Brian Cathcart, professor of journalism at Kingston University London, on what the UK government’s cuts and plans for university fees will mean for journalism:
Of all the professions, journalism is surely among the most vulnerable when it comes to the kind of touch cost-benefit analysis that school leavers and parents will have to do in a world of higher fees. Undeniably, the news industry is in existential crisis: yes, it offers thrilling new possibilities, but it is distinctly short on security.
In this environment, whatever Vince Cable and Nick Clegg may say, poorer students – by which I mean students who are not middle class – are more likely to back away than risk the big debts that will accompany a journalism degree.
The next generation of journalists, therefore, will probably have just the same social profile as the generation currently supplying us with news, even though the country around us will have changed.
The video is available at this link (no embed available unfortunately) and features answers on paying for news online (“Charging for news is incredibly expensive”) and journalists’ need for business savvy (“Every reporter should understand what the options are as to how you tell a story and how much do those options cost”).
Online journalism needs to be “of the web” not “for the web; journalism in the future must have a better understanding of the processes and business underwriting it and journalists must build relevancy and trust, she says.
In rebuilding – or rebooting – journalism, digital technologies are central to the solution, and not as many would have them, the source of the problem.As journalists, facing our own “Wapping moment”, we must examine some of the foundation stones of journalism and build better. We can acknowledge and perpetuate what is good about the best of our craft, but there is in truth so much opportunity to improve. We do not want to sustain parts of the business that need not a new model, but a sledgehammer. When we rebuild journalism we want it to be a more diverse and inclusive than the parts of the profession we have all at some point worked for. A rebuilt journalism has to hold power to account, but be accountable and transparent itself.
Rebuilt journalism has to be sustainable and not carry with it the extraordinary and untenable fixed costs of the past. It has to understand how to uphold free speech and tell stories in a world where protecting sources is evermore complicated. Rebuilt journalism has to use new ways to re-engage a generation alienated by old formats and for who screen-based portable devices bring the world to them. It has to live in a world of scarcer resource by understanding how to create production efficiencies, and measuring and understanding the impact of its output.
There has been plenty of discussion about moving digital journalism forward at the World Editors Forum this week, and the first panel debate today looked at the state of new media training and how editors can improve the teaching of their staff to enable full exploitation of the new media environment.
The number one motivator for success is “I need to learn”. You need to tell staff there is a reason why you’re getting the training, it’s because we need to move the organisation from here to here. Give them the reasons to learn, give them the background.
He added that “training cannot stop”.
We do not have the luxury of declaring victory and moving on, this is not mission accomplished. What your staff are telling us is that they need direction, they need goals.
Up next was Joyce Barnathan, president of the International Center for Journalists. In her speech she gave four recommendations to editors in summary below:
Train your staff to engage your readers. In her example of Malaysiakini.com, the site found that whenever citizen journalists posted their videos on the site “the web traffic would just shoot up”. Now the site relies on its citizens to surface stories and editors are able to cover under-represented communities.
Train your staff to use new tools – “let me tell you that the benefit of a free web is that there are free resources that you can take full advantage of to make your website more interactive. Don’t have to have a huge budget to gain access to the technology” e.g. Factual, Dataviz.org, Google fusion tables, Wordle.
Train your staff to be experts in areas of intense interest to your readers – Expert reporters are able to find great stories in their field that others may not.
She echoed Finberg in saying that media training is “a moving target”.
You can feel that you’ve learned the tools to get by today, but there are new tools coming out tomorrow. Journalism can be enhanced in this technological area and we can be better journalists if we embrace the new tools and new partnerships.
Finally the conference heard from Tarek Atia, media training manager for the Media Development Programme in Egypt which organises donor programs which have helped to train more than 4000 journalists in four years.
His lessons to trainers were:
It helps to be a journalist.
Certificates matter.
Be patient – “if we had thought after the first 10-20 workshops on the idea of local media, this isn’t working, then we wouldn’t be where we are today, which is that all of a sudden after two or three years of these courses, in late 2008, suddenly there was a breakthrough and several newspapers started producing local editions.”
Online journalists should check out this really useful post by Ed Walker, online communities editor for Media Wales, looking at some important questions surrounding the legal challenges for online news outlets.
Prompted by a bit of media law refresher training, Walker refers to three scenarios in particular, which were put to him during training and undoubtedly reflect events in newsrooms on a daily basis:
What to do when faced with a rolling crime news story: how should you cover each new piece of information? How can you ensure the content on your site is contemporaneous?
How should you use content from social media, if at all. How should journalists be using social networks? Is it fair to use quotes from comments on people’s walls? What about photographs? Who would the copyright belong to?
How should you deal with comments on stories? Should you pre or post-moderate? Should every story be allowed them? Should journalists respond?
The value of industry body accreditation in journalism has been at the centre of debate this week, following a meeting of the NCTJ’s cross-media accreditation board last week, where members raised concerns about the impact of potential education funding cuts on the journalism industry.
Quoted in a report from the NCTJ Professor Richard Tait, director of the Centre of Journalism Studies at Cardiff University, argued that accredited courses must be protected in the face of cuts.
While the NCTJ is quite right to insist on sufficient resources and expertise so that skills are properly taught and honed, education is a competitive market, and NCTJ courses are expensive to run. In the likely cuts ahead, it is vital for accredited courses to retain their funding so that they are not forced to charge students exorbitant fees; otherwise, diversity will be further compromised.
