Up To Speed Journalism’s Tom Hill takes a look back at an incredible year for Up To Speed’s students and former students.
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With disarming innocence my seven-year-old daughter started the day at 6.15 with a question:
“Daddy, how do wars end?”
I thought about it for a minute and with yesterday’s Remembrance Sunday services and World War I in mind, I replied: “Well, usually the fighting stops when one side decides it can’t win and gives in to the more powerful side.”
I’m not sure the answer was very convincing, either for my daughter or for me.
A few minutes later, our newspaper was delivered. The head of Britain’s armed forces, Air Marshall Sir Jock Stirrup was predicting that the end of the conflict in Afghanistan wouldn’t happen until 2014. By then my daughter, who was born a year after 9/11, will be in her second year of secondary school. That’s a long time to wait for peace, especially for a child.
But how do wars end?
Twenty years ago today, people-power brought down the Berlin Wall and a BBC reporter revisiting the scene this morning noted how many expensive designer boutiques had now sprung up to replace concrete and conflict. Consumerism triumphed over communism and for many young people now the i-phone appears to be more important than ideology.
So, maybe there’s a clue there for Afghanistan and those who seek to bring peace to a troubled country.
Let’s ignore the headlines for a moment and take a look at the bottom line.
According to the New York Times, the US budget for overseas conflicts for 2010 is $130 billion. So, if we take Sir Jock Stirrup’s prediction on board, we can multiply that by five, which gives us a nice round figure of $650 billion. That’s a lot of spending power.
So, what could we spend it on? What have they got to sell in Afghanistan? A report on MSNBC recently calculated that the opium harvest in 2007 was worth $4 billion, or almost half of Afghanistan’s GDP. That crop supplies 93% of the world’s heroin producers.
So, why doesn’t the US Government go into the drug dealing business? If it paid Afghanistan’s growers $40 billion dollars a year for their crop – ten times its current market value, surely farmers would be tempted to start trading and the Taliban would be priced out of the market. Afghanistan’s GDP would also be increased five-fold overnight. If the model was successful, the US would be making a saving of $90 billion.
But what could the US Government do with a huge stockpile of opium? Well, first they could choke off the supply to heroin dealers around the world and second they could use the opium to create free drugs to be used for medicinal purposes. For instance, at least two opiates are used to treat diarrhoea.
Last month the World Health Organisation released new figures showing that diarrhoea is killing three times as many people over the age of 5 as previously thought – 1.1 million people every year. But here’s a more shocking statistic, especially for any parent: in addition to those 1.1 million people, a further 1.5 million children under the age of 5 are killed by the ailment every year. That Afghan harvest could save a lot of tot’s lives.
Of course, it is all too easy to oversimplify any conflict or the motives driving those fighting on either side. But if political leaders can look for creative ways to turn swords into plough shares and then to ensure that the farmers working the ploughs can receive a decent farm gate price, surely the warmongers will find themselves on the back foot.
It may sound preposterous, but surely no more preposterous than trying to beat the Afghan people on their home territory. The Soviets tried it 30 years ago and when First World War troops on the Western Front were laying down their arms on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, my daughter’s great-grandfather, a man who had survived the first day of the Battle of the Somme, was still fighting. And guess where? That’s right. Afghanistan.
When Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg addressed a town hall meeting in Poole last week, Up To Speed’s Abbas Akbar, 17, was there to capture the event on video.
Abbas, from Birmingham, is taking Up To Speed’s Fast-Track course in Digital Journalism in his Gap Year. He’s applying to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics at university and so the assignment ticked at least two boxes for him.
At Up To Speed, we pride ourselves in keeping our students on top of all the latest changes and developments in the industry.
Back in February, we set all of our students up with Wordpress blogs and twitter accounts and encouraged them to integrate their output and to use their Facebook pages for the same purpose.
At first, some of our students struggled to see the point, but many realized that this could be an excellent way of spreading the word about their work and themselves.
The results for the group were immediate. The number of unique users visiting our news site Poole People increased by 400% in a matter of weeks, mirroring the experience of other publications. The Daily Telegraph has reported that 8% of traffic to www.telegraph.co.uk comes from social media.
Laura Allard was one of our most devoted tweeters and now it has paid off. Just check out these emails from Laura over the past few days:
Laura Allard, Up To Speed
Laura Quotes
“Sept 9th
I have to thank you for all of this, for all your help, and for getting us to sign up to Wordpress and Twitter all those months ago. My mum was sceptical about Twitter, but it has really helped. I’m really pleased you showed the new group my blog. It has obviously helped me, so I hope it helps them too.
Sept 16th:
How exciting, I am an F1 columnist! 
