Abstract
An innovative UK training course is to close.
Its leader hopes some bold initiatives will survive
My question was an attempt to understand the baffling logic of a decision to pull the plug on something that by so many measures would be deemed remarkably successful. Financially viable? Check. Significant growth in overall student numbers? Check. Outstanding employability outcomes for those who study with us? Check. Holding a long-term contract to deliver senior journalism training for a globally renowned media institution? Check check check.
Less than 24 hours before the VC’s entourage swept in, the BBC’s director-general Tim Davie had delivered his blueprint for the corporation’s future in a keynote speech to the Royal Television Society. In it, he underlined the importance of apprenticeships to the corporation; it is on target to recruit 1,000 of them in various disciplines, as part of its ambition that 25 per cent of its staff should be from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds by 2027.
And a sizeable chunk of them – their postgraduate Level 7 journalists – are being trained by the Centre for Journalism under a contract that had just been renewed until 2028. This is the replacement for the BBC’s fabled graduate journalism training scheme and has been a hugely successful attempt to break away from the hard-to-shake image that there was an Oxbridge template for recruits to BBC newsrooms.
The apprentices are an incredibly talented, wildly diverse bunch – some have never been to university, others have master’s level qualifications in other subjects; all have been selected by the BBC for their storytelling abilities and their commitment to ethical, impartial, truthful journalism.
And, as Tim Davie said in his speech, they “bring a lot of joy, by the way”.
So why would a university whose marketing tagline is “We Stand for Ambition” choose to shut its journalism centre and, in doing so, walk away from a BBC contract that I would suggest is the most prestigious journalism training contract in the world? I can’t remember the specifics of the VC’s attempt to explain the decision in primary-school terminology. But I’m on safe ground to say that corporate jargon was involved: targeted disinvestment; challenging portfolio choices; international growth objectives. Bottom line, journalism courses will all close to new entrants with immediate effect, with a two-year “teach out” for students who have already started their courses.
The reality was that we had been pulled into the financial black hole of a university that is labouring under a mountain of debt, is projecting an operational deficit of around £31million in the current financial year (on top of £12million and £11million deficits in the previous two years), and at the behest of its lenders has been forced to sell several buildings, including the one that housed the journalism department.
Kent is by no means the only university in serious financial bother. Nor is it the only one in desperate need to get people like me off its payroll. It’s not likely to be the last that “disinvests” in journalism. A report by PwC published earlier this year predicts that 40 per cent of the 70 universities it analysed will be running deficits by the end of 2024. That could rise to 80 per cent the following year if the growth in international student numbers on which many are basing their recovery plans fails to materialise, the PwC work suggests. At least 52 UK universities are currently running redundancy programmes, some voluntary, some compulsory, according to the University and College Union. (Nonetheless, the former education minister Michelle Donelan said in March that there was no crisis in university funding. Go figure).
My own experience tells me that journalism departments will be particularly vulnerable when it comes to decisions about where the axe should fall as the crisis deepens. There is a particularly unhelpful bit of data doing the rounds: a projection from the crystal ball-gazers at the Higher Education Statistics Agency that there will be 16 per cent fewer applicants to undergraduate journalism degrees between now and 2028 – a figure that I suspect will have played its part in recent decisions at other universities to close their journalism courses, including at the University of South Wales and at Canterbury Christchurch University.
Journalism is also vulnerable because it is more expensive to teach than subjects where 500 students can be crammed into a lecture theatre with a single academic at the front. The modern multi-platform journalist needs kit, software, studios – and lots more assignment feedback than your typical essay-and-exam-assessed student.
That economic reality is now spreading even into the Russell Group universities. Until now, these “top tier” institutions have been less affected thanks to Tory policy changes that enabled them to Hoover up more UK students after numbers caps for individual universities were removed. But now an insider at one Russell Group university tells me they have just been told to close their successful MA in broadcast journalism next year because of the costs associated with delivering it.
