This Spotlight features Imogen Sabey, Editor at Honi Soit and director of the Student Journalism Conference at the University of Sydney. Imogen shares her perspective on student journalism, the value of collaboration, and the challenges of leading a major student publication. Her insights highlight how Honi Soit foster emerging talent, adapt to industry change, and uphold journalistic integrity.
Thank you for interviewing me! I can’t take credit for the idea for this conference because the event that I’m running isn’t the first iteration of it. Over the decades, student publications have collaborated in various ways, but what immediately preceded this was the 2024 Student Media Conference (SMC), led by Ariana Haghighi, one of the 2024 editors. Before that, there had been more groundwork laid by the 2023 Honi Soit editors, who had reached out to universities across the country to establish a student media network. That was an attempt to establish a virtual connection between people, because a lot of people in student media didn’t know about the other publications in their state, let alone interstate.
Then there was a ton of admin, and I was really up to my eyeballs in it. I spent a lot of the summer holidays working, because I knew that was the best opportunity I had to get stuff done early. The nature of Honi Soit is that while we have more resources to make this happen, we’re also under greater pressure and workload due to being the only weekly student newspaper in the country, so once the semester began, we were focusing primarily on our own newspaper. Same with the winter holidays — it’s not prime time for relaxation.
In terms of getting everyone together — the publications and speakers, and other organisations — I just sent about a million emails. I asked everyone I could think of who might be faintly interested in getting involved, writers whose work I found fascinating, talented journalists from everywhere in the industry, and people who I never expected would accept an invitation, until they did. Spreadsheets came in handy, and my team and I made sure that everything was written down, because we knew that with so many moving parts, it was necessary to have everything recorded and organised. There were at least a dozen tabs on the main spreadsheet we used, with gigantic graphs and lists and progress trackers. Each month, there’d be some task that was the main focus — whether that was speaker invitations, catering, accommodation, merch, programs and so on — that was really time-sensitive, and that would be super urgent until it was done, and replaced with something else that was super urgent. There have been these rolling waves of jobs and issues to deal with, some of which I saw coming and others that I couldn’t have anticipated. Likewise, there have been some really nice surprises; I had Gamamari (UNSW) and Pelican (UWA) both reach out to me a couple of months before the conference to say that they wanted to join in, and that they had heard about it because everyone in student media was talking about it. I even had a couple of friends say to me, ‘Hey, have you heard about this event that’s happening at USyd? It seems right up your alley’ and then I’d tell them that I was running it, which was pretty gratifying.
Yeah, I was really pleased that they were able to attend. Hosting Filipino student journalists in particular is great, because outside Australia, the Philippines is the only other country within several thousand kilometres who have a similar interest and engagement with student journalism. They've got a huge number of publications, and they host their own national conferences, so they have a more established network than we do. I think there’s a lot we can learn from them.
I invited a ton of people — there were about a dozen universities in the Asia-Pacific region, including New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and a couple of others, plus a publication based in Fiji that published work by students across the Pacific islands. The issue isn’t how many people are invited, it’s how many people are interested in attending and can sacrifice their time, get involved in the laborious organisation process, and are able to afford to fly overseas.
The conference is almost entirely funded by the University of Sydney SRC, so we had flat bursaries for people based in Australia and then larger bursaries for LaSallian, who were based overseas, but it’s not logistically feasible for us to either pay for flights in full or pay for a ton of international journalists to come to Australia, because that adds up really quickly. I think this is something that could change if the conference continues over the years to develop, build sponsorship connections or potentially have student publications contribute funding. For NatCon, USyd paid $76,000 in accreditation fees to the NUS in 2024 primarily so they could send 7 delegates (plus three student journalists, including myself). While I’m definitely not saying student publications should chip in tens of thousands of dollars, it would absolutely secure the future of the conference if the onus wasn’t entirely on Honi Soit to secure funding and sponsorships.
There are additional issues with expansion. No matter how you slice it, someone somewhere has to sacrifice something to make it happen. I’ve had people from interstate tell me that they’d love to attend if this were held in their city, but I can’t make it happen in their city because of how deeply centralised it is within my organisation. And most university students face some sort of financial barrier, particularly if they’re overseas, and it costs maybe a thousand dollars just to get them here. The three things that it costs to put this together are time, money and effort. And the less Honi Soit contributes and the more everyone else contributes to all three of those, the greater chance we have to host this with more people or in a different location. But this is only the second time a nationwide conference like this has been held, and we’ve got three or four times as many journalists this year as we did last year, from several more states and universities across Australia. This is also the first time we’ve had international student journalists. So I wasn’t aiming to break through every barrier at once because that’s something that can only come with time.