I got practically no sleep last night I was so excited after this got published I’ll be writing for the site every Wednesday, and I may be doing some podcasts as well!
http://www.formula1blog.com/2009/09/15/marbles-laura-marieee-09-16-2009-f1-formula1/
Also writing a feature on Lotus for the end of the week for another site as well. ”
So, the proof of the pudding is in the tweeting!
It’s just two years since she received her A-Level results, but today Zara Bilgrami is working in a media office on the shores of the Caspian Sea. In a few weeks she’ll be back at the London School of Economics, starting the second year of her degree in Social Anthropology and able to reflect on a summer spent living in a different culture.
Zara Bilgrami: An Up To Speed Gap Year Success Story
Zara earned the chance to work for a Non-Governmental Organisation(NGO) in Azerbaijan, because she spent part of her Gap Year gaining a professional qualification in journalism at Up To Speed and subsequently working as an intern at CNN.
“The qualifications I gained at Up To Speed helped me gain an internship at CNN and a two month work placement in Azerbaijan
where I am currently re-writing the PR materials for an NGO, including their brochure, website and an award
application,” said Zara, 20.
“I have been putting the skills I learnt at Up To Speed into use every day.”
Two years ago Zara’s decision to opt for a seemingly serious option in her Gap Year was picked up by the Daily Telegraph.
At the time, Zara was at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and might have selected a more fun or exotic Gap Year experience, but she had the foresight to realise that she wanted her year to have more lasting value.
During her time at Up To Speed Zara published several articles for the course newspaper Poole People.
However, within weeks of finishing the course Zara was seeing her work published by CNN.
In the meantime, she had been able to use the time she spent in the UK on her UCAS application and by the time she had finished the course in February, 2008, Zara had been offered a place by the LSE. Only then did she opt to go travelling with a friend and use part of her Gap Year to see more of the world.
“The course I had taken at Up To Speed was a great talking
point when making new friends at LSE and it also gave me the opportunity to get involved in extra-curricular activities,” said Zara.
Over the next two years Zara is planning to build on these experiences and to keep using her journalism qualifications.
When she graduates in 2011, Zara will have formidable credentials.
Up To Speed’s Fast-Track Courses in Digital Journalism start each September and February and last for five months. To find out more, click www.uptospeedjournalism.com or ring 01202 761944.
Up To Speed’s Alice Fredenham has been making headlines since she decided to move from beauty therapy into news.
Alice Fredenham
She’s been a regular newsreader on Forest FM in the New Forest since joining Up To Speed’s Fast-Track course in Digital Journalism in the spring.
Alice, 23, worked as a therapist for four years in five star spas and now she’s hoping her new-found journalism skills will land her a job in broadcasting.
You can hear one of her news broadcasts by clicking on the link below:
Annie Roberts - Shorthand Star
Up To Speed student Annie Roberts found shorthand tough when she first started the Digital Journalism Fast-Track in February, but she was determined to get the better of it. And she has.
Annie passed the 100wpm exam at the first attempt after just 14 weeks.
“I’m just one of those people who hates to be defeated by anything and I wanted to prove that I could do it,” said Annie.
But Annie’s success in Shorthand has not come at the expense of her other studies. She received an A in her first Public Affairs exam.
The great thing about journalism is that you can find your way into it with any degree if you have the aptitude and you are prepared to adapt your knowledge and work hard to learn some practical skills.
The editor of the Celebrity Gossip site TMZ.com, Harvey Levin, is a trained lawyer. In some ways the two things may be unconnected, but if you stop and think about it, a knowledge of what you can say and how you can defend yourself in court can be incredibly useful for someone reporting on the lives of highly litigious Hollywood stars.
In Up To Speed’s own survey of 75 leading British journalists, there are two lawyers among the well-known faces and names. The sports presenter Gaby Logan has an LLB from Durham and the news reporter and presenter Andrea Catherwood read Law at Manchester.
There are a couple of other minority subjects on our list. Sky News presenter Anna Botting read Geography at Oxford while David Shukman read it at Durham before finding his way into a job as a BBC News Correspondent. Another Durham graduate is BBC Presenter Kate Silverton, who read Psychology, a subject tackled at Stirling by the Editor of Channel 4 News, Jim Gray.
Five people on our list are scientists. ITV News Science Editor Lawrence McGinty began by taking a Zoology degree at Liverpool and Zoology was also the subject of choice for the influential environment reporter and writer George Monbiot, who is an Oxford graduate. The Physics degree at Imperial College, London produced Newsnight’s science expert Susan Watts. The Today programme presenter Sarah Montagu took a degree in Biology at Bristol and David Attenborough started his life on television by taking Natural Sciences at Cambridge.
There are also six eminent historians on our list: Andrew Rawnsley(Cambridge), Matt Frei who also read Spanish(Oxford), Rageh Omah(Oxford), Dermot Murnaghan(Sussex), Tom Bradby(Edinburgh) and Jeremy Bowen(UCL).
