The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade says that we are “marching slowly towards the death of newspapers”. The internet is awash with blogs such as ‘Newspaper Death watch’ and ‘Cynical journalist – Tracking the demise of the newspaper industry’. Figures show that sales of the newly launched ‘I’ paper, the first new national to be launched in years, have fallen by over half in the month since its launch.
So, what idiot would pay thousands of pounds to do a newspaper journalism course?
Well, I’m one of 37 idiots at City University London doing the MA in newspaper journalism. Call me naive, but I’m confident that I’ll come out the other end with at least some sort of job vaguely related to newspapers and journalism, and if I have to wait a year then so be it. I might not be on the Guardian news desk, or writing features for the Sunday Times, but even if I was, it surely wouldn’t be THAT outlandish or unbelievable, would it? The world wants news and trained journalists are needed to provide that news. Ironically, the aforementioned blog, ‘Tracking the demise of the newspaper industry’, is written by one of the students in my class.
Catherine Wylie is a reporter at the Press Association in London.
