timesonline
Ed Caesar

A good job in journalism is a licence for nosiness, a soapbox on which to perorate and a backstage pass to the live performance of history. It can make the blood boil and the mind race and the days pass in an arrhythmic heartbeat. A bad job in journalism is like a bad job anywhere.

Still, we must look like we are having fun — almost every week I receive em: starting a career in journalism has always been a crap shoot, and becoming successful is like finding Wonka s golden ticket. There are, however, ways to up your chances.

Nicholas Tomalin — the wonderful, bombastic Sunday Times writer who died in 1973 reporting from the Golan Heights — thought he knew the answer. In 1969, a happier time for the industry, he began a piece in this magazine by asserting: “The only qualities essential for real success in journalism are rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability.” But if Tomalin were commissioned now, he would strike out that famous gambit and start again.

Today, you will need luck, flair, an alternative source of income, endless patience, an optimistic disposition, sharp elbows and a place to stay in London. But the essential quality for success now is surely tenacity. Look around the thinning newsrooms of the national titles. Look at the number of applicants for journalism courses, at the queue of graduates — qualified in everything except the only thing that matters, experience — who are desperate for unpaid work on newspapers and magazines. Look at the 1,200 people who applied in September for one reporter’s position on the new Sunday Times website. You had shoot a horse with those odds.

These are the signs of an industry at a strange moment. Hordes of young people still want to become journalists; there are fewer opportunities than ever for them to do so. It is no secret that what used to be called the “print media” has been economically straitened. But just as belts are tightened and we are attempting to map our future in the internet age, the legions of graduates keep coming — arts degrees and journalism diplomas in hand — to join the party. Are they, by attempting to start their journalism careers in 2010, making what the hero of Joseph O’Neill s Netherland calls “a historic mistake”? Is their situation “pre-apocalyptic, like the last citizens of Pompeii… or merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the cold-war inhabitants of New York, London, Washington and, for that matter, Moscow”.

Pompeii or Moscow? Paywalls or free content? iPad or Kindle? Nobody knows for sure but that has not stopped my boss and many others making large bets on the outcome. But if aspiring print journalists can, in spite of this uncertainty, suffer the indignity of working for free, in order to gain the opportunity to work for low wages, in order to write or edit a meaningful story at some point for decent, if unspectacular, money — if they can brook all this and succeed — they will need tenacity.

Tomalin’s 1969 piece has an enduring appeal for journalists. Indeed, his observation about rat-like cunning has become a kind of mantra for the industry, recycled at every awards dinner. Tomalin s catalogue of “other qualities”, which are “helpful, but not diagnostic” to a career in journalism, is less well known: “A knack with telephones, trains and petty officials; a good digestion and a steady head; total recall; enough idealism to inspire indignant prose (but not enough to inhibit detached professionalism); a paranoid temperament; an ability to believe passionately in second-rate projects; well-placed relatives; good luck; the willingness to betray, if not friends, acquaintances; a reluctance to understand too much too well (because tout comprendre c est tout pardonner and tout pardonner makes dull copy); an implacable hatred of spokesmen, administrators, lawyers, public-relations men, politicians and all those who would rather purvey words than policies; and the strength of character to lead a disrupted personal life without going absolutely haywire.phones for computers, and Tomalin s list rings true today. The “implacable hatred” section should be tattooed on the foreheads of all new arrivals, especially those who think journalism and PR are two parts of the same industry.

How do you measure success? In 2008, the Press Gazette nominated seven people for the British Press Awards Young Journalist of the Year — given to the journalist (aged 26 or under) considered to have made “the most impact in 2007”. They were Jerome Taylor of The Independent, Claire Newell of The Sunday Times, Patrick Foster of The Times, Stewart Maclean of The Mirror, Helen Pidd of The Guardian, Natasha Pearlman of the Daily Mail, and Kate Mansey of the Sunday Mirror, the eventual winner.class of 2008 were an eclectic, precocious bunch. None of them took the same route into national newspaper journalism. Take Stewart Maclean, who now runs a news agency in South Africa with his partner, Emily Miller. When he was 16, at sixth-form college in Winchester, he was “tremendously geeky about wanting to be a journalist”. He started sending press releases about sports results to his local free newspaper — which he delivered every Thursday. Eventually, they asked whether he would like to write a sports column, and, of course, he said yes.

“I ended up writing it on a Monday and delivering it on a Thursday,” he remembers. “It was a very small newspaper, but it gave me my first taste of writing and being read.Maclean arrived at Manchester University to study English, he immediately joined their outstanding student newspaper, and, by his fourth year, he was editor. Throughout his university career, he also made contacts on London newsdesks and sold them stories, while garnering as much work experience as he could on local and national newspapers. He was one of three graduates selected to join The Mirror s trainee scheme — during which he learnt shorthand and media law, and worked for two years as a paid-up reporter. It was, he remembers, “an amazing opportunity”.

