Abstract
As a member of this esteemed journal's editorial board I read all the articles – some with more interest than others. But an article in the previous edition of the BJR (How do you train a young reporter? by Neil White, BJR 27/1) had me metaphorically jumping up and down shouting, “Yes, yes, yes”.
Neil White is editor-in-chief of the Derby Telegraph, a well-respected regional daily, so his views on the training of young journalists would be interesting in their own right but, and it's a big but, he is also chairman of the Journalism Qualifications Board of the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ to you and me). So his views don't just have added weight, they carry a powerful punch.
The essence of White's argument is that the NCTJ's long-established tradition of insisting that all its qualified students achieve 100 words-a-minute shorthand and have a detailed knowledge of virtually all aspects of central and local government, plus an almost encyclopaedic understanding of every aspect of media law, should no longer be regarded as essential.
White talks about the new environment of daily journalism, one dominated by online sources, particularly social media, in which reporters are expected to be able to supplement their stories with stills and video, make intelligent use of user-generated content, are comfortable handling big data and can think, act and write outside the box (apologies for this minor lapse into management speak).
The NCTJ has played a major role in raising standards of journalism across the UK for the past 60 years and more (declaration of BJR interest – the journal editor chairs the NCTJ) but it has also been criticised for being overly prescriptive in terms of the courses it validates. In the first half of its life this was, to a large extent, understandable. The main market for its graduates was the local and regional press and its courses tended to be taught in further education colleges; but that all began to change in the 1970s and 1980s.
First, journalism as a subject of study spread from further education into the more autonomous higher education sector, in which universities and colleges of higher education were less than comfortable with outside bodies prescribing detailed curricula. Today, the trade body for journalism in this sector, the Association for Journalism Education, now has upwards of 80 institutions in membership and probably only a minority run NCTJ validated degrees. Alongside this expansion the broadcasters decided that they needed their own validating body and established the Broadcast Journalism Training Council.
Both bodies have always been professional, robust and efficient, and in a pre-digital era the demarcation line between the two validators was clear enough – if it moved and/or made sound it was the BJTC, all the rest was NCTJ. But then along came online journalism and what was clear became opaque. Into whose territory falls a newspaper website, with its vlogs and podcasts? Mine, said both validating bodies (more or less). For universities and colleges, caught in the middle, the issue of who (if anyone) should be validating their courses became the proverbial minefield.
But has White thrown a lifeline into this muddy minefield (he says, mixing his metaphors with the best of them) by thinking aloud the same thoughts that we in the universities have been scratching our heads about for some years now. Does the new journalism environment really require all its entrants to have 100 words-per-minute shorthand and extensive knowledge of public affairs and law? Is journalism losing some of the best and the brightest, put off by a curriculum that does not seem totally relevant for a digital age. A knowledge of law and basic politics is important and shorthand is desirable, but not necessarily an essential asset. White wants would-be journalists who can challenge him, who are full of ideas, creative and who are multi-skilled. And this is not so far from the sort of blurb that universities tend to write when describing their own graduates. We do provide training in basic skills (although the speed of technological change means that even the best-equipped courses find it difficult to avoid teaching technologies that soon become outdated) but we also produce would-be journalists who are creative, critical and reflective, are multi-skilled and can think write and act outside the box.
Data journalism, crowd-sourcing, visualisation, drone and virtual reality journalism and so forth are the emerging skills of our trade, but they defy the conventional lines of being classified as print or broadcast. The media environment is changing rapidly, as is the technology, as are universities. Would now not be a good time for all interested parties to sit down and work out a system of validation for journalism courses that is not only fit for purpose (whoops) for 2016 but would also still be relevant 50 years from now?
Over to you, Mr White.