"Student journalists are sidelined to being like ancillary press officers"

I,ve met Joseph Stashko a couple of times now.

He is a student at Uclan who along with his colleague Andy Halls is working on a new hyperlocal news site for Preston.

I wish them luck with that but on this blog post he looks at a couple of issues regarding student journalism and subjectivity but I particually liked his take on writing for the student paper

I saw time and time again editors hand out stories, almost ready made for print, just needing a few rewrites and possibly quotes. Student journalists are sidelined to being like ancillary press officers, simply reduced to moving phrases around and adding a few minor embellishments.

Specialism-the way forwards

With much talk of journalists needing to find a niche,an interesting report from Hold the Front page.

University College Falmouth is planning to specialise in arts and environmental reporting on its journalism course.

It quotes course leader Anna Kiernan who says

BA (Hons) Journalism at UCF has enjoyed a successful track record over many years and its graduates continue to achieve significant success, but the industry is ever changing and we need to continue to change with it. "To that end, we are going to play to our strengths and focus on the themes that connect the industry with our sense of place.

Most important is a drive for journalism

I am in total agreement with Adam Westbrook who writes about what he thinks are the priorities for journalism students.

He joined a panel at Kingston University and his starred priorities are

1.Entrepreneurial skills

2.Social-network skills

3.New technical skills

4.Old journo skills but perhaps most importantly

5.The drive

As Adam says

You can’t teach this to kids, but you can try to instill some enthusiasm. It is no longer good enough (in any walk of life, save I dunno, chemistry, engineering etc) to walk into a degree and hope to walk into a job. That attitude will earn you a McDonald’s badge and not much else. Students themselves must crave success, and as Hannah Waldram puts it: “get-up-and-go to take them through the difficulties and pressures of doing something on their own…”

Get yourself an online brand

Getting that personal brand is a must for journalism students in today's ultra competitive world.

Mindy McAdams gives a 10 pointer score card to see whether you have passed the test over on her blog

1. People in your field should know who you are.

2. Someone who Googles your first and last name should be able to find out who you are.

3. Your online self-representation should demonstrate that you are a serious, ethical journalist.

4. Samples of your best work should be linked to your home page or online (HTML) resume.

5. Your real work experience should be easy to find and easy to scan quickly. People will want to check this for verification, so dates should be clear, not obfuscated.

6. Make sure your online pages can be read easily on various cell phones, including the iPhone.

7. If you supply a link to a PDF of your resume, make sure the pertinent job or freelance-experience information is also available via simple HTML (not exclusively in the PDF). Word Docs are not good for online resumes. A Google Doc would be better.

8. People who might want to hire you need to be able to find your contact info EASILY. Don’t make them hunt all over for it. If you supply an e-mail address, make sure you check mail at that address just about daily, if not more often.

9. You need to be around, to be visible, to be seen — people should see your name in comments, retweets, etc.

10. People online should point to you from time to time, as I have pointed to Joe, Dave, Ryan, Greg, and Lauren in this post. This confers authority on you. Brands rest in part on authority, in part on name recognition.

Unistats on the career prospects of journalism students

Josh Halliday spent his Sunday pouring over the Unistats statistics of the UK's Universities and Colleges to look at how media students fared in the job market in 2009.

My eyes fell straight at the figures for Uclan which showed that 39% of journalism undergraduates ended up in a media related profession whilst 85% of post graduates did likewise.

Tops was Sheffield where the figures were 70%

Of course it is fairly impossible to analyse these results further and you probably have to question that categories that the universities provide.

Nevertheless some interesting statistics and congratulations to Josh for ploughing through the figures.

Specialise and differentiate in the current job market

Some really useful comments picked up by Journalism.co.uk's Amankwa Annorbah-Sarpei from an industry gathering this week.

They concerned the current job market for journalism students and included the following

The nature of the media landscape has changed 'beyond recognition' with the advent of online publishing and new technologies

,

according to Nicholas Brett, editorial director of BBC Magazines adding that

Tools that were exclusively held and kept by a certain group of professionals are now owned by all of us, we are all content makers," he said, urging students to embrace this new 'democratic market' by becoming experts at everything.

