Journalism

A Career Handbook

Anna McKane

• Publisher: A&C Black Academic and Professional
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781408103371
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Print journalism is one of the most popular career options among
recent graduates. But how many of them land that crucial first job and
go on to build a career in print journalism?

This book gives you all you need to plan and build your career in
journalism, including sections on: - Analysis of the industry: sectors
and structures - Types of print journalism: newspapers, national and
regional; magazines; consumer handouts; voluntary sector publishing;
web journalism; agency work; photojournalism - Range of job
opportunities; freelance/salaried; in-house/in the field - Routes into
journalism: getting in and getting on - Training and education;
resources/contacts.

1
Working in Print Journalism

• What do journalists do?

• What are journalists like?

• What qualities do you need to be a journalist?

• How does the job operate?

• Salaries

‘The only qualities essential for real success in journalism are a rat-like cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability.’

Nicholas Tomalin, Stop the Press,
I Want to Get On, in The Sunday Times, 1969

Estimates for the number of people working as print journalists in Britain today vary wildly. It seems likely that there are about 60,000 to 70,000 people involved more or less full time in print journalism, but there must be several thousand more who are slightly on the fringes, producing material for websites, travel brochures and the like. There are many graphic designers working for pressure groups, charities and firms, who would not regard themselves exactly as journalists but are doing a journalistic-type job. There are many more who do bits of journalism alongside their main job, because they have some expertise in an area, or because they know an editor. The field is expanding at present and there are expected to be several thousand more jobs in print and broadcast journalism in the next decade or so.

What do journalists do?

Journalism is about finding things out: the facts of a plane crash, the outcome of a court case, the latest attempts at spin-doctoring, David Beckham’s new hairstyle. Then the idea is to tell as many other people as possible. Generally, this process will be a joint effort, with reporters doing the finding out, photographers taking a picture which makes a point, and the production team getting the material from them to the reader.

One misapprehension about journalists among the general public is that they all write articles. This is a word, incidentally, that few journalists ever use. They either talk about a story, a feature, or simply a ‘piece’. All this is known collectively as copy. But there are thousands of successful journalists around who have never written a story. For every single reporter whose name appears at the top of a story in a local or national paper, there is another journalist working behind the scenes, having ideas for articles, commissioning them, editing them, designing pages, finding or commissioning the right pictures, and organising production schedules. Those who have not seen it done often cannot understand the amount of work involved in actually converting a list of news stories and features into the newspaper or magazine itself.

Often someone will say, ‘I think I would make a good journalist because everyone tells me my writing is good.’ It is sad, but true, that in the lower echelons of newspapers and magazines, an interest in ‘literary writing’ may be a hindrance. There is a story about the playwright Tom Stoppard who was sent to cover an accident when he was a young reporter in Bristol. He wrote a beautiful piece about the atmosphere, the lowering sky, etc, but didn’t secure the exact facts of how the crash happened, how many people were injured, and so on. No surprise, then, that he didn’t make it as a news reporter, but there is no question about his ability to write.

It is far more important, in the early stages at least, simply to be efficient. A junior reporter needs a clear idea of the facts needed for a news report, a methodical mind to record them accurately, the organisational ability to get back to the office in time and type something into the computer, and the common sense to acquire the phone number of someone who knows what happened. Then the reporter needs charm, so that when she is writing up the story and finds some vital point has been forgotten, she can ring that person up to check it.

Journalists are happiest when they are the first to find something out, and the first to tell everyone else about it. So another quality they either have when they start, or they develop if they do the job well, is a competitive streak. But again this applies to most careers, from medical researchers to teachers. It is probably just a bit more obvious with journalists.

Journalists like to ‘Be There’. Some years ago the entire picture team of The Independent – picture editors, researchers, staff photographers and freelances – were at a party in Islington. A terrorist bomb went off at the Honourable Artillery Company building in City Road, just near the paper’s offices. A duty officer rang the picture editor, and the partygoers heard of the explosion within seconds. The freelance photographers left en masse, abandoning half-eaten barbecue, half-drunk glasses and half-drunk and slightly irritated girlfriends.

Some of the photographers were inside the damaged building before the police. One of them, Jon Jones, now a highly successful international photographer, got the picture that was used in the next edition of the paper. Within an hour all the photographers had returned to carry on partying, but one probably echoed all their feelings. He knew he hadn’t got the best photo, because Jon Jones got into the building first. ‘But,’ he grinned happily, ‘I was there.’

The staff photographers didn’t dash off to City Road. More secure in their jobs, most had not taken their cameras to a Saturday night party. But the freelances, who cannot afford to miss a chance, had theirs.

Most journalists agree that the job can often be great fun. Meeting people, digging up information, taking a photograph which encapsulates an important story, producing a good-looking paper, magazine or website – all these are creative activities, and from the Blue Peter of childhood onwards, most people like creating things. Journalists might moan a lot, but that may be because many of them talk a lot. The other day I was chatting to an older hack whose career has included work on nearly half Britain’s national newspapers. It was all fun, he said, but the best fun was being there at the launch of The Independent. The arrival of new technology which made the project feasible, the rise of anti-Murdoch feeling in Britain following his move to Wapping which meant that a good percentage of Times readers were looking for a change, and a genuine belief in the paper meant that the first couple of years of its life are regarded by those who were there as having been a golden springtime.

