Wannabe Hacks is part journalism blog, part pseudo-scientific experiment. The five young men at the heart of it (of which I am one) are the equivalent of laboratory mice, undergoing intense testing in the hope of discovering an answer to a question as unfathomable as a cure for cancer: “What is the best way of getting a job in the media?'”
As any good experiment, Wannabe Hacks has one important variable– the means by which the five wannabe hacks take to crowbar themselves into an already over-subscribed profession. To that end, each writes under a different alias. The Intern, or Nick Petrie to his friends, decided against formal journalism training and opted instead to graze the fields of journalism internships in the hope of securing of job. The Student, yours truly, is a postgraduate student at the prestigious City University London where I am studying an MA in Newspaper Journalism. The Freelancer is Matthew Caines, who, since graduating in 2009, has worked independently and written for numerous national publications. The Detective, aka Ned Murray, is doing an MA in Investigative Journalism, hoping to prove that there is more to postgraduate journalism study than news. And finally we have The Chancer, Tom Clarke, another MA student at City, who left everything to the last minute. As all of the quintet are recent graduates from a Redbrick, Wannabe Hacks is what your secondary school science teacher would call a ‘fair test’. The question is: whose path will yield the skills and qualities to get them a job as a journalist first.
Wannabe Hacks came into being because the five of us got bored of being fed ‘industry advice’ by journalists who 1) already had jobs and 2) whose experiences co-existed with the use of the metal printing press. We discovered little content actually came from wannabe journos trying to get their foot in the door. So we set up Wannabe Hacks to narrate our exciting but often daunting journey and to help other potential journalists along the way.
Although the site has only been up and running a smidgen under two months, so much has been learnt already, in particular what it means to run with an idea. For weeks before Wannabe Hacks went live, we struggled with nailing down how often we would blog and what we would blog about. We had a vision for what the site looked like. But with no financial backing, we resorted to pestering people on Twitter, hoping to find a kind soul to magic us up a website for free. It wasn’t until The Guardian’s Martin Belam told us to “get started. Tomorrow”, that we realised a pretty homepage wouldn’t guarantee us any hits.
On that advice, we joined the merry band of blogs on WordPress. Faster than you could say ‘graduates poised for more media job woes’, we were up and running. In the meantime a young web designer agreed to make us a custom homepage for nothing and we scraped together £30 for web hosting for the future. An arduous task then but Wannabe Hacks is slowly resembling the space for debate on journalism that we envisaged.
Our advice for young journalists, however far you are down the rocky road to hackdom, is be prepared to fail. We were well aware before we started that Wannabe Hacks might not take off, and that we may have to drop it and move onto to something else. We still may do. But- and this is key- there is always that something else, another avenue to try your luck. You don’t need to know the editor of a national but you do need to be unwavering in your commitment to becoming a hack.
