Oxbridge has got its first tabloid. In defiance of the traditional highbrow student press, this year's Cambridge freshers were greeted with the Tab – an online redtop with celebrity gossip, sports news and a student version of the Sun's page 3. In its first week, the Tab got over 80,000 hits.
"There's a huge amount of snobbery around, mainly from those who haven't read the site," says Taymoor Atighetchi, a third-year student at Trinity College and one of three male co-founders who stumped up £500 each to start the site.
Recent top stories include Bra Vo – a celebration of the fact that Cambridge women have the ninth largest bra sizes in the UK (34C on average). The Tab Totty page controversially features female undergraduates in their underwear.
One student model featured in the Tab, who prefers to remain anonymous, says: "I did it as a favour for a friend and was just trying to be a good sport, but the whole thing is so embarrassing ... I think … I'll ask them to take the pictures down now."
The student union's women's officer, Natalie Szarek, has called for Tab Totty to be taken down for good. "It reproduces and reinforces harmful attitudes towards women. Their fliers showing pictures of semi-naked women in provocative positions are being shoved in freshers' faces … We can do better as a university," she says.
Editorials in the paper have hit back, calling the student union a "sad dinosaur" that needs to "die or be cut back". Despite hits falling to 50,000 last week, the Tab is now selling itself to potential advertisers as the most read student publication in Cambridge.
Atighetchi believes that the Tab's live news and TV clips are stealing readers from the traditional student papers – Varsity and the Cambridge Student – which have a combined print run of some 20,000 a week.
"They get left at the porters' lodge – hundreds of copies are just sitting there," he says, "Students want news quickly and they want it to be entertaining – they get enough essays already."
The Varsity co-editor, Anna Trench, a third-year English student, dismisses the accusations, saying the traditional press is "taken a lot more seriously" and that the anti-elitist Tab is run by "three of the richest students in Cambridge".
• This article was amended on Tuesday 27 October 2009. The original read "Despite hits falling by 50,000 last week . . .". This has been corrected.
