‘The City is dead! Long live Innovation!’ are the words we hoped would be cried out around campus last week as The Beaver added another twig to its nest of revitalisation. However, as of yet, we have still not received a submission to the newly rebranded section. We, at Innovation, began to rack our brains for schemes to popularise the rookie segment. It was concluded that an introductory piece would be useful in laying out our plans for this year and onwards. In addition, we hope to persuade you, our highly literate student population, to turn your attention to matters of a more unconventional nature and upload them to Innovation.
Firstly, I believe a bit of background to the direction change would not go amiss. The City was originally set up to document events relating to business, finance and economics. Whilst this may have excited some, economics is not known as the dismal science without reason. The connotations of data crunching and number analysing were a deterrent for many and left The City with a narrow readership and even narrower writing base. We sought a change to broaden the appeal for potential writers and readers.
With the evolution into Innovation we are attempting to open a wide umbrella that encompasses new and quirky ideas beyond the limited scope of business and finance. We are opening the floor to any new research, discovery or technology that may have developed or be developing. For inspiration, we encourage you to look to the Science and Technology or the Entrepreneurship sections of The Economist and Financial Times respectively. Articles published here tend to veer towards the realms of Physics, Archaeology, Sociology and Anthropology to name but a few. This is what we are aiming for: a couple of pages each week that will satisfy your interests and desires reaching beyond 32 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
That is not to say we are discouraging articles on exchange rates and derivatives. As a student paper, our aim is to act as a platform for LSE students to voice their opinions. If you get your kicks out of writing a weekly column critiquing China’s trade policy, you should have the opportunity to express your ideas. For those more mathematically inclined, it would be useful to view The City as a subset of Innovation: a cog in a larger machine.
Size doesn’t matter.
To engage you, the reader, we are encouraging submission of short form articles. Ideally, the section would contain two 200-300-word long articles, a 400-word article and a larger 500-600-word article. Once again, we advise you look to The Economist. In the latter sections you can find articles of only two to three paragraphs in length. Our hope is that the shorter form will drive readership as less time has to be devoted to a lengthy piece when you might be eating lunch instead.
With more readers and more writers, we will be able to be more creative with Innovation. We are currently trialling a two-week special. This issue has been dedicated to ‘small’ innovation (I urge you to read Tom Sheriff’s article on nano-technology) whilst next week we’ll turn to ‘large’ innovation. Groundbreaking stuff. Yet, if the content comes, we will be able to branch out to more pivotal areas and turn the two pages before sport into the weekly highlight.
This is the aim. Part of The City’s failure was that, even if you were a finance enthusiast, why would you turn to The Beaver rather than the FT? With shorter, quirkier articles we hope to push the boat in the direction of content that you would not receive from your mainstream papers. Write about something that interests you and it will most likely interest others. Above all, remember that rather than you being there for the paper, we are there for you.
