HerCampus Has A Problem

Taking the temperature of one of St Andrews' biggest publications

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed is how I began my second year in our sodden town, determined not to spend another year waiting for my friends to stop vomiting in the Vic’s toilets. I’d spent the entirety of first year seemingly hiking between DRA, McIntosh, and Sallies, and what time I had left was spent pretending to do readings and gossiping in the corner of Younger Hall. It was, in other words, a perfectly respectable St Andrews routine — but not one that suggested I would graduate with a first. If I wanted to justify my academic downfall to my future self, I needed something else to fill my time. As many students do, I drifted back toward hobbies I had quietly abandoned after arriving at university. Writing had always been one of them, and HerCampus seemed like an obvious place to start. 

It promised a space where students could experiment with ideas, try their hand at journalism and — crucially — write about whatever they found interesting. For a long time, that promise more or less held.

I have written for HerCampus for over two years now, through two different chapters and four editors-in-chief. And, despite ever-changing management, one thing has remained clear: My articles usually were on the higher end of the reader count spectrum. For better? Mostly. For worse? Once or twice.

Thus, I have some stock in saying that HerCampus has changed for the worse. What used to be St Andrews’ journalistic stepping stone has become the publication I can do nothing but ask people to avoid. 

When I was first accepted into HerCampus, the writing team consisted of about twenty women. We’d take up one of the tutorial rooms in St Mary’s, pretending to know everything about each other when we were mostly there to show face and tick that all-important attendance sheet. We’d brainstorm in groups of supposed strangers, um-ing and ah-ing over what might be good topics to cover. And, that evening, we’d go home, enter our expected two pitches for that week, and wait to see who got the green light. 

It was, admittedly, a fallible system. Despite HerCampus basically being literary Pinterest or Cosmopolitan’s youngest cousin, some writers were ‘picked’ to write at a higher rate than others. This, naturally, led to complaints. Writers who wrote the fourth ‘Why everyone dresses up for lectures in St Andrews,’ or fourteenth ‘I have imposter syndrome, and you do, too,’ article of the week were, unsurprisingly, never really picked. Despite a clear desire to regurgitate the same concepts as literally every other publication on campus, said campus would rather not be subject to reading it. And so, the editor would look elsewhere.

But on my return from my year away, things had dramatically changed. Twenty writers had been replaced by sixty, and gone was the literary freedom to pitch what you fancied that week — now, you had to write for one of five sections: life, style, culture, career, or wellness. Each writer was assigned roughly two weeks across the semester and essentially told what to write and how to write it. Want a change from the assigned homework? There are two slots a week for arbitrary pitches, which are usually booked out a week in advance. Evidently, literary freedom is harder to access than Masayoshi Takanaka tickets. 

If you’re lucky, you get assigned to the culture section — where you can really let loose. I’m talking, ‘How to find your favourite workout,’ ‘Where to find the viral necklace that’s all over your fyp,’ and ‘Romanticising St Andrews.’ Riveting stuff; although, I probably shouldn’t be harsh. In assuring literary freedom, writers who opt to write things like that should be given the chance just as much as any other. But telling good writers to write what Google Gemini or a reverse image search would answer in 30 seconds just so thirteen fourteen-year-old girls click on it during their English class in Tennessee is everything that journalism probably shouldn’t be.

The introduction of RankMath earlier this year confirmed many of my suspicions about the direction HerCampus is taking. RankMath is a WordPress tool that scores articles out of 100 based on search engine optimisation. To improve that score, writers must incorporate ‘focus keywords’ — trending terms that people might type into Google. The logic is that articles will appear higher in search results if they contain enough searchable language. I’ve had editors tell me to write in subheadings and sprinkle in images (that always serve this misogynistic ideal of female journalism); they’ve told me to hyperlink the word “valid” when I was saying that someone thought their belief to be a “valid” one, and worst of all, I’ve had an editor (without asking, I may add) change all of my spellings to American-English despite me being pretty sure we’re currently in Scotland. 

In the few times I’ve attended HerCampus events over the years, patterns emerge within the management of the writing team. I’ve routinely witnessed them proudly gossiping in a corner over writers they don’t like, or articles they thought were boring — a problem that would be solved if they chose better pitches and encouraged writers to write liberally. The writers, simply, are not at fault. It’s the editorial leadership who sidle up to the blonde American social members and clearly ignore those who don’t fit what they see in the mirror, who are doing nothing but hurting the chapter that many great women have built for them.

Simply put, HerCampus’s writing team has become too big for its boots. It is not a news publication, nor, unfortunately, something many people take seriously. Thus, it's wildly inappropriate, for instance, to publicly threaten a writer who had the flu with loss of good-standing — simply because of their understandably low output that day. 

HerCampus once functioned as the trial run — a place where students experimented with ideas before moving on to more formal journalism. If it continues prioritising algorithms, rigid content structures, and managerial authority over creativity, it risks losing the very qualities that made it worthwhile in the first place.

So, for whoever becomes the next EiC, consider this a gentle request: restore some freedom to the writers. Let them pitch strange ideas. Let them write things that may not perform well on Google. Let the publication breathe again. This article may be in part my resignation letter, but it is also a long-overdue reminder that HerCampus can and will be a great space for women who build each other up instead of putting us down. After all, great writers deserve a great platform.

Illustration by Veronika Sullivan