'Newcastle? It's a city in Scotland', The Times

Friday, July 05, 2002

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'Newcastle? It's a city in Scotland' - When reporter James Silver went to teach a journalism course, he was astounded by his students' aversion to news.

Someone should have warned me. Five minutes into my first seminar on a damp February morning at Thames Valley University, it was clear that I was in for a frustrating time. I had agreed to teach writing for journalism to first-year students as part of their BA in new media journalism.

The 20 students stared at me with slack-jawed bewilderment when I asked which news programmes they watched or listened to. Had they ever switched over to Newsnight or tuned in to the Today programme? A silence. What about Channel 4 News? More baffled looks.

OK, so they were not interested in broadcast news. But what about newspapers? No joy there either. Of nearly 60 students, only a couple had ever picked up a broadsheet. A handful occasionally bought the Daily Mail and Evening Standard. About a dozen read The Sun and Daily Mirror - and the news pages were invariably skipped through in favour of showbiz and sport. The most popular daily newspaper turned out to be the freebie Metro. Fewer than a quarter paid regularly for a daily or Sunday newspaper.
Was it not reasonable to expect undergraduates who had signed up for a three year media degree (encompassing subjects ranging from print journalism and website design to video production and broadcast news) to have more than a passing interest in the news agenda?

The lack of interest in current affairs among first years at TVU, in West London, was accompanied by amazing gaps in their general knowledge. At one point, the senior lecturer set them a news and general knowledge quiz which was to form part of their overall assessment. I marked a share of them. One student thought that Scotland's biggest city was Newcastle. Another reckoned Russia's currency is the dollar.

Over the past six years, the number of British students accepted on to media studies university courses has risen by nearly 50 per cent. The cash-strapped university sector tries to squeeze as many students as possible on to popular media-related courses to bolster income. Then there are the foreign scholars: overseas students can pay fees of £6,000 a year.

There is, however, a clear distinction to be made between the quality of undergraduate media studies courses at some of the "new" universities, and well established postgraduate one-year courses such as those at Cardiff, Sheffield and the London College of Printing, which are widely respected.

Donald Trelford, the former Editor of The Observer and now a visiting professor in journalism studies at Sheffield University, says: "It is a great pity when the bad ones tarnish the reputation of the good. The media is a popular profession and there is certainly an element of cramming students in to get money. I think that's cynical."

Students at TVU are not the only media students with an aversion to current affairs. One former BBC reporter recalls setting a news quiz while lecturing at another university. "It was a week or two after September 11 and I asked who the leader of the Taleban was," he remembers. "I helped them by saying it was not Osama bin Laden. Despite blanket coverage on the news, of 30 students, none got it right. And, what is worse, most of them said bin Laden. Typically, the only question they all got correct was naming the famous personality who had just revealed she was pregnant - Liz Hurley. "I mentioned this to my head of department, who agreed, saying her students were 'crap too'. She said she would have failed at least three of them but the policy was not to discourage them too early on. Of the 30 students on that course, my honest assessment is that none will make it into national news journalism."

A media departmental head at a rival London university, who spoke on condition of anonymity, reluctantly agrees. "I would be surprised if 1 per cent of each intake got jobs in a mainstream media outlet," he admits. "A few might get into PR. Universities at the lower end of the league table, including my own, attract students who have often been turned down elsewhere. Many end up studying journalism without any real idea of what is required."

Top of the list of requirements for learning the basic skills in journalism - writing leads, structuring news stories, reporting a case in a magistrates' court - is the ability to use good English and write in clear, concise sentences. But in my seminars there were a number of overseas students who struggled even to speak the language, let alone write a coherent news story.

At times it tilted into the realms of farce. One bright Middle Eastern student had considerable experience of journalism in Arabic but spoke little English. When I handed out news-writing exercises, he would take them home, put them through Arabic-English translation software, write his copy in Arabic, then translate it back into English. The results were unintentionally hilarious.

Unfortunately it is a common complaint on some media courses. "Many of the students I teach have basic language and writing problems which have not been addressed at school or by the university," says a lecturer in broadcast journalism at another university.

Foreign students paying to attend media courses are being misled by universities, says the departmental head, who is obliged to take a significant percentage of them each year. "In my view, universities that take students who don't speak English to a good standard are taking money under false pretences," he says.

On my first morning at TVU, I asked students in which field of journalism they hoped to work. One was interested in war zones. Four wanted to be on-screen TV reporters (they weren't picky about the programmes), eight women wanted to work on showbiz columns (all cited the Daily Mirror's 3AM Girls as role models), six men wanted to write about football and a handful coveted entertainment specialisms such as films, fashion, theatre and music. The rest had not made up their minds. The reality is that most, if not all, will be disappointed.

(The TImes, July 5th, 2002)

Posted by James Silver - On Friday, July 05, 2002

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