expanded the franchise, they inadvertently diluted any quality which may have previously existed. The truth is that Pi Media wastes money, is badly managed, poorly written and has lost its selfrespect. Pi gets one of the biggest grants of the UCLU clubs and societies, being handed an impressive £10,000 every year. A
nice tidy sum to work with, you might think; but that’s not all! Pi also receives an approximate further £10,000 from advertisers (those nice people at Deloitte who throw money at students in return for their souls, at al.) Add the membership fees of approximately £700 per year and that all adds up to a lot of moolah. So how does it all get spent? While membership fees go towards social events, each issue of the magazine costs approximately £2,000, and each issue of the newspaper costs
£1,000. With six copies of each publication being produced per year, that totals a whopping £18,000 of expense. No dount a Pi columnist would describe this sum as being equivalent to 115 Bacardi Breezers and a pair of Louboutins; clearly we’re talking big money here. Unfortunately, it’s not all being well-spent. Forlorn stacks of unread Pi are a familiar sight to many students, and (like the circle of life) these unread copies are inevitably pulped. Media & Communications Officer