Across the pond

 Xcity is the annual magazine produced by the magazine students in City University’s Department of Journalism, which circulates to all alumnae and enables them to keep in touch with each other. The Spring 2008 edition deserves one bouquet and one brickbat.

The bouquet goes to Brian Semple, who not only got to interview City University’s new boss but led him to say something controversial. The new vice-Chancellor, Malcolm Gillies, actually has some experience of journalism as a music critic and higher education commentator in his native land for The Australian.

He told Semple:

‘The whole newspaper industry lags behind the advancment of technology appallingly. When I was a music critic I still had to phone my copy in. I could not send it as an email, and that was only 13 years ago.

But a journalism school has to lead the industry. We can’t follow it, we’re training for the next generation.’

 Good for the students. Gillies might not be so pleased since along with the head of the journalism department, Adrian Monck, he is hoping to raise 10 million pounds for new facilities for journalism at City from the British journalism industry, who might not agree that they lag behind the ‘advancment of technology’. Particularly since The Guardian leads the world with its web pages, now reaching a readership of 19 million compared with the 400,000 circulation of the print version. And in the past year The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Financial Times and the Daily Mail, have massively improved their web coverage, by recruiting more staff, some of them from City University. They are competing very effectively with the New York Times and the Washington Post, who have much bigger staffs.

Like Barack Obama, Gillies has to learn that speaking off the cuff when journalists are listening does not always convey the message which was intended.

The brickbat is for missing the best news for this year’s edition, which should have been highligted with interviews with the men concerned. In January two ex-City students became national editors, James Harding, class of 1995, at The Times, and John Mullin, class of 1985, at The Independent on Sunday. They follow in the footsteps of Will Lewis, class of 1991, who became editor of The Daily Telegraph last year.

The Xcity listings section, which reports what ex-City University journos are doing now, has James Harding as the Washington bureau chief of the Financial Times,  and John Mullin, as executive editor of The Independent. Which was true last year!

The listings are are an awful sweat to produce, now that there are several thousand ex-students. But that makes it a good learning exercise for students to track down the ‘lost’ students. It is boring work with lots of un-returned phone calls. Just like real journalism. And ex-City students turn to the listings pages first, just as Time Out readers, go right the listings as soon as they buy the paper.

 But the staff and the management need to share the blame with the students in terms of Xcity priorities. The listings section, which now runs to 38 pages, no longer lists the details of the international students, the department’s money spinner, which has been taking eighty students a year for some years now. Including them would require an expensive extra twenty pages. But, in my view, they are worth it. They are, after all the geese who lay the golden eggs, and when they go back home they tell their colleagues and friends how much they gained from their year in London.