From The Campus: Mumbai's St. Xavier's College Students Unveils 'Catchphrase' - A Guide For Future Media Leaders

Mumbai: The Mass Media Department of St. Xavier's College (Autonomous), Mumbai, launched its annual magazine, 'Catchphrase,' earlier this month.

This magazine is open to first-, second-, and third-year students. Students were given the creative freedom to build the magazine from scratch, for instance, picking a theme, narrowing down the topics to focus on, and the faculty would oversee.

Inside The Magazine

Catchphrase this year caters to media enthusiasts and also serves as a guide to the first-year mass media students as well as for students planning to apply to St. Xavier’s College for the Mass Media course. It gives an insight on how this course develops and enhances various skills, opportunities students might get after this course, and potential career options.

The magazine also has a section that focuses on faculty insights. But this magazine is not just work talk, this magazine has their very own crossword as well as interviews with famous alumni of the department. Some of the alumni who have been interviewed for this magazine are Prabhati Gharat and Eeshit Narain.

Catchphrase brings in alumni stories as the editor in chief for this year, Arushi Dabhade, a third-year journalism student, thought this perspective will prove to be very helpful to students across years. The focus behind this was also to emphasise various other career options that are not strictly limited to the advertising or journalism industries.

The stories highlight what students can expect from the industry and the stories come from people with both veteran and fresher perspectives.

Meet The Editor-In-Chief

Arushi Dabhade, editor in chief for 2024 Catchphrase, expressed her experience while talking to The Free Press Journal. She said, “I have learnt a lot about how working on projects at such an intense level works. When you are putting together a publication, you have to think about the marketing, distribution, and target audience, and as editor in chief, I was in charge of handling these things and the experience I’ve gained can not be found elsewhere."

"Right from assembling teams, delegating work, and coordinating with interviewees was all that needed to be done to bring this magazine to life. The faculty feedback proved to be very helpful in terms of narrowing down what we wanted to do and say. The faculty aided us every step of the way. I can not wait for people to read and love this magazine as much as we do,” Dabhade added.

The Inception Story

Catchphrase is an initiative by Professor Periyanayagi Subramaniam of the mass media department of St. Xavier’s College. This endeavor came into being in 2014 as part of Professor Periyanayagi’s vision to build a BMM department magazine and publish printed material by the mass media department.