Skip to content

Newsrewired: Journalism students should play a real role in news publishing

What’s the future of journalism? Throwing imaginary Italian food at walls and seeing what sticks?

Well, it’s more complicated than that but spaghetti throwing was the metaphorical practice recommended by City University’s head of journalism George Brock at Journalism.co.uk’s News:Rewired conference. The former Times exec kicked off the day by calling for innovation and bravery to get things wrong. “This is a room of spaghetti throwers,” he declared.

He also announced a summer conference run by City on entrepreneurial journalism and said a new MA in financial journalism is on the way. But more interesting was his enthusiasm that journalism students should play a part in real-life news gathering:

Journalism education needs to throw some spag of its own. One example: if local Journalism is to take the toughest hit, can journalism schools help to fill the gap? This is happening in some places: instead of makming journalism private for students inside a school, why not make it happen outside in the community?

He talks sense: The University of Sunderland is joining ITN, Newsquest, Johnston Press and ITV local staff for the right to run the Independently Funded News Consortia (IFNC) pilot in the north-east of England. (Much more on IFNCs at paidContent:UK for anyone interested).

Newsquest’s Brighton Argus took on students bloggers from a local college and Trinity Mirror even has schoolchildren involved in Teesside.

Seasoned school-of-life hacks will sneer at this, but if there’s a willing army of journalism students, I don’t see why they can’t play a real in local publishing. In most big city newspapers – and at almost every national – a procession of free slaves “work experience” students play a significant role every day. Some are practically useless – as I found when I worked at a magazine – but so many keep newsrooms going and often go uncredited.

So we need a concrete system of rewarding students’ efforts and making sure news organisations get the help they want and need.

UPDATE: I caught up with Brock after his speech to ask him to elaborate. He says that the plan isn’t so much to legitimise the adhoc system of free work experience, as I suggest – he even says there’s no real reason to reform that j-school/news org relationship – but to get City students reporting online for real, in the wild.

He says that students that currently create community news magazines for internal purposes could “but actually help an online local, community news site”. Here’s the audio…


This was written by Patrick Smith. Posted on Thursday, January 14, 2010, at 1:21 pm. Filed under Education, Journalism, newspapers. Tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.

  • Pingback: uberVU - social comments

  • http://www.martinstabe.com/blog Martin Stabe

    I really don’t understand why there even needs to be a discussion about this, as it’s so blindingly obvious that this is what should be happening.

    Virtually every major university in the US (not just those with J-schools) has a student-run newspaper — often a pretty high-quality daily that covers the local community — or runs some sort of news agency that sells into the commercial media. Why UK journalism schools don’t operate in what Brock nicely calls a “teaching hospital” manner has never made any sense to me. Is it caused by fear of our libel laws or something?

  • Pingback: Freelance Unbound» Blog Archive » News:rewired – your handy guide

  • http://www.psmithjournalist.com Patrick Smith

    Mr Stabe: you’re right, it is obvious and we’re lagging the States in that respect massively.

    There, students do take part in real reporting – I’m not sure of the extent that even forward-thinking J-schools like City want to replicate that. There are so many talented young trainees willing to do this – there just needs to be a platform for them.

    Meanwhile, the most sensible students are already setting up their own sites. The opportunity for schools to capitalise on this is ebbing away.

    And as for libel, I’d say that’s the number 1 fear of MSM when engaging with h-local or student media – certainly the worry I hear the most in conversations I’ve had.

  • Pingback: psmith, journalist › Is News Over? City University journalism chief George Brock says journalists should accept changed world