Maclean still thinks he was “incredibly lucky” to have been chosen. “The key thing is to prove you really want to do it,” he says. “You have to work hard, at odd hours — and an ability to show that you can cope with all that is essential.doesn’t hurt, either, to think big. While studying German at Edinburgh University, Helen Pidd worked for her student newspaper, ran a festival freesheet called Fest, and pitched “absurd and brazen ideas” to The Guardian s pull-out features section, G2. She wanted to be a journalist because she “could not think of anything that could be more interesting”, but, when The Guardian eventually offered her a job, she did not accept immediately.

“I told the editor I wanted to start my own magazine empire,” she remembers. “I didn’t know at the time that I was playing hard to get, but apparently that made him want to hire me even more. A little while later, I just sat up in bed and thought, ‘Why am I being so stupid? Of course I should go and work for The Guardian.’ And that is what I did.is no best route into the profession. Editors do not seek talent; talent finds them. In times gone by, there was a well-trodden path for reporters. They would finish their education, learn the trade, cut their teeth on regional newspapers, and then, if they were good enough, take the train to London. Today, it is a more confusing picture, largely because the locals are struggling even more than the nationals. Meanwhile, print journalism has become, overwhelmingly, a graduate profession. The days when a keen young school-leaver like Frank Johnson could start as a messenger boy on the Sunday Express at the age of 16 and rise to become the editor of The Spectator are behind us.

The most sensible path into print journalism now is through the postgraduate journalism diplomas, particularly at City University and Cardiff University — where there are three applicants for every place — but a qualification is no guarantee of a job. Next month, around 3,000 students will complete postgraduate diplomas in journalism and media studies, and a further 30,000 will receive degrees in these subjects.

Journalists must therefore take their chances. Jerome Taylor started his life as a serious reporter unexpectedly, when the 2004 tsunami hit an area of southern India through which he was travelling. Over two months, he wrote stories for The Week, an Indian current-affairs magazine. Reporting from the areas affected by the tsunami was “a weird and quite brutal introduction to journalism. It wasn’t fun, seeing all that. But it was exciting at the same time”. Some months after he returned to Britain, The Independent s foreign desk was impressed enough to take him on a temporary, and then a permanent basis.

No two career stories are the same. Patrick Foster worked at The Times during Oxford University vacations, and stayed after graduation. Kate Mansey came in through the Liverpool Echo trainee scheme — one of the few local-newspaper training schemes still in operation — and began on the nationals by working temporary shifts. Claire Newell arrived at The Sunday Times on work experience and proved an invaluable member of the investigations team. Natasha Pearlman worked for the South West News Service and was picked up by the Daily Mail after placing several stories with them.

Many graduates simply turn up on work experience and refuse to leave. It worked for me. After a week of work experience at The Independent, I was asked to write a story about where influential members of the media eat lunch. The piece was packed with memorable scoops (oddly ignored by our competitors), including the discovery that Michael Winner could be seen filling the banquettes at The Wolseley. The editor, Simon Kelner, was impressed — and having returned from what I can only assume was a convivial lunch himself, instructed the features editor to start paying me.

Nearly every person who writes for a national has a tale like this. “We tend to romanticise that chancer element of the business,” says Taylor. “Everyone can tell you the editor who took them under their wing, or about writing the story that caught someone s eye.” The reverence with which journalists treat their “big break” is also indicative of how we see ourselves and our industry: roguish, irregular, basically decent, and, above all, meritocratic. Some of that self-image is true. Journalism is, to a large degree, a business where qualifications are less important than skills. Editors rarely care where you went to school, or university, or what training you received, as long as you can do the business.

Back in 1969, Tomalin characterised journalism as the most meritocratic of professions, once you had entered “the charmed circle”. “Anyone who has got into the club,” he wrote, “has no right to complain. His talents are frequently and publicly on display to his colleagues and customers. He needs no formal system of grading, no office politics, to demonstrate how good, or bad, he is. The promotion system in journalism therefore works very simply and very well. By and large a News of the World man, or a Farmer & Stockbreeder man, or a Penthouse man, deserves to be where he is. If he pretends to be ashamed, it is only because cultural snobbery demand he be so — he is happier, and better suited, than he admits.ntry to the charmed circle is the thing. All national newspapers are filled with young people looking for the password. The truth is that now journalism remains a meritocracy only to those who can afford it. Because work experience is so important, almost all aspiring journalists need to work in London, for free, at some point in their careers. Not everyone has the wherewithal to do this.

Kate Wiggans, who is now 29 and a press officer for a landmine charity, is from Rochdale in Greater Manchester. While she was at Hull University reading American Studies, she formulated what she now admits was a “fuzzy view” of journalism. With the eventual ambition of becoming a human-rights reporter “who exposed warmongering governments”, Wiggans enrolled on a postgraduate NCTJ course, did weeks of unpaid work experience at local newspapers in the northwest, then came to London. She had two weeks work experience on The Observer before joining The Independent, where an unpaid position led to a minimum-wage position, which led to a temporary editing job of a few weeks. Then she was let go.

