Up To Speed Journalism Careers Advice – Tip #2 Research The Reality
Up To Speed Journalism’s Founder Tom Hill gives careers advice on becoming a journalist in a new series of posts on the Up To Speed blog.
We hope you find the advice helpful. Over the next few weeks we’ll be covering a range of topics including tips on how to write for print, online, radio and television.
In the first few posts, we’re looking at the initial steps you need to take to become a journalist including the all-important task of winning a place on the right course.
Tip #2 Research The Reality
Research The Reality
Finding a job in journalism is a bit like digging up a story when you are reporter. If you want your dream job to be a reality, you need to start out by doing some research.
One way to find out how to become a top journalist is to follow in the footsteps of people who have made it. Check out their backgrounds and how they started.
There’s a perception that you are much more likely to have a lucky break if you are from a privileged or well-connected background.
However, the reality is that to get ahead in journalism, it’s about who you know and what you know.
It is important to make contacts and to start networking, perhaps by offering yourself for work placements, but it is also vital to acquire professional skills and qualifications.
Luck may sometimes play a role, but if you are going to win in the journalism game, you have to make your own luck.
You need to have a goal and you need to have a plan.
My goal was to be a television reporter, but I knew I had to start somewhere first and so I applied for work placements on local newspapers. When I was fortunate enough to be offered two weeks in a newsroom, I threw myself into the job and started looking everywhere for stories. I found one in a pub. My first scoop was about an Alsatian called Sabre who liked to call into his local for a pint of Guinness. They say Guinness is good for you and it certainly was for me. The Sabre story impressed the editor and when someone gave in her notice during my placement, I was called in for an interview.
After a test including spellings and current affairs, I was offered the job.
As a university student, I had been inspired by Michael Buerk’s reports from Ethiopia. With my first job on the North Wales Weekly News, I was to go through the same NCTJ training Buerk had received as a school leaver on the Bromsgrove Messenger twenty years earlier.
Like Buerk before us, the three reporters in the Weekly News Colwyn Bay office were all to work for the BBC within a few years. Dawn Bryan is now a Radio 4 producer who has worked on Sunday, You and Yours, Woman’s Hour and with Michael Buerk on The Choice. Richard Galpin is currently a Moscow correspondent and has also worked as a BBC Correspondent in Athens, Jakarta and Islamabad.
I was to spend five years working for BBC TV in the East Midlands before moving to GMTV, ITN and Sky News.
The NCTJ qualifications we gained as trainees in those days are now regarded as a pre-entry requirement by most newsrooms. You can take them on the courses I run at Up To Speed’s training centre in the Daily Echo, Bournemouth. Those Fast-Track courses also include the multi-media skills I learned as a broadcast journalist.
Up To Speed’s courses prepare you for all forms of journalism. If you’re tempted click I want to be a journalist.
In the next post, I’ll be discussing ways to succeed in a competitive and challenging career.
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Tags: BBC journalist, Bournemouth Daily Echo, Bromsgrove Messenger, Dawn Bryan, Foreign Correspondent, journalism, journalism careers, Journalism courses, Michael Buerk, North Wales Weekly News, Richard Galpin, The Choice, Woman's Hour