Hot off the SAMMPress
By Seth Robinson
Fancy yourself a wordsmith? The launch of a new look SAMMPress is a chance to put your pen to paper and contribute to a publication “born out of the desire to explore different ideas and themes in the worlds of Management, Marketing and University life”.
SAMMPress isn’t a new institution. In fact, if you know your way around Google and are willing to dig a little, you can find posts from the Students’ Association of Management & Marketing (SAMM) going back to 2015, some of you may even be dedicated readers, but 2018 marks a fresh new page for SAMMPress, and a revitalisation under the guidance of editor Kavindra Iddawela, who has approached the project with a strategic focus, and the goal of making SAMMPress bigger, better, and more independent than ever.
“What we want to do with SAMMPress from here on out is twofold; first, it’s to serve as a supportive function for SAMM, to give some coverage to its events and projects, and cover the big takeaways. It’s the second part we’re really excited about though; we want to make it an independent publication of sorts. So far, we’ve broken SAMMPress into four big categories; university life, employer ready, industry insight, and opinion,” says Kavindra. “Ultimately, if you want to grow your readership and create content they want, you have to look at the data. You have to understand what you’re executing, how that turns into results, and how you’re going to fuel your long-term goals.”
It's a strategic approach that has allowed Kavindra and her team to rebuild SAMMPress, giving them long term goals and structure, and opening up possibilities for growth
“At the moment, we want to get the foundation for SAMMPress established, get the rubber hitting the road. We have a writing competition going on right now, which we’re using to seek out some guest writers. What we’re doing with the writing competition is putting the feelers out to see who might be interested in contributing, so we can reach out to them saying ‘Hey, you know what, we read your article and we really like your style. We think it really parallels what we’re looking for in terms of style and tone and theme, would you be interested in being a guest writer as well?’”
It’s here where SAMMPress’s potential as an opportunity for student enrichment emerges, as ultimately, it’s all about the writing, something which can often be forgotten when it comes to buckling down and studying business.
“Writing is such an essential skill, but it’s not really emphasised in a lot of places, and I think that’s somewhere we have the opportunity to offer some enrichment, not just how to write well or how to improve your skills, but to reinforce that idea that writing is important. I think eventually we’d like to offer workshops on that, and perhaps writing for the industry, because there’s a difference between writing for arts and writing for business, and ultimately SAMMPress is part of the business school.”