By Aarti Malhotra and Bora Bayram. Additional research by Jack Beeching. Illustrated by Charlie To.
The Beaver is fighting for its life.
As a result of bye-law changes in the LSESU, The Beaver, LSESU’s award-winning student newspaper, is facing the grim prospect of permanently losing its funding. This means no printed paper, no articles, and no space for student voices on campus.
This, to put it mildly, is a disgrace. After circulating a petition that got more than 600 signatures, we have started the process of reversing the decisions that led to this mess. This is not only a story about SU mismanagement but also the years long fight for The Beaver’s survival.
Here’s why and how it’s happening, and what we’re doing to save The Beaver.
What is the problem?
The SU has informed us that starting next year, The Beaver will receive no guaranteed funding. This was a result of changes made to the SU bye-laws last year when entire sections governing The Beaver were removed. These included provisions which set funding guidelines, foundational principles, and disciplinary procedures. Even though the paper hasn’t received that level of funding in years, the existence of these provisions pressured successive administrations to consider The Beaver’s funding and to take action. However, there is currently no provision guaranteeing any amount of funding to The Beaver.
These bye-laws were removed during the Democracy Review that took place over Lent and Summer Term last year. In a series of workshops run by the non-profit Democratic Society, a group of students were consulted on proposed changes to the bye-laws, with their recommendations being approved by the student body in the Summer Term. In the course of the drafting of these bye-laws, The Beaver was forgotten: contrary to repeated claims, sections were removed without any consultation with the previous committee. Whether arising out of inattention or apathy, this was a blunder that ultimately calls to question the initiative’s true commitment to ‘democracy’.
In either case, this issue is existential: with funding gone, it becomes impossible for us to publish anything. Printing costs, website and digital platform, and software are our only expenditures. And these costs are growing by the day: just earlier this year, our printer instituted a new energy surcharge upwards of £125 per issue. We spend no money on socials — every single penny goes towards achieving our central goal: to make sure students remain well-informed about their Union and university. There used to be a time when advertising brought in thousands of pounds per issue. However, times have changed, and advertising revenue has become more scarce. Consequently, The Beaver cannot survive without funding from the SU.
This is not a new problem. The Beaver used to publish every single week: now, it’s only every three weeks. As of now, we don’t even have enough money to publish our planned four issues this term, with costs being expended even on things we did not previously have to pay for. For instance, the SU now obliges us to pay for libel checkers out of our operational budget whereas, in previous years, this was funded directly by the SU.
This not only reflects our urgent need for funding but also how The Beaver’s situation will deteriorate in future years if we do not have guaranteed funding. Vani Kant, Managing Editor, has noted how “our primary job has now become lobbying, and the paper’s suffering for it.”
When did this start?
After finding out about the removal of the Media Grant, we spoke to multiple ex-editors of The Beaver. From our conversations, one thing became increasingly clear: the removal of The Beaver’s Media Grant is not an isolated development. On the contrary, it represents a pattern of increasing funding cuts and other issues that the paper has faced in the past decade.
According to members of The Beaver’s previous committees, tensions between the paper and the Union began to emerge in the year 2017. Jacob Stokes, Executive Editor of The Beaver between 2017-2018, recalls two primary causes for the strained relations: financial and political. Jacob said, “First, it was made clear that The Beaver’s budget should be scoped down over time, with LSESU funding covering something like print and digital hosting costs only. Anything else was expected to be funded via advertising revenue procured by The Beaver’s student team.”
The second source of tensions, according to Jacob, were attempts by the Union to wield more managerial influence over the paper. He said, “An impression was given that LSESU would prefer the executive management of The Beaver be delegated to LSESU staff, with students managing lower-down operations. We were suspicious of such ideas. Whilst The Beaver is not, should not, and arguably cannot ever be wholly independent of LSESU, there nonetheless remains a state close to maximum independence that can only be ensured if all aspects of the publication are ultimately under student control.”
“The difficulty here though is that ’99 per cent independence’ is as good as ‘0 per cent independence’, if that last 1 per cent allows for existential control.”
In the following academic year, The Beaver saw its funds slashed from approximately £20,000 to £12,000. Adam Solomons, Executive Editor at the time, recalls how this budget cut presented a fundamental turning point in The Beaver’s trajectory by forcing the paper to publish fortnightly as opposed to weekly.
Adam explained, “We had to go from printing 32-40 pages each week to around 24 every other week. Digital became the focus and that was that. We pleaded for more money and they adjusted a little, but not much. We saw that as existential — [we] had no idea it would get so much worse [in the coming years].”