Speaking to Journalism.co.uk about his comments further this week, Tait said he was voicing real concerns that courses which meet industry standards may be more at risk because of their expense:
There has been a huge expansion of courses about journalism and about the media, but not all of them are accredited. These are not real journalism courses, they are journalism studies courses. There’s nothing wrong with them at all, some of them are very good courses, but they are not a professional training of journalists.
It’s really important that whatever happens to journalism education we protect those courses that provide this professional training of the journalists of the future.
If you’re running a journalism course that does not have a digital newsroom, does not teach videojournalism or students how to report online or what podcasts are, what’s the use of that? Some universities have invested heavily in these areas. But when money gets short people will say “do we really need this digital newsroom, do we need to teach shorthand etc”. There is a danger of people saying “frankly bad courses might be cheaper”.
Just days after the meeting, Brian McNair, former professor of journalism at Strathclyde University and now working at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, happened to discuss his decision to pull Strathclyde’s journalism course out of NCTJ accreditation in 2008 in a post on allmediascotland. His comments, which were picked up by media commentator Roy Greenslade, have since prompted huge debate about the value of the body. In his post McNair said accreditation is not enough:
In a world where (…) the supply of traditional journalism jobs has fallen by as much as 30 per cent (and those that remain are scandalously low-paid), the high flying journalist of the future needs more than NCTJ certificates in Public Affairs and Media Law to get on. He, or she, needs talent, imagination, a spirit of independence, an understanding of IT and social networking and their impact on media, culture and society in general; everything in short, that the NCTJ curriculum squeezed out with its relentless stress on externally-decreed learning by rote.
Many, maybe most, successful journalists never passed an NCTJ exam. NCTJ-certified journalists are being sacked, perhaps as I write, sometimes by editors who sit on NCTJ boards and declare their allegiance to the “gold standard” of training. The old world of print journalism in which the NCTJ was formed is passing into history, replaced by content-generating users, citizen journalists and all those journalistic wannabees who make up the globalised, digitised public sphere in the 21st century.
But while Tait reiterated McNair’s call for talent to be the measure of a journalist, he insisted that accreditation is a vital tool for students:
The problem is that there are a huge number of courses which have got the magic word journalism in them. If you’re a student and you’re looking at this multiplicity of courses and trying to work out what one is up to a certain standard, that’s absolutely essential.
What you’re already seeing in journalism is that it is becoming a profession where who you know is becoming more important than what you know. It should be about talent. I think that if you don’t have the accreditation process, the rigorous approval of courses by accreditation bodies, how can the students work out what to do?
What do you think? Let us know in the comments or by voting in the poll below:
Niles ha previously claimed that locally-owned publications today have cost advantages which outweigh the “economies of scale” of national chains of local publishers. But pushed by a reader to come up with advantages for national chains which could make them more profitable, he puts forward two ideas as a starting point for further debate, shown in summary below.
National training
A smart, focused national training program could help reduce the time it takes a local editor to produce an engaging website. Local website publishers who don’t have access to such training will take longer to get up to speed.
Search engine optimization
A national chain can give its local publishers an advantage by arranging for aggressive cross-linking among its sites. That creates a potentially huge number of inbound links, helping push the chain’s sites ahead of its local competitors. In addition, by building a national brand for local news, the chain might be able to elicit more in-bound links to its sites from outside the network.
Great post of ideas from Alfred Hermida, assistant professor at the University of British Columbia’s graduate school of journalism, on how journalism schools should approach the teaching of social media, from newsgathering and verifying social media channels to managing an online presence as a professional.
Teaching social media is more than showing students the mechanics of Twitter. Rather, they should learn how to build a network of relevant followers and how to interact with them to be a better journalist.
In the classroom, we need to stress that social media technologies do not just offer journalists new ways of doing old things. They offer the potential to explore new ways of telling stories, of collaborating and connecting with audiences, of rethinking how we do journalism.
The National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) is offering sports journalism trainees the opportunity to report on this season’s football play-off finals as part of a new arrangement with the Football League.
The sporting body is sponsoring a new award for the best performing candidates in the NCTJ’s sport journalism exam. The winner of the award will cover the Championship play-offs, while second and third place will report from the League One and League Two play-offs respectively.
The winners for the 2009-10 exam will be announced next month. Candidates for the forthcoming academic year will have the chance to report from the 2011/12 season play-offs.
Robert Niles, writing on the Online Journalism Review site, offers five top tips for students about to embark on a journalism course at university or college in the coming weeks.
In summary, his recommendations are:
Don’t believe that journalism school will help you prepare for your career. Why? Because your journalism career’s already started.
Audience equals power for journalism job-seekers. Start building your own online straight away.
Your career is only as strong as your network. Follow the right people.
Pursue your passion, and develop expertise within it. Become an expert in a field that stirs your passion.
Conduct yourself as a journalist, at all times.
The overall message from Niles is for students to use the internet to make their own opportunities – “never wait for someone to hire you before starting to work”.
Journalism students at a US university will be given iPads during their course to help them learn to file multimedia news stories from the latest technologies.
Course professor Bill Celis says the students will be encouraged to “push the boundaries” of the device in their production of multimedia journalism.
“Students can file stories from the field that include audio and slideshows. I’m teaching the same vital journalism skills I’ve always taught while ensuring the students have experience in the latest and emerging technologies.”