David Baines, School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University

Employability.

Our experience relates to the media sector, but I believe it is of wider relevance within subject areas which are concerned with professional practice and the more vocational fields of HE.

1)Some context: Formal training in journalism of any kind did not begin in Britain until the 1950s, although it has a long history in the US. The curriculum for training was laid down in Britain by the National Council for the Training of Journalists - NCTJ –jointly established in 1952 by the Guild and society of newspaper editors, the newspaper society representing proprietors, and the journalists’ unions.
This consisted of newspaper journalism, media law, public administration and shorthand. The NCTJ acted as a clearing house for would-be entrants to journalism, matching the numbers allowed on to courses to the number of traineeships offered in any year by local newspapers.
The courses were delivered on day or block release at FE colleges and supplemented on the job learning. The lecturers, had to be approved by the NCTJ, which insisted that they were former journalists.
Employment was virtually guaranteed for ‘graduates’ as trainees on local weekly and daily papers. I say graduates, but the level of qualifications were really siting somewhere between GCSE and A level – or in my day, O and A level
This system started to fragment in the 1980s, when national newspapers started recruiting university graduates directly rather than taking journalists who had started on local papers and some groups – Thomson Newspapers; Westminster Press; Mirror Group – started their own in-housetraining schemes. University graduates going into journalism in the 1970s and 80s and even the 90s, would be ‘apprenticed’ or ‘indentured’ for two years as trainees and had to pass NCTJ – or similar – exams before they went on to a ‘senior’s’ wage and status.

2)Higher Educationprogrammes in journalism, rather than craft training, really began with a post-graduate diploma at City University in the 1970s, but undergraduate and masters level journalism programmes only really started in the 1990s and now there are around 60, mainly post-92- Universities delivering them.
However, many of these have been modelled on the old NCTJ curriculum, and indeed, have taken NCTJ accreditation because that is what local newspaper editors wanted in their recruits – that is what they had gone through themselves and that is what they understood. Few local newspaper editors were graduates, many were scornful of critical media studies courses, most saw on-the-job training as the ideal.

3)But the world was changing. Local newspapers were no longer the virtually exclusive pipeline into journalism that they had been. People who wanted to be journalists were going straight to national papers, to magazines, to broadcasters, to new digital media platforms. PR agencies were recruiting people who specialised in PR and did not necessarily have a local paper or journalism background.

4)Media careers in general PR – advertising – film – TV – publishing - were becoming more and more characteristic of the liquid life conceptualised by Zygmunt Bauman: precarious; project-based; risky. They might involve periods of employment with a classic modern organisation such as a newspaper publisher or broadcaster. But they were also likely to include periods of unemployment, of short-term project-based work; of freelance work.
Journalism was changing – technologically, socially, culturally, commercially - it was moving onto new platforms, there were new ways to tell stories, it was becoming interactive; it was becoming more of a conversation than a broadcast; audiences were becoming collaborators in producing journalism – and even competitors for journalists – and traditional journalists’ jobs were being cut-back, casualised, outsourced…

5)In April this year the Huffington Post was awarded a Pulitzer prize.

6)But most of the people delivering journalism education at universities were, like me, former journalists, the NCTJ, run by former-provincial paper journalists continued to insist on their accredited courses offering ‘traditional’ course content with added digital extras - even though the model of providing trainees for local newspapers was broken – they were no longer the main people giving our graduates jobs.

7)Journalism educators in HE did recognise the need for change – but the debate continued to be framed largely by the employers and in terms of ‘adding new skills elements’ to our courses – video shooting and editing, the ability to build a website – audio recording – photography – social media … but keeping the rest.

8)Luckily, we at Newcastle only started to offer MAs in Media and Journalism and Media and PR in 2006, so we were not tied to this model and could, and did, go our own way.

9)From the start, we maintained a strong academic, theoretical grounding as well as the more vocational, professional practice elements. We offer masters level qualifications, not training in journalism, or PR. Today – it can be argued that every organisation is a media organisation – every organisation needs communicators. Our graduates can apply their professional skills and knowledge in any such organisation, public or private, or take up a completely different career supported by masters level qualifications – or take an academic trajectory if they wish to go on to a PhD.

