Written off? The crisis at Vertigo

For more than half a century Vertigo, the student magazine of the University of Technology Sydney, has been an integral part of campus life, documenting the arts and student politics, but it now finds its assorted dramas have become the story itself.

After an explosive bun fight between the magazine and the UTS Students’ Association, involving allegations of bullying and a complaint to the Fair Work Commission, the publication has been effectively shuttered until 2028 in both print and digital, with not even a social media presence to announce it.

A thick hard copy magazine, Vertigo has traditionally been distributed around the university’s Broadway and Haymarket buildings several times a year, with many of it’s alumni going on to impressive careers in the media, from The Sydney Morning Herald‘s economics editor Ross Gittins, the magazine’s inaugural editor, to ABC reporter Joseph Hathaway-Wilson, one of it’s most recent.

Even older than UTS, the magazine has a long history, running under the title Newswit from 1973 when the institution was still a polytechnic, before transforming into Vertigo in 1991, three years after the university’s own official incorporation.

But the seemingly sudden disappearance of the both loved and maligned student publication has also been a long time in the making, with repeated management clashes, the revoking of the magazine’s office space and significant cuts to its budget, that had left Vertigo on life support.

In July, the UTS Students’ Association (UTSSA) decisively passed a motion to remove Vertigo from its constitution, replacing its existing editorial structure with two publications: a new twice-a-year edition of Vertigo, focused on long-form journalism and creative arts, and a revived Newswit, that would cover university affairs, student politics and campus life. In the interim, it was controversially decided, there would be no further publication of the magazine for over a year, leaving 2027 a complete write-off.

News of this momentous shift, however, arrived at a Vertigo already well in crisis.

We put in so much effort into repairing that relationship (with the UTSSA), into making Vertigo more engaging again.

Bianca Drummond Costa, former editor-in-chief

Over the past nine months, eight editors and two designers have resigned from the publication. Under the previous UTSSA constitution, a minimum of six editors and designers were required for the magazine to be operational.

By mid-July, it’s understood the 2026 team had been reduced to just five editors and two designers. Weeks before the UTSSA voted on the constitutional changes, another two team members resigned. What resulted was a publication unable to operate under its existing structure for the remainder of the year. 

Asha Johnston, who joined the 2026 team as news editor, walked out roughly six weeks into her tenure. Having contributed to previous editions of the magazine and serving as a guest editor, she says taking on the role initially felt like a privilege. 

“I have so much love for student publications,” she says. “I obviously am studying writing and journalism. Vertigo is my bread and butter.”

But her enthusiasm was short-lived.

“I had figured on resigning on week two,” she says. “But it was really just a matter of, I gotta try and see this out. This is what I’ve wanted.”

By week six, she’d changed her tune. “It just became almost immediately clear that it wasn’t going to be the future I had envisioned,” she adds.

Fair Work dispute

The collapse of this year’s editorial team coincided with a dramatic deterioration in an ongoing hot-cold relationship between Vertigo and the UTSSA, and a dispute with the current editor-in-chief Emanie Darwiche.

Early in the year Darwiche, a Communications student who in 2025 was the youngest Senate candidate in the federal election on the Australia’s Voice party’s ticket, took the Students’ Association to the Fair Work Commission over allegations of bullying and harassment in the workplace. 

The application, which specifically named UTSSA President Neeve Nagle and general secretary Salma Elmubasher, soon became part of Vertigo’s own reporting. In June, the publication ran an anonymously written article titled ‘Where is our SSAF going?’, accusing the UTSSA of spending $40,000 on lawyers in response to Darwiche’s claim, instead of on student services and advocacy. The article on Vertigo’s website has since been removed, although a version remains active on the magazine’s Instagram account, where it has attracted 68 comments, more than any post from this year’s Vertigo team.

Darwiche was contacted for comment but did not respond before publication. However, Central News can reveal, the FWC case was dropped three weeks ago.

A member of the 2026 editorial team, speaking to Central News on condition of anonymity, had left Vertigo by the time of the Fair Work dispute, but says they had already become “largely jaded” by what they described as the poor relationship between Darwiche and the SRC. It included, according to them, a hostile atmosphere in meetings organised for the two sides to collaborate and resolve problems.

Johnston similarly describes the relationship between the 2026 team and the Students’ Association as “strained from the beginning”.

“I myself felt that there were never any restrictions [from the UTSSA],” she says.

“The restrictions really came from within, being a team member.”

She believes the relationship became more tenuous as members of the 2026 team, including herself, began to voice their own concerns about the magazine. 

“It only became an issue when people like myself were complaining to the UTSSA,” she says, citing allegations of “inappropriate” communications and too many restrictions. 

Johnston says the UTSSA subsequently increased its scrutiny of the 2026 Vertigo team, and that the resulting relationship was one where both sides increasingly believed the other was acting unfairly.

History of fall outs

But tensions at Vertigo  between both the UTSSA and the university executive are nothing new. 

In 2022 an edition of the magazine changed its title to Vertigone after senior management overruled the Student Association’s decision to increase the magazine’s budget, leaving it at half what had been proposed for the financial year and severely impacting its publishing schedule.

Vertigo had asked for funds for 2022 of $245,000, which the UTSSA had informed it would be granted, an increase from a pre-pandemic 2019 budget of $205,000. However, the UTS executive kept funding at the previous year’s cutdown level of $129,000 and, to add salt to the wound, made it a condition that extra funding for the Association could not go to Vertigo‘s budget.