What are journalists like?

‘Quoyle, you got some kind of a wreck to brighten the front page?’

E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

There are a number of misconceptions about what it takes to be a successful journalist, and what it is like being one. Journalists have traditionally been regarded as slightly raffish, maybe a bit loud, perhaps a little untrustworthy. This is not entirely justified. Journalists who break genuine confidences, name a source when they had promised not to do so, or who pretend to be a sheikh when they really work for a Sunday tabloid, are a very small minority, though they are the ones people hear about. As other groups, including politicians, lawyers, even the police, are falling slightly in the public’s estimation of their trustworthiness, journalists are being seen as perhaps no worse than anyone else.

Journalists are regarded as glamorous. This image is fuelled by novels, plays and films, and by the elevation of some of them, TV journalists in particular, into media stars. It is an image encouraged by some journalists themselves, who as a group possibly tend to sound off more in the pub about the exciting moments in their work.

Plenty of it is exciting too, but not necessarily in the way non-journalists would expect. It is not all about exposing a crooked tycoon or a bent politician, or uncovering a terrible injustice. Production journalists, for instance, get a kick out of getting a massive national paper, with its endless sections of news and features, to print on time. Gossip columnists would be equally excited about being the first to report on a new romance between two soap stars.

The desire to tell other people things certainly does seem to extend to their workplaces more than with some other walks of life. The image of colleagues and rivals gathering in the pub after work, going over the day and generally gossiping about what has gone on, who is about to be hired or fired, is probably more true of journalists than other professional groups.

Another impression, again gleaned from films and novels, is that journalists are hard-bitten, slightly callous and uncaring. And there is no doubt that some journalists have made their friends wince with their open cynicism. Edward Behr, in his autobiography about his life as a foreign correspondent covering wars and uprisings all over the world, describes a scene in Africa. Belgian refugees were huddled in aircraft hangars waiting to be flown out of the newly-independent Belgian Congo: ‘Into the middle of the crowd strode an unmistakeably British TV reporter, leading his cameraman and sundry technicians like a platoon commander through hostile territory. At intervals he paused and shouted, in a stentorian but genteel BBC voice, “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?’’’ Behr used that cringe-making quote for the title of his book.

Such anecdotes are not likely to improve the standing of journalists, but it may be that journalists are no more cynical than other groups. A vicar I overheard at a dinner party was clearly scandalised to hear a night editor say, with mild satisfaction, that ‘Rudolph Nureyev died in time for the edition’. Maybe it was a bit naïve to imagine that a non-journalist would understand the kick the night editor got of getting the story into the paper.

Most journalists who have reported on accidents and disasters for local papers have a story to tell about an emergency worker seeming to joke about a tragedy. Police, doctors and paramedics all have to devise ways of separating their work from family and other human relations, or they might not be able to carry on with the job. It is likely that, because on the whole journalists are keener to talk about their work, an apparent hardness of heart may be more noticeable.

It is the hard-bitten, cynical hacks who most often appear in plays and films as representing journalism, but on the other side of the coin (and there are plenty like this as well), are the idealists who genuinely want to ‘make a difference’. They want to expose injustices, uncover corruption, or simply make their readers care more. It can be lonely and difficult work. Tom Bowyer, who spent years investigating the misdeeds of the Mirror tycoon Robert Maxwell, described the frustrations of compiling huge dossiers of facts and continually receiving injunctions preventing him from publishing what he knew to be the truth.

There is a debate raging at the moment in the field of war reporting about how much the reporting might affect the way events unfold. Wenlock Jakes in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop overslept in a train, ended up in the wrong country, filed extensively and fictionally about revolution going forward in a perfectly peaceable place, and ended up destabilising the country to such an extent that there really was a revolution.

Peace journalism is a fairly new and complicated subject, whose idealistic advocates want to use journalism to ‘make a difference’. Its advocates say that all journalism is an intervention in a situation, that reporters should be aware of the effect of their reports, should seek to avoid stereotypes, try to report on conflict resolution rather than just on conflict, and in this way intervene to defuse a situation rather than worsen it.

The fictional Wenlock Jakes is an exaggeration, fortunately, but it is certainly the case that journalism, and in particular television, can have a huge effect on events. There are plenty of cases where the public in Britain has taken a great deal more interest in, and begun to do something about, a famine or disaster once the television cameras arrived. It might not look like it in some areas, but there are signs that journalism is becoming more responsible.

Probably the best-known campaigning journalist in Britain is Paul Foot, who has exposed corruption, scandal and injustice in his work for The Mirror and Private Eye. He wrote so regularly about the case of the men wrongfully imprisoned for the 1978 murder of the paperboy Carl Bridgewater that colleagues at The Mirror...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 – Working in print journalism
• Chapter 2 – Newspapers
• Chapter 3 – Magazines
• Chapter 4 – Online journalism
• Chapter 5 – Agencies
• Chapter 6 – Charities, NGOs and travel brochures
• Chapter 7 – The Visuals
• Chapter 8 – Freelancing
• Chapter 9 – Training
• Chapter 10 – Getting a job
• Chapter 11 – CVs and job applications
• Chapter 12 – Contacts
• Chapter 13 – Further reading
• Glossary
• Epilogue
• Imprint