And this from Terry Mansfield, former director at Hearst Corporation,

"If you want a job you have to create something that's special about you,prospective journalists should look to specialise and think of how to make their work relevant to the consumer,

Dear despondent journalism student

This is definitely worth a read (via Salon Magazine)

Dear Cary,

I spent the last four and a half years studying print journalism in college and watching vacantly as the newspaper/magazine industry crumbled before my eyes. The decline never bothered me. I always figured I had what it takes to get a job even in an extremely competitive market: Before I ever graduated, I had completed four internships at newspapers, magazines and a Web site, published almost a hundred clips (including longer, high-quality pieces), and left a good impression with everyone I worked with. I knew I wanted to be a journalist, and I knew that I wanted to write for a living.
Now, six months after graduating, my parents still pay my cellphone bill and I am working full-time making ice cream.

As does the reply

Dear Scared Journalist,

If you are a true journalist, the world is going to kick your ass. If you are a true journalist, you are supposed to be having a hard time. This is how the world makes writers. It kicks their ass long enough that they start finally telling the truth. They just finally give up and start bleating out little truthlets.

Ht-Josh Halliday

An element of fraud but the whole system of higher education needs to be looked at

One of the themes of this blog has of course been the future of journalism education.

The proliferation of journalism degrees in the UK brokered by considerable demand for the product has coincided with the biggest downturn in the profession.

This will no doubt lead to many disappointed graduates not being able initially at least to pursue their chosen career.

What is the solution?

Well there are too parts to this problem.Universities have a responsibility to tailor their output to the job market.Not just in journalism but across the board.The drive to send as many people down the degree route will result in a generation of dashed hopes.Coinciding with the recession,the market is simply not there.

This has led to the criticism of universities of following the doctrine of bums on seats.The introduction of top up fees in 2006 has extended this philoophy.

As for journalism itself,the universities will say that they are simply responding to demand for courses.

Yesterday saw a controversial article appear in the Times Higher Educational supplement in which Tim Luckhurst, professor of journalism at the University of Kent said that

there was “an element of fraud in journalism education and Universities are conning students by accepting them on journalism courses when they have no realistic prospect of working in the profession.

There is a certain truth to this but that can be addressed by changing the content of courses more in line with the skills that are required.The emphasis on shorthand for example needs to be looked at and the career path of preparing a student for a trainee ship on a paper must also be examined.

These should be replaced by the cottage industry skills of blogging and freelancing as well as using social media for promotion.

Another possibility would be to combine journalism with another skill so that the aspiring journalist is no longer "jack of all trades master of none" but has a subject area with which to write.

Course leaders reading this will say that we are in a employment blip but there are structural changes taking place and universities need to adapt and tailor their output to them.

A worrying time but take heart

Whilst waiting for my journalism degree results,reading this in the Guardian is rather worrying this morning.

Up to 40,000 of this year's graduates will still be struggling to find work in six months' time, according to figures compiled for the Guardian that reveal the scale of the recession's impact on the class of 2009.
The number of new graduates out of work will double compared with last year if unemployment trends follow those of the last recession, careers experts predict.

But whatever happens and I have some things in the pipeline,I take heart from Seth Godwin who gives some tips for idle hands

* Spend twenty hours a week running a project for a non-profit.
* Teach yourself Java, HTML, Flash, PHP and SQL. Not a little, but mastery.
* Volunteer to coach or assistant coach a kids sports team.
* Start, run and grow an online community.
* Give a speech a week to local organizations.
* Write a regular newsletter or blog about an industry you care about.
* Learn a foreign language fluently.
* Write three detailed business plans for projects in the industry you care about.
* Self-publish a book.
* Run a marathon.

I am not sure about the last one but the others are all good advice and am doing some already.

