Age in journalism: why it matters, why it doesn’t

Unless you are Buddha, or aspiring to become one, it is almost impossible not to be affected by news that a former classmate, who did the same journalism course as you, has landed a job….

Every classmate who finds work and leaves the boat behind – the boat of miserable unemployed whingers – triggers mixed feelings of joy and sorrow. Why him? Why her? Why not me?

I never expected the perfect job to fall from the skies, but I wasn’t prepared for 10 months of doom and gloom either. The more time elapses after graduation, the harder it is to keep the motivation up to even continue looking.

Stats
Laura Oliver, senior reporter at Journalism.co.uk, says in a blog for journalism graduates in the Guardian Careers site this week:

“[A] recent graduate told me that only three of his coursemates from a year of 75 had jobs lined up – two of them in PR.”

This doesn’t surprise me. Out of 23 classmates in my fast-track course, I reckon four to five people (approx.20%) found employment during or shortly after the course, one in PR. That was last year. I guesstimate their average success rate for journalism jobs now at two to three  students each term, and not always working as reporters or subs.  

Warped Reality
For the school, even one journalism student with a job is worth two in the (unemployment) bush. Because it makes excellent PR, you will hear those success stories being trumpeted again and again by your tutors, along with any news on NCTJ student awards and nominations.

No one will give you an update on how the remaining 20-odd jobless graduates  are making ends meet.

When you are unemployed, skint, with a stash of unpaid bills piling up on the kitchen table, facing the dreary early evenings as winter sets in, those two or three annoucements feel like a dagger to the heart.

You know what I mean. Even though it was one or two in a class of 25, it still sounds as if everyone else in the world – but you – has got a job and is living happily ever after. Your mind plays tricks on your perception of reality, making things look bigger than they are. 

Don’t believe the trickster. The truth is the majority of journalism graduates are not managing to get their foot in the door.

A youth-friendly path
I think we all agree journalism is elitist and those with private education and financial means to do a few months’ work placements in Fleet Street end up having the edge over the rest of us, working class paupers. 

So who is getting the jobs? The Oxbridge graduates? The ones with flats in London who did internships at the BBC and the Guardian? The WASPs? The ones with the right accent? The younger ones?

Certainly the younger ones.

In a way, being young and fancy-free is an advantage. If you haven’t got a mortgage, or a partner/children to take into account, you could move from Brighton to Manchester, if necessary, for a first job. You could live on lower wages, just because it hasn’t been long since you left school, and you still have those “shoestring budget” survival skills. Overall, a younger person has fewer restrictions to tie them down.

Too old to be a journalist?!
For mature students like myself, who have already been working for a good many years, built up a career in a different field, achieved a certain level of income and social status, going round knocking on journalistic doors for a first job, with wages that may not even cover your rent, is a much tougher call. We have neither the time nor the recklessness of youth on our side.

I am not using age as an excuse for my status, nor do I regret my mid-life choice to pursue journalism over a cushy jet-setting managerial job in publishing until retirement. At 22, I would not have been as ready and determined as I am now.

Never a right time
Former accountant Nigel Barlow decided to move into journalism at the age of 42. Last June he wrote in Journalism.co.uk:

“For me it’s the right time to become a journalist.” 

I agree. It is not about whether there is a recession or not. It is about being the right time for you. In your life, was this the right moment? And if your decision came from the heart, the answer will most likely be yes. You can read Nigel’s full article here.

Waiting for…Darcy
Back in the boat, like in a circle of spinster friends, where everyone dreads being the last to marry, we all long to catch that bride’s bouquet and turn luck to our side. 

With trepidation I too await my Darcy equivalent of a job. When I find him, my schadenfreude says he might just be a little bit richer and better-looking than my classmate’s catch.

…If you are an older journalism graduate, please share your thoughts on this with us by leaving a comment below.   

Related links:

• A job for the wealthy and connected by Peter Wilby (Guardian)
• Greenslade on working-class journalists (Student Journalism Blog)
• Too old to become a journalist (Journalism.co.uk blog – at 28?! Surely not…)

Ethnic minority schemes: is positive discrimination really positive?

Ethnic minority is the theme of a standing joke at home between myself and my husband. Whenever I see a job ad welcoming applications from “members from the ethnic minority groups”, he says, “It’s for you. Go for it.” And my stock answer is an indignant, “But I’m not ethnic minority.” It makes him laugh that I am so reluctant of being called “minority”.

Bizarrely, as a child, growing up in Brazil as a second-generation Japanese Brazilian I was always conscious of being “different”, the odd one out, the kid that never quite blended in in a classroom. When I went to work in Japan, I was relieved not to stand out in a crowd at last. But the physical alienness was only replaced by one of psychological ostracism, as,  being a Brazlian at heart, I felt very much a foreigner in my thoughts and values among the Japanese.

