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comment Hack Hell: do we really need more journalism graduates? The UK Graduate Careers Survey 2005, or High Fliers survey, shows that this year both journalism and teaching are tied for the most popular professional destinations for university leavers. Of the respondents, 12.7% indicated they would go into either profession. Who would not argue that Britain needs more teachers? Not many, I would have thought. But journalists? Do we really need any more of them? Whereas statistics for aspiring teachers may have possibly been bolstered in recent years by governmental training incentives, the same cannot be said of journalists. Journalists spit out £3,000 to study for NCTJ qualifications; teachers, however, can expect to lap up double that figure in postgraduate training bursaries. Teachers and journalists may indeed be the graduate survey’s highest fliers this year. But whereas aspiring educational instructors may have chosen a grounded, reliable career, some wannabe hacks are flying, like Icarus, dangerously close to a scorching sun, blinded by their high hopes of attaining their dream job. The unfortunate fact is that journalism is a lot of other people’s dream as well. Despite the fact that since 2002 the numbers of graduate journalists have not been specifically listed in research publications, competition for places in the industry has been consistently fierce. According to the ‘What do Graduates Do?’ survey 2004, of 2002’s six month-old graduates, only 1.1% of Media Studies students were journalists. Four years earlier, by contrast, 3.6% of the 2,034 strong Media Studies graduating class were. That’s a mere 73 new journalists. According to the Labour Market Information Team at Graduate Prospects, data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency's First Destination Survey shows that among all UK first-time graduates from 2001, 425 (0.2%) stated that they were working as journalists in Britain six months after graduating. It is fair to assume that this year’s survey – which reveals that only 2.8% of graduates went into artistic and literary occupations in 2003 – would probably reveal, percentage-wise, a similarly low journalist population. Aren’t we exaggerating the competition to get into the profession, though? Unlikely. According to UCAS, in July 2004, journalism applications were up by 16.2% from the same period the year before. Although final figures for applications and course acceptances will not be available until mid-July, it is probable that we will see the new figures surpass last year’s again. You don’t have to be an Oxbridge Mathematician to realise that too many people have caught the bug – journalism courses and students are spreading like the plague. But where there is a boom, there must be a bust. So is the journalism degree bubble likely to burst any time soon? If my experience on my student magazine is anything to go by, for the sake of journalism I sincerely hope so. Perversely, I think I will always cherish the memory, in my duties as a sub-editor, of having to spend whole weekends grinding through countless horrendously written articles – replacing errant, or absent, apostrophes, reworking poorly constructed sentences, and correcting grammatical faux pas… It is curious to learn, however, that although application numbers for journalism courses are researchable and calculable, there is no recent data available on the number of journalists currently working in the UK. The most up-to-date figures were released three years ago by Publishing NTO in ‘Journalists at Work’, an illuminating 68-page survey of the industry. Commissioned by the Journalism Training Forum, the survey found that there were between 60,000 and 70,000 journalists in Britain in 2002. However, according to Kim Fletcher, former editorial director of the Telegraph and author of the recently published Journalist’s Handbook, the NUJ “reckons to have a third of all journalists in Britain and Ireland as members. There are 34,000 in the NUJ,” he says “which puts the journalistic population of the British Isles at just over 100,000”. Given such contradictory figures, it’s hard to know how many journalists there are. Perhaps they are hiding, afraid or reluctant to help the innumerable wannabes primed to step onto the first rung of the ladder. This idea is not that far fetched. Journalists have themselves written that the task of training new recruits is increasingly being handed from newspapers to the universities. This is probably due to the findings of the 1997 Dearing Report, in which employers recommended that all students should get some form of work experience before leaving university. It seems the practice of organising one’s own work experience has become so engrained into work culture that some newspapers have slashed their investments in trainees. Kate Simon, mother of the NUJ chapel for The Independent says that the paper spends very little on formal training. “The only person I am aware of who has had any training in the last few years,” she says, “was a relative of the chief executive officer.” Nepotism? No, surely not. You can’t accuse journalism of that. What you could accuse journalism of, though, is advertently or inadvertently, encouraging young people to squeeze into an industry they think of as colourful, glamorous and full of celebrity. Most of the time it is not. It seems apposite, in light of the popularity of teaching this year, that journalism and those seeking to enter it, could each do with being taught a lesson. |
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current graduate fashion for teaching is evident: figures released
by the Graduate Teacher Training Registry (GTTR) show a 4% rise
in the number of graduates applying for teaching posts between 2004
and 2005.