Be careful what you write

We have heard the case of the Independent Herald and Times taking away journalist's identities as they move their online archives.

However it can sometimes work the other way as this post over at the Chronicle of Higher Education tells that as

college papers have begun digitizing their back issues, their Web sites have become the latest front in the battle over online identities.

Why?

Youthful activities that once would have disappeared into the recesses of a campus library are now preserved on the public record, to be viewed with skeptical eyes by an adult world of colleagues and potential employers. Alumni now in that world are contacting newspapers with requests for redaction. For unlike Facebook profiles — that other notable source of young-adult embarrassment — the ability to remove or edit questionable content in these cases is out of the author's hands.

Essential skills for journalism training

Frédéric Filloux in his Monday note takes a look at the issue of journalism training.

Comparing the attitudes of this year's crop whom he sees as far more realistically centred he concludes that five areas should be considered when training journalists

1. Production skills. Scripting, staging a story are now key elements in modern journalistic storytelling.

2. Dealing with complexity, handling datasets, from public statistics to GIS. These are key instruments to spread knowledge in an increasingly visual society.
3. Enroll pure technologies competences. Journalists need to learn how to deal with techies. Cross-pollination between the two is crucial.

4. Encourage nerdy tendencies among students or rookies journalists. In doing so, they will dramatically increase their employability.

5. Teach them how to sell their work, skills, passion. This ranges from setting pro-like blogs to — yes — creating their own tiny company, the commercial vehicle for rising above the crowd and monetizing their work.

A vast opportunity but first you need a business plan

I think that Christopher Wink has got this spot on when he looks at the market for the young journalist.

Job prospects are rare and uniquely competitive now.
So, of course, it’s the perfect time to start your own venture. Will it fail? Maybe, but when you’re young, with fewer responsibilities, the chance at making something of your own is a wonderful one.
But first things first, you need to be able to write a business plan

It is strange that more journalism courses don't teach something of this aspect but perhaps the changing environment will produce some new ideas

Ht-Josh Halliday

Pick up the phone

Student journalists seem reluctant to use the phone prefering the keyboard.

Tim Luckhurst writes at his centre for journalism that (ht-Judith Townend

An important message has emerged from my recent discussions with Kent Messenger Group editors, news editors and reporters. Centre for Journalism students are wonderful and very talented. The KM Group is delighted to have you, but there is always room for improvement and in this case it involves use of the telephone.

It is,I hasten to add not just journalism students but people in general.Email and social network personal messaging has taken the fear factor out of personal contact.People know longer have to justify their action,instead they can hide behind the keyboard.

I'm not a luddite,technology has a massive part to play in our new media society but let it never take the place of personal contact either by phone or face to face.

Time to face the real world

It is coming to that time when the real world taps one on the shoulder as three years at journalism school is rapidly ending.

Having seen the news at first hand from writing this blog,it is not going to be the best time to be trying to enter the profession but I take heart from this posting over at journalism.co.uk by Michael Haddon who is a postgraduate student of Newspaper Journalism at City University London.

We all have to take a realistic - but not pessimistic - assessment of the way things stand. I’m sure that many young graduates will give up and get out of the game, but I love journalism too much to do that. Thoughts of walking into one of the best graduate schemes are gone and the aim must be making sure we are best placed for that elusive job which should eventually show up. I plan to continue blogging, interacting using Twitter and revitalising that LinkedIn presence where a personal profile might be able to help career ambitions.

I agree with Michael's analysis.It is not going to be a question of walking into graduate jobs,it is going to be a process of networking,probaly internships and hopefully some freelancing.

I am alos working on a project myself of which more soon but for those that are getting disheartened,my advice is to stand back and take a realistic look at the prospects.

Most importantly don't throw away the skills you have learnt in the previous years

People need to persevere with journalism degrees

only a liar without a conscience can pretend that many of them will succeed.

Tim Luckhurst writes in the Indy this morning on the continuing rise in students wanting to learn journalism at college.

