OK OK, I’ve heard enough people tell me that the first thing they’re asked in job interviews nowadays is ‘Do you blog?’ So just for completeness, I’ll join in.
Roy Greenslade made this comment about the middle class taking over the media a whole week ago, but there has been much to ruminate on, and the issues aren’t going to go away. Plus, the comments, astonishingly, are constructive and interesting, and not the usual stream of vitiated, embittered bile you’d expect in newspaper web comments.
Anyway, Roy Greenslade has been teaching at City University in London for five years. Their journalism MA, he says, now costs £8,000. Eight grand! A woman I know told me she had to drop out of the City course, a couple of years ago, after a term, because of the cost of having to relocate to London. That’s not right.
And I wonder, how does anyone do it? Actually this isn’t just about ‘working class’ versus ‘middle class’, it’s about rich versus not rich. Plenty of the despised ‘middle class’ has very little spare cash, although the way some people carry on, you’d think we all lived in castles. And anyone leaving college in the last how many years [Google's not giving it up right now] will be saddled with a stack of debt. Mind you, I’m also astounded by the number of people whose parents buy them flats while they’re at university. Hardly anyone had that when I was an undergraduate.
And why does journalism have to be taught at this level? What happened to learning on the job?
Just for fun, let’s go back in time, to 1990, when I was a student at City. From the late 80s I’d become aware of the concept of the unpaid internship, and wondered how people did it. Then I got a traineeship on a Sunday paper, and part of the year’s training was a term at City. It was a very good course, taught by ex-journalists and editors from the national press, but I was dealing with some health problems at the time and probably should have deferred it.
There was quite a spread of people in the class, but there were a few staggeringly well-connected people who made the likes of me look like chavs. These are the people you know will probably float to the top, whatever they do. One of the tutors had a hard-on for a) the male students, and b) the posh ones, and made her preference clear. I remember one time in her office, when we were having a chat about my inability to get out of the bed in the mornings, and my constant tiredness. I actually had something quite nasty, and sobbed as I told her. She had never heard of it, however, looked at me as if I was mad, and I had to explain to her in detail. During my tearful account of it all, her phone rang. It was a student, one of the super-posh ones. She had called the tutor to say that although she had had tonsillitis, she was going to file a piece of work only half a day late.
After hanging up, the woman looked at me and said, ‘Xxxxx, she’s such a trooper.’
Oh esprit d’escalier! Oh to punch folk in the face with impunity! I gained some consolation from the fact that, over the following 15 years, every time I ran into someone who was on the course, they had exactly the same impression of her.
For contrast, there was another tutor who was exactly the opposite, had a massive chip on his shoulder and favoured anyone who identified as ‘working class’; openly, if indirectly, despising anyone who wasn’t.
Now I look back, their behaviour was kind of outrageous, really, but, with the benefit of years, perhaps they were just trying to teach us that this is the way it works, in journalism as anywhere else.
Posted on July 28, 2009 by taniaglyde
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