The ignominious death of "Student Review" at BYU
 

If you a google search "student review" byu it turns up precious few results.

Not only did it die a death in print, it is complete irrelevant and unknown in the internet universe.

What was once funny eventually became nothing more than an inside-joke playground to unfunny hacks. Institutional suicide.

It will be remembered in the annals, but I once offered to write a sports column for SR, that I hoped would be interesting and controversial. The idea was summarily rejected.

(Defenders will say it's death was assured when campus distribution was banned).

i'm aware of the student review but not aware of how it died.

what's the back story?

Decreased distribution, decreased quantity and quality in terms of writing and administration. Increased focus on "we are cool and you are not" without any evidence in writing skill and wit to back that up.

Basically it came to be run by people who were born to destroy it. Dumb, unfunny people.

sounds like it died from being over-hip

there was talk a few years back about starting up an alternative student newspaper in utah county but nothing has come of it

More like it died from claiming hipness and failing to demonstrate it.

Good summary. At one time, it was very good. But not for very long.

For a while there were funny stories. There were touching stories. There were stories that gave you information not found anywhere else.

And then, instead of wit, insight, and humanity, you had a bunch of articles that assumed sarcasm was inherently funny, that whining was the same as making a stand, and that mocking was ultimate form of writing (who will be the first to accuse this board of the same thing :) )

If anyone is Googling around on Google looking for Student Review information, yes, it is rare. I have quite a bit of information about the paper, if anyone is interested you can email me at ncbradbury@gmail.com. There is an archive in the BYU library special collections that contains a lot of issues of Student Review, but is not near complete. I personally delivered copies of the final editions to the archive. Someone this summer anonymously mailed me a copy of one of the last editions of the paper, which I helped edit. Maybe they stole it from the archive. It brought back a lot of good memories about really good times with great friends. It was published in 1999. For what it's worth, the name of the paper is available for revival if anyone's interested. I don't know who would officially hold the permission for such a revival, though nothing was ever official. I think there might be somewhere between $0-300 in a Provo bank account in the paper's name.

I would like to somberly confirm that we had a sense of humor. But not much sense of direction, probably. Man, those were heady times!

Sorry, I involuntarily snorted derisively when I read this.

And who anonymously mailed me a copy of Student Review last summer?

Oh, SR was a registered non-profit of one type or another at one point, and maybe copyrighted.