Last Friday, as another copy of Varsity rolled off the presses, the news broke that as of the end of March the Independent will no longer feature as a staple of newsagents’ shelves. As the first major national paper to make the transition to wholly online publishing, in one sense this is a brave step: a leap of faith which gambles on the fabled ‘death of print’ coming to pass.

This is, of course, a sad moment for journalism, and particularly for the art of print journalism. Newspapers which can openly wear their editorial independence on their sleeve are sadly few and far between, and it is something of which we at Varsity are proud.

However, this does not mean that other forms of journalism do not have value, as we all choose to read very different things, from very different outlets.

On Sunday, the Guardian ran a feature online entitled: ‘The Tab picks up business without paying.’ It begins innocently enough, charting the rise of The Tab, from Cambridge to international operations. The piece then begins to doggedly follow a line of questioning about the fact that some contributors to The Tab are not payed for their work, citing individuals and organisations who have condemned this as a form of “exploitation”.

This is a move which fundamentally misunderstands the state and nature of student journalism. As The Tab’s executive editor Joshi Herrmann points out in the piece, they think of themselves as both “a platform and a publisher”. This is exactly correct; although The Tab may now be a multi-million-pound business, student journalism did not start out that way, and in most cases it still does not exist on that sort of scale. Let’s not get into the debate about whether the now-international Tab should pay its writers; that is a topic for ethical reflection at Tab HQ, and in suitably righteous Guardian think-pieces. (As an aside, it is worth noting that the Guardian has since been accused of publishing articles written by unpaid interns. Pot, meet kettle, it would seem.)

What is at stake in this debate is the essence of student journalism. On the one hand, there is the argument (albeit a slightly woolly and potentially rose-tinted one) which positions The Tab as the modern-day off-shoot of the long-running convention within student print journalism, according to which writers file articles in exchange for a platform, a by-line, CV points, or even just the fun and experience of writing for publication. On the other hand, The Tab’s financial success is being used as evidence in support of the counter-argument – that the articles they publish should be treated as marketised commodities which must be bought from writers.

When we adopt this second approach to the articles which we commission, receive, read, and edit, we abstract them from the intellectual value of their ideas. While looking to pay contributors for their work is perhaps something which we feel would be fair and admirable, reducing the work which they produce to a raw material value based wholly on how much of a page it fills – or, in the case of online publication, how many clicks it generates – is a gross undervaluing of that content. With this in mind, it does well to remember that it is the quality of a publication’s content which will make all the difference to a potential reader as they decide whether they want to pick up a copy, click on a link, or engage in some other way. It is, of course, crucial to the survival of any publication not to lose sight of that.