That’s a great question. We do pride ourselves on being a radical newspaper, and I think we’ve inherited an amazing legacy, which means that when we do crazy stuff we can point to much crazier stuff that previous editors have done and say ‘Yeah, this shouldn’t come as a surprise’. We can make anyone raise their eyebrows if they dig through enough of our archives. Some particularly infamous examples were Vagi Soit, a 2013 edition that featured many vaginas on the front cover (we were forced to censor it, but the censors did a bad job and reprinted it with transparent bars over the vaginas), articles that were respectively pro-North Korea and pro-necrophilia, and of course a lot of deeply political work, including a 40-page special edition that my team made earlier this year to cover the federal election. That cover featured a three-way French kiss between Albanese, Dutton and Bandt. We were very proud of that one.
As for censorship, that’s something I care about very deeply. The state that universities are in right now is not one where freedom of speech is safe or encouraged. When we’re talking about genocide, when we’re talking about protests, and when we talk about suppression sanctioned by administrations, that’s not something that universities want to be reported on, so the publications that are less independent than we are have less power to report on issues that really matter to students.
I’ve been doing a lot of coverage this year on issues at other universities, such as course cuts, job losses, protests (often about course cuts & job losses) and administrative misconduct. Our job is to cover all major stories in tertiary education, not just things happening at our own university. We challenge censorship by talking about things that we know other people can’t. I know student journalists who want to cover protests happening at their campus but their Vice-Chancellor wouldn’t let it be published. I know student journalists who are at risk of being defunded, or who deal with bureaucratic and institutional red tape that limits their ability to publish freely and promptly, and internal chaos happening at various publications that cripples their ability to report.
Most students face censorship at some point — I know we often have — but self-censorship is nearly as bad. Media law is a very scary thing when you’ve got hardly any money and possibly no legal team. We are lucky that we do, but the more I learn about media law, the more wary I get, and I think it’s important to keep publishing anyway. Every major masthead has made a ton of mistakes throughout its history that have been splashed across the front pages of the other mastheads. Sometimes those mistakes cost hundreds of millions of dollars, or lead to thousands of people telling them how they’re inherently despicable and they don’t deserve basic human rights. We face the same risks and consequences on a smaller scale, but I interpret that as a sign of our legitimacy: nobody bothers to criticise something they see as powerless or without influence.
There are a myriad of issues facing publications all around the country, but there are also creative things students are doing to address these, and very different techniques that people have, which I hope people will discuss and learn from during the conference. One of the events I’m most looking forward to is entirely hosted by students: a plenary about student media and student politics, where there will be a panel (which I’m on) discussing major issues in student journalism. We'll hopefully get to hear from a lot of people with different backgrounds and experiences, which I think will be a great way to foster cross-media collaboration.
One of the best things about student media is autonomy. Aside from when we face censorship issues, we do get to publish effectively whatever we want. There’s no editor to answer to because we run it.
The problem that mainstream and legacy media faces is that when they’re established and trying to market themselves as impartial — which it’s very difficult if not impossible to be in journalism — they probably censor themselves more than we do, because they have to care about ratings and backlash and losing their readership. And I think the genocide in Gaza has wreaked havoc on Australian legacy media: it’s forced everyone to either stay silent and pretend that nothing is going on, report it constantly but without stating an opinion, or actually go out and say what they think.
Everybody in this country has an opinion on the genocide in Gaza. So for legacy media, this is a hot-button issue that they all have to deal with, and regardless of what they do there will be several million people who disagree with them, and they will lose some of their readership. They call it a “conflict”, people will stop reading, they do the same with “war” or “genocide” and people will stop reading. And Israel has ties everywhere. You can’t look at any mainstream media without finding that some lobby group has connections somewhere. Because of this, no major news organisation in Australia has a perfect record when it comes to Palestine and Israel.
In this situation, student journalism is a breath of fresh air, because we can take a transparent stance and we don’t have any ties to Israel. Nobody has ever invited a student journalist on an Israeli junket, and no student journalist would ever say yes. When Honi Soit can’t publish something, it’s for legal reasons, not because someone told us that they disagree with us and their opinion outweighs ours.
As for the future of the industry, I expect to see a lot of the people attending Stujocon (Student Journalism Conference) in various media outlets in the near future. If mastheads are wondering what the future of the media looks like, they don’t have to go very far. I can’t predict what those people will be doing, but I trust that if the people who care deeply about journalistic integrity are the ones running things, we’ll be fine.
The experience I’ve had is really valuable because there is no better hands-on practice that you can get before you go into a professional newsroom. What we do is pretty much everything: the writing, editing, art, design, social media, admin, website management, any task that you can think of. In a normal media organisation that work is divided between departments and people don’t get to explore beyond their specific role, it’s inflexible. What we have is amazing and terrible because on the one hand, you can do everything, and on the other hand, you absolutely have to do everything. There’s no backup plan. And when there are ninety-five editorial teams before you that have produced a weekly newspaper and never missed one, there’s not really room for error, laziness or even personal crisis. You just have to get on with it. That kind of intensity prepares you for the craziness of the media industry.
We also have layup day on Sunday, which is where we’re all holed up in our little windowless office and by the time we leave there’s got to be a newspaper ready to go to print the next day. The shortest layup we’ve ever had was about 10 hours, the longest was 19. I’m never going to complain about working more than 12 hours a day in a professional job, because I’ve become used to working about 12 hours a day every day for a week straight, albeit usually not for weeks on end.
