A reception and two discussions about the future of British journalism was held at the Fronline Club on April 17, 2013.

Sam Coates, Banking Editor at The Times, hosted the first panel of young journalists and addressed the audience of representatives of 35 of the country’s best student papers:

“I wanna give you a flavour about what is brilliant about journalism. About why it is the best job. It’s a job that my friends now are jealous of.”

Joshi Herrmann, Lucy Fisher and Jennifer O’Mahony were giving helpful advice to student reporters.

The panel included James Ball, data journalist at The Guardian and City tutor, Joshi Herrmann, feature writer for The Evening Standard, Lucy Fisher, world affairs journalist for The Sunday Times and Jennifer O’Mahony who works at the Online News Desk for The Telegraph.

All four got into full-time journalism jobs through different paths: Fisher “jumped at every internship opportunity and slept on friends’ couches,” O’Mahony started blogging in France, interned in Malta and in the US then got into freelancing, Ball worked for a small trade publication in Crawley and Herrmann edited The Tab in Cambridge.

Advice to journalists who think it's cute not to understand data from @jamesrbuk "if you don't know numbers, piss off right now" #FBJEvent

— Jenni Russell (@jennirsl) April 17, 2013

Herrmann recommended:

“I think there is a slight danger in student papers when they are commenting on national events(. . .). When you show your cuts in an interview, editors often want to see what things you have discovered in your university. That shows that you could transfer that skill. If your portfolio only shows opinion pieces about the Middle East, that will have less appeal for editors because they already have people who are great at that.”

When the discussion was opened up to the packed forum, a member of the audience asked if and how the interests of owners and advertisers affect their jobs.

The panel agreed they have never been told what to write or when to be kind to people, although Ball addressed a more subtle problem:

“When you do a story, you want it to get as much space as possible. You are always serving a particular readership. I know what story would go on page one and what would go down on page seventeen, and that affects what story I chose.”

When Ball asked Fisher whether the only future for print will be the Sunday papers, Fisher replied:

“I definitely think that Sunday journalism will and should remain in print because part of the joy of the Sunday Times is that it’s got these beautiful supplements. (…) The photography is world-class, and it’s just not the same even on a shiny new iPad. I think in terms of daily journalism, there is more need for it to be 24-hour online, whereas weekly journalism is much more investigative.”

Relating to the value within online journalism, a student raised the controversial question about whether the future are pay walls. O’Mahony summarised:

“We [The Telegraph] have gone into a system that is very similar to the New York Times: You get 20 articles for free and then start to pay. Before working for a a national paper, I was coming from a blogging background. A lot of the time that’s people who are very committed to open-source and who want all content for free. I no longer believe that’s right. I don’t see why my colleagues in Syria who are risking their lives every day should come for free. I hope that people always pay for quality.”

Ball ended the first discussion with optimistic closing remarks:

“Today, more people are reading journalism than ever before by a huge number. We’re not diminishing, we’re growing. We just have to work out a way how to not run out of money”

Been on a panel with @samcoatestimes @LOS_Fisher and @jamesrbuk at the Frontline Club. Now the big dogs are up. pic.twitter.com/koHK79ind4

— Joshi Herrmann (@joshi) April 17, 2013

After a break for drinks, nibbles and networking, the second panel discussion began. Hosted by Steve Richards, chief political commentator at The Independent, a team of editors from the UK’s most influential papers came together to discuss issues such as the funding of investigative reporting and the future of magazine publishing.

 John Witherow, Editor of The Times, said:

“I think this is a fantastic age for journalism. People are under such scrutiny now, people who know a lot more about you as a journalist and are gonna comment on it. So all the time, standards are rising in the quality of what you’re reading about. (. . .) I don’t think people realise that newspapers today are so much better than 50 years ago. Back then, they were pretty mundane.”

Addressing some of the problems of investigative journalism, Ian Katz, Deputy Editor of The Guardian, concluded:

“Investigative journalists produce a relatively small amount of words per year but often they are the most important ones. But they need a lot of legal and expert support. The big challenge is how we fund that. What we see around the world now is that there are a lot of non-profit foundations who support the work of these journalists. It must be at the core of what we do.”

Steve Richards, Ian Katz, John Witherow and Sarah Baxter were addressing issues like pay walls, funding of investigative reporting and ways into the industry.

