New era begins for Ylioppilaslehti

The Helsingin Sanomat Foundation will fund the work on reforming Ylioppilaslehti in 2026. The work on the reform is aimed at helping Ylioppilaslehti find its place in a changed digital media environment.

If you had the opportunity to rethink your own media use, what would you do? Would you consume more AI-generated brain rot or focus your consumption on high-quality journalism, for instance? I am sure that many of us would love to read long, intelligent and sophisticated feature stories. You are what you consume and so on. However, statistics paint a different kind of picture. What is the problem? Even now, your brain is probably already craving short videos and your fingers will soon have instinctively opened TikTok.

In recent years, discussions related to reforming Ylioppilaslehti in HYY’s Representative Council have, out of necessity, been limited to a very black-and-white palette: how many issues of Ylioppilaslehti in its current form can we afford to make per year and can we afford to have the magazine delivered home to students. The need for reforms has been identified but resources to make a high-quality digital transition have not been available.

It gives me great joy that I am now able to tell you that the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation will fund the work on reforming Ylioppilaslehti with one hundred thousand euros in 2026. The foundation’s funding provides a long-awaited new alternative that brings colour back to the visions for Ylioppilaslehti’s future. During this year, we will use the foundation’s funding to conduct market research that allows you to tell us what Ylioppilaslehti should look, sound, feel, taste and smell like in the future. In the autumn, we will organise an idea competition for the new Ylioppilaslehti to give the magazine its new form.

With the foundation’s funding, the break in publication in autumn 2026 will turn into a completely different chapter in Ylioppilaslehti’s story than we had anticipated. Originally, our intention was to spend the autumn mainly on administrative reforms, but we will now get to spend the rest of the year working on our new student media outlet. The new Ylioppilaslehti could be more multimodal than before and combine the best sides of different forms of media, platforms and events. What could membership in Ylioppilaslehti mean (besides being a status symbol for our generation)?

The student community at the University of Helsinki is facing a major change this year with all the Student Union’s organisational premises located in Leppäsuo in the future. Domus Gaudium will become perhaps the most interdisciplinary student house in the world, and Ylioppilaslehti has played a key role in building an interdisciplinary community of students since its founding. When Ylioppilaslehti was founded in 1913, bringing together the student community that had experienced rapid growth and become divided by fields of study was already one of its main goals.

How could the new Ylioppilaslehti help you get closer to your ideal way of consuming media? Join the clandestine secret society of Ylioppilaslehti and tell us! During the break in publication, the secret society will focus on the work reforming the magazine. As a member, you will be among the first to hear the hottest gossip as well as get to contribute to building a new student media outlet. To join the secret society of Ylioppilaslehti, go to ylioppilaslehti.fi/salaseura. Join our media revolution.

Emil Aarnio

Chair of the Board