Last of the PG Dips
Current MA and PG Dip students at City University
It was revealed today, through various sources, that City University will no longer be offering a Newspaper Journalism Postgraduate Diploma.
This only leaves the more expensive, and longer, MA option for those who wish to train in newspaper journalism at the school with “an exceptional reputation and an outstanding graduate employment record.”
The news came initially from my colleague Michael, who found out through Twitter, from the user “gemkapram”, who had attended the open day this morning.
In the mock newspaper, The Islington Post, produced today by City Students, Alice and Simon broke the story.
Does this mean that postgrad diploma’s are going out of fashion? Or is it just the university being greedy and wanting all the money they can get..?
I wonder if other top journalism universities will follow suit, charging students up to £8,595 for the course.
Confusingly, the City University website still gives instructions on how to apply to the PGDip for 2009.
Admin, eh?
November 23, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Are the other PGDips being phased out, or is it just the newspaper one? Greenslade would probably tell you it’s because the newspaper industry is dooooooooomed!
November 23, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Unbelievable. No news organisation asks for an MA. Many do not even officially require a Diploma or NCTJ. What could be the rationale behind it other than it being a way to get more money?
November 24, 2008 at 7:47 am
Smacks of a ploy to get more money. Bad timing when University has failed to deliver the media suite on time and with the recession. University should explain itself.
November 24, 2008 at 5:52 pm
I also heard this news and could not believe it. We were told that the MA was not necessary for getting a job and not to do it unless we had a topic we really wanted to write about. It seems the powers that be have changed their minds about this, nice of them to tell us.
November 26, 2008 at 10:52 pm
I was surprised to read Adrian Monck’s quote in The Islington Post. He said that the PGDip was basically a useless qualification, that an MA was the real deal. (I loosely paraphrase from scattered memory)
I honestly believe that this isn’t true in the first instance (many traditional editors scoff at postgrad journalism courses anyway when replacing hard graft on a real paper), and secondly, this is a rather inappropriate thing to say as the Head of Journalism Dept.
When you consider that the majority of people on the course are doing the PGDip, being told it will make no difference in terms of employability will do little for our faith in the department. More importantly in the current job market, this may well quash any scrap of our remaining morale.
Another bloody brick wall.
January 14, 2009 at 4:13 pm
Newspaper journalists in America are seriously worried about whether they’ll have careers in three or four years, let alone a decade. Why would anyone, anywhere want a degree in the field?
January 14, 2009 at 4:30 pm
I can’t believe for a second that an MA is better than the PgDip for getting a job in journalism (he says as a holder of said PgDip for the last 13yrs). Newspapers and other media outlets want practical skills, not an ability to demonstrate how cerebral you can be on a good day!
What publishers DO want is to know they are getting people who are safe with their legal knowledge (which also means court speed shorthand) and grounded in the practices and principles of good journalism. Now more than ever, as the rules change toward social media, this is going to be vital, surely?
@Peter – yes, the landscape is changing fast and many traditional news outlets will disappear, but it’s hard to see a world without the professional touch of someone with the skills to pull the information together and ensure that it’s accurate. Information is largely useless if you can’t trust it and it will be long time before algorithms will be reliable in that way. I do, however, concede that much damage will be done to the industry before people realise this and try to rectify it.
January 14, 2009 at 4:37 pm
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” — Steve Job and some dead guy
I don’t disagree Newspaper are going through a MASSIVE change. But a few lessons form history;
TV didn’t kill Movies or Books
Internet hasn’t killed TV and it wont kill the newspaper any time soon.
Internet almost killed the music industry (and still might) but the ‘papers are much better placed than the labels will ever be.
We are at least 20 years off downloading our favorite daily blogs to our flexible OLED reader for use on the train.
Besides, the BBC is great for breaking news but a multi page feature on Gaza in the Sundays is much better.