10)ZygmuntBauman’s conceptualisation of liquidity was brought home in terms of the media work environment by a conversation I had with a senior BBC executive:

She said that when recruiting, they wanted to ‘‘identify creative people who would be very good at what they did with the BBC’ but could ‘be equally be very good at working for someone else or themselves’.
And by a presentation to a conference I attended by Marc Harrison, head of digital at BBC Vision – the TV bit of the corporation – in 2009. The people he was looking for will be:

‘multi-skilled, but not predictable patterns of multi-skilling . . . Production teams willgather in creative clusters round projects rather than programmes . . . I am looking forcreative people . . . the most valuable quality will be the ability to walk into a team, adaptto the needs of the project and acquire the skills needed . . . When I was head of Arts atthe BBC, I had young producers whose big ambition was to produce a perfect Arenaprogramme. I told them that I was doing that 30 years ago ‘you need to bring the

creativity you use in your home life to a production for the BBC . . . I am looking for mindset,rather than skill-set.’

All very exciting – but he is still talking about precarious, project-based, short-term work.

So when dealing with employers:

We need to recognise that:

a)Their interests are not necessarily those of our students or of wider society and can conflict with those of our students and society at large.. They want tame junior recruits, but our students might be better starting their own enterprise – in competition with them.

b) Employers seek job-specific skills today which may be redundant tomorrow – and they often undervalue - or scorn - the wider critical, theoretical understanding of the media field that equips new entrants to the sector to understand the wider role of journalism in society, its complexities, its changing trajectories.

c)Employers’ interests are varying and complex and it is not appropriate to conceptualise ‘employers’ as a homogenous group

d)And who are ‘the employers’ – My students have gone on to work in Sky News, the BBC, the Times of India, China Daily – and in NGOs, marketing agencies, art galleries, schools and on cruise liners – which have TV and Radio studios, intranet sites and daily newspapers.

e)But employers – whoever they are – also value work experience in candidates.

So – how did we approach employability in this context?
To prepare our students for this liquid world – but also for traditional employment contexts:

1)We reconstructed one of our key modules – Multimedia J P&P.
We ran it over two semesters, packed the gaining of a range of skills into the first semester and in the second, students worked in groups on multimedia projects – in which they were explicitly told that they had to be innovative, think of new ways to engage audiences – bring to the project more than we had taught them.
The ‘Creative clusters – innovative – mind-set, rather than skill-set’ that the BBC’s Tony Harrison sought!

2)We introduced series of master classes in enterprise – to open up to students the possibility of starting their own media enterprise rather than simply working for an employer or simply working freelance for an organisation. We developed this, with David Butler of Fine Art, into a module in enterprise and entrepreneurialism in the creative sector that is going to feature in the cross-SACS MA in Creative Practice beginning in September, and available to our students.
These opportunities, I believe, also enhances their attractiveness to potential employers – who might see them as competitors if they do not take them on – but can also see benefits in having employees who take an entrepreneurial approach to producing media, as the industry moves from an industrial to an entrepreneurial model in need of innovators.

3)We started a new MA – MA in International Multi-media Journalism – which does not have a traditional dissertation in the third semester, but is delivered in conjunction with the Press Association – which has a training division here in Newcastle where industry-based tutors in professional practice, deliver modules in advanced reporting, video journalism and online journalism. So those who take this programme emerge with high-level industry-relevant professional skills and knowledge– AND the innovative, creative approaches to producing media content and engaging with audiences that we deliver on-campus.

4)Work experience. – As I have mentioned, employers and students both value this, but it can be problematic in terms of necessitating blocks of absence from coursework, the administrative load of arranging it and maintaining some control over the experience and its value.

Mark Hanna and Karen Sanders at Sheffield University found that the number of students who were sure they wished to be journalists fell from 75% on arrival to 53% on graduation and cited turn-off factors such as poor pay; cynical employers; insecurity; difficulty of career progression; perception of journalism in practice as boring, routinized; not creative and with limited opportunities to write autonomously. Such perceptions resulted from work experience spells on lodal papers.

And researchers have found that ‘internship and work experiences that include a high degree of variety, feedback and opportunities to deal with others may be more effective for progressing through the career development process than experiences without these qualities’.

