Tomorrow's News, Tomorrow's Journalists

TNTJ May: Surviving the jobs drought

The Guardian’s Media supplement is getting thinner, Hold the Front Page is looking sparse, and yesterday’s daily Journalism.co.uk email had no trainee jobs at all. As the 1,888 journalists who are now on the dole will no doubt testify, this is crisis time.

At Sheffield University the journalism department has finally clued on to the fact that very few of its graduates this year will get reporting jobs. Professor Peter Cole (former Guardian deputy editor) told students recently: “It is not going to be an easy year, and it’s pointless to pretend otherwise. But there are plenty of things you can do and we need to be positive and upbeat as well as realistic.” Most of us have given up other careers, taken out massive loans and worked damned hard to go into journalism, and the prospect of doing “other things” is disheartening to say the least. But as I’ve discovered while working in news rooms in Sheffield and London in the last few weeks, people are being laid off all over the place, and there are only a handful of openings for trainees.

So what to do? The Sheffield department has put on two crisis talks for job seekers recently, trying to provide us with a Plan B. At the first talk tutors from the different journalism disciplines told students to consider any media job (such as PR) until the journalism industry resurfaces. See Kyle Christie’s report for more details of that discussion.

This week the department invited a number of local editors and industry notables for Part 2 of the lecture series. It was well attended, as everyone realised that the speakers were the kind of people who are reading our job applications.

And the advice was good. There were the usual offerings for those of us who are carpet bombing the idustry with applications: keep CVs brief, sell yourself but don’t go over the top, offer story ideas with your cover letters (Peter Genower, former IPC weeklies editor-in-chief); be super friendly and enthusiastic (Graham Moorby, BBC Look North news producer); be aware that you have 30 seconds to impress (Bob Cockroft, Barnsley Chronicle editor).

But there were also some encouraging, and less obvious, insights. Peter Genower told us that there is no such thing as a recruitment freeze. Even if a company is not recruiting, there are ways of worming your way in and making yourself indispensable. Graham Moorby stood by the time-established tactic of taking lots of unpaid work experience (although obviously you have to find a way of funding it).

Bob Cockroft advised that budding reporters should look at subbing jobs as ways in to the industry. As he pointed out, there are a lot more subbing jobs around at the moment than reporting jobs, and he argued that design and editing are a great addition to a reporter’s toolbox, rather than completely different jobs.

Interestingly, when I asked Cockroft how editors would view journalists who had taken a PR job (as we all, let’s admit it, are considering at the moment), he said that it would not be seen as a negative move. “Everyone knows there are no jobs around at the moment,” he said. “So if you take what you can get and then come back to reporting, I don’t thing anyone would look badly on it.”

As I’ve argued before on my blog, there are jobs out there, although admittedly not many of them. In the last few weeks, working in busy, understaffed newsrooms, I’ve realised that you just have to put yourself out there and impress, learn all the skills (design, web, video, damn good writing), and network (online and off) and opportunities will come up. And when the money runs out PR offers an acceptable port while the storm passes.

I’ll finish by going back to Ed Walker’s post, which I think offers advice most journalists training at the moment will be needing very soon:

“If you do find yourself in a ‘non-journalism’ job, just remember it’s not the end. You can still be a journalist, you just might have to do it as a hobby to start off with and then see when the break comes. When it comes, take it with both hands.”

This post was originally published at the Media Notes blog.