Edward Melvin and Katherine O'Callaghan are co-editors of the University Observer newspaper at University College Dublin.

TO be editor of a student newspaper for a year is an amazing experience. It's something you're not really going to be able to do again in the future: to completely make your mark on a publication.

The University Observer has benefited hugely from having different editors every year. Each editor has been able to build on what has gone before and add what he or she has wanted to that.

This is the University Observer's fifth year in existence. In a previous incarnation, it was called the Students Union News, and because of the name many students regarded it as little more than a propaganda sheet. Now we have more editorial independence, we decide what goes in and we shape the paper. Having said that, the union are still the publishers - so there are still some grey areas. We see ourselves as having three functions: to inform the members of the students union, to entertain and to allow people the opportunity to get involved in writing and producing the paper.

We don't want to go overboard on union activities. A lot of students don't care - they prefer to read about sport, music and comedy.

This year we've gone broad-sheet. We've put news and news focus in our broad-sheet section and then the tabloid section has a very strong features element. Going broad-sheet has forced us to come up with new ideas and meant we had to get more people involved. It also cost considerably more than just printing a tabloid, but since we've changed format advertisers have been a lot more interested.

As editors, we're paid on a per-issue basis by the students' union, but we finance the paper's printing costs and equipment requirements through advertising. Advertising takes up a lot of time and it is probably the most difficult aspect of the job. It doesn't compare with the whole buzz of a story, but we're afraid that if we started to rely heavily on the students' union for finance we would lose some of our editorial independence.

The Friday before a production weekend is the last really active day in terms of gathering material for the paper. The phone rings all day and people are running in and out of the office continually.

Contributors can let us down or they can come in with something extra that we feel really should go in. An ad may not come in and we'll have to fill that space with copy.

The two days that come after that - the production weekend - are universally regarded by student journalists as hell. We have a strict Monday deadline from the printers - if we miss it, that's it, we can't go to print until the following week, which is a major disaster. We work from 10 a.m. on Saturday until midnight and then from 10 a.m. on Sunday until we get it done, which can sometimes be 8 a.m. on Monday. The design editor has the most stressful job of all, as most of the weekend is taken up with layout.

We're locked into the Arts Block in UCD, which is cold, lonely and spooky on Saturday and Sunday nights. We've bought a toasted sandwich maker so we don't starve. We stay awake by drinking Coke and a certain soft drink soon to be removed from the market. The tabloid section goes to the printers early on Monday afternoon and the broad-sheet goes later in the evening. We have to come in on Tuesday morning to distribute the paper. By Wednesday you're back into dealing with advertising and complaints and comments about the last issue. The news cycle begins all over again.

Having said that, we wouldn't like to give the impression that it's a horrible thankless thing we're involved in - it can be immensely enjoyable. It's all worth it when the paper comes out and we go for lunch in UCD restaurant and see students enjoying things in the paper and pointing them out to their friends.

In an interview with Roddy O'Sullivan.