Well, as you may have noticed, the future isn’t bright and it isn’t orange. Journalism has always been notoriously precarious and now, just in time for our generation, it has become that bit wobblier, thanks to the credit crunch and the Internet. The Guardian Media Group, to take one horrifying example, is struggling to stem the haemorrhaging of a £100 000 a day, and even the free newspapers in London, thrust into your hand as you scurry past, have not escaped unscathed as The London Paper and London Lite folded last year.
The sorry upshot of all this for aspiring journalists these days is that a decision has to be made as to whether you can afford such a career, like an expensive hobby in the vein of horse-racing or poker. If Rupert Murdoch smiles upon you and bestows a paid internship for six weeks, you will still need to finance yourself through the career itself. Contracts are often short and you’re likely to be earning, for a number of years, less than the average tube driver. Apart from the big name columnists, it is usually a high status-low pay profession. Even Toby Young in December was offered a paltry £150 to write a weekly column for a broadsheet newspaper, as he lamented in his Spectator column.
In light of this, I would imagine that the trend will continue for those with familial financial backing to be left standing because it seems that you need a rather substantial financial safety net. Without the patronage of your family or sugar daddy (or mummy, of course) living in London is going to be painful. This was certainly my experience of The Times and the Literary Review. Time and time again, I have met journalists who are either closet trustafarians or are making ends meet from other sources of revenue. Suspiciously smart addresses are occupied by hacks on twenty-five grand a year – South Kensington and Notting Hill on that salary? It just doesn’t add up. One assistant editor I encountered, struggling to pay his London rent, was even running SAT lessons after a full day’s work and he had no dependents. If Carrie Bradshaw were real and living in London, she would either be buying her Blahniks with pity money from Mr Big or living the dream in a bedsit in Kilburn, a place where Louboutins are as unusual as unicorns. There are some decent parties to attend if you’re in the arts sections, but one cannot live by canapés and champagne alone. Well actually, let’s not be hasty…
To look at the whole phenomenon in a more positive light, it will probably involve a transfer of medium to the Internet. However, this still has many complications for publications trying to break even. Internet advertising revenue is in fact not as high as one might imagine and unless many of them start charging for content en masse, readers may simply flock to the news outlets that are still free. The BBC website for example will probably benefit, if Murdoch and others start charging subscriptions. Accordingly, privately owned media outlets are terrified that the BBC will just continue to expand, as market forces see off unprofitable publications.
I had a personal wake-up call to my journalistic fantasies, when I bumped into an ex-editor of the Oxford Student. I couldn’t have thought of a more suitable candidate, anyone more primed for success in this volatile field. He had a first class degree, had been nominated for a Guardian Media award and secured an internship at the New Statesman. Having spent only a matter of months there, he rapidly had become disillusioned with the whole profession. Established journalists are unsure whether they are going to have jobs in a few months’ time and he found the pessimism to be monumentally depressing.
You may think that I, as a budding journalist myself, have written this sneaky apocalyptic article to put the rest of you off. However, I think I know you better than that. You know that you should be working for Deloitte and you can’t bring yourself to do it. Well, in the spirit of sinking-ship camaraderie, I am sharing what I have found out so far – getting work experience is not too difficult, getting anyone to pay you for your trouble is the hard part.
There are of course the success stories. Unfortunately, as you may have been told when you were applying to Oxford, “it’s all a bit of a lottery”. However, the wealthier can afford to buy more tickets. It is competitive enough for blatant nepotism to be unusual. The main problem is that most people do not have the funds to live in London and work for months on end without payment. If you want to be a journalist in the immediate future, you can go in armed with all your “charm and cunning” as John Witherow, editor of the Sunday Times, suggested to me. However, I think some kind of nest egg is also sadly necessary. There is the hackneyed saying, “there is always room at the top”, but the question is, can you afford the journey?
