By Thomas Lepper
You may have heard of us; after all, you are currently sitting, standing, or laying down reading the oldest student publication in Canada. However, our sister school in Saint John has their own publication, the Baron.
Their website hosts some excellent articles, my personal favourite at the moment being Jonathan Bruce’s review of the most recent Joker film: “Joker: Folie à Deux is a misguided, uneven Sequel… and a weird musical.” After reading Johnathan’s article, I decided we should chat with the Baron and see what our sister school’s student publication is up to. After some emails back and forth I was able to hop on a call with Kylie Mackenzie, Editor-in-Chief of the Baron.
Kylie Mackenzie is a 3rd year Arts student honouring in English. She had found out about the Baron when researching ways to get her name out there and her works published. She started as a staff writer, what we here at The Brunswickan call a reporter. As a second year student she became a copy editor, ensuring every article had the correct punctuation, spelling, grammar and facts. She was then elected as the EIC by the Baron’s Board of Directors for the 2024 – 2025 term at UNB Saint John.
Since becoming EIC, the Baron has published daily on their website and updates on their TikTok too. The Baron covers UNBSJ news, events, sports and also hosts a wonderful review and op-ed section.
We at the Bruns have had op-eds for a while now, but have only recently revived our review section: filling it with movies, tv shows, and or non-local media reviews.
I asked Kylie about how they fostered such a vibrant op-ed and reviews section. “We like to cater to what student interests can be,” she said, “because not every student wants to read about politics. Some students want to read about the arts and what’s happening in pop culture… it’s nice to have that variety”
The Baron found itself in a similar situation to us here at the Bruns dealing with the fallout of Bill C-18 in 2023. If you don’t recall, Bill C-18 was designed to have corporations like Meta, X, Google, etc. compensate news outlets for reproducing or facilitating access to our content through their platforms. Instead, the tech giants no longer made news content available to users in Canada through their services. In essence, the Bruns alongside almost every news outlet in Canada was deplatformed.
Even though the Baron posts daily on their website, they are unable to print more than once a semester due to budgetary constraints and small student population. Despite this, their prints are exceptional. They look and feel like a true old-school newspaper — something you would see your father read before he heads off to work. When preparing for print, the Baron chooses the top articles for that semester, compiles them, then sends them to the printing company. This process differs from our own as we pitch articles each month which are later worked on and put into our monthly magazine — all designed in –house.
However for the Baron their method clearly worked because, according to Kylie, their end of the year print saw the most engagement they got from students. When asked why they saw so much engagement from the print Kylie offered this, “because it’s on campus. It’s in their face. It’s new for most people. Most people don’t really have physical newspapers that they pick up anymore, so it’s something that is interesting and new for them.”
Kylie along with the EIC of The Muse (Memorial University of Newfoundland’s student publication), John Harris, are our Eastern representatives for the Canadian University Press (CUP). CUP is a wonderful organization where EICs from multiple student publications in Canada share ideas and collaboratively overcome challenges. Originally founded in 1938, CUP is a non-profit organization and according to their website, it is, “the oldest national student organization in North America.” At these board meetings Kylie and John advocate for smaller student publications; A category we here at The Brunswickan belong to.
Unfortunately, once you become EIC you do far less writing than you want. Instead you are tasked with much of the operational work like running the newspaper: keeping everyone on task, scheduling, and governance, etc. With all of the work Kylie is doing, on top of being a student, she now only gets to pen her letters from the editor. However, she does enjoy reading the work her team produces, in fact, her favourite articles to read are the opinion pieces from the staff writers. “It’s just interesting to read when someone’s really passionate about a topic. You can tell in their writing, when they’re really passionate, they tend to do more research and it tends to be a more of an engaging read.”
Similar to the Brunswickan, the Baron is an independent entity and is not subservient to their Student Union or any other organization. However, with growing costs some student publications are being bought out by other companies. For example, McMaster University’s student publication The Silhouette is being bought out by the campus radio station.
When asked if the Baron would ever sell Kylie responded, “I would always advocate for the Baron staying independent. That way, we can always provide students with a non-biased coverage of anything happening on campus if UNB does something we don’t approve of, or if the student body doesn’t approve of it, we want to be able to cover that and make sure that we’re able to call out things we don’t approve of, and make sure we’re able to cover anything without seeking the approval of another company or UNB or someone else like that.”
It is wonderful to hear that kind of statement from an EIC, and a leader. We as journalists strive for impartiality and objective journalism; these things are complicated when you have a corporation involved. As long as the proper investigation and evidence is presented, journalists should be able to write about the truth and hold powerful people accountable. It is why newspapers were invented, to speak truth to power. Not for ad space or to play some billionaires political game, and certainly not to hide the truth from people who need to hear it the most.
