Why the Course at Strathclyde

Brian McNair: I'm told that the journalism programme I used to run at Strathclyde received low satisfaction ratings in a recent national student survey.

I had something to do with that, I fear, because I was the one who in 2008 made the decision to pull Strathclyde’s Journalism & Creative Writing degree out of the accreditation scheme run by the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ). I had no choice, and the university agreed, because the NCTJ scheme I encountered on my arrival turned out to be structurally incompatible with Strathclyde’s BA Honours degree, within which journalism occupied only one quarter of the programme. There was simply no space for the NCTJ’s increasingly unrealistic demands on both staff and students.

Be that is it may, and painful as it was, I think we replaced the NCTJ curriculum with something better: journalism education focused on the high end skills of good writing, incisive analysis, rigorous research, strategic thinking, problem solving, story telling, the sociological and cultural context within which journalism is made and consumed.

Undergraduate journalism at Strathclyde had always been combined with creative writing, and then with history, politics, marketing, English studies. There was a reason for this approach, to do with the Strathclyde ideal of university as the exposure of high performing students to a liberal humanities education (as opposed to the mastering of shorthand at 100 words per minute). Free of the NCTJ curriculum, that synergy of journalism with creative writing, humanities and social sciences could flourish.

Events have reinforced the wisdom of that approach. In a world where, according to allmediascotland this very week, the supply of traditional journalism jobs has fallen by as much as 30 per cent (and those that remain are scandalously low-paid), the high flying journalist of the future needs more than NCTJ certificates in Public Affairs and Media Law to get on. He, or she, needs talent, imagination, a spirit of independence, an understanding of IT and social networking and their impact on media, culture and society in general; everything in short, that the NCTJ curriculum squeezed out with its relentless stress on externally-decreed learning by rote.

Many, maybe most, successful journalists never passed an NCTJ exam. NCTJ-certified journalists are being sacked, perhaps as I write, sometimes by editors who sit on NCTJ boards and declare their allegiance to the ‘gold standard’ of training. The old world of print journalism in which the NCTJ was formed is passing into history, replaced by content-generating users, citizen journalists and all those journalistic wannabees who make up the globalised, digitised public sphere in the 21st century. 

I hope, and believe, that Strathclyde journalism graduates will be well placed to succeed in that environment.

Brian McNair is a recent former Professor of Journalism at Strathclyde University. He now has a similar position at the Queensland University of Technology, in Australia. Read his blog - Kelvin Grove - at www.brianmcnair.com