Exhibit JC42 - The Leveson Inquiry

For Distribution to CPsThe Emergence and Development of Education for Journalism in Britain: John ChurtonCollins and the Birmingham University Scheme for Educating Journalistsorganized University instruction in Journalism in England. Deus sitpropitious. ’~° This was less than a month after he first introduced thescheme on 5th June 1907, to the editor of the Birmingham Daily Post andthree other journalists. The local newspapers record the progress of thescheme over the next year. ~1Collins outlined his proposals in the February issue of the NineteenthCentury in the following year. ~2 He formulated a postgraduate course (witha possible option of its leading to a degree at some later stage), having ageneral and a technical element. (See Appendix VI) The specific training inthe techniques of journalism involved descriptive article writing, which couldprovide opportunities of acquiring miscellaneous information ’from visits tomuseums, art galleries... (as well as) to departments of the University.’Leader article writing, leaderettes, and notes would be taught as would ’themanagement of paragraphs.., and deciphering telegrams with shorthand’not... perhaps.., compulsory.’The University-approved version of the syllabus (see Appendix VII)is notso detailed, leaving out any mention of the technical elements. TheBirmingham Evening Despatch for May 20 th 1908, records that the subjecthad been the topic of a meeting the previous evening, at BirminghamUniversity and that several journalists present had joined a committee to’confer with Professor Churton Collins as to future arrangements.’ One ofthose joining the committee, Mr A.H. Mann (1876-1972), later becameeditor of the Yorkshire Post.Collins mentioned in his Nineteenth Century article that the editor of thatjournal, Sir James Knowles (1831-1908), had earlier suggested a schemeof education for journalism to Benjamin Jowett of Balliol College, Oxford,but no reference exists in Jowett’s papers in the College library.I have referred earlier to Collins being a Balliol man, just as Steevenswas to become known as a ’Balliol prodigy’ when he entered journalism.Collins spends more than five pages of his article on ’The Universities andJournalism’ discussing the general state of the two older Englishuniversities and makes a strong plea that they should be the homes of a’course of instruction essentially modern’ yet he outlines Jowett’s policy forencouraging those who wanted to take up journalism being one in whichthey attached: ’themselves loosely to Balliol and ramble about theuniversity browsing here and there on such lecture-fodder as they couldfind palatable, or likely to meet their needs. Sometimes they looked in onlectures on political economy, or on English history, or on art, or even onGreek philosophy. They were encouraged to visit museums and artgalleries or to write essays and go walks with their patron or some otherillumining pundit. This he called giving them the flavour of Oxford life.’’Oxford training left me with a range of interests too extended to go verydeep’ was Ernest Barker’s view, who was at Balliol College from 1893-98. ~3While Collins allowed that we might consider smiling at the ’veryrudimentary conception of a course of "modern" education at a university ’~4he infers that about a third of newspaper journalists might have enjoyed asimilar kind of education while ’at least two-thirds of what claims to bejournalism.., is not only a national disgrace.., to us, but simplyunintelligible. ’~ 48MOD100051219