Up To Speed Journalism Career Advice For Graduates
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.
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Tags: Andrea Catherwood, Andrew Rawnsley, Anna Botting, Bournemouth University multi-media journalism, David Attenborough, David Shukman, Dermot Murnaghan, Gaby Logan, George Monbiot, Harvey Levin, Jeremy Bowen, Jim Gray, journalism careers, journalism careers advice, Journalism courses, Kate Silverton, Lawrence McGinty, Matt Frei, Rageh Omah, Richard Bilton, Sarah Montagu, Susan Watts, TMZ.com, Tom Bradby, Up To Speed Journalism