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 Journalistsimpression of offering an incentive for the less professional among itsmembers to become more professional? °The original membership must have welcomed attempts to enablejournalists to exercise ’a larger measure of autonomy in choosingcolleagues and successors, ’91 by being able to stop the entry of those,unqualified in journalism, who had ’influence or intellect’ enough to gainentry while working journalists saw their own careers blighted by the entryof such people, whom they then had to train.As soon as entry examinations, requiring knowledge of Euclid, wereintroduced then the working journalist members wrote into their journalsaying they had never had to use Euclid in thirty years in journalism. By thetime the Institute had discussed ideas of university entry, in 1908, theNational Union of Journalists had been in existence for a year, devoted toimproving the pay and conditions of working journalists? 2 Table II on page61 illustrates how NUJ membership overtook that of the IoJ.If we compare this progress towards professionalism in journalism withthat of teachers we find that the forerunner of the National Union ofTeachers, founded in 1870, had seen courses for teachers started, inOxford, in 1885, with a Diploma by 1893. Another professional association,the Library Association, founded 1877, gained its Royal Charter in 1898,with the examinations starting in 1896. As a general rule all thoseassociations which had arranged university-style entry requirements before1914 had to wait until the end of the First World War for these to beinaugurated, even though some may have been agreed as early as 1910. 93The School of Librarianship, for instance, had to wait until 1919 to open atUniversity College, London, in the same year that the Diploma forJournalism was inaugurated. The difference was that the LibrarianshipSchool had a full-time director and several staff lecturers, while theJournalism Diploma had none.In discussing these topics regarding professionalism we have toremember that writers on the subject advise caution in using lists to try anddescribe what counts towards the definition of a profession? 4 Anothermodern writer also provides useful insight into one of the problems forcombining the practical and academic:’the professional schools may be accused of being too "academic": and theacademics accuse the practitioners of failure to be sufficiently intellectual. ’gsEarly Examination SyllabusesThe early attempts at formulating examination syllabuses (Appendix I)were very basic and comprised an oral test in English literature and generalknowledge, with another written paper involving condensation of articles, orspeeches, writing a ’short essay on some selected subject ’96 and’paragraphs’ of three incidents narrated by the examiner. There were also24 incorrect sentences to be corrected and a balance sheet to bescrutinized. Such a syllabus is remarkably simple, and direct, and reflectsits origins in the National Association of Journalists in 1887/8, when it wasstill in the hands of those working provincial reporters responsible forfounding the association. Even by that date, the ,influx .of editors and56MOD100051227