Noise@UNSW
Noise is the only independently published student paper at UNSW. Founded by my friends and I in early 2024, we've quickly amassed over 400 daily readers, with numbers growing every week.
Client
UNSW
Service
Student News and Activism
Date
November 13, 2021
Challenge
Produce a respected and accurate publication reporting on the experience of UNSW students.
Solution
Noise runs on a privately managed instance of Ghost, the free and open-source publishing platform developed to provide content creators with a method of escaping the traditional (and expensive) ecosystem of publishing. The Noise editorial team is now composed of 20 students, with up to 10 articles being released every week.
Noise is UNSW’s only independent student publication, produced without the assistance of the university or corporate service providers like Arc. We aimed to provide UNSW students with a transparent and equitable account of what’s happening both at our university and the changes occurring throughout the sector, without “selling out” and becoming controlled media like Tharunka/Gamamari.
Since February 2024, we’ve had over 200 people sign up to our newsletter, with a retention rate of 92%. We’ve also hit 250k pageviews on our homepage, and over 400 followers on Instagram. Our team has expanded to over 20 editors and writers, and we’re actively growing into the rest of 2024 and 2025.
On the infrastructure side, Noise now runs via a distributed cluster of Docker nodes. We have a physical presence in NSW and the ACT in order to facilitate the shortest possible loading times for readers, and run a private mail server in order to ensure the security and confidentiality of any disclosures made via email. The entire site is backed up via the GSSG static site archival tool, meaning a crash of the website can instantly fail-over to the static version hosted by Github Pages and Cloudflare. Additionally automatic archive snapshots are taken nightly by the Wayback Machine.
This site is available at noiseatunsw.com. We’re also on Instagram @noiseatunsw.
