The new boss of newspapers at Fairfax, Brian McCarthy, is taking the industry backwards and setting it up to fail, according to the head of one of the country’s leading journalism education programs.

The head of journalism at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Maree Curtis, told Crikey this morning that Fairfax’s cuts and alterations to its training program are exactly the wrong moves.

“Brian McCarthy is taking the industry and his organisation backwards,” she said.
“I worry for our industry. The media is not contracting. The media is growing, but at the same time the media organisations are cutting back on training.”

Lack of solid journalistic training meant the journalistic profession would cede ground to the “so-called citizen journalists” and anyone else who had a computer and broadband access, she said.

“If all they want is content providers, then that’s what they will get. But that is not journalism.”

Meanwhile Wendy Bacon, journalism educator at the University of Technology Sydney, says that now is exactly the time when more young people should be being brought into the mainstream media organisations to help them adjust to the new media age.

Curtis’s comments follow would-be trainees and journalism educators being informed that after edicts from McCarthy, Fairfax will take in only four trainees for each of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age next year, and that of those half will have only secondary school qualifications.

Fairfax’s head of editorial training, Colin McKinnon, has not returned a call asking for comment, but his attitude can be guessed from this 2005 interview, in which he supports the requirement for Fairfax trainees to have degrees – though not necessarily in journalism.

I understand that there is widespread anger and concern at the training edict in Fairfax newsrooms.

Curtis says it has been more than ten years, and possibly as many as 15 years, since Fairfax has taken in non-graduate cadets.

She agreed that the move away from graduates was partly a reflection of lack of industry confidence in the proliferation of communications and journalism degrees. Many of the newer degrees, she said, emphasised theory at the expense of skills. But having savvy journalists who have both skills and the ability to reflect and think was vital to the future.

Crikey has been trying to get figures on just how many young people are presently studying journalism related degrees, and where they are likely to end up. It is almost impossible to get meaningful figures since many institutions bundle journalism together with communications and media studies. Educators estimate that hundreds of wannabe-journalists are presently studying in each state.

Where will they go? Regional and suburban publications are big employers – including Fairfax and former Rural Press newspapers. At the same time, the lack of jobs in journalism means that many will go into quasi-public relations, further blurring the boundaries between the two professions.

But it is also clear that new media is already picking up some of the training bundle.

That grand middle-aged-man of the industry Max Uechtritz, now editor in chief at Ninemsn, told Crikey yesterday that he took on six cadets recently.

“That is significant in any comparison, especially given the intakes (or lack of) at much larger media companies.” The ninemsn cadets get training from the (continuously depleted) range of Channel Nine luminaries, it seems, as well as learning to use digicams.

According to Uechtritz, they will be the “new breed of multi-skilled, cross platform exponents… You’ll be hearing more of them.”

And so, it seems, the future direction of journalism passes from newspapers to the web. The risk is that the best of print newsroom values won’t make the transition.