I had to come to terms then that wherever I went, East or West, I would never be quite the same as the natives in the land. When you grow up on the borderline between multiple cultures you don’t belong anywhere, and at the same time, you are a citizen of the world. Some will respect you that much more for it; others will make sure you know your place and stick to it, ie always on the outside looking in.

Fairy tale of gypsy girl in a wagon
This week the news that a journalism graduate, who was a former “gypsy”, was awarded a traineeship at The Guardian and had a four-page feature published in G2 struck a chord with me.

Roxy Freeman, now 30, came from a traveller family and grew up in a horse-drawn wagon for a home with nine other siblings, roaming round Ireland, with no formal schooling until age 22. Her only educational credits are an Open University degree and a diploma in journalism obtained  at the same training centre in Brighton where I studied last year.

Considering that travellers are one of the most hated, contemptuously discriminated and abused minority groups in this country, I felt like giving Roxy a standing ovation for her admirable feat. The published feature, “My restless Gypsy life“, is her own life story so far, which she tells with disarming candidness and, surprisingly, not an ounce of bitterness  against anyone who may  have once slighted her. Proof that living as an outsider can help you acquire wholesomeness as a person in a way a school can never do.

According to an article posted in HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk, Roxy got a work placement thorugh The Guardian’s Postive Action Scheme, which “supports journalists from ethnic minorities”.

Daily Mail goes ethnic
This immediately reminded me that, last summer, the Daily Mail started recruiting young applicants from ethnic minority groups for their annual Young Journalist of the Year prize, which included a week’s internship at the Daily Mail and £500 in cash.

There was a lot of jeering on Twitter at the time. A web editor of a regional newspaper I “follow” sarcastically tweeted: “The Daily Mail wants a brown face on their front page.”

It was unfortunate that this initiative was associated with a redtop better known for its right-wing views on immigration and foreigners in general. The Daily Mail may have used it as a publicity stunt to undo some of the negative PR it regularly receives, but the original intent of the award is supposedly to encourage diversity in journalism. Details on the GG2 Young Journalist of the Year Award can be found in the PDF document within this link.

My question is: are such awards really that positive a step towards including the excluded at a time when journalism has been found guilty of being an elitist and exclusive profession of the middle-classes? (I have written a little about this in my previous posting here and in Journalism.co.uk: Journalism: an aspiration soley for the elite).

Women, the ethnic minority of publishing
When I used to work in publishing, I always felt slightly irritated by the existence of the Orange Prize for Fiction aimed exclusively at female writers when there isn’t a men-only one. It is ironic then that the Man Booker is for both sexes, but doesn’t a unisex prize suffice? Or could there be a sinister, male-chauvinistic and condescending flip side to the Orange Prize, which implies women authors are not good enough for the Booker and therefore need to be evaluated separately?

Could it be that women, like ethnic minorities, are considered under-privileged in some way, and need that “little push” to come to the limelight?

Don’t get me wrong. I am delighted that lady writers are being given the opportunity of winning a prestigious literary award that could help boost the sales of their books, but unlike in sport, where there is an obvious difference in physical strength between males and females, I struggle to accept the idea that women need to be placed in a category of their own.

A little help from your friends
Awards  and traineeship schemes for ethnic minority journalism graduates are excellent initiatives, without which someone like Roxy may never have got her foot in the door. At least not so fast. It gives them that little edge over the others, who may not have to fight so hard against discrimination to get that first job.

Roxy’s story made me suddenly wonder if any of my job application rejections in the past was in any way influenced by my being of Japanese origin, even though a candidate’s racial discrimination is officially illegal.

I recall now that when I changed my family name to Elliott, after my marriage, I felt much more confident introducing myself by name to people I was interviewing.

I realised, in shock, that I had sub-consciously imagined people would never believe someone with a foreign name could write a story in decent English, let alone for a newspaper.

As with appearance, people make judgements based on your name. If you have a double-barrelled name, that is an indication of a privileged status. If you are a Smith, you are nondescript. A Rothchild means a free pass in life. A foreign name and people are immediately suspicious as they cannot pigeonhole you in a category they can easily understand and rate.

Roxy had a blank space on her application form under “education”, which provoked frawns and dirty looks.  Now her CV will say “trainee at The Guardian”. “Features published in The Guardian.” Who will dare refuse her an opportunity? Good on her.

Pride can takes you places
Yet, just as I have my gripe against literary prizes for lady authors, I cannot help but dislike the thought that any minority group should need the “protection” of the state or of private companies when they are just as capable of great achievements as anyone else.

Maybe I am too proud.