In response, Vertigo‘s then editor-in-chief, Hathaway-Wilson, and his team produced an edition that poured scorn on UTS’s senior executive and in particular former Deputy Vice-Chancellor Shirley Alexander, who had claimed the magazine didn’t serve the interests of the majority of students.

But beneath the bravado, the cuts had serious production ramifications for the publication, known among uni papers as “the beautiful magazine” for its high spec issue and design quality. Instead of five editions a year, which included the annual election guide, it only had enough money to put out one edition in its usual size of close to 130 pages in an A4 format, and two much smaller editions of about 50 pages in a smaller A5 format.

In March 2024, then editor-in-chief Raphaella Katzen and student news editor Bianca Drummond Costa published an article, outlining issues faced by the incoming Vertigo team and the ‘complicated dynamic’ with the UTSSA. Among them was a basic operational problem: the editors had lost access to their offices.

While senior management had advised the UTSSA to revoke access to office space for non-adherance of directives to keep it clean, there was talk it was a response to ‘partying’ taking place in the office. Whatever the case Vertigo was locked out and denied access to its equipment and extensive archive.

For three months, the team worked from UTS study rooms, while the office was instead given over to the Ethno-Cultural Collective as a ‘safe space’. 

This series of disputes have raised awkward questions for a student publication expected to scrutinise its own governing body, while relying on that very body for funding and administrative support. 

Drummond Costa, who became Vertigo’s editor-in-chief in 2025 after campaigning for election with the presciently titled team ‘Freefall’, says the relationship is crucial to the publication’s survival.

“When that relationship between the UTSSA and Vertigo is stable, it is so much easier for everybody,” she says. 

“It’s extremely disappointing. We put in so much effort into repairing that relationship, into making Vertigo more engaging again.”

But the problems facing Vertigo are not simply about its relationship with the Students’ Association. The publication is also struggling with a more fundamental question: what is it actually for?

Magazine, vanity project or something else? 

For much of its existence Vertigo has operated somewhere between a student newspaper, creative magazine and a portfolio builder for students, that has been accused by both UTS management and the UTSSA of being of more benefit to its editorial team than the student body. UTSSA’s answer to Vertigo’s identity crisis is to separate those functions. 

The Association says the proposed new model to split Vertigo into two publications follows independent research it commissioned in 2023 into student media preferences, but precisely how this new structure will work remains unclear.

In response to questions from Central News, the UTSSA says the details of the split “have not yet been determined,” and that further discussions and consultations will need to take place before the new structure can be confirmed. It is currently unable to provide details on the “specific arrangements, timelines, editorial structures, budgets or transition arrangements”. 

For Johnston, separating student news may create its own problems, and she argues there may not be enough material to sustain a publication dedicated entirely to it. 

“It’’s the hardest to write, it’s the most difficult to source,” she says. 

“If they dedicate a whole area, however they’re gonna do it, I just don’t think that the material will be enough to sustain it.” 

But former Vertigo members agree the magazine’s value has never been confined to its content alone. 

“Verti is, at its heart, a safe space for the student body,” the anonymous team member says. “I think we really saw that last year with the way our community showed up for the magazine launch parties.”

 

For Drummond Costa, Vertigo provides students with a low-stakes environment to experiment with their self-expression.

“You can be doing medicine and go, ‘I actually really like writing,’” she says. “You can just put that out there for fun.”

She adds that the magazine created a community around its contributors and readers. 

“I think the beauty of student publications is that whole culture and community around it,” Drummond Costa says. She fears that broader function will be hard to maintain when the publication is split in two. 

For the anonymous team member, that community is what ultimately should be saved. 

“If I had to preserve one thing, I think it would be the community of creatives we have cultivated,” they say. “Verti boiled down is a space for creative growth, from writing and graphics all the way to the DJs and videographers at the launch parties.”

The transitional period also raises questions about what students will lose in the interim. 

What’s next?

Beyond the broad outline of the two publications, the future of Vertigo remains unsettled. But the UTSSA says the restructure intends to strengthen, rather than end, student media at UTS. 

Johnston sees some benefits in bringing the publication closer to the UTSSA, particularly in terms of its funding and visibility. 

When you just kind of stand back and look at UTS, the soul of it is in its publication. And I think getting rid of that will kind of be the final nail in the coffin.

Asha Johnston, news editor

“I think that it would avoid [the] absolute schemozzles that occurred this year,” she says. However, she worries stability could come at the expense of the magazine’s expression. 

“I think, obviously, that just comes in terms of who’s in power at the UTSSA will have a specific vision,” she says. “And that means that the publication won’t be as expressive.”

For Johnston, the greater concern is what could happen if student publications start to disappear altogether. 

“I think that UTS is really renowned for its diversity and its opinions on things, and I think we used to be a really, really well-spoken institution,” she says.

“When you just kind of stand back and look at UTS, the soul of it is in its publication. And I think getting rid of that will kind of be the final nail in the coffin.”

 

Alongside the broader trends of cuts to courses, infrastructure, staff and more – both at UTS and other institutions – Johnston isn’t all that surprised that Vertigo has been on the chopping block. 

For Drummond Costa, the change isn’t anything new. 

“Vertigo has gone through so many different iterations throughout the years,” she says. “It’s always changing and growing.” 

The magazine has been subject to countless changes in its material, length and delivery. The question now is what of that will survive the current restructure. 

Johnston has one piece of advice for UTSSA members deciding Vertigo’s future. 

“Keep the people and the community,” she says. “The community is really, really something special.

“If you can create something that garners a community of that energy and that love, then you’ve got something great.”

Main image by Central News.