Three Years of Per Capita Media: What Student Journalism Taught Me About Independence

Per Capita Media launched in August 2023. At the time, it was a long-odds bet: another student publication, another WordPress site, another group of earnest twenty-somethings convinced they had something to say. Cambridge already had Varsity, The Tab, The Cambridge Student. The question — which several people asked me directly — was: why?

The honest answer is that I wasn't entirely sure. What I knew was that something was missing. Most student media occupied a narrow bandwidth: events coverage, gossip, opinion pieces written to a formula. The investigative and long-form work that student journalists once did — the kind that led to careers at The Guardian and Private Eye — had contracted. And the institutions that might have supported it were under financial pressure, chasing traffic with short-form content.

Per Capita was always conceived as something different: a publication that would treat readers as intelligent adults, take policy and ideas seriously, and build a genuine community of writers rather than a masthead.

What worked

The speaker events surprised us. We brought the Editor of the BBC Russian Service to Cambridge in our first term. We hosted a discussion with a former Foreign Minister. We ran a panel on protest and student encampments that filled a room in a way that none of the "mainstream" university events that week managed. People were hungry for substantive conversation; we just had to create the space.

The network effect was also real. Once we had contributors from Oxford, from the London arts schools, from Birmingham and Bristol, the publication stopped feeling like a Cambridge thing. That breadth changed the quality of the conversation — you can't have a serious discussion about UK higher education with only Cambridge students in the room — and it changed the ambition.

The BBC connection opened doors I hadn't expected. Working with a production team, learning to translate a story from written to broadcast form, understanding what editors actually want — these are not things you learn in a supervision. They are not things you learn in a seminar. They are things you learn by doing, and by getting things wrong in front of people who will tell you.

What was harder

Sustaining it. The structural problem with student publications is the same as the structural problem with student anything: the people who built it leave. You rely on institutional memory being transmitted down the editorial chain, and that transmission is imperfect. We've had terms when the writing was brilliant and the operations were a mess, and terms when the operations ran smoothly and the writing was coasting.

The other hard thing is the question of funding and independence. PCM is not funded by the University, which is a deliberate choice — it protects editorial independence in ways that matter when you're covering University governance or student welfare controversies. But it also means we are perennially resource-constrained. We've never had a dedicated designer, never had a budget for photography, never paid contributors. That's fine for a student publication; it would not be fine for a serious media organisation.

What comes next

I'm increasingly convinced that the most important thing PCM can do in the next two years is the mentorship work: running workshops for sixth-form journalists, building pathways into the industry for students who don't have the network. The access question in journalism is not subtle. Publications like ours can either reproduce existing hierarchies or actively work against them. We intend the latter.

The journalism landscape has changed considerably since 2023. AI tools have compressed the time it takes to produce certain kinds of content, which has put pressure on places that competed on speed. Long-form, reported, original work is more valuable precisely because it can't be automated. Student journalists should be learning to do that work, not learning to prompt-engineer summaries of press releases.

Three years in, I still believe what I believed in August 2023: that independent student media matters, that the students who do it seriously are doing something genuinely important, and that the fact it's difficult is not a reason not to do it. It's the reason it's worth doing.