Employability.
Our experience relates to the media sector, but I believe it is of wider relevance within
subject areas which are concerned with professional practice and the more vocational fields
of HE.
1) Some context: Formal training in journalism of any kind did not begin in Britain until
the 1950s, although it has a long history in the US. The curriculum for training was
laid down in Britain by the National Council for the Training of Journalists - NCTJ –
jointly established in 1952 by the Guild and society of newspaper editors, the
newspaper society representing proprietors, and the journalists’ unions.
This consisted of newspaper journalism, media law, public administration and
shorthand. The NCTJ acted as a clearing house for would-be entrants to journalism,
matching the numbers allowed on to courses to the number of traineeships offered
in any year by local newspapers.
The courses were delivered on day or block release at FE colleges and supplemented
on the job learning. The lecturers, had to be approved by the NCTJ, which insisted
that they were former journalists.
Employment was virtually guaranteed for ‘graduates’ as trainees on local weekly and
daily papers. I say graduates, but the level of qualifications were really siting
somewhere between GCSE and A level – or in my day, O and A level
This system started to fragment in the 1980s, when national newspapers started
recruiting university graduates directly rather than taking journalists who had started
on local papers and some groups – Thomson Newspapers; Westminster Press; Mirror
Group – started their own in-housetraining schemes. University graduates going into
journalism in the 1970s and 80s and even the 90s, would be ‘apprenticed’ or
‘indentured’ for two years as trainees and had to pass NCTJ – or similar – exams
before they went on to a ‘senior’s’ wage and status.
2) Higher Education programmes in journalism, rather than craft training, really began
with a post-graduate diploma at City University in the 1970s, but undergraduate and
masters level journalism programmes only really started in the 1990s and now there
are around 60, mainly post-92- Universities delivering them.
However, many of these have been modelled on the old NCTJ curriculum, and
indeed, have taken NCTJ accreditation because that is what local newspaper editors
wanted in their recruits – that is what they had gone through themselves and that is
what they understood. Few local newspaper editors were graduates, many were
scornful of critical media studies courses, most saw on-the-job training as the ideal.
3) But the world was changing. Local newspapers were no longer the virtually exclusive
pipeline into journalism that they had been. People who wanted to be journalists
were going straight to national papers, to magazines, to broadcasters, to new digital
media platforms. PR agencies were recruiting people who specialised in PR and did
not necessarily have a local paper or journalism background.
4) Media careers in general PR – advertising – film – TV – publishing - were becoming
more and more characteristic of the liquid life conceptualised by Zygmunt Bauman:
precarious; project-based; risky. They might involve periods of employment with a
classic modern organisation such as a newspaper publisher or broadcaster. But they
were also likely to include periods of unemployment, of short-term project-based
work; of freelance work.
Journalism was changing – technologically, socially, culturally, commercially - it was
moving onto new platforms, there were new ways to tell stories, it was becoming
interactive; it was becoming more of a conversation than a broadcast; audiences
were becoming collaborators in producing journalism – and even competitors for
journalists – and traditional journalists’ jobs were being cut-back, casualised,
outsourced…
5) In April this year the Huffington Post was awarded a Pulitzer prize.
6) But most of the people delivering journalism education at universities were, like me,
former journalists, the NCTJ, run by former-provincial paper journalists continued to
insist on their accredited courses offering ‘traditional’ course content with added
digital extras - even though the model of providing trainees for local newspapers was
broken – they were no longer the main people giving our graduates jobs.
7) Journalism educators in HE did recognise the need for change – but the debate
continued to be framed largely by the employers and in terms of ‘adding new skills
elements’ to our courses – video shooting and editing, the ability to build a website
– audio recording – photography – social media … but keeping the rest.
8) Luckily, we at Newcastle only started to offer MAs in Media and Journalism and
Media and PR in 2006, so we were not tied to this model and could, and did, go our
own way.
9) From the start, we maintained a strong academic, theoretical grounding as well as
the more vocational, professional practice elements. We offer masters level
qualifications, not training in journalism, or PR. Today – it can be argued that every
organisation is a media organisation – every organisation needs communicators.
Our graduates can apply their professional skills and knowledge in any such
organisation, public or private, or take up a completely different career supported by
masters level qualifications – or take an academic trajectory if they wish to go on to
a PhD.
