How to Navigate The Boar for News, Reviews, and Student Life Articles

Updated

The Boar organises its content into named sections — News, Features, Culture, Lifestyle, Entertainment, Science & Tech, and Sport — with a "Hottest Content" list on the homepage for the most-read pieces. If you know which section matches what you want, going straight to that section is faster than scrolling the homepage. If you don't, the homepage's mix of latest and most-read items is the better starting point.

Section-by-section: what you'll find where

Based on the site's own listings, the sections break down roughly like this:

Section What it carries Example from the site
News Campus and UK higher-education stories "UK universities face 'financial crisis' as international student numbers fall"
Features Longer-form opinion and analysis "Resignations, Russia, and reputation: The UK's defensive readiness in an era of change"
Culture Arts coverage, including books and poetry "Poetry Feature: Until I Drown"
Lifestyle Student life, wellbeing, fashion, seasonal pieces "Give yourself Grace: How to stop burnout catching you in October"
Entertainment Film, music, and TV reviews "Beabadoobee's 'Pylon' is a perfect lesson in perspective"
Science & Tech Research and technology writing "Are higher-order multispecific antibodies too ambitious?"
Sport Match reports and sports commentary "Refereeing decisions steal the spotlight in contentious Manchester derby"

Two things worth noting from this structure. First, film and music reviews sit under Entertainment, not Culture — Culture leans toward arts features and poetry. Second, student-life content is split: wellbeing and lifestyle pieces are in Lifestyle, while campus news and university-policy stories are in News.

Finding reviews specifically

If you want a film, music, or arts review:

  1. Go to Entertainment for film, music, and TV reviews.
  2. Go to Culture for arts features, poetry, and theatre-adjacent writing.
  3. Check the date on each article — reviews are tagged with a publication date (e.g. "Sep. 18", "Sep. 14"), so you can judge whether a review is current or from an earlier run.

The site's own listings show reviews appearing close to release dates, so a review of a new album or film is usually published within days of it coming out.

Finding news and current campus stories

News items carry both a section label and a date, which makes them easy to scan for timeliness. Examples from the site include an entry-level jobs report, a pumpkin shortage story, A-Level rejection coverage, and international student number declines — all UK higher-education or student-relevant topics rather than general national news.

If you're looking for something specific like Warwick campus coverage, the News section is where campus-facing stories appear, but note that the site also covers broader UK university news.

Using "Hottest Content" and the homepage

The homepage surfaces a numbered "Hottest Content" list — the most-read articles at that moment. In the material reviewed, this list mixed sport, lifestyle, and study-abroad pieces, for example:

  1. A Djokovic Grand Slam story
  2. "Lady Thistledown: A toothed encounter"
  3. "The hard truths about leaving for a study abroad"
  4. A Commonwealth Games feature
  5. A UK rare bird story

This list is useful when you want to see what other readers are engaging with, but it changes over time and isn't organised by topic. Treat it as a discovery tool, not a search tool.

Practical tips for navigating

  • Use the section name, not the topic, to start. A music review is under Entertainment; a wellbeing piece is under Lifestyle.
  • Check the date tag. Articles show a month and day (e.g. "Sep. 15", "Aug. 25"), which tells you how recent a piece is.
  • Expect overlap between Features and News. Some analysis pieces sit in Features even when they touch on news events.
  • The homepage mixes latest and most-read. If you want chronological order, a section page is more reliable than the homepage.

One caveat: the material reviewed doesn't show a site search function or an archive-by-date view, so navigation relies on section pages and the homepage lists rather than keyword search. If you're hunting for a specific older article, browsing the relevant section is the available route.