Across the pond

Last week’s Media Guardian report on journalism training has sparked a lively debate about whether university courses have biased entry to journalism towards a public school Oxbridge elite. Lis Howell, one of my colleagues at City University’s Department of Journalism replied with some current hard facts from the front line of recruitment for next year. This is what she wrote:

· I read Peter Wilby’s article on a day when I was interviewing candidates for City University’s MA/postgraduate diploma in broadcast journalism.
In the last week we have interviewed 90 applicants for 46 places. The majority have attended state schools. Of the successful candidates approximately 60% are female, over 12% are from visible ethnic minorities, and almost all do extra work in bars, offices and shops in their holidays or at weekends. We also take non-graduates at our discretion and in the past have accepted a psychiatric nurse, an actor and a fashion designer, all in their thirties.
I was unsure what Mr Wilby was advocating. I was the first member of my family to gain a degree. When I tried to become a journalist in 1973 I was rejected by my local paper as “over-educated for a girl” then they relented and offered me “something on the woman’s page”. I didn’t take the job. I finally gained work experience in BBC local radio after joining a queue of women interviewees for receptionist. Take it from me, it was not a character building experience!
I am in no doubt that whatever the flaws in the system today it is fairer than it was, and the students we take at City have a great deal more life experience and good humour than some of the narrow-minded men I worked with in the 70s. Of course I did not have the privilege of working with Mr Wilby, who I’m sure was very fair and decent. With that in mind, I’d like to invite him to meet this year’s cohort here at City. I’m sure he’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Lis Howell, director of broadcasting, City University, London

I can report that, on this score, things have not changed since I began teaching journalism at City University in 1979. The regional newspaper industry at the time was worried that the universities would send them a lot of know-alls, who would scorn coverage of weddings and funerals. And who would not stay working in the provinces because the pay was so low.

When I arrived at City in April 1979 my first job was to help with the recruitment for the next year’s post graduate diploma in journalism. My two full-time colleagues were both Oxbridge graduates. But they came from humble origins and they bent over backwards NOT to favour the Oxbridge public school entrants. So much so that they wanted to turn down the only Oxford graduate that year, whom I thought did have absoluttely the right talent for the journo trade. Happily each of the interviewing panel was allowed one hunch choice for a candidate against the majority vote. So he came, performed fine in the regions; today he is a senior editor at The Financial Times.

I had a similar experience to Lis Howell in my own first job. In 1955 I was turned down, without an interview, by the newspaper in my home town, the Wolverhampton Express & Star. I was accepted, however, by the Investors Chronicle, part of the Financial Times group. This was despite the fact, as I discovered subsequently, that the FT, under Lord Drogheda, had led Fleet Street in hiring bright Oxbridge graduates at a time when most journalists were not university educated. They left school at 14 and went straight on to their local paper. Drogheda with the editor, Gordon Newton, used to go up to Oxbridge in interview possible candidates. Harold Wincott, the editor of the Investors Chronicle, was totally aware of this, but since he was very much his own man, he did not feel bound to follow it.

 So maybe I benefited from not being Oxbridge or public school and from a working class family.

Co-incidentally, Dermot Murnaghan, now presenting the news on Sky Television, was writing in Monday’s Guardian about how he first made it into journalism. He does not refer to the Wilby article. But he does say he was ‘lucky’ enough to get on City University’s post-graduate course. What he does not know is how lucky he was. Because my colleagues on the interviewing panel wanted to turn him down, on the grounds that he was an eternal student type; he was then in his fourth year struggling to write up his Ph D.

I was able to argue successfully that he was also a lad from a humble background with a gift for words and the nouse to make a good journalist. By the time he arrived he was heavily in debt and was about the most shabby dresser on the course. When it was time for him to go on his first work placement at the Coventry Evening Telegraph, I told him he must wear a suit. ‘I don’t have one.’ he replied. ‘Then, borrow one.’ I said.

He did. And today he is able to buy his own and is one of the snappiest dressers in the trade.

But to return to the debate about class and bias on journalism entry. In journalism, who you know is as important as what you know. So for entirely practical reasons journalism benefits from have a wide variety of applicants, including some from the elite, who can help their colleagues in acquiring contacts amongst the powerful. The same applies to ethnic groups.

And journalism courses are good places to enlarge your contacts. I am sure that is one reason why Salam Pax, the Baghdad blogger, is on this year’s MA in International Journalism at City University, London. He has already demonstrated that he can make it in journalism. He will learn something in the classroom that is useful but the big gain will the be the additions to his contact book and the chance he has to talk to London journalists.