Journalism is a closed shop with 51% of top journalists having been privately educated and only 19% having attended a state comprehensive, in comparison to 90% of the general population.

A #ChangeTheMedia hashtag has been trending on social media for the last week. Started by Jeremy Corbyn, following Labour’s pledge to make radical reforms to the media, and continued by his followers, the hashtag is giving breadth to the debate about media diversity.

There is a modern-day collective awareness that our press operates as a contemporary oligarchy, a closed shop that serves the interests of its owners and their inner circle. In 2013 Left Foot Forward argued that over 50% of the print media is owned by 2 people, and a 2016 YouGov poll found that people view 5 of the 7 major newspapers in the UK to hold predominantly right wing views. But while this awareness exists, there are few new ideas on how to deal with it, or how the fightback begins.

Actions such as the Leveson inquiry aim to reduce the power the media has, and boycotts of publications, including the ‘StopFundingHate’ campaign against the Daily Mail, Sun and Express, aim to bring power back to consumers, but while these initiatives focus on taking power from the oligarchs, there isn’t much discussion about empowering aspiring journalists from marginalised backgrounds.

In addition to reigning in the power of those at the top, we must look at how to empower those at the bottom. Labour’s reforms promise a new tax on companies such as Facebook, Google, and Netflix to subsidise the licence fee, a new fund for independent journalism, charitable status for not-for-profit publications and allowing the public to elect BBC directors. Regardless of your opinion on these reforms, the focus is undeniably on those at the top, it’s focused on publications and corporations not journalists, and while there is lip service to ‘independent journalism’, this is already geared at people established in the profession, leaving little to combat the disparity in those entering it.

Discussion on the #ChangeTheMedia hashtag eventually wound it’s way back to the idea that journalism is a closed shop. For context, 51% of top journalists are privately educated, which is over 7 times more than the percentage in the population in general. A measly 19% of journalists attended a comprehensive, in sharp contrast to the 90% of the population who did. This figure drops for columnists but is still wildly disproportionate. On top of this, a 2016 study concluded that 94% of journalists are white, less than 1% identify as black or Asian, and 55% are men. This is an obvious problem – we’re asking an isolated demographic to write about demographics they have rarely encountered, let alone been a part of. This disparity leads to an inevitable gap in how we write about marginalised groups and how their interests are represented, leaving us with an alarmingly white middle class conversation about a whole realm of things that are neither white, nor middle class.

A (remarkably civil) debate on Twitter between Laura McInerney, a Guardian Education Journalist and Jem Collins, Founder of Journo Resources (a project aimed at making journalism more accessible), correctly traced the problem to its roots – if we want to improve the diversity of journalism, we need to improve the access.

 

I have to say I respectfully disagree. I speak to a lot of young people who are doing everything (often including blogging), and can’t seem to break in. I thinking blogging does offer opportunities which didn’t exist before, but it is becoming ever more saturated.

— Jem Collins (@Jem_Collins) August 27, 2018

Speaking primarily on class – and using the admittedly loose generalisation of class in relation to education and relation to accessibility to resources – then we can begin to see the class gulf in journalism opens up well before employment age. Modern journalism requires a wealth of media skills – can you edit your own video? Can you edit audio? Experience in graphic design? Sure, there are some skills like tracking people down over the phone or online that might come easier to the younger generation, but the majority of these skills aren’t learnt at everyday comprehensive schools, meaning working class kids are forced to learn on the job – which a lot of employers simply don’t want.

If you don’t have the opportunity to learn at school you can always get an internship, can’t you? It’s a debate that Left Foot Forward has covered before, so I won’t go into too much detail – but unpaid internships are overwhelmingly suited to people from financially stable backgrounds, people from richer backgrounds are up to 3x more likely to undertake an unpaid internships than their socio-economic counterparts. Speaking from personal experience, my internship last summer set me back just short of £1000, for a family below the tax bracket, this is nearly their monthly household income and probably impossible to fund.

The easiest way to surmount these problems is through university, where students have financial support and access to media software – yet again this is a process that still favours middle class students – 19% of teachers would never tell their brightest students to apply to an Oxbridge university, only 42% certainly would. Meaning 19% of students (no prizes for guessing which end of the socio-economic spectrum they come from) don’t get pushed down that path. Even when they do, students from low income areas are 3x more likely to make mistakes when applying to university, and are more likely to have lower attendance in school. This combined mass of problems means that when we get to employment age, we’re far less equipped to apply for media jobs. The problem needs to be combatted beforehand at an earlier age.

Instead of, or maybe even as well as, their current reforms, Labour needs to pledge to incentivise (or maybe subsidise) paid internships, especially those aimed at marginalised groups, in order to provide invaluable experience and give these people more contacts in the industry – it’s about ‘who you know’ after all.

This needs to be combined with a 21^st century education platform which equips our generation with multimedia skills. This includes editing and creating audio and video, the ability to do light amounts of coding, to process and sift through mass amounts of data and visualise the results. These skills are not just increasingly prevalent in media jobs, but in 21^st century work in general.

But most importantly of all, if we’re to equip kids with the skills they need to survive the obstacle course of modern media work, then we need them to be able to practice it before they enter employment – more money for education could be dissipated into student publications (at a pre-university level), allowing students to showcase their existing journalism skills on their CV’s. Encouraging schools, especially comprehensives, to use this money in order to start a publication to give students practical skills would be invaluable in levelling the playing fields. There is already an expansive network of student journalism at university level, with the national Student Publication Awards each year showcasing the best in journalism, a similar incentive could be orchestrated at school level.

These skills need to be particularly focused on comprehensive schools, and possibly further enforced by local authorities in order to guarantee they are taught. This will, of course, require a Labour government to supply adequate funding, but that’s how our media is going to be diversified. If we want working class journalists, we have to invest in them at an earlier age than we are doing now – paid internships, more multimedia education, more funding for schools to have student publications. If we want a balanced media, we have to make it as saturated with marginalised applicants as it is with privileged ones.

Jack Ashton is a writer and student. He blogs at Jack Talks Politics

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