Thomas Scovell

I wasn’t one for many of the traditional student activities while at varsity. Didn’t spend much time at the student bar, join any clubs or take part in any sit-ins. Admittedly the late ’90s weren’t exactly a hot-bed of student activism and the student bar’s choice of music didn’t much align with my tastes at the time. But the year after I finished I took up the offer of writing a column for Auckland University’s magazine, Craccum to make up for it.

The DotCom boom was in full, hyperbolic and lampoonable, effect by this point so I named the column “Webshite” and spent a year with my tongue in my cheek and the rest of my time procrastinating till the last minute like any good student journalist.

For some reason I decided to wage a mock vendetta against Peter Sinclair who wrote a column about the Internets for the NZ Herald. Which seemed even less amusing when he passed away a couple of years later. Somewhere out there a student’s pen is poised to mock me I fear.

I think Robyn G summed up the general aesthetic of student media when critiquing the 2001 magazine,

Craccum was like a mutant hybrid of The Onion, Adbusters and a serious student news publication. There were too many times when I’d be halfway through an article and stop and think, “wait, is this a parody?” Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn’t. I always imagined that there were a bunch of stoned people somewhere laughing their arses off, being like, “oh my God! That is sooo funny! You’ve got to put that in next issue!”

Indeed.

1999 was an interesting time to be writing as the online space was finally hitting the mainstream locally and the scene overseas was ridiculously (full of) hot (air). I wrote one column on how to “acquire music” online a few months before Napster launched and changed the music world forever. Then, after a break in 2000 while I lived in Wellington, came back to write the column in 2001 after the bubble had burst and re-wrote the column for a post-Napster world.

In 2002 I wrote some Craccum columns on politics and the odd feature or four on other topics. I might dredge the content of those up for another story…