It may sound obvious, but if you want to become a journalist it really does help if you love words. Reading. Writing. That kind of thing.

And so it’s perhaps not surprising that in Up To Speed’s look at the undergraduate careers of 75 leading journalists, English came out on top. Twenty people on the list read English at university.

Among the newsreaders Natasha Kaplinsky at Five and Samira Ahmed  at Channel 4 News were at Oxford as was the Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips. ITV’s Julie Etchingham, Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis and BBC Sport presenter Clare Balding were at Cambridge. Mary Nightingale, also at ITV, graduated from Royal Holloway, London.

English was also the subject of choice for many of the male faces on television. Jeremy Paxman, Andrew Marr, Sir David Frost, John Simpson and Edward Stourton all read English at Cambridge. Ian Hislop and the Channel 4 News reporter and presenter Alex Thomson both went to Oxford as did Evening Standard editor Geordie Greg whose first job on a south London weekly paper allowed him to list his credentials as Eton, Oxford and Deptford. Panorama presenter Jeremy Vine has an English degree from Durham, while Adrian Chiles went to Westfield College, London and Gavin Esler studied English and American Literature at Kent. The film reviewer Mark Lawson read English at University College, London.

However, the key to success for many of these people was the work they were doing when they weren’t studying English. Julie Etchingham combined her degree with a show on BBC Radio Cambridge and Jeremy Vine had an overnight music show on Metro Radio in Newcastle.

During their time at Cambridge, David Frost and John Simpson were both editors of Granta while Jeremy Paxman edited Varsity. Edward Stourton edited another student magazine called Rampage before joining ITN as a trainee. Clare Balding was President of the Cambridge Union.

At Oxford, Samira Ahmed was editor of Isis, while Ian Hislop went his own way with a college paper called Breaking Wind. He landed his job with Private Eye after interviewing his predecessor Richard Ingrams.

English may have come out on top in our survey, but hot on its heels was another subject, or cluster of subjects – politics, philosophy and economics. We’ll have more on that tomorrow.

The latest volley in an unseemly row over TV newsreaders’ qualifications was fired by ITV anchor Mary Nightingale today.

She leapt to the defence of the glamorous so-called “auto-cuties” who read our nightly news bulletins, pointing out that most of them have brains as well as beauty.

Ms Nightingale was responding to the veteran newscaster Peter Sissons, who reportedly said that Five News’ £1m a year presenter Natasha Kaplinsky had “done very well out of her looks”.

Sissons, 66, who was shot in the legs while covering the Biafra war for ITN, said he believed all news readers should have earned their spurs as frontline reporters.

However, if you take a step further back in their careers, you’ll find that Kaplinsky and Sissons, broadcasting beauty and latter-day Boot of The Beast, have something in common.

They both went to Oxford. 

A few years ago some research by the Sutton Trust found that a whopping two-fifths of graduate journalists had spent three years studying beneath its dreaming spires.

This week, Up To Speed will be taking a closer look at the university days of some of Britain’s highest profile journalists to see how they made the transition from student to star reporter.

Looking at the backgrounds of 75 journalists we’ve found that 30 went to Oxford, 13 went to Cambridge and 32 went to other universities.

We’ll start tomorrow by looking at the single most popular subject from our list -  English.