bonaldi.me

Me, on Twitter yesterday:

Got another email from new print journalism student. Is it even ethical to have a new intake? Might as well be a Philosophy degree

Adrian Monk, former head of journalism at City, a month ago:

[Potential journalism students] should be informed of the jobs crisis within journalism

Tim Luckhurst, former Scotsman editor, and head of journalism at Kent:

“[The majority of courses] at an undergraduate and post-graduate level are essentially worthless”

Both of them quoted in this piece from journalism.co.uk which says that, apart from Bournemouth and Kingston, no undergrad course has more than 40% of journalism grads working in media-associated professions within six months of graduation.

That’s worse than the latest figures for architects, which have just 49.5% working in the field six months after graduation. The Unistats (body run by UCAS and hotcourses) figures for the big four journalism courses do work out largely like it says:

Luckhurst talks about post-graduate courses as well, however. I can’t find the figures for Kent. Maybe his courses are worthless, but the others really aren’t:

So … undergrad journalism doesn’t really get you anywhere –– in fact, as a putatively vocational degree, it probably does more harm than an avowedly useless but challenging generic humanities degree. If you want a journalism job, do a postgrad, preferably at Strathclyde. Which is how it’s always been, really. Many of the best journalists I know came from the Strathclyde course, and it’d be both a disaster and surprising if they weren’t finding jobs.

Still, those are the 2008 figures, and the really swingeing cuts in newsrooms didn’t begin in earnest until the end of 2008. Next year’s figures are going to be worse — there’s hardly anywhere for those postgrad figures to go but down anyway.

More importantly, even if they do find jobs, though, the newsrooms they work in are going to be much poorer places to start careers from. There have been waves of layoffs, so instead of learning from experienced colleagues they’re going to get thrown in at the deep end. The people who would be able to help them are busy and few.

When I started subbing, received wisdom was it took two years to make a sub-editor you could let loose on something important. It might not be as long as that, but there’s no question that you do a tonne more learning after you start than before. It took years before I worked on a splash story. At my last paper, the dedicated sub for the front page had been in the job for a decade, and there wasn’t a sub quite like him; you couldn’t help but learn from his editing. Only rarely did anyone else get a look in. Then he took redundancy, and by 2009 we were so short on staff we gave splash stories to casuals and new starts who’d barely been subbing for six months.

The same month, a reporter came in on work experience, a 21-year-old who had just graduated from the same philosophy course I’d been on, and got six stories in the paper, including a page lead. On her first day.

So, yes, the figures aren’t quite as bad as journalism.co.uk makes out, but they don’t tell the whole story. Undergrad journalism really might as well be philosophy for all the vocational help it’s going to be, but you can still get a job if you do a post-graduate course. It’ll just be a job, though, not the start of a new career in print.

It’s already too late to get into the world of journalism, because if it hasn’t already vanished at your paper, it’s just about to.

UPDATE: I’d forgotten about this gem. “Come, fill the voids left at The Herald and Evening Times after we culled everyone, and get ‘gold standard’ training in how to put out a paper with no staff.” Not to say there’s no gold there, but it’s not the people with time to go and give lectures.