Red in the face over the student red top?

### Tom Davies

**You may have heard, this term will see a brand new media outlet arrive on campus.
In actual fact the Warwick Tab, a new student tabloid newspaper, was meant to have launched at the start of Term 1. As it happened, the sum total of their output in the final three months of last year was a tweet to a man called Christopher.**

I can’t pretend to know exactly why the Tab took so long to get going, but I think we can all be fairly certain that the great tide of opposition it has faced, even at the mere suggestion of its existence, cannot have helped.

Let’s face facts: the Warwick Tab has been made to feel about as welcome as Abu Hamza auditioning for a production of Peter Pan with a voraciously enthusiastic props department. I for one am struggling to see why.

There is a student comment on The Boar’s website, for example, expressing its dismay that Warwick “could even constitute an audience” for the Tab’s “gutter-press journalism.” Well I’m sorry sunshine, and presuming the Tab isn’t going to advocate the mass enslaving of anyone whose parents live north of Bishop’s Stortford, but I’ve always taken a pretty novel approach to this sort of thing: if you don’t like what a newspaper writes, try not reading it.
I may not like tennis, but that doesn’t mean I’ve an insatiable desire to see Mark Phillippoussis skewered up the arse by an enraged elk. Who are you to say what Warwick students can or can’t read?

I’ll admit that I have a small amount of sympathy with the concern that the Tab is run for profit by a few blokes in an office in London, but it’s not the end of the world. Our existing paper may be fully student-run, but that doesn’t mean its editorial team is about to set up a chain of Boar-branded coffee shops. If you want a student-run tabloid, why not try setting your own up?

Am I worried that some of the articles in the Warwick Tab will have been published on twenty other Tab websites at other universities around the country? Not really, no. The first thing I ask when I read something is “will this be relevant and interesting to me?” not “will this also be read by some spotty-faced Zoology fresher in Exeter?”

Nor am I expecting the Tab to have a significant impact on the Boar’s activities. Remember when this paper published an article extolling the virtues of the £1 vajazzle kit, or their fortnightly column on ‘fit lecturers’? No, neither do I. Comparing the two is like pitting a Ferrari against one of those diggers with a big drill on the end they use at building sites. They’re made to do completely different things.

Yes, there may be something of a rivalry between the two papers, but there were a couple of articles published in The Boar last year which haven’t helped its case.
I’m not saying that I think the Tab’s going to be the best thing to happen to campus since everyone got excited because that lad off Young Apprentice was living in Jack Martin. Nor am I certain that it’s going to be utter crap.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s difficult to say what effect the Tab will actually have at Warwick when it hasn’t actually published anything. Even when it does, there’s nobody forcing you to read it.