By 2021, when Angbeen Abbas took over as Executive Editor, The Beaver’s Media Grant had been reduced to £8,000. Given the new budget, The Beaver was forced to further reduce publishing to every three weeks, limiting output to only eight issues per academic year. It is noteworthy that such consistent cuts in the paper’s funding explicitly violated the LSESU bye-laws at the time, which stated the paper was entitled to enough funds to “produce 21 issues of The Beaver newspaper per academic year.”
The funding was halved to £4000 this year, putting even more financial pressure on The Beaver.
Why is this happening?
From our multiple conversations with staff at the Union, this pattern of consistent cuts to The Beaver’s budget and the removal of the Media Grant has been attributed to a rapid decline in the LSE administration’s funding of the Students’ Union. This has also been used to justify various other policies such as charging societies high fees for using SU venues and a vast reduction in the funding of Athletics Union clubs. However, financial data about the Union from the Charity Commission seems to paint a different story.
It must be noted that LSE’s grant to the Union increases by approximately two per cent each year and therefore it is decreasing in real terms. However, the primary reason for the Union’s tight financial situation is not LSE, but falling revenues from the Union’s businesses, as illustrated by the closure of Denning Cafe, which was losing money.
While the Union’s income from its trading activities has been falling since 2016, the drop in revenue is particularly large in the 2019-20 financial year, where income fell by 70 per cent from £1,970,000 to £589,930 compared to the year before, attributed to the economic impact of the pandemic.
In that sense, the SU’s commercial failings are seriously affecting its financial prospects. However, it is unclear why The Beaver should be defunded. On the contrary, The Beaver’s role is ever more relevant as Union members need independent and rigorous reporting on these challenges. Previously, the Union recognised that in 1973 as it was fighting its own existential funding battle with LSE: it allocated almost 10% of its grant to ensure The Beaver could continue informing students. Now, as we ask for the bare minimum to continue this legacy, the SU should look to its past. In recent years, The Beaver has taken up a mere 0.2 per cent of the overall SU budget, so guaranteeing the paper a secure annual budget is not a difficult financial commitment for the Union to make.
What are the alternatives?
The SU has given three suggestions as to how The Beaver can solve its funding problem. However, they are all inadequate and impractical.
We have heard the first suggestion too many times: ‘Just run ads.’ Unfortunately, it is not as simple as that. Running ads is not a small feat and it does not happen overnight. Under the old bye-laws, the SU was responsible for selling advertising, not editors. This not only reflects the time constraints faced by editors but also the challenge of the task. If the Union is serious about these proposals, then it needs to significantly invest in The Beaver over a period of years to even think about advertising as a viable option for financial independence. Otherwise, it would be throwing its newspaper in at the deep end with no chance of survival.
Second is the idea of charging membership fees or charging for readership. Charging members would mean students have to pay to make their voices heard. Charging readers would mean students have to pay to remain well informed. These would not only introduce an unacceptable barrier to engagement but also mean the SU was abdicating its moral responsibility to ensure students have access to free and independent information about the Union.
Third is for us to apply to the Students’ Union Fund (SUF), a fund which gives a maximum of £5000 to each society. Putting aside the fact that even if we received the maximum amount of funding from SUF there would only be enough money to publish 5 issues a year, we would be forced to reapply every year.
We have been assured by the Sabbatical Officers, especially General Secretary Tilly Mason, that they will not let The Beaver die. We appreciate their support; however, it is unfortunately not enough for only this year’s sabbatical team to commit to funding us (which, to be clear, we haven’t explicitly heard from the sabbs). On its current course, The Beaver would have to continuously lobby successive sabbatical officers for essential funding, leaving its future precarious. That needs to change: The Beaver is a public service to students and union members.
What is The Beaver proposing?
This is why we are proposing to bring about a more permanent solution: a change in the bye-laws.
Our proposal is to restore provisions which used to guarantee The Beaver a certain amount of funding per academic year. Currently, with our tri-weekly publishing schedule, we need guaranteed funding for eight issues, as well as money to maintain our website and other digital platforms.
In order to do this, we have called a Student Members Meeting with the support of over 600 students and alumni. There, we will introduce a motion which details our funding requirements. Students will vote on our proposals, and, hopefully, the future of The Beaver will be more secure.
To be clear, it is not legally possible for the bye-laws to force the SU to give funding to a cause, as budgeting decisions are exclusively the purview of the Trustees. However, our proposals will do the next best thing: force every successive administration to consider The Beaver’s funding and make the students’ support of The Beaver known. Democratic mandates are powerful; any decision that goes contrary to the student body’s wishes would be vigorously scrutinised and hard to justify.
To further this democratic mandate, we will also submit a policy proposal. This is a separate process from the Student Members Meeting as it will include a panel of students and is only valid for two years. Combined with the mandate we hope will come out of the Student Members Meeting, the trustees will face a stark choice: to fund The Beaver or go against the will of the student body.
