Why should you become a journalist? Alex Thomson, chief correspondent for Channel 4 News, was so stung by a blog item by Felix Salmon that he decided to explain his reason for taking up the reporting trade.
Salmon’s “advice” to would-be journalists was one of those unedifying and condescending riffs based on the fact that, although he’s been there and done it (due to “a combination of luck and privilege”), he’d rather no-one else did.
Examples of his non-advice advice: “journalism is a dumb career move... enormous numbers of incredibly talented journalists find it almost impossible to make a decent living... life is not good for journalists”.
Thomson saw through Salmon’s real message, as conveyed in his concluding remarks: if you want a career-oriented, well-paid, middle-class lifestyle the chances of getting there through journalism “have probably never been lower”.
In response, Thomson wrote that Salmon’s blog wasn’t about journalism but about money. And you can detect his mounting anger, sentence by sentence:
“If anyone ever approached me about wanting to become a journalist for the money of course I would show them the door.
Try getting all those A* grades then going for your interview at medical school and patiently explaining you want to become a doctor because consultants get more than £150 grand a year – and see how far you get....
People should become doctors because they want to cure sick other people. People should want to be journalists because of anger. And when I see anger I give real encouragement.
And guess what – they actually do pay you a bit, enough, to go out and expose wrongdoing, and that feeling is a hell of a lot better than money or drugs or anything else for that matter.
So that’s why you should do journalism and that ain’t going away no matter how the different platforms of media delivery are being invented...
That alone should motivate journalists of any age – the anger to damn well try and do something about it”.
He made it clear that it’s not about him and his career (“there’s nothing special about me”) by pointing to other “journalistic triumphs”, such as Panorama’s care homes revelations. He continued:
“I will bet the farm I don’t have that not one of the individuals was doing it for the money or the middle-class lifestyle or the whatever material benefits that could arise.
They were doing it because they were angry at the way things are and they had the power to make it better”.
Great stuff, Alex. That’s the passion we need to instil into wannabe journalists. So I plan to read his uplifting piece to my City University MA students on Monday.
