Posts Tagged ‘City’

I mentioned City’s student newspaper - The Inquirer - in this post a few weeks back. Today an email from its editor landed on my doormat. I’ve reproduced it in full below (with permission).

Don’t want to add too much, as it speaks for itself about how tough starting a new student publication can be. All I really have to add are three thoughts:
1. A touch ironic that the institution that churns out more UK journalists than any other has banned circulation of its student paper, no?

2. The struggle for the paper’s finances again reminded me about the conservatism of journalism students. The setup which this blogs runs on could easily host an online student newspaper, with audio and video if wanted. It costs around £30 a year. The costs of printing at least 6 copies of a print paper (at a loss) are rather higher. Still, for now, it seems for students newsprint’s where it’s at.

3. As someone who worked on both established and new student publications, I can confirm that it’s not unusual for students to be out of pocket as a result of working on student papers. The time, money, and dedication taken to establish an institution’s first paper is pretty impressive.

Anyhow, I’ll hand you over now to Tom Walker:

Hey,

Noticed your little mention of the Inquirer, ‘cos the link sent a few referrals our way.

Just wanted to say, even saying that City has one student paper is being a bit generous. We started up the paper ourselves in late 2006 because there wasn’t one (ridiculous at such a supposedly great journalism school), and since then we’ve published the thing completely independently - we’re banned from giving it out inside the university, and any staff that help us out with stories find threats from the senior management landing on their desks. The paper is one that is published by City students, is about City, but has no real links to City as an institution at all.

We publish monthly (well, sort of - like you say, we’ve had to skip out the exam period because no-one’s got any time to do it then). Printing costs come out of our student loans, and getting ads to make that money back is a complete pain in the neck. The university does not fund, help or support us in any way… nobody is paid to run the paper or given any time out of their degree to do it, and the thing made a loss this year.

I write this not because I’m insulted or anything, but just because I don’t think people generally appreciate how precarious our one student paper’s situation is!

Yours, someone who went to a bog-standard comp and didn’t even manage to get into the University of London, never mind Oxford,

Tom Walker
Editor, the Inquirer
(and undergrad journalism student, and general City rabble-rouser)

Self-indulgent post here, I’m afraid (skip at will). The below is a first-person interview piece with a Big Issue vendor, done as part of my coursework last year. I like to get a few of these pieces out somewhere now and then. Here goes:

“I had to leave my parents’ house. I was just a kid, and ran away from home. I’ve never been back. I’ve been “homeless” ever since. I went to the officials and explained my situation, and they put me up in a bed and breakfast, then a hostel. I was there for months.

You’re in a single bedroom, with a toilet in your room and not much else. The bathroom and kitchen are shared with a load of other guys. There are drugs everywhere, and you start using them more than you would believe.

It’s fucking horrible. I started by smoking dope, and thought it’s cool, then I’m taking speed and pills and all that in clubs and being the big guy. And, it’s just so different. It takes over a part of you. I’m a heroin addict. I’m not a using addict any more – I’m on methadone, but it’s hard.

I’m doing better now. I see young people who are dabbling, you know, and they think they’re really cool. They think they’re different, that they’ll be okay. Then I see them two years later – well, there’s a young lad at the moment, and two years ago he started injecting.

He’s twenty now, I saw him earlier today. His clothes were disgusting – his tracksuit bottoms were black, and he’s got dirt under his fingernails. He’s picked his face where he’s been smoking crack and looking in the mirror – it’s like a beard of scabs. When it’s so dirty, you know it’s not going to heal. Because I’m doing okay at the minute, I gave him some stuff – some jeans and a t-shirt – but what else can you do?

Watching this happen to your friends is tough. People have died in Oxford in the past year, through getting banned from the night shelter and not having anywhere else to go. They can’t get in to hostels – they don’t let you in any more if you’re not from the area, so they’re on the streets. Being out on the streets - well, if you’re not on anything, you usually are in a few weeks. And your use just becomes massive, it just becomes your whole life. Because it’s the only thing that keeps you going.

It’s a trap: once you become homeless, you stay homeless. There’s so much day-to-day support, you wouldn’t believe. I come in the morning to a place by the train station and get porridge, for 10p, and egg on toast for 12p, and you get coffee all day long. Then Night Shelter does dinner at half 12, and a place on Cowley Road gives you dinner for £1.10 at 5pm. Then round the corner the Gatehouse gives you sandwiches, tea and juice until 7pm. Then three nights a week the Christians come round and give us coffee and snacks. I don’t know why anyone pays for food round here when there’s so much for free!

You’ve got drug addicts and alcoholics, and you just give them free food, and Big Issues to sell, and they don’t have to make any commitment to change anything. Where do you think their money goes? At least no-one has to go thieving or shoplifting or hitting old ladies over the head for their handbags, but it’s an easy ride. So a lot of people, a lot of people I know have been in the same predicament for a long time, for ages, for years. Well, me too I guess.

It takes so long to get off the streets. You start out in the night shelters, or bed and breakfasts, and wait two or three years to get into a housing association – a shared flat in sheltered housing. They watch you closely there, you can be out after one mistake. I know one guy who was kicked out for letting one of his mates take a bath. Three years keeping your nose clean, working up, and you’re back in the night shelter. When you can live okay in the shelters, and it’s that hard to get out, you stay.

Homelessness is different now to what it was. It used to be working boys who drank hard and worked hard and split up with the wife. Go in the Night Shelters now and the majority of people are 30 years and under, and heroin addicts or young alcoholics; 25 year old men that look like 40 year olds.