Apprentices “do not belong in universities”
It’s also true that journalism is not the easiest subject to market to those international students on whom so much hope is pinned by all universities in the years ahead (unlike for UK students, there is no cap on what such students can be charged) when compared to subjects such as law and computer science that lead to higher salaries and more stable job markets.
And finally, there remains a lingering snobbery in academic circles that journalism shouldn’t ever be considered a “real” academic subject. This is exacerbated when you add the term “apprenticeships” into the mix. I was told with a straight face by one senior academic that they should never have been allowed to “escape their natural habitat” of FE colleges. This despite the fact that the Level 7 journalism apprenticeship (accredited by the National Council for the Training of Journalists and equivalent to a master’s degree) is by far the most rigorous mixture of academic and professional training that I have come across.
It’s the success of that academic-professional blend that makes the closure of Kent’s Centre for Journalism so much harder to swallow. I believe we had come as close as anyone to cracking a practice-focused teaching model that has been talked about in global university journalism circles for some years, but which to my knowledge had never been tested fully in the wild in this country.
This is what Eric Newton of the Knight Foundation described as the “teaching-hospital model” in an eloquent keynote speech he gave a decade ago, which espoused the idea of professional journalists, educators and students working collectively to deliver real content to real audiences in innovation-friendly commercial journalism environments based within geographical communities.
It was based on the familiar idea of learning by doing, which he traced back to Confucian philosopher Xunzi “I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand.”
Newton’s view was that the teaching-hospital concept – a proven model both in his native US and the UK – where “medical students under the tutelage of actual doctors learn how to draw blood, how to insert catheters, how to set broken arms, even deliver babies” was ideal to translate into local journalism on the grounds that both hospitals and newsrooms need to be deeply rooted in their communities. Newton also noted that teaching hospitals delivered quantifiably better outcomes for their patients than other types of hospital.
What better way of learning to be an ethical, responsible journalist than by having a real audience to cover – and to be accountable to – alongside a professional team and under the guidance of practice-focused academics? And what better way of filling the democratic deficit left behind by the hollowing-out of local newsrooms across the country?
Our version of this was built around KMTV, the Ofcom-licensed television channel that is part of the Local Television Network (LTVN) of 34 hyperlocal commercial stations whose framework Jeremy Hunt established when he was culture secretary. Launched as a joint venture between the university and the KM Media Group, which is now part of Iliffe Media, KMTV serves an audience of nearly 300,000 households, predominantly in the Medway region of Kent, on Freeview Channel 7, and across the whole county on Virgin TV. Its licence is based on a commitment to high quality public-service journalism and over the past few years under the energetic leadership of channel director Andy Richards, we have integrated its newsrooms ever more closely into the teaching of our students – not just from our various BA and MA journalism courses, but increasingly too for students from departments including law, marketing, film studies and business. Students are involved through a mixture of credit-bearing modules that are built into their studies, and through paid internships for the more capable of them.
Viewing figures consistently show that KMTV’s audiences peak when viewers are hungry for local context at times of national crisis – such as during the pandemic lockdown and in the aftermath of the Truss/Kwarteng budget disaster. For the last general election, we ran a ground-breaking 12-hour live programme in which every Kent constituency count was covered by students putting their learning into practice alongside KMTV’s paid reporters, with guidance from tutors who were also part of the editorial team.
Students have already been involved in planning for the upcoming local elections, and for the next general election. They have also helped to develop innovative content across social media platforms that is extending KMTV’s reach still further. They can learn too from teams producing longer-form journalism. Thanks to high six-figure grant-funding from the BFI’s Young Audiences Content Fund, the KMTV team – with help from our students – have made documentary series for teen viewers on subjects as varied as genomics, religion, and the justice system. These are quality projects too; the first has just been bought by ITV to show on its national streaming platform, and another is under negotiation.
Apprentices get real opportunities
As I write this, the shared newsroom next door is buzzing with BBC apprentices making a series of Kent Tonight specials that will air on KMTV in the coming weeks on subjects including sea pollution, tourism cuts, music venues and loneliness – as part of a block of teaching that gives them hands-on planning, research, production, editing and on-screen presenting opportunities that they wouldn’t all get from their BBC roles.