Maybe because of my pride I do not feel comfortable being classed as ethnic minority because that feels a bit like second-class citizenship. I  remember that as a child I worked twice as hard as any Brazilian kid at school just to prove that I might be “a Jap with slits for eyes”, as a bully at school once told me, but academically I could outshine them any day.

In fact, many ethnic minority children grow up to become grand figures in history exactly because they had their prides to defend and a point to prove. Hardship gives you chutzpah.

Did you see where that little half-cast boy called Barack ended?

I will make a concession and accept that they –correction, we – we at times do need a little help from our friends. It may not be so bad after all to be granted special opportunities and schemes for being  under-recognised and under-represented in a certain community. 

What saddens me is that we live in a society where discrimination and social inequality are so rampant that, without the extra help, it is still difficult for some of us to jump off that travelling wagon onto the bandwagon of security and success, which should be our birthright.

Is breaking news the only passport to a job?

Today I received a letter from the editor of a B2B magazine where I had applied for a reporter’s job. The letter starts with “Thank you for attending an interview for the above position.” and ends with the all too familiar “however I have decided not to pursue your application.”

It would all have been normal procedure, had it not been for the fact that four days ago I had already received an email from their HR department informing me I had not been shortlisted for interview.

Unless my alter ego got frisky and decided to barge into an interview uninvited, it was clearly an HR cock-up. But what was interesting was that the editor explains in the letter what I need to do in order to have a chance of being employed by the magazine in future:

“I would suggest that the more experience you gain of landing news exclusives, the better your future prospects on a magazine like [publication name].”

It was a question I was intending to ask them by way of feedback, so I am glad I now know.

So an NCTJ, a smattering of internships and a potfolio bulging with published cuttings do not make me employable material until I have “exclusives” to show for it.

I am no defeatist, even though, at my ninth month of unemployment  – almost a full gestation – I sometimes lose my rag and fantasise about slitting my wrists in front of the local JobCentre….were it not for the fact that the recession turned our high street into such a ghost town no one would even notice.

A ‘lemony’ view of life
Louise L. Hay, one of the pioneers of self-help movement, famously said:

“If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. If the lemons are rotten, take out the seeds and plant them in order to grow new lemons.”

I mentally run through my options on what I could realistically do to get to those “exclusive lemonades”:

1. Job hunting vs story hunting: In order to make time for story hunting that  might be worthy of a front page, I would have to stop applying for jobs for a while, as job applications can often take days to complete. Unless you are a lazy scum who just cuts and pastes cover letters word for word every time.
2. Jobseeker’s Allowance is not Storyseeker’s Allowance: If you are on the dole, as I am, you must “sign on” at the JobCentre every fortnight, with your “dole book” completed with SIX steps you took to find a job. Even if you didn’t find six vacancies to apply for in between visits, you must convincingly prove you have been actively looking for and available for work.
3. Become a “career intern”: I could apply for more internships in the hope that an “exclusive” will fall onto my lap in its natural course. Internships are invaluable for hands-on experience but as a rule they are unpaid. Can you realistically afford it? Should you not be using the time to look for paid work instead?

The price of experience 
It is a chicken and egg situation. Without a job you cannot get experience. Without experience you cannot get a job. But how much work experience counts as job experience?

In a blog in Journalism.co.uk (Without traineeships going to trainees, how can we get experience?), feelance journalist Ross Davies asks:

“How many more internships do I have to complete before I have the sufficient experience that editors are looking for? How long will I have to go unpaid for the articles I provide?”

Unleashing Aspirations…how excatly?
Only last July a government-led report on (the lack of) social mobility and equal opportunities in the UK highlighted the fact that only aspiring journalists from middle-class families could afford to go on long-term unpaid internships to acquire the type of experience newsrooms required. A summary of the report’s findings was published in The Guardian.

Although Press Gazette’s Dominic Ponsford responded with “Ten Tips for a school-leaver” to buck the elitist trend and gain entry into the world of journalism, tips such as  “Get into Oxford or Cambridge” and “Learn Chinese or Arabic” can hardly be considered practical. Does he realise the majority of Oxbridge graduates come from private school education and foreign languages are not exactly a forte for the average British national?

Get real
Journalism for me was a mid-life and mid-career choice, which meant I did not have a) time for years of study and b) money to keep me afloat through a long post-grad.

I did what Roy Greenslade suggests in his Guardian blog (23 July 2009). Instead of spending £8,000 on an MA at City University, I took a fast-track course which still came with an NCTJ certification at the Brighton Journalist Works for £3,600. A comprehensive list of NCTJ-accredited courses is avaliable on their site along with a list of  other short-term courses (average 20 weeks).

My course covered all the basics for a peliminary NCTJ at an ultra-intensive pace – subediting, newswriting, media law and central and local governments – and was taught by excellent teachers, producing higher-than-average NCTJ pass rates at the end of every 10-week term.