And finally, what about journalism itself or media studies? The BBC Special Correspondent Richard Bilton read Media and Communication at the University of Central England, now Birmingham City University.
The fact that there is only one media graduate on our list may suggest that journalism as a first degree has a lot of catching up to do. However, the picture is not as simple as that. First, many of the journalists we feature took postgraduate courses in journalism, some won coveted traineeships with ITN, the BBC or national newspapers and others, like the Old Etonian editor of the Evening Standard, worked on local papers taking the NCTJ’s qualifications. And secondly, Journalism BA degrees were not an option when many of the people on the list started their careers. A recent survey of Multi-Media Journalism graduates from Bournemouth University shows that its course has given hundreds, if not thousands of people a first-break in the industry.
The Sutton Trust Report may lead many to conclude that journalism is a career with a bias towards a well-connected Oxbridge elite. There may be an element of truth in this, because editors may explicitly, or unwittingly, hire in their own image. They may also value the specialist knowledge that some graduates can bring to the role. However, anyone assuming that their First in PPE from Oxford or in English from Cambridge will guarantee them immediate respect in any British newsroom has another thing coming. You are only as good as your last story. If there are a lot of Oxbridge graduates on Up To Speed’s list it may simply be down to the fact that the people who win places at Oxford or Cambridge do so through a combination of brains, ambition and determination to succeed – traits which help them to climb to the top in the competitive world of journalism. So, it’s perhaps no surprise that twenty-five years after he won the Oxford Pushy Fresher award, Nick Robinson enjoys the coveted title of BBC Political Editor.
There was a dignified stand-off last night as journalists at BBC News 24 and Sky tried to verify the sad news that Michael Jackson had died, but in the meantime their tickers were telling us that a website called TMZ.com had broken the story.
The BBC firmed up the story first and confirmed TMZ.com’s report an hour after the website first ran with the news.
A few hours later and tmz.com’s wikipedia entry has already been updated to mark its new status.
It tells us that far from being a small independent start-up run by showbiz bloggers, TMZ.com is owned by the corporate media giants AOL/Time Warner. TMZ, which stands for Thirty Mile Zone has been breaking Hollywood news and making itself unpopular with the glitterati for some time.
Its managing editor is Law graduate and celebrity reporter Harvey Levin.
Sun Editor Rebekah Wade made headlines herself this week when she moved from the newsroom to the boardroom to become the Chief Executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News International.
It has taken Ms Wade, 41, twenty years to rise from a researcher on the News of the World magazine to become a powerful media mover-and-shaker with close contacts in Westminster and Show Business.
It’s perhaps surprising that the queen of Britain’s red tops has a degree in French from La Sorbonne when you’d imagine that most tabloid editors would assume Ile De La Cite was a fancy pie and mash shop for East End barrow boys.
But there are many linguists on Up To Speed’s list of 75 well-known journalists.
It may seem obvious that if you hope to become a foreign correspondent an ability to speak the language will help. Thomson Reuters has traditionally recruited many of the country’s brightest language graduates to use those skills. The Oxford-educated BBC Diplomatic Correspondent Bridget Kendall must have found her fluent Russian handy when she worked as a Moscow Correspondent. However, if you look at other people on the BBC’s extensive list of high-profile foreign correspondents, you’ll also find that knowledge of the native tongue is regarded as less important than an ability to report from anywhere and to tell a story compellingly. Kate Adie’s degree in Scandinavian Studies from Newcastle has never limited the scope of her reporting to peaceful democracies fringing the Baltic.
Indeed, many language graduates are not ostensibly using their skills at all in their day-to-day jobs. Before they read the news, Fiona Bruce read French and Italian at Oxford and Huw Edwards read French at Cardiff. Their boss at BBC News, Kevin Bakhurst read French and German at Cambridge. BBC presenters Sophie Raworth and Joanna Gosling read Modern Languages at Manchester and Birmingham respectively, Dani Sinha read French and Latin at Bristol.
Channel 4 News’ Brigid Nzekwu took a language degree in London.
In the field, two of the BBC’s front-line reporters will have found their knowledge of Arabic and Islam invaluable. The former Baghdad Correspondent Caroline Hawley read Arabic at Oxford, while the Security Correspondent Frank Gardner studied it at Exeter.
And while they may not have found it possible to apply their linguistic skills in the modern world, Boris Johnson and Radio 4 Presenter Martha Kearney have clearly put to good use the four years they spent studying Classics on the Greats course at Oxford.
So, languages can be useful in journalism. Quod erat demonstrandum. Tomorrow, we look at journalists who’ve studied zoology, physics and journalism.