Meanwhile, the Centre for Journalism’s academic staff, most of them journalism practitioners, get to keep their professional skills up to date through their own involvement in KMTV programming. The weekly Kent Politics Show, for example, is presented by senior lecturer Rob Bailey, who encourages students to get involved as producers and reporters, and who uses his and their work to inform his teaching sessions. The KMTV sofa has been graced by thousands of guests from across the county’s political and cultural spectrum, including then-deputy prime minister Damian Green, who gave us the exclusive interview after he had to resign.
The delivery of this kind of high quality and trusted content has brought other positives too; KMTV been commissioned by the BBC Local News Partnerships to trial a multimedia reporter for the Local Democracy Reporting Service that will run until August. And then there is News Nuggets, a pilot programme we are running for primary school-age children that is the first such hyperlocal news and current affairs show of its kind in the country. Medway Council is working with us on the pilot shows, which aim to give younger children an understanding of the importance of democratic principles and accountability at a local level. The borough’s schools will have access to the content to support teaching sessions from September 2024, and we’re talking to the Electoral Commission about a partnership that could see it rolled out as a national scheme.
This “news laboratory” model has also proved highly effective as a conveyor belt for editorial talent into the wider industry. The number of CfJ/KMTV alumni working for major news organisations is way too big to list here – but they’re in newsrooms across the globe, including at the BBC, ITV, Sky, C4, CBS, CNN, The Sun, The Times, the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and many, many more. The awards, too, have come thick and fast: 33 shortlistings in the Kent Press and Broadcast Awards in the last five years, multiple NCTJ awards – and just this week, two nominations for RTS Awards. So it’s a model that really does work.
Its manifestation at Kent might now be running down – although KMTV should continue to broadcast as a separate entity beyond the “teach out” period – but I hope that its lessons will not all be lost. Back in the US, there is a growing body of evidence that shows university journalism departments stepping in to sprinkle some water into the “news deserts” left behind as the larger news corporations withdraw reporters from the field.
The University of Vermont has set up a Centre for Community News that documents more than 100 examples of universities and colleges getting directly involved in community newsgathering initiatives. Last year, Professor Peter Laufer of the University of Oregon wrote a piece entitled “How journalism schools could save local newspapers”, in which he made a public bid for his university to take over the daily Register Guard from Gannett.
Then, in February, Forbes reported that the University of Iowa had bought two local weekly newspapers, the first such media acquisition by any university. Under the deal, the university retained the existing staff of the Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun and the Solon Economist, and even gave them pay rises, as part of a plan to integrate editorial and commercial aspects of their publication with its journalism and business courses.
It’s perhaps fanciful in the current climate to imagine such a deal happening this side of the Atlantic, at least until some brave new education secretary finds the nerve to grasp the nettle of university funding reform. In the meantime, is there anything that can be done that could help vulnerable university journalism departments and news organisations struggling to maintain on-the-ground reporting staff across the country?
I believe the answer to that question lies in those entities understanding each other far better than is commonly the case. The NCTJ’s “industry adviser” system (which is about to be beefed up further) for each of its accredited institutions is a great starting point: senior members of newsrooms on the patch make scheduled visits to ensure teaching methods are reflective of their current practice.
But the real opportunity lies in deeper collaboration that will need to start at a much higher level. News publishers and broadcasters should look at universities not just as feeders for their most junior jobs, but as places where creative partnerships can thrive and resources can perhaps be shared. University vice-chancellors and their entourages should be less fearful of meaningful engagement with the media organisations that are often quite reasonably critical of them, and more open to tailoring their teaching, assessment and research in ways that allow students and academics to learn and work alongside the professionals – not just in journalism, but in many other creative and commercial business areas too.
Once those board-level conversations start, I’m convinced there is a collaborative sweet spot to be found that works to the benefit of educators, professional journalists, editorial and commercial workforces, students and, most importantly of all, the communities that they all serve.