Shorthand, short money
What was not included in the fee was a shorthand module, so Ponsford’s advice of  “make sure you get your 100-words-a-minute shorthand” would have costed me another £900 at Twenty First Centruy Shorthand to achieve the NCTJ-standard of 100 wpm.

In reality shorthand is only required if you want to work for a newspaper as a reporter but it is an invaluable tool, which I dearly wish I had every time I do an interview on the phone or cover a public meeting.

If you are as skint as I am, you can also try to teach it yourself at home. I bought Teeline for Journalists but I must confess I threw in the towel at unit 4. Unless you have the discipline to practise daily, it is one stop forward, three steps back.

But shorthand and exclusives are not the be all and end all of all journo jobs out there…

Toughen up
Let’s face it: profile building has never been harder for aspiring journalists:

• Jobs are far and few between and most require a track record which you may lack.
• Competition consists not only of other graduates but also laid-off hacks with a few good years ‘ experience on their backs.

With every internship I complete, however, my determination to persevere as a journalist becomes stronger as I realise this is what I am cut out to do. Having said that, I did an internship at the B2B magazine where I was applying for a job and that didn’t help me get an interview.

When well-meaning editors say, “Good luck in your career” at the end of the internship, read it as meaning ” Apply anywhere else but here; tough luck.”

Diversify
Whatever the cynics might say, my suspicion is that exclusives is not the only type of lemonade you can make out of being an out-of-work journalist.  

Whereas NCTJ rams into you extremely old-school journalistic skills, which are still valid and useful, I suspect the way forward for modern journos, lies in skill diversification. Writing for multiple platforms. Exploring new media, social media, however you want to call it. I will expand on this in a future blog.

For now, you may be interested in reading what former FT.com editor Liisa Rohumaa says in Journalism.co.uk about “journalists needing to reinvent themselves” to surivive.

A blog on Alltop (25 things journalists can do to future-proof their careers) says in its tip no.15 that “Exclusives are passe”.

Are you smiling now?

“All journalists love a good scoop, but an exclusive story doesn’t stay exclusive for very long these days.[…] ‘scoops of interpretation’ are perhaps just as important.”

Kick arse
Today I got rejected. Next week I will probably get more. What I won’t do, and you cannot either, is to reject yourself, your dreams.

Getting angry at rejections is okay. But once you’ve slammed your fist on the table, screamed, sworn, cried or slit your wrists like me, let go and move on. Write a blog. Comment on a blog and network. Participate in career discussion forums. That’s also experience. If you are letting off steam, you might as well do it creatively and showcase your talent.

Above all, write, write and write some more – that is what you were born to do.

In my next few posts I will be talking about how unemployment can teach you invaluable tools  journalism schools never did.

For starters…

In April 2008, almost as if hit by a mid-life crisis, I decided to leave a successful jet-setting career in international publishing sales to try my hand at something I had always dreamed of: a diploma in journalism.

Everyone groaned when I resigned but no one asked why. My colleagues and friends told me they were jealous. Everyone has a secret dream, but how many really pursue them at whatever price it takes?

In December 2008 I became certified as a journalist by the NCTJ.
In May 2009, after five months of fruitless job hunting in the thick of an economic downturn, I decided to officially certify myself as unemployed too. I threw my middle-class pride out of the window and joined the dole queue at the JobCentre. I’m now a government statistic, one of the 2.4 million.

Unemployment sucks. There is no joy in being on the dole. But being a journalist means I can write about why and how it sucks and what you can possibly do to make the best use of this time.

This blog is a record my thoughts and experiences as an unemployed journalist-in-the-making. I am hoping it will resonate with others in similar situations and give inspiration – and hope – to those who are struggling in the recession as I am.

I have in mind all new journalism graduates trying to get their first foot in the door but also any “mature graduates” for whom journalism was, as for me, a new career choice.

I certainly have enough to share with anyone who cares to read: my laughable dealings with the JobCentre, discovering how to use my free time as an unemployed constructively, tricks that worked in turning fate to the right direction, etc. The (as yet unwritten) last chapter of the series will, hopefully, be a happy-ending one.

I will be including links to articles, blogs and stats as are relevant to each topic, but the series is as much about the “soft” side of unemployment, the human aspects of it, as it is about hard facts and figures.

I also blog on Blogger on random subjects, which tend to be philosphical: lessons of love, gratitude and mortality I derive form my daily life. I often write about my blind dog Binks, who is my spiritual teacher. Like Pooh Bear. Sometimes I get very serious and comment on topics such as assisted suicide. Occasionally I even rant about erm…boobs – in every context imaginable: breastfeeding, sexuality, cancer, even…Jordan.

If you’re curious, you can see some of my previous musings here.

I hope you enjoy my musings in On the Dole, On the Ball.