Xmedia Online attacks The Drop for low Quality journalism. We set the record straight.

Ben Jones has launched a stunningly hypocritical attack on The Drop. We put Blow Job Jones and X-media Online to the sword.

12 years ago

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Ben jones exeter guild expose xmedia exeter

EDIT 1: 01/03/12 20:11 Comments have been deleted on this article following the start of personal attacks on people associated with it.

EDIT 2: 01/03/12 22:18 We apologise for directing our argument at anyone other than X-Media Online (XMO) who published the article and Ben Jones who wrote it, it is not directed in anyway towards XpressionFM or XTV. This has been edited appropriately into the article.

EDIT 3: 04/03/12 09:49 The above edit has now been extended to include Exeposé who have rightly pointed out that they and XMO are separate publications.

A great man once said, “to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.”

Judging by X-Media Online’s recent attack on The Drop, it seems they’d like us to become what they have been for years: nothing.

The article’s author, Ben Jones launched a staggeringly misinformed assault on The Drop, calling it “a sustained attack on the intellectual quality of student media”.

He says The Drop spreads a “hyper-masculine lad culture, depicting women as little more than conquering grounds for rampant, mindless men”.

All of this from Ben Jones, whose abject failure of a campaign for Guild President carried the slogan: “give the guild a BJ”.

Let us make one thing clear. The Drop is not a lads’ mag. It does not stand for sexism and women are equally important to us as men.

If the oh-so-refined team at X-Media Online cannot appreciate the irony and humour in pieces like Timepiece Tales then we can only pity them.

Mr Jones attacks the quality of our publication, even though he had this to say about a recent article on X-Media Online: “I don’t think I’ve ever read anything as poorly researched as this”. (see slideshow)

He even sneers at our readers, telling his audience of 14 people: “the problem is the people that read it”.

The only thing The Drop stands for is its readers. This is what matters in every almost news organization in the country, and what should matter in student ones.

We are not “lowbrow”, we are not driving standards down. We won’t always get it right, and we are new. But we are working hard to improve our service and we want our readers’ help.

By experimenting and learning, we dare to risk public criticism. At X-Media Online, they produce articles so dull and uncontroversial you’d think a robot was writing.

When Mr Jones has finished giving the Guild a BJ, perhaps he will actually have a chance to compare the The Drop with Xmedia online and its website.

A quick look at their homepage shows today’s top stories are:

– Britain: still a colonial power?

– Windows 8: future or failure?

– World superbike coverage

Do these writers even care about the news in Exeter? As they produce bizarre opinion pieces and readerless news stories, we give you an investigation on burglaries, tales of Exeter’s sporting success and local music reviews.

The snobs at X-Media Online say we “damage the integrity of student media”. We say their total failure to report what is going on in our world means they have no integrity at all.

Drop reporters cover news and sport as it happens. They are going out and talking to people. This is the core of true journalism – time driven reporting.

Exeposé’s editor, Henry White describes his paper as part of “the official student media” in a comment on Jones' article. If he believes being in the clutches of the Guild, forced to share his writing an embarrassment of a website like X-Media is the way to run a newspaper, then he clearly doesn’t care about his readers.

The Drop is proud to be unofficial. We are open to contributions from the whole University, not just a small group of wannabe journalists.

We are dying to know how many people read the X-Media website. In the last three weeks The Drop got over 18,000 visits and 52,000 page views.

If you feel your cowardly pursuit of the uncontroversial is what people really want to read, then please share your statistics with us.

While you sort that out, we’ll be doing what we do best: writing the stuff that matters to our readers.

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