You’ll find most of us are upbeat because that’s the way you’ve got to be, otherwise you just fail miserably. If we didn’t, you’d see Oxford, “the city of dreaming spires” with people like me hanging from them everywhere. I’ll be all right. It just might take a while, you know?”

David Leigh, investigations editor of the Guardian, has accused the Government of undermining the appeals procedure for Freedom of Information requests.

Speaking to XCity, the alumni magazine of City University, where he holds the post of Anthony Sampson Professor of Reporting, Leigh said:

“The dysfunctionality of the [FoI] appeal procedure is getting worse, and the ICO is probably being deliberately underfunded”

Leigh was speaking in response to a story in Press Gazette (by, er, me) which reported that one in five complaints to the commissioner take over a year to be processed, with one in three taking over six months.

The XCity article (print version only) continued to quote a spokesman from the ICO backing up concerns over funding:

“Our current funding levels for this work will restrict our ability to make further improvements to this backlog. We are in ongoing discussions with the Ministry of Justice to discuss the current level of funding”

It’s perhaps not wise to hold out too much hope for these talks - the current Minister of Justice, Jack Straw, has not been among FoI’s biggest cheerleaders. Last year he was forced to apologise for criticising the Information Commissioner for not paying enough attention to exemptions within the Act (allowing Government to be too open, in other words). He was also a signatory to the Private Member’s Bill (later quashed in the Lords) calling for the Commons to be exempt from the Act. Still, we live in hope.

Twenty years ago, journalism training was relatively simple. Students picked a pathway – broadcast, newspapers, or periodicals, and found a course teaching the skills needed. With the skills they picked up, some work experience, the right contacts and a bit of luck, they landed that crucial first job.

Now, it’s not so simple. It’s still possible to enrol on courses in newspaper, magazine and broadcast journalism, and students may still aspire to work in these fields. The difficulty is the all-pervasiveness of the internet – wherever you want to work, learning online skills could make all the difference. Bizarrely, learning how to shoot video might help land you your dream newspaper job.

But Emma Harpley of the National Council for the Training of Journalists, which accredits 60 UK journalism courses, said the first thing students should remember is not to neglect key skills like shorthand. “However the story is going to be presented, shorthand is key to actually getting the facts in the first place, so will always be a vital part of journalism.”

Harpley says students on NCTJ-accredited courses concentrate on core newsgathering skills that will always be solid and sound. Incorporating online skills into accredited courses is, she said, still “work in progress at the minute, as the industry is moving forward quickly”.

However, Harpley also believes young journalists should learn multimedia skills. “If someone’s very experienced in print then there’ll still be jobs out there even if they aren’t multimedia skilled. But looking forward, those kinds of jobs will be diminishing.

“The future of journalism is certainly becoming very much more focused online – and it’s moving very quickly at the moment. Journalists need to keep their skills up to date,” she says.

Journalism training institutions and the industry seem clear that multimedia skills are important, but the industry still expects students to have all the writing and newsgathering skills of journalists qualifying a generation ago. Shorthand and media law are as essential as ever. With so much to pack in to a short course, it’s important to have a clear idea of what’s essential.

Bill Thompson, new-media pundit and visiting lecturer at City University, London, says he believes an understanding of new media is crucial for trainee journalists. “Just as we teach you about the legal environment within which you work, so we must teach you about the technological stream in which you are now swimming,” he says.

Those in training now have some things easier than their immediate predecessors. A few years ago, it was essential to know programming languages to work online. Thankfully, due to content management systems (CMS), Thompson says this is no longer the case. “As a recovered programmer, I’d like to teach you all Java, of course, but that’s just me being cruel,” he says.

“I think you need to know enough about coding to be able to tell why the copy you’ve cut and pasted into your CMS template from Microsoft Word is screwed up. That means a basic understanding of HTML and AJAX.”

Everyone agrees that having multimedia skills will help you find a job. Knowing how far to go is still difficult to judge, especially when courses and the industry still haven’t set out their requirements.

Thompson believes a general approach is essential.

“Nobody should leave a journalism course without knowing how to write copy, sub a website, record an interview for audio or video, make a radio package, drive a desk, do a stand-up piece to camera and make a video report, and use a content management system. Any less than that and you’re not a journalist in the modern age – sorry.”

This article originally appeared in Press Gazette

Professor Adrian Monck has thrown his hat into the ring in the current round of NUJ-bashing.

Having had very few dealings with the NUJ (short of binning the Journalist magazine), I’m in absolutely no position to comment of the merits of the NUJ. Indeed, I would be more than happy to take Professors Greenslade and Monck at their word and not join. But for one thing.

Professor Monck is the head of City university’s school of journalism, and Roy Greenslade teaches there. I, as most of you know, am a student of said school. And when we had out induction last month, we were “advised” in no uncertain terms to join the NUJ (at a bargain student rate of £25 - a 150 per cent price hike on last year).

In fairness, this advice didn’t come from Prof. Monck himself, but still: the blog post indicates quite strong longstanding opinions on the NUJ, from someone whose faculty then delivers some 150 or so new journalists into the organisation. Can’t help but feel that someone, somewhere down the line, needs to make their mind up, here. Union membership for students is all about getting the press card - but would the BAJ or some other body perhaps be able to do the job?

I hesitate to criticise (even flippantly) someone who not only writes a blog I very much enjoy, but also heads up my educational facility. However, I’m sure Adrian Monck is a very reasonable man. Here’s hoping.