Is it possible to pass down the privilege for choosing articles from teachers to students for school magazine?

Question

So everyone should be familiar with contributing articles to a magazine (or another word submitting articles to magazine company). But most time, there will be editor in magazine company (or organization, anyway) that will choose which article to post on the magazine and improve it. So as school magazine.

But how about letting students vote which article to put in the magazine instead of letting teachers to choose articles? Since it's school magazine which means it's not official (at least compared to those outside) and it's much like students' magazine rather than school's magazine. Is it possible to pass down the privilege to chose articles from teachers to students? What will happen if we do this, and what's the reason that they don't do this before? We've already known that we might be facing that friends vote for friends' article, but will this issue really matter? A school with thousands of student, where there are only small groups (that might vote for each other) around 5~10 people. Will this really become a big issue that stops this kind of plan for running? If not, what other issue that we might facing which will turn this kind of plan to impossible to run?

Answer 1

Who are the readers of your magazine? The students?

Imagine then, that you get a subscription to some journal. However, instead of providing you with carefully selected, edited and reviewed content, the journal sends you all the hundreds of raw submissions they get, and asks you to read through all of them, and pick the ones you like to appear in the journal.

That would be problematic, wouldn't it? In fact, there are core problems with this approach:

1. You are turning the consumers into manufacturers.
2. You are asking the students to go over hundreds of unedited raw articles, the best of which no doubt would need at least one revision. Not a single student would go over all those articles. Many would just vote by name, without reading anything, some would gloss over some of the articles and vote for whatever looked interesting.

---

There is an alternative, something between what you're proposing, and letting the students do all the work. You can have a "magazine club" - some volunteer students, who would do the selecting and the editing, and learn about the process of editing a magazine in the process.

Answer 2

What you suggest can work as long as the a teacher has a veto: nothing offensive or of low quality can go through. You have to take responsibility for that.

The problem is that the students you get to volunteer for something like this are a particular type of student and are usually friends. You end up with just what a small group of students would like to see, not the majority. (I've seen it happen several times.)

The other problem is that students tend to be very keen intially and then quickly lose their enthusiasm as they realise it is work. It sounds great being an editor until you actually do it.