By Peter Wilby (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-04-11 07:36

In 1969, the late Nicholas Tomalin, the star foreign correspondent of his day, observed that national newspapers in Britain were "feudal fiefdoms all bound up in intimate friendships and shared values".

To get in and get on, he advised, young people needed to cultivate "pals at court". And the best allies of all were famous or well-connected parents. "Journalism, being fashionable, is a privilege profession. In its present state it shows many of the aspects of the aristocracy, and lineal descent is one of them."

Nearly 40 years - and several thousand newspaper leaders about equal opportunities - later, you might expect things to have improved. In fact, they are far, far worse.

In Tomalin's day, some of the top newspaper positions were still occupied by people who had left school at 16 and worked their way up from reporting flower shows, darts matches and magistrates courts for local newspapers and agencies up and down the country. A few had even started as messengers.

Though the rule was widely flouted - particularly on the posher papers - an agreement between the journalists' union and employers stated that nobody could work on a national newspaper without first serving a three-year apprenticeship in the provinces.

Despite what Tomalin wrote - and despite areas that were almost exclusively upper middle-class, such as most gossip columns - journalism could plausibly claim to be classless and meritocratic, at least by comparison with, say, law, banking or medicine.

When I started on the Observer in 1968, my immediate boss was a non-graduate. So were at least two of my fellow reporters.

What has happened to journalism since then is what has happened to every other middle-class occupation: it has become a graduate-entry profession. Paradoxically, the expansion of university education, supposedly a force for equal opportunity, explains why journalism is more socially exclusive than it was in Tomalin's time.

In 2002, a survey by the Journalism Training Forum found that 98 percent of all journalists in Britain had a degree or postgraduate degree level qualification. The only journalists who did not have these high level qualifications were older journalists who had been in the profession for a long time.

Nearly half had also taken a postgraduate qualification, usually in journalism, from universities such as Cardiff and City in London. The provincial training schemes, where 16- and 18-year-old school- leavers rubbed shoulders on equal terms with graduates - with the latter often getting rough treatment from hard-bitten editors and subeditors - had all but collapsed.

The MA or postgraduate diploma in journalism was the new apprenticeship, and it became one of the most common routes to a national newspaper job.

Moreover, the 2002 survey showed, more than two-thirds of new entrants to journalism came from homes where the main wage-earner worked in a professional or senior managerial occupation.

Fewer than 10 percent came from any kind of working-class background, and only 3 percent from semi-skilled or unskilled occupations. About 96 percent of the journalists surveyed were white - a figure that looks more damning when you realize that more than 40 percent of journalists work in multi-ethnic London.

More recently, the Sutton Trust, an educational charity, found that of the country's 100 leading journalists - national newspaper and broadcast editors, columnists and news presenters - more than half had been to fee-charging schools and 45 percent to Oxford or Cambridge.

The social exclusivity of journalism seems certain to become still more common. "Walk through our corridors," a lecturer at one university journalism school told me, "and you will hear that homogeneous public school [elite ] accent."

According to a sample analysis carried out for the Guardian, nearly half the postgraduate students in City University's journalism school, still one of the main gateways to the national UK press and the BBC, come from just four universities: Oxford, Bristol, Leeds and Cambridge.

All four are among the elite which recruit higher than average numbers of students from middle-class homes and fee-charging schools.

The explanation? Simple economics. Though loans, at zero real interest rates, cover fees and maintenance for the three years of undergraduate study - and students from poor homes are exempt from some or all of the fees - that is not so for postgraduate courses.

Of course, a lucky few win higher-paid jobs with broadcasters or newspapers. But in effect, the costs of training, once borne by employers, have been transferred to the prospective journalists.

Then, before they can dream of a salary, many will do several months of "work experience", possibly for a succession of employers. Some of them will make the tea, as wannabes did half-a-century ago, with the difference that they won't get paid for it.

For entry to national newspapers and the main broadcasting and magazine companies, the result is geographical as well as social and ethnic bias, with those who have families in the southeast enjoying the advantage of free accommodation.

With most jobs unadvertised, families living in the right neighborhoods, socializing in the right circles and working in the right jobs may provide introductions to those "pals at court" that Tomalin thought so important.

They may also, as an added bonus, provide the contacts among the rich and powerful that will get you your first story.

The Guardian

(China Daily 04/11/2008 page9)