The outgoing editor of Aberdeen’s Press and Journal has lambasted the state of journalism graduates coming out of university.
Derek Tucker, who announced his retirement earlier this month, said it had been a mistake to leave the training of new journalists to the academics.
Speaking at the Society of Editors conference, he said he would not want to adopt a content management system where journalists wrote directly onto pages because of the standard of graduates.
But other editors speaking at the session, entitled ‘It ain’t dead and we’re fixing it’ disagreed, saying their trainees had brought new skills to the newsroom.
Derek told the conference: “We could not produce what we now do with that method. I would be very reluctant to take that route due to the current state of the industry and handing over the education of young people to universities.
“We are reaping what we decided many years ago when we decided to leave training to the academics.”
“We must have a more active role in the selection of the people entering the profession.
“Tomorrow’s journalists must be trained by today’s journalists, not yesterday’s enthusiastic amateurs.”
Derek added many journalism graduates did not leave university with the right characteristics to be journalists or with a good grasp of the English language.
But Joy Yates, editor of the Hartlepool Mail, disagreed and said she had not had any bad experiences of trainees.
She said: “If there’s one thing that makes me proud, it is taking educated university students and turning them into the journalists of the future.”
Joy added that when the Mail was starting out with videos, they had benefited enormously from a new trainee who knew a lot more about them than anyone else in the newsroom.
Fellow editor Darren Thwaites, from Teeside’s Evening Gazette, said he had found there were still good trainees and bad trainees.
He added: “But no one under the age of 30 knows where to put an apostrophe.”
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Well said. Most trainees are more interested in flashing their press card and giving out business cards with ‘reporter’ on them rather than actually building contacts and learning how to cover the meat and bones such as court and council. Grr.
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The problem is that a bachelor’s degree now serves the same purpose that five o’levels did half a century ago. It shows that a candidate at least has a reasonable basic education. However, I agree that it’s far better for a recruit to learn the business alongside a proven professional than from an academic who is probably a wannabe journalist with no real experience on the ground. Old-style apprenticeships had much to be said for them, but they relied heavily on recruits having a sound working knowledge of the language, something one can never take for granted nowadays.
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A contemporary of Derek Tucker on the E&S had a saying about reporters: I wouldn’t pay them in bent washers. How right he was. The standard of journalism and particularly grammar and spelling is appalling. Reporters today sit and wait for emails and press releases because they wouldn’t know how to go out and get a story off their own bat.
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As usual there are both sides. A lot of the writing is bad beyond belief and does not seem to be edited. (why?) But there are some excellent young peopple too. There are plenty of “How to Write” books out there. Students or editors should invest in some.
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re writing books. couple of years back came across a very helpful and blessedly concise starters guide, I think called Write News or Rite News, that featured on HTFP briefly. ta for that.
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More and more the newspaper industry is happy to take journalists as cheaply as they can. Once over a newspaper would take someone fresh from school and spend years training them up in house at their own expense. But those days are gone. Now typical trainees have put themselves through three years of university at immense expense before then signing up for a 20-week fast-track course in Journalism (add on another couple of grand) before entering an incredibly competitive market for a trainee job which pays £16-£17k. If the profession wants a return to apprenticeships then it’s going to have to cough up – and we all know that’s not going to happen.
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How right Derek Tucker is and how sorely missed he was by the E&S when he departed for Aberdeen. Some three months after he left there was a street explosion less than a quarter-of-a-mile from head office. At the time it was feared it might be a terrorist bomb and a reporter (just one!) was put on the case. He spent an hour on the phone calling police, fire and ambulance to find out what had happened. When it was suggested (not ordered!) that he might visit the scene himself he spent another 20 minutes looking for an A-Z to discover where he had to go. In Tucker’s time at least three reporters and two photographers would have been sent immediately to the scene and the first details of the incident would have been on the front page within 20 minutes. That reporter had done a university journalism course and was a product of the already emerging system of staying in the office and re-writing press handouts, so he knew little difference. We old-timers, who to use a cliche, had printers’ ink coursing through our veins, shook our heads in amazement and despair when Derek was overlooked for the E&S editor’s chair which should rightfully have been his. He is a newspaperman to the core and I cannot believe that when he retires he will not find the call of journalism in one form or another too powerful to resist.
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