Abstract
Journalism is not a profession, thank God. A profession is a closed group to which you have to be admitted by existing practitioners after professing to obey fixed and enforceable standards. Once in, you can be expelled. A doctor can be struck off, a priest defrocked, a lawyer disbarred. Journalism, in contrast, is a craft. If you can do it, you can do it. If you can get someone to pay you and print what you write, then you are a journalist. Even if you have trouble placing a fresh piece after having written others, you remain a journalist. If you are fired, you look for another job or plough on alone, taking your skills with you. The question of whether journalism should be classed as a profession goes back more than 100 years, according to Wikipedia. The simplest answer is related to free speech. If you have a right to speak your mind, you have a corresponding right to put your thoughts into print.
For journalism, you need no degree of any kind. The only qualities necessary for a successful career are, famously, according to the late Nick Tomalin, rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability. (I would add to the list the ability to write fast; news stories invariably break suddenly.) Yet the increasing number of academic courses in media studies has led to the widespread assumption that the journalist has professional status. This is false. While training helps in any craft and while you are certainly stronger if confident in your skills, formal preparation is not necessary to become a journalist, even if more and more editors expect candidates for the few jobs that become available to be brandishing a degree when making an application.
The best way to learn is by doing. Part of the fun – and after a long career putting words into print, I know what fun it can be – is being able to take on a great variety of assignments. Once in a job, the proposition: “Anybody here want to interview X?” can lead to the chance to talk to the president of a small country, a beauty queen or a gravedigger. Years ago, while in Latin America doing a survey of telecommunications for The Economist, I was led into a room and introduced to Uruguay's minister for economics – a subject about which, despite the name of the publication I was representing, I knew little. As it turned out, somehow the courteous politician and I got through an hour talking about the importance of a free press.
In the 1930s, Harvard University, which had been given a million-dollar bequest by the Nieman Foundation, formed by the widow of the founder of the Milwaukee Journal, faced the dilemma of whether to establish a Harvard Journalism School to correspond to its Law and Business Schools. The answer was “No”. University president James B Conant observed that in journalism there was no base of fundamental knowledge upon which courses for an undergraduate degree could be built. Instead, Harvard provided the Nieman fellowships, highly-sought awards which allow chosen journalists to spend an academic year at Harvard studying philosophy or economics, or whatever they choose, in order to emerge wiser in the fields they write about.
It should be said, however, that for a journalist to know nothing about a subject before embarking on writing about it can be asset; for neither does the reader. The reporter's job is to find out why the story to which he or she been assigned deserves to be brought to the public's attention, and then to ask the questions that will flood into the reader's mind. Why did a poacher turn gamekeeper? Should rubbish be collected three times a week, or just once? Did the fire service send enough men and equipment to put out the blaze?
Broadcast journalism, especially live, is far harder than print journalism. Silence is not golden; it is poisonous. There is no rewriting, and inadvertent errors of fact or lapses of taste are easy to make. (Once, when I was an interviewer on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week, one of the morning guests was the playwright Arthur Miller. The team were briefed in advance that we could ask him anything we chose – except what it was like going to bed with Marilyn Monroe. It was an awkward interview as we struggled to avoid the topic.)
There are many journalists, especially those working in print on what are still known as “the broadsheets” no matter what their size and shape, who insist that our trade is a profession, although I suspect this is mainly due to a snobbish desire for parity when mixing with accountants and solicitors in the bar of the local golf club. In no way a profession, journalism is a craft – a deeply satisfying and often amusing one that offers a public service essential to democracy. That's where is has its edge: journalism is a job essential to an open society.