“When I left the Indy I was so poor I couldn’t buy a ticket for the Tube,” she says. “Part of my decision to give up on journalism was financial. I was renting in Brixton with a couple of mates, and there is a limit to how long you can hang around with no money. I think, if I could have afforded to stay, I might have achieved what I wanted to. But I came to journalism with quite a naive view of what I could do there, and that is my fault. I love my job now — so it is worked out.this system healthy? Some newspaper executives will admit (off the record, naturally) that people on work experience are not only advancing their careers, but providing the paper with necessary labour that was, until recently, paid for. If keen workies were not beavering away for free, the edifice might start to crumble.

“It has become a fact of life,” says the deputy editor of a national broadsheet. “Interns are being used to fill the paper. If you are struggling to have enough money to fill the pages, to have a stream of bright people who are willing to work for free because they want to learn something... it has become the quid pro quo. But every year, a couple of those people manage to inveigle themselves onto the staff.Elliot Major, a former news editor, wrote a research paper for the Sutton Trust in 2006 in which he found a “deep-rooted social inequality” to the news media in Britain. He found that half the “leading figures” in the industry came from private schools, which account for 7% of the school population. What’s more, “the most recent recruits are even more likely to come from privileged backgrounds”.

There are compelling factors, he argues, why journalism is weighted towards the well-off. They are: “Low pay and insecurity at junior levels and the high cost of living in London; the increasing cost of postgraduate courses; the stronger skills, such as well-developed self-confidence, deemed to be exhibited by those from private schools; and a bias towards those with family or personal connections.” Four years after the report, Elliot Major says that “the problem has got worse”.

“The newspaper industry, in particular, is going through a period of entrenchment, and it’s harder than ever to get in,” he says. “I do believe the profession is meritocratic, once you’re there. The problem is this crucial early career stage in journalism. Typically, what people do is they go to London and work for free, or for very little, and hang around until they get somewhere. A very talented journalist from Newcastle who hasn’t got somewhere to stay in London is not going to be able to do that.take a look at that young-journalist class of 2008. Of the seven finalists, only Jerome Taylor went to private school. He was on the verge of quitting journalism because of financial pressures when The Independent offered him shift work. In fact, all seven finalists worked like dogs to get where they are. When Kate Mansey was trying to break into the nationals she would work all week at the Liverpool Echo, and then work weekend shifts in London. This does not sound like the story of someone who is part of a cosy metropolitan elite.

“It is,” says Patrick Foster, “a self-selecting system. If you’ve got sharp enough elbows to get yourself into a newsroom in the first place, you’ve probably got what it takes to succeed.question remains: why would anyone choose to become a journalist in this climate? In the early years, at least, the hours will be weird, the money derisory, the burden Sisyphean. You will also enjoy the added anxiety of having no idea what the industry will look like in 10 years.

The public, meanwhile, continues to loathe us in interesting and complex ways. Two years ago, a priest asked me whether I might enter the profession of “writer” rather than “journalist” in his marriage register, which seemed significant — we seem to feature somewhere between MPs and estate agents in the sliding scale of disgustingness. Indeed, Justin Lewis, head of the school of journalism at Cardiff University, says that part of his role is to temper the high expectations of students.

“Some of them do come here with very idealistic notions of what being a journalist is all about,” says Lewis. “We don’t want to hammer that out of them, but we need to be realistic about what those opportunities are. Research we’ve done within the school has shown that each journalist produces three times as much copy today as they did 20 years ago. So it is tougher. It’s tougher to get a job, and it’s tougher when they’re in a job, and we need to be clear about that.” Lewis, one expects, also tells his students that journalism is often wonderful. Return to the class of 2008, and you see young reporters enjoying extraordinary experiences. Kate Mansey, for example, was sent to Afghanistan in 2007 for a month, where she wrote a memorable story about a family of heroin addicts on the outskirts of Kabul. The youngest addict was a nine-year-old girl.

Jerome Taylor, meanwhile, has talked through the night with asylum seekers in Calais. Claire Newell went undercover to tease prominent MPs into admitting their role in the cash-for-honours scandal and the cash-for-influence scandal which sank Stephen Byers. Helen Pidd spent a day being rude to people in Perth, after it was voted Britain s most polite town. The list goes on.

There will be those who could think of nothing worse than meeting poor Afghanis, or hoodwinking politicians, or testing the patience of Scotsmen. Fair enough — sell cars. But there will also be those for whom the idea of such encounters is intoxicating, and the prospect of reporting such experiences more thrilling still. These people, if they are lucky and tenacious enough, become journalists.

Newcomers on the paper trail

For a junior reporter on a local paper, starting salaries can be as low as £12,000

The average salary for journalists is £24,500

Working hours can often stretch to between 50 and 60 per week

More than 60% of new journalists are graduates 90% of recently qualified journalists had copy published during work-experience placements, but only 22% were paid for their efforts