Organisation - November 19, 2009

Tilburg's magazine comes top

Tilburg University's weekly Univers has won the 'Golden Gadfly' award. Resource was one of five nominees.

Yesterday evening, the University of Tilburg's weekly Univers  was announced the best media product about Dutch higher education. The magazine won the gulden luis in de pels (literally 'louse in the fur') for critical journalism. The award is an initiative of the University of Amsterdam and the HvA, Amsterdam's University of Applied Sciences. The jury was made up of Frits van Oostrom (former president of the KNAW academy), Doekle Terpstra (chair of the HBO council for applied sciences education), Frank van Vree (professor of journalism and culture) and Gerard Oosterwijk (chair of the LSVb, the national students' union).
The jury praised Univers for its content: well-written, critical and with broad coverage. They were critical of its format though: it was messy and dull.
Resource was on the shortlist along with the magazines of the Applied Sciences university of The Hague, and the Universities of Amsterdam, Utrecht and Tilburg. The jury only looked at numbers from the first half of 2009, which was before the restyling of Resource.
Jury chair Van Oostrom had this to say about our paper: 'In Wageningen university's Resource the jury was impressed by the variety and the critical involvement. There were some criticisms of the format and the amount of space devoted to announcements from societies. This is the same in other magazines. The magazine could be improved by reconsidering its journalistic approach. What is striking is the large number of English language articles, which underlines the international character of the institution.'