The opportunities we have don’t really involve writing for other publications — although one of the editors is currently working at FBi Radio — and I don’t think we have much of a problem with this because we have our own platform to publish on. We tend to get coverage opportunities instead. Some cool things that I’ve worked on were live coverage of Mardi Gras, where I got a front-row seat having never attended before, and coverage of the federal budget at the annual lockup at Parliament House. My co-editor, Will Winter, recently got to review Dark Mofo, which he travelled to Tasmania for, so we get to report on things that at a bigger masthead would probably go to older and more experienced reporters.
However, it’s definitely been a fantastic opportunity to network. I’ve spoken to some really cool people, some of whom I’ve been able to interview. Part of my role as Stujocon director is that I’ve been able to talk to all of the speakers, and also to a lot of other people who wanted to attend but couldn’t for whatever reason, some of whom are eyewateringly cool! I got home from work one day and someone who’d emailed me earlier about the conference was on the television presenting the news. It’s a surreal job.
A lot of editorial alumni look back on Honi as the best-worst year of their life, and I would agree with that. It’s definitely been the most interesting and the most intense, and boredom never enters the equation. I’ve faced many challenges, and learned a lot on the go. At this point if I found out that I was getting sued by the president of Uzbekistan I wouldn’t bat an eye, because I’ve become so conditioned to drama. My editorial team has become a second family, which I don’t think applies so much to normal newsrooms, particularly because we have a flat team structure. Our office has also become a home away from home. Each editorial team adds their own flourishes and over time it’s become really cosy.
Our media cycle is unusual because technically it’s nonstop online coverage throughout the year. However, unlike a normal newsroom we have an editorial turnover at the start of December, so there’s a natural gap while the new team finds their feet. During the summer and winter holidays we still do coverage, but not as frequently. We tend to do more rigorous news coverage during the semester, in addition to our weekly newspapers. That print cycle begins a month before the edition hits the stands, and everything happens on Sundays: we put out prompts for our reporters, we have pitch meetings, and we make the newspaper.
Stujocon will be happening during this cycle, although we made arrangements for it late last year. We have four autonomous editions annually, where identity collectives including the Disability Collective, the Queer Action Collective, the Women’s Collective and the Autonomous Collective Against Racism (ACAR) all get an edition of their own. A team of volunteer editors and reporters produce the content and we oversee the finicky details. During Stujocon it’ll be ACAR making the edition, so fortunately I don’t have to worry about fitting a 12h+ layup into what will be a very intense weekend.
Almost as soon as I started editing I realised that a lot of newswriting is people just telling you things, because they see you as a source of news even when you’re the one receiving news from them. I am really nosy so I think that helps too, I love a good scoop. That being said, I get a lot of interesting tips from the NTEU, because they obviously cover a ton of tertiary education news, and they’re great for inside tips on what’s happening at a university, to get quotes and further information. Press releases are good too, although we receive dozens a day, so there’s a lot of stuff that we don’t need to receive. I think what makes Medianet really good is that the newsfeed is curated to your preferences, so it’s much more streamlined.
I consider something newsworthy if it’s timely and of interest to my audience. We consider ourselves the primary source of tertiary education news in Australia, because that’s our specialty. Staff, students, union leaders and so on know to come to us to find out what’s going on or ask us to cover something that’s happening at their university. But news is only some of what we do, and it tends to be dominated by editors. We receive very few ‘news pitches’ because reporters aren’t confident about writing news and we develop an instinct for knowing what has to be covered and what doesn’t.
As an emerging journalist… that feels weird to think about, because as an editor I’m in the position of being both a paid full-time journalist and having a lot of people who don’t know anything about Honi assume that it’s a fun weekend gig. I just think of myself as a journalist and try not to worry about categorisation. I’ve learned that the only thing you really lack is time, and with enough energy you can make up for that. In the media you have to be constantly alert for ‘something’. You don’t know what it is yet, but it’s super important and it needs to be done immediately.
The things that make Honi most distinct are the articles that a normal newspaper would never publish. Some of the best pieces I’ve seen this year have been about totally random things — like a review of bizarre hot cross bun flavours — while other pieces have just had really beautiful writing, like a perspective piece on the transition between Catholicism and atheism. I feel extremely passionate about the newspaper, and the articles I like to see best are the ones that feel representative of the student body: the pieces that students relate to, find funny or interesting, that are critical of issues that matter to them. We have a very unique media culture at USyd, which has been going for 96 years now and is cemented into campus life. We are very lucky to have Honi, and to be part of Australia’s rich student media sphere.
Honi Soit is the weekly student newspaper of the University of Sydney, Australia. Published since 1929 by the Student’s Representative Council (SRC) at the University of Sydney and distributed around campus free for all students to read, Honi Soit has a colorful and sometimes controversial history but has a proud reputation of being the most vibrant and prestigious student publication in Australia. It is also the only weekly student publication in Australia.