Three weeks not enough for learning journalism
April 4th, 2008Xcity, the annual magazine produced by the magazine students at City University, London, takes on Newsnight presenter, Jeremy Paxman, in the latest issue that has just come off the presses. Paxman asserted that the nation, and the students, were wasting their money by studying journalism at a university. According to an interview he gave it takes only three weeks to train a journalist. Whereas the poor students at City University and elsewhere, have to sign up for three years for the undergraduate option or twelve months for the intensive post-graduate courses.
Paxman is renowned for challenging the conventional wisdom, and doing so with the ferocity of a Rottweiler and the tenacity of terrier. In this case he is espousing the conventional wisdom. Had he come to last night’s annual party for the Laurence Stern Fellowship, he would have found that the three national editors present, (from The Guardian, The Times and the Financial Times) would have agreed with most of what he had to say on the subject.And I think it probable that the executive editor of the Washington Post, Len Downie, the presenter of the Today Programme, Jim Naughtie, and the anchor man of BBC News24, Gavin Esler, who were also at the party, would have found themselves agreeing with Paxman.
I can assert this with a degree of certainty because I have known for several years all the people I have mentioned so far, with the exception of the present editor of The Times, James Harding.
Harding was also exceptional in that he was the only editor mentioned who actually went on a journalism course before he embarked on a career in journalism. As it happens, he was at my own University, but because by the time he came we were the biggest in the UK we never met. I was running either the International course or the magazine course. Harding was on the newspaper course, but I know what he was taught.
So I am 90 per cent sure, that when challenged by Paxman, in my fantasy meeting which did not take place, he would have said that the course he did at City helped him get his first job, but it did not give him the skills/qualities which enabled him to leapfrog the competition and jump into the editor’s chair at The Times.
What all these editors would have agreed about, was not that it takes three weeks to train a journalist, but the thinking behind the sound bite that Paxman delivered to the City University student who interviewed him. The best way of learning journalism is by doing it. What you can learn off site, whether it is in a university or on a training programme run by the BBC or by a newspaper group, is far less important than what you have to learn by attempting to do it, thinking on your feet in a busy newsroom and getting what help you can from experienced colleagues, in the limited time available for you to write the story to get in tomorrow’s paper.
This was always true. But it is even more true today, when journalists, and students on placement with news organisations, have to meet the demands of twenty-four hour a day broadcast programmes and newspaper websites, which have adopted the same deadlines. As recently as two years ago, there was a fierce debate as to whether newspapers should save their scoops for the paid for printed newspaper. Those who wanted to hold stories have lost out to the realities of the web age in which we live. There are a few exceptions, where for instance, a newspaper has been conducting a long investigation on the Watergate scale, and has accumulated information which no rival can possibly equal in a few hours.
But even in those cases, the need to publish quickly often over-rides other considerations. While the newspaper is consulting its lawyers, other newspaper rivals will not attempt to publish. But web sites, like the Drudge Report, will publish the essence of the story in the making.
This poses a problem for universities preparing students for entry into journalism. The journalistic need is to design courses which will encourage the Rottweiler and terrier like qualities exemplified by Paxman. But at the same time, there is the even more important imperative, to discourage wouldbe journalists from trying to model themselves on the Jeremy Paxman brand, and to hold any Rottweiler tendencies they have firmly in check for a few years. After all Paxman only established his brand after many years studying serious subjects in higher education and after many years of learning on the job. It is not easy for universities to satisfy these kinds of needs. The dominant concern is with what is taught rather than how it is taught. The curriculum rules. And when I was in City University yesterday the talk was all about the changes in the curriculum being made and being proposed to make sure that students were prepared for the web age.
That is the wrong emphasis. It would in fact be quite possible to teach journalists what they need to know about the web in three weeks. What takes much longer is learning how to get stories, to write them in accessible language, learning how to interview people at all levels and to get them to tell you what is necessary for the story.
That is very expensive because when journalism is learnt at college the staff have to do what editors and senior colleagues do for young journalists starting out. Which means they must be experienced journalists. And that they must be prepared to spend hours going through copy individually or in small groups.But however good the teachers are, their efforts will be in vain if the students do not have the range of skills and personal qualities necessary to do decent serious journalism.
That is why the pressure to take more and more students needs to be resisted. Journalism departments have expanded so rapidly in Britain that far more would-be journalists are being turned out than there are new jobs. And although it is not easy to prove it is probable that there are more places available than there are students good enough to make it. And it is certainly true that adding another ten students will mean taking some who would have been rejected. That will lead to a fall in quality. It will reduce the willingness of media organisations to take students on placement, so that graduates will be less well trained in the essentials. The short-term gain for this year’s profit and loss account will lead to a downard spiral on the longer term. It has taken well over twenty years to get the confidence of the media industry, to reverse the belief, still held by some older journalists, that universities teach the students media studies, not practical journalism.
The talk between the editors at the Stern party was about the severity of the recession, already biting savagely in the US and expected to hit the UK later this year. Already the editors are being asked to reduce the number of journalists on their payroll.
If the universities want to maintain their reputation in journalism education, they should be asking, not how many extra students can we recruit. They should be considering whether it would be prudent to take fewer students for the next year or two.
April 5th, 2008 at 6:23 am
Paxman’s wisdom has been known in New Zealand journalism schools since 1975, when a tutor at what is now Auckland University of Technology J School introduced the idea of journalism students spending the core of their time on his course writing real stories and submitting them for publication/broadcast at real news outlets (in those days, mainly community newspapers and radio stations – but occasionally dailies).
No surprise then, that journalists trained in this country tend to have no trouble getting a job overseas (and most of us do an OE at some stage).
While the rest of the so-called developed world went down the path of “degree-ising” journalism education, New Zealand has largely continued the coalface approach.
However, that is now changing as the undergrad disease takes hold here and post-grad programmes start to throw out the practical stuff. AUT now sends its students to court not to write stories but to write a 2000-word essay on what they saw. Brilliant training to be a court reporter…not.
Coalface courses hang on at former polytechs (although they are vastly underfunded) and enjoy 100% employment rates for their grads, while some university journalism schools demand tutors have a PhD (but not necessarily any real journalism experience).
Going to hell in a handcart? Probably.
My programme at Whitireia Journalism School will run as a virtual newsroom, with students producing news and features for our news website, newspapers, radio and TV.