Student newspaper The Courier publish n-word in word search

The n-word was accidentally printed in the word search on the puzzle page of the most recent publication of The Courier.

The Courier is the Newcastle Uni student paper which is distributed around campus.

The most recent games page had a word search in which the word N**** could be seen.

The printing of the word caused confusion and upset amongst students. One told us that she posted it to her Instagram story to raise awareness of the mistake. She said: "When I saw the paper on my friends Instagram story, I immediately kept it on mine to bring more awareness to it. As soon as I did that, my friend who was an arts editor on The Courier set out to rectify it and got it under control with her other colleagues.

"Like I told her, it didn’t matter if a black person had been in charge of it and kept it in the paper, it’s all boiled down to the impact it would have had of seeing that word on a news outlet that is well known on campus.

"I essentially didn’t want there to be a wrong message that stuff like this should be normalised. I’m just happy that I managed to make a change from just one repost."

The Courier posted a statement to their social channels stating that this was it was a randomly generated word search with no intentional inclusion of the word. They said: “A mistake made in the puzzles section this week has recently been brought to our attention.

"This was in no way intentional, our crosswords are randomly generated by an online algorithm, we just did not catch this mistake in this instance.

"In no way do we authorise the use of this language and will carry out more due diligence in future.

We sincerely apologise for any offence caused."