But they must persevere as

society has never had more urgent need of reporters with advanced academic, professional and technical skills. Serious journalism is the lifeblood of democracy. It keeps powerful institutions under pressure to be honest and informs popular choice on crucial issues.

The time to tackle over capacity in student journalism

Journalists exercise power. Ideally, they exercise that power on behalf of the powerless. If they know nothing about what it is like to be powerless themselves, they may come to exercise their considerable power on behalf of the already powerful.

Ht-Adrian Monck

An extract from a reply from Cary Tennis to a journalism tutor having doubts about teaching the profession when there are no jobs to send the students to.

It is an interesting question.Of course no degree can guarantee a job at the end but there is a wider question at the end of this that doesn't just relate to journalism.

Surely our learning centres should align their output to the job market and the skills required.

Journalism courses have expanded rapidly over the past few years and yet there has been no similar expansion of the job market.

Yes there will be the argument that a degree is a degree and will teach life skills but a journalism degree like a medical degree teaches job specific skills.

With today's debate on increasing student fees,maybe this is the time to tackle supply and demand?

Only make journalism a career for the love and not the money

“I became a journalist out of love for writing and it still continues. This medium does not bring in money. Money can be earned only through blackmail or yellow journalism. Students should make journalism as their career only if service is their motto, not money.

Those are the words of K.B. Ganapathy who is editor in chief of the Star of Mysore, published from the south Indian city of Mysore,and he gives the following tips for jourmalists Ht-Sans Serif

1) Develop a healthy curiosity about everything

2) Aspire for a high level of general knowledge

3) Use your common sense

4) Develop the reading habit and read vociferously

5) Develop a rich vocabulary but show restraint in how you use it

6) Be confident but do not think only you are right

7) Avoid bias in spite of having to write bitter facts

8) Evaluate yourself regularly, and

9) Learn to work as part of a team.

Vocational or wise-the choice for student journalists

I am torn by the comments of Nick Davies which have been reported by Press Gazette today.

The author of Flat Earth News has caused a stir in his comments at City University

there is a danger with the courses: there are now hundreds of them which claim to teach these skills, but a great many of them are genuine crap, taught by people who haven't the faintest idea of how to do the job."

and

dismissed suggestions made recently by Eastern Daily Press deputy editor Paul Durrant that vocational training was more important than a degree for aspiring journalists.

Coming to the end of three years of a journalism degree,I have certainly been taught the vocational skills required for a journalism degree.

Being a mature student I have an advantage in coming into the university with world wise skills and deep knowledge of certain subjects.I do not have to reach for google every time that I want to write about something.

Where the system fails and this is not necessarily the fault of the university is that a lot of students don't come with that knowledge.I would put that down to a general failing of the education system which is geared to results and not to acquiring knowledge.

From the point of view of potential employers,surely they would prefer new journalists to come equipped with the vocational skills rather than have to invest in teaching those themselves.

However they would also want to see that potential applicants have a knowledge of the topics that they are going to be writing about.

A balance is required?

Advice for journos-live likes rats

That is at least according to Michael Miner who according to CJR was worried

he’d have nothing to tell the young, aspiring journalists at an upcoming panel discussion. After talking to a fellow journalism vet, he’s come up with this advice:

Live like rats, I’ll tell the kids, and in time there’ll be some cheese.

Things that student journalists should know

Take a look at Mindy McAdam's piece on what student journalists should know as they enter the work place.

Her results come from a survey at a recent job fair and the three answers that scored the highest were

1. Diverse skills: multimedia storytelling, including audio and video; Web-first reporting; report/write for both printed publication and online

2. Writing skills: writing on deadline; writing brief and fast, including for Web site; attention to grammar, spelling, clarity, organization

3. Curiosity and enthusiasm

Some other interesting things came out of the survey.Asked why people should still consider journalism in this difficult times the response was that skills of a journalist will always be in demand regardless of format and that journalists forfilled an important role in society.

Finally interestingly it was suggested by many respondants that freelancing was an important way of getting a foot in the door