What
Tuesday, December 4th, 2007November is obviously media month. During the past week alone, I’ve been to Sheffield, Bristol, Cheltenham and London. Would have been Nottingham too, but Riva took that one.
Yes, I know that the Periodicals Training Council and the National Council for the Training of Journalists ought to be doing that sort of thing. But it appears they ain’t. One university was delighted that I had brought along the PTC’s brochure on getting jobs in the media. “We contacted them twice about getting some, but they didn’t even reply,” I was told. Its mind is obviously on higher things.
There are supposedly more people on media-related courses than there are jobs in the media. Well, I don’t know where these students are, ‘cos they don’t seem to come along to media sessions. The honourable exceptions I’ve noted over the past year have been Durham, Cambridge, Nottingham Trent and Bristol, where there have been a roomful with lots of good questions, instead of a smattering.
You can tell the no-hopers: they sit at the back and giggle, look blank if you ask them a question, and clearly have a blind belief that The Sunday Times, Glamour, Condé Nast Traveller, FHM, The Economist, Cosmopolitan, NME and FourFourTwo all have a place just waiting for their inestimable talents.
I’m not sure they believe it when I tell them that they won‘t get that first journalism job on the glam titles. For most of them, there will be no job at all.
I feel a bit rotten, saying that their media-studies degree is almost certainly a waste of time. But how many editors need 5000 words on the state of the press in Kenya, or the impact of the unions on 1960s newspapers? Learn to write a news story, turn out a headline that means something, lay out a page: reviews on non-famous bands don’t impress anybody.
On the plus side, I spent a few hours on Saturday with the staff of Epigram, Bristol University’s student newspaper, suggesting ways they could improve it. Great enthusiasm and a real desire to create a good paper. Some of those people (watch out for the editor, Josh Burrows) will make excellent journalists. That’s what makes the 200-mile drives worthwhile.