1)So - we started our own media enterprise – Jesmond Local – to give students continuous work experience in a real-world environment throughout their course – and provide a ‘laboratory of inquiry’ in which they can experiment with -and we can research -new ways of doing journalism and engaging audiences and exploring new digital delivery platforms.
This is led by a former Guardian journalist – Ian Wylie. He is primarily a business journalists who lives in Jesmond and he now works freelance – primarily for titles such as the Economist, Monocle Magazine in the US and the FT. So our students have the opportunity throughout their course to work with a first rate practitioner.

2)We have developed our students’ experience with Jesmond Local further by holding ‘journalism bootcamps’ – our students work with interested people who live in Jesmond to tell their stories in interesting ways using new media platforms. This allows our students to interrogate and experience ways of working which are in line with the ways in which media work is developing.

The sharing of skills, collaborative models of journalism, valuing journalism as a process and a community resource, rather than the traditional industrial model which places value primarily in the product – (story / broadcast, feature, documentary).

In the traditional industrial model, for commercial media, the community it addresses is essentially commodified as a package to be sold on to advertisers. So the community model which we are exploring is a very different type of journalism and our students are aware of the different relationship which they are developing with the audience – if that is any longer an appropriate word – that they might develop on a local paper pr commercial TV station.

But the traditional model is under stress – sales of local papers are rapidly declining, and the industry is very much aware of this. So employers are interested in what our students are doing and the ways in which they are exploring new ways to do journalism.

As far as we can tell, all those students who have worked on Jesmond Local and graduated up to last year have found work – I have every confidence that those who graduate this year will as well.

The industry is very curious about what has become known as hyper-local journalism, and institutions searching for new ways to do journalism want to benefit from our students’ knowledge and experience. One graduate last year now works for the BBC here in Newcastle (she was also offered an interview with Sky Tyne and Wear – the new online local journalism project piloted up here) – but the BBC wants her to carry on working with JL because they see benefits in that.

This is not the kind of thing which we alone are doing in this university – I know Law has a street law advice project which is also immersing their students I a project which develops and explores different models of the profession and its relationships with communities.

By offering these opportunities as voluntary options, rather than compulsory elements of the course, they also become self-selecting –students who work on them are the ones who are most committed to the subject and to developing their career. So while we are giving them a helping hand, we are also giving those who might be better prospects for employers in any case the opportunity better to demonstrate those qualities when they enter the job market, and helping them to put something out of the ordinary and intriguing on their CV.

One current project which has grown out of the Jesmond Local journalism bootcamps has been a collaboration between our students working on their multimedia journalism project next semester and West Jesmond Primary School – whose students produce a weekly ‘radio programme’.

That should also attract attention and look good on a CV.

3)We also launched a mentoring project with journalism students at five NE universities and journalists on the BBC NE and Cumbria.
The project has grown out of an ESRC-funded seminar series which we have been running from Newcastle for a couple of years on expanding ethnic diversity in the news industry workforce.

The aim of the mentoring project is to enhance the ‘week ties’ which Mark Granovetterdiscovered to be so valuable in building the sort of networks and social capital which enhance – in this case - our students’ prospects in the field of media work.

We are in process of evaluating the project so we can learn lessons from it and, hopefully, roll it out to other areas.

While these developments have been designed to enhance employability for our students, they have also both grown out of and informed my own research and given rise to a series of publications, which have raised the profile of the university in the field of journalism education, put me in a useful position for the forthcoming RAF submission and informed the design and delivery of our programmes here.

Finally – Post Leveson, there is of course an interest in the cultures and ethics of journalism. A colleague and I have just submitted a paper, Journalism Education after Leveson, in which we propose the adoption of the Aristotelian concept of Phronesis – ‘practical wisdom’ – for developing a deliberative, dialogical approach to the development of ethical professional practice. This emerges from reflexive practice – which is not easy to put in place in a workplace context on a conventional university-based programme.

But through engagement in professional practice with projects such as Jesmond Local and the dialogical opportunities which arise on such projects and through mentoring relationships, it is possible to develop a degree of practical wisdom, phronesis, on courses which feed in to the professions – courses in which Newcastle University, has long excelled.