Andy is a lecturer at UCLAN and very kindly showed me around the facilities before I enrolled on the course.
I have to agree with a number of his comments about what he regards as the conservatism of journalism students in failing to embrace totally the new technology.Andy is right when he links some of the causes with the environment that we have to operate it and there is no doubt that job security breeds conservatism.
Andy also adds that
A lot of students come in to journalism with very little idea of the reality of the world they will go in to. They consume limited styles of journalism - sport, celebrity - and are attracted to that. Of course that’s a very small and restricted part of the journalism world and they suss pretty soon that its all a bit more mundane than that.
I would go further Andy,because I think that the proble is not just in journalism but it is in education as a whole. It strikes me that students come to university now as merely the next stage in the production line of life,having been consistently battered by the continuous examination and testing that has dictated their lives to date.
This ,coupled with the need to enter a society, that increasingly judges us on materialism,will breed a conservative outlook and a need to conform.
It is up to people like you to ensure that after three years ,the course will produce free thinking journalism students who are willing to take risks and develop the industry further.
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