This semester I have been teaching undergraduate students about issues and ethics in journalism, which has involved a lot of lambasting the Daily Mail. But last week I faced a moral quandary. I’m also a freelance journalist, and when I was looking to pitch a story to a national newspaper, a colleague looked over it and said: I hate to say this but it has got Mail Online written all over it.
As a practitioner I wanted to sell the story. But as a researcher and academic lecturing on the failure of the liberal free market and the creation of homogenous infotainment, I felt doing so would be hypocritical.
In the end I decided not to pitch the story. I knew that if I did, I wouldn’t be able to face my students. In the meantime, I stumbled across another one which I sold to The Sun. I felt this was justified because the story was about a multimillion pound company rather than a family business – I had been concerned about what Mail Online coverage would do to the latter.
This is just one example of the challenges hackademics (practitioner academics) face when they straddle the real world and academia.
The merger of the academy and the media industry is now happening at both a student and lecturer level. Data from the 2013 Journalists at Work report indicates that 82% of people working as journalists have a degree or higher level qualification compared to 38% of UK workers. This makes journalism a highly qualified occupation.
Meanwhile journalism courses are increasingly being taught by former or current journalists who are expected to embrace academic research, become PhD candidates, and make peer review contributions to the Research Excellence Framework (Ref). This is a good thing – the problem is that such expectations do not always comes with the time and support that academics need.
This exacerbates a paradox: the traditional consensus is that journalism education should be focused on practical vocational skills including shorthand, news gathering and news writing and yet it is situated within an academic environment, whose core business is research.
Although the practitioner academic is fairly common in universities today, due to the huge rise in converted polytechnics teaching vocational courses, a big divide still exists between practitioners and researchers.
Practitioners are academics – they are increasingly expected to become fellows of the Higher Education Academy and to lecture in their subject matter – but that does not make them researchers. The University of Sheffield self-styled hackademic Tony Harcup interviewed journalism educators in 2011 and found evidence of a “pervasive disconnect between research and teaching, between theory and practice”. Universities want practitioners to become active researchers, but in reality this only happens in pockets on the ground due to historic divides between the two parties.
As a practitioner-academic-researcher hybrid, I find myself in the precarious position of bridge-builder between the two camps. First and foremost, I view myself as a journalist: that was the career I trained for and it still holds a certain kudos that calling yourself a lecturer does not.
However I understand that research informs both my teaching and my practice, as it gives me the ability to contextualise and reflect. Similarly, practising journalism gives me greater credibility and authenticity in the eyes of students and keeps me up to date with industry developments.
But on the whole, journalists tend to mock academia, while relying on it for the training that industry no longer provides. During my own PhD project the journalists I interviewed were very interested in my findings but were confused about why I would want to publish in anything other than a media outlet, having only the vaguest concept of peer review publications, despite most of them being graduates themselves.Having one foot in academia and another in industry is not as easy as it sounds. Universities often face recruitment problems when they are trying to attract staff for skills-based courses such as journalism, film, media, computing or even engineering. Devising a job specification that doesn’t immediately rule out all potential applicants is an art form in itself. How many sports journalists with PhDs do you think exist in the UK? And in the interview process, what takes priority – the candidate’s access to premiere football clubs or their Ref-able publications?
And once in post what should a lecturer prioritise? At my institution, full-time staff have 170 hours a year of self-managed time which is to be used as academics see fit for professional and scholarly activity. This period of time is distributed between research outputs, grant generation, attending conferences (research and practice based), freelancing, attending learning, teaching and assessment events and keeping up to date with technology.
All this leads to the question of job choices. I recently decided that I wanted to continue working as a freelance journalist and teach practical skills, but also go on conducting academic research and teaching theoretical modules. The problem is that jobs are regularly advertised as research posts or practitioner posts, even though there is a contradictory expectation that practitioners will be willing to undertake some research. So in the future what type of post should a hybrid like me apply for? The message from universities is confusing. They advertise practitioner posts with an expectation that applicants will undertake research, but then they advertise separate research-only posts which push hybrids like myself away from practice.
I am lucky at my institution that I am able to bid for research time while also being encouraged to work as a freelance journalist. But I am aware that many of my colleagues at other universities are not so fortunate, which means my future job prospects are limited unless I choose one side or the other.
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