10) Zygmunt Bauman’s conceptualisation of liquidity was brought home in terms of the
media work environment by a conversation I had with a senior BBC executive:
She said that when recruiting, they wanted to ‘‘identify creative people who would be very
good at what they did with the BBC’ but could ‘be equally be very good at working for
someone else or themselves’.
And by a presentation to a conference I attended by Marc Harrison, head of digital at BBC
Vision – the TV bit of the corporation – in 2009. The people he was looking for will be:
‘multi-skilled, but not predictable patterns of multi-skilling . . . Production teams will
gather in creative clusters round projects rather than programmes . . . I am looking for
creative people . . . the most valuable quality will be the ability to walk into a team,
adapt to the needs of the project and acquire the skills needed . . . When I was head of
Arts at the BBC, I had young producers whose big ambition was to produce a perfect
Arena programme. I told them that I was doing that 30 years ago ‘you need to bring the
creativity you use in your home life to a production for the BBC . . . I am looking for
mindset, rather than skill-set.’
All very exciting – but he is still talking about precarious, project-based, short-term work.
So when dealing with employers:
We need to recognise that:
a) Their interests are not necessarily those of our students or of wider society and can
conflict with those of our students and society at large.. They want tame junior
recruits, but our students might be better starting their own enterprise – in
competition with them.
b) Employers seek job-specific skills today which may be redundant tomorrow – and
they often undervalue - or scorn - the wider critical, theoretical understanding of the
media field that equips new entrants to the sector to understand the wider role of
journalism in society, its complexities, its changing trajectories.
c) Employers’ interests are varying and complex and it is not appropriate to
conceptualise ‘employers’ as a homogenous group
d) And who are ‘the employers’ – My students have gone on to work in Sky News, the
BBC, the Times of India, China Daily – and in NGOs, marketing agencies, art galleries,
schools and on cruise liners – which have TV and Radio studios, intranet sites and
daily newspapers.
e) But employers – whoever they are – also value work experience in candidates.
So – how did we approach employability in this context?
To prepare our students for this liquid world – but also for traditional employment
contexts:
1) We reconstructed one of our key modules – Multimedia J P&P.
We ran it over two semesters, packed the gaining of a range of skills into the first
semester and in the second, students worked in groups on multimedia projects – in
which they were explicitly told that they had to be innovative, think of new ways to
engage audiences – bring to the project more than we had taught them.
The ‘Creative clusters – innovative – mind-set, rather than skill-set’ that the BBC’s
Tony Harrison sought!
2) We introduced series of master classes in enterprise – to open up to students the
possibility of starting their own media enterprise rather than simply working for an
employer or simply working freelance for an organisation. We developed this, with
David Butler of Fine Art, into a module in enterprise and entrepreneurialism in the
creative sector that is going to feature in the cross-SACS MA in Creative Practice
beginning in September, and available to our students.
These opportunities, I believe, also enhances their attractiveness to potential
employers – who might see them as competitors if they do not take them on – but
can also see benefits in having employees who take an entrepreneurial approach to
producing media, as the industry moves from an industrial to an entrepreneurial
model in need of innovators.
3) We started a new MA – MA in International Multi-media Journalism – which does
not have a traditional dissertation in the third semester, but is delivered in
conjunction with the Press Association – which has a training division here in
Newcastle where industry-based tutors in professional practice, deliver modules
in advanced reporting, video journalism and online journalism. So those who take
this programme emerge with high-level industry-relevant professional skills and
knowledge– AND the innovative, creative approaches to producing media content
and engaging with audiences that we deliver on-campus.
4) Work experience. – As I have mentioned, employers and students both value this,
but it can be problematic in terms of necessitating blocks of absence from
coursework, the administrative load of arranging it and maintaining some control
over the experience and its value.
Mark Hanna and Karen Sanders at Sheffield University found that the number of
students who were sure they wished to be journalists fell from 75% on arrival to 53%
on graduation and cited turn-off factors such as poor pay; cynical employers;
insecurity; difficulty of career progression; perception of journalism in practice as
boring, routinized; not creative and with limited opportunities to write
autonomously. Such perceptions resulted from work experience spells on lodal
papers.
And researchers have found that ‘internship and work experiences that include a
high degree of variety, feedback and opportunities to deal with others may be more
effective for progressing through the career development process than experiences
without these qualities’.