Sarah Baxter, Editor of The Sunday Times Magazine was asked about whether magazine journalism was as vulnerable as the rest and how its future looked, particularly online:

 “I think it’s one of the great myths that people don’t enjoy long pieces on the web. One of our exposés about Goldman Sachs had a great impact in America, that wouldn’t have been possible without the web. (. . .) I find it’s a great test. If a story keeps me me engaged on my iPhone, I know it’s a winner. It’s either good journalism or it isn’t and I don’t think we should worry too much about platforms.”

The event was sponsored by City University London, Cardiff University , Teach First and Orillo. It was organised by Grapevine Events.

Watch both discussions here:

Strictly by invitation only. Please contact the organisers for inquiries or view the website here.

On Wednesday 17 April, the editorial teams of the top 40 student publications in the country are coming together for an evening at the Frontline Club.

The evening will begin with a reception before moving to panel debates and talks with speakers, including: John Witherow, editor of The Times; Sarah Baxter, editor of The Sunday Times Magazine; Ian Katz, deputy editor at The Guardian and Steve Richards at The Independent.

The event will be an opportunity to meet the other students running the best campus papers, with publications from the LSE, Imperial, UCL, Birmingham, Oxford, Durham, York, Cambridge, Warwick and Bristol among those attending.

View in iTunes
Watch the event here. 

By Will Spens

The Frontline Club’s first ‘On The Media’ event of 2011 was a fascinating discussion focusing on the changing and sometimes wrought relationship between the worlds media and WikiLeaks. The controversial whistle-blowing website has attracted intense worldwide interest following the massive releases of leaked US military and diplomatic files and the controversy surrounding its enigmatic founder, Julian Assange. In this event, chaired by presenter of The Listening Post on Al Jazeera English, Richard Gizbert, this thoroughly modern relationship was dissected and argued over passionately by an expert panel.

On the nature of the relationship between WikiLeaks and its media partners during publication of the leaked US embassy files around the world, Ian Katz, deputy editor of the Guardian – the only UK paper working with WikiLeaks – was clear in his assessment:

“There was really a rather remarkable collaboration that held for several months and produced some really remarkable journalism. People may not quite understand the sheer scale of the journalistic effort that went into the publication of the cables”

As to the shift in focus by the media from WikiLeaks to Julian Assange, author and columnist David Aaronovitch acknowledged that this was almost inevitable and is more than just media appetite for personality stories:

“Julian Assange is an absolute phenomenon of the modern era. He represents what we think of as the uncertain coming world.”

Mark Stephens, a media lawyer who is Julian Assange’s solicitor, thought that WikiLeaks is itself holding a mirror up to journalism:

“The public see a very crisp image, but what they don’t see is how journalists get that information. They don’t like the way WikiLeaks or journalists get their material and this is an interesting area for concern.”

Gavin MacFayden, director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, agreed with this but suggested that some media organisations have acted more reprehensibly than others, adding: ‘a lot of media responded to the worlds greatest power saying to them “you must not publish this”. I think we’ve seen that [in the New York Times] and it’s disgraceful’.

When the question of whether news organisations were equipped to deal with such massive quantities of data to investigate was raised, Ian Katz asserted that “we are nowhere near ready to deal with this kind of data. We need a whole new breed of data journalists’. David Aaronovitch however took a more acerbic view that these releases were “creating a sort of analyst caste of journalists… but the real question is this: do existing media organisations have the economic ability to deal with it?”

One fascinating hypothetical scenario was raised at the end of the extended talk: the question of whether, assuming WikiLeaks had been operational before the war in Iraq, would the US and the UK populations have had access to material which may have prevented the invasion of Iraq from occurring?

Watch the video here:

This event was in association with the BBC College of Journalism.

Throughout 2010 whistleblower website WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange were making headlines with the release of classified documents. Both the leaks and the controversy surrounding Assange have been covered extensively by the media.

For the first On the Media discussion of the year we are going to be putting the spotlight on the media and asking what the WikiLeaks operation and the media coverage of it tells us about the press.

How have journalists responded to this new kid on the block? The future will no doubt see the emergence of similar organisations, but what impact will this have on the culture of journalism? How will the media adapt and how will this currently uncomfortable relationship develop?

Chaired by Richard Gizbert, presenter of The Listening Post on Al Jazeera English.

David Aaronovitch, writer, broadcaster, commentator and regular columnist for The Times;

Mark Stephens, media lawyer with Finers Stephens Innocent and Julian Assange’s solicitor;

Ian Katz, deputy editor of the Guardian;

Gavin MacFayden, director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism.

In association with the BBC College of Journalism.