I recently attended a talk for
postdocs and early career researchers at the University of Birmingham entitled
“The Media: Friend or Foe? Or the job for me…?” The speaker was BBC Midlands Today
reporter Joan Cummins.
Joan’s talk “Rough Guide to
Journalism” began with a brief story of how she became
a journalist. Joan started by volunteering for her local evening newspaper and
then for an independent radio station. Her first task was to sit in the
corner of the room and “observe”. She did nothing else but that for a while! I
am sure everyone in the audience, like me, thought that it must have been
really boring. But Joan expressed the contrary. She said it had been
fascinating to see how journalists worked. They had to update the information
EVERY HOUR and efficiently use the phone to find the stories (remember there
was no internet at the time!). That’s when she realised journalism was the job
for her. She graduated in communication studies and since then has been working
as a reporter for radio and television.
Next, Joan gave us advice on the
use of social media. She uses Facebook as a tool to find people who are related
to the tasks she has been assigned, or just to look for stories. As for Twitter,
she suggested not to trust everything we read and check the information
somewhere else. “Be careful what you share on social media”, she said, “It will
be found”.
She then explained a bit about
the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) code of conduct, a series of guidelines
that every journalist has to stick to. And also in her particular case, about the
BBC values, stressing that “the public has got to trust the media” and “everyone
needs to be treated with respect”.
We also learned how hectic the work
of a journalist is. For example, the average news report is about 10 minutes
for an interview, which then has to be translated for a general audience to
understand. She made emphasis on that point, saying that the KEY in journalism is
to be able to translate the information down. She compared herself to a sponge,
“I soak stuff up and squirt it back out in an understandable way”. Her
suggestion was to make the information as short and tight as possible. But being
a journalist also has its perks, “You get to see things and places that the
general public do not” and “your interpersonal skills rocket!”
Her final advice for anyone
interested in journalism was to “keep an open mind” and to remember that
“everyone has a story”.
Someone in the audience asked about
opportunities for scientists that would like to become journalists. She
suggested a journalism qualification, for example a one-year
postgraduate course, because you have to qualify as a journalist first. “You
need this qualification because it is very important to KNOW the law”.
As a final note I will quote one
of her most striking phrases. I believe it was meant for all of us, whether we
are thinking about leaving Academia or continuing to work at the bench: “DO NOT TURN YOUR BACK ON JOURNALISM”.