1) So - we started our own media enterprise – Jesmond Local – to give students
continuous work experience in a real-world environment throughout their course –
and provide a ‘laboratory of inquiry’ in which they can experiment with - and we can
research - new ways of doing journalism and engaging audiences and exploring new
digital delivery platforms .
This is led by a former Guardian journalist – Ian Wylie. He is primarily a business
journalists who lives in Jesmond and he now works freelance – primarily for titles
such as the Economist, Monocle Magazine in the US and the FT. So our students
have the opportunity throughout their course to work with a first rate practitioner.
2) We have developed our students’ experience with Jesmond Local further by holding
‘journalism bootcamps’ – our students work with interested people who live in
Jesmond to tell their stories in interesting ways using new media platforms. This
allows our students to interrogate and experience ways of working which are in line
with the ways in which media work is developing.
The sharing of skills, collaborative models of journalism, valuing journalism as a process
and a community resource, rather than the traditional industrial model which places
value primarily in the product – (story / broadcast, feature, documentary).
In the traditional industrial model, for commercial media, the community it addresses is
essentially commodified as a package to be sold on to advertisers. So the community
model which we are exploring is a very different type of journalism and our students are
aware of the different relationship which they are developing with the audience – if that
is any longer an appropriate word – that they might develop on a local paper pr
commercial TV station.
But the traditional model is under stress – sales of local papers are rapidly declining, and
the industry is very much aware of this. So employers are interested in what our
students are doing and the ways in which they are exploring new ways to do journalism.
As far as we can tell, all those students who have worked on Jesmond Local and
graduated up to last year have found work – I have every confidence that those who
graduate this year will as well.
The industry is very curious about what has become known as hyper-local journalism,
and institutions searching for new ways to do journalism want to benefit from our
students’ knowledge and experience. One graduate last year now works for the BBC
here in Newcastle (she was also offered an interview with Sky Tyne and Wear – the new
online local journalism project piloted up here) – but the BBC wants her to carry on
working with JL because they see benefits in that.
This is not the kind of thing which we alone are doing in this university – I know Law has a
street law advice project which is also immersing their students I a project which develops
and explores different models of the profession and its relationships with communities.
By offering these opportunities as voluntary options, rather than compulsory elements of
the course, they also become self-selecting – students who work on them are the ones who
are most committed to the subject and to developing their career. So while we are giving
them a helping hand, we are also giving those who might be better prospects for employers
in any case the opportunity better to demonstrate those qualities when they enter the job
market, and helping them to put something out of the ordinary and intriguing on their CV.
One current project which has grown out of the Jesmond Local journalism bootcamps has
been a collaboration between our students working on their multimedia journalism project
next semester and West Jesmond Primary School – whose students produce a weekly ‘radio
programme’.
That should also attract attention and look good on a CV.
3) We also launched a mentoring project with journalism students at five NE
universities and journalists on the BBC NE and Cumbria.
The project has grown out of an ESRC-funded seminar series which we have been
running from Newcastle for a couple of years on expanding ethnic diversity in the
news industry workforce.
The aim of the mentoring project is to enhance the ‘week ties’ which Mark
Granovetter discovered to be so valuable in building the sort of networks and social
capital which enhance – in this case - our students’ prospects in the field of media
work.
We are in process of evaluating the project so we can learn lessons from it and,
hopefully, roll it out to other areas.
While these developments have been designed to enhance employability for our
students, they have also both grown out of and informed my own research and given
rise to a series of publications, which have raised the profile of the university in the field
of journalism education, put me in a useful position for the forthcoming RAF submission
and informed the design and delivery of our programmes here.
Finally – Post Leveson, there is of course an interest in the cultures and ethics of
journalism. A colleague and I have just submitted a paper, Journalism Education after
Leveson, in which we propose the adoption of the Aristotelian concept of Phronesis –
‘practical wisdom’ – for developing a deliberative, dialogical approach to the
development of ethical professional practice. This emerges from reflexive practice –
which is not easy to put in place in a workplace context on a conventional universitybased programme.
But through engagement in professional practice with projects such as Jesmond Local
and the dialogical opportunities which arise on such projects and through mentoring
relationships, it is possible to develop a degree of practical wisdom, phronesis, on
courses which feed in to the professions – courses in which Newcastle University, has
long excelled.