Review by David Robie
Stop Press: The Last Days of Newspapers, by Rachel Buchanan (Melbourne: Scribe, 2013)
The New Front Page: New Media and The Rise of the Audience, by Tim Dunlop (Melbourne: Scribe, 2013)
WHEN Rachel Buchanan penned a commissioned article entitled “From the classroom to the scrap heap” for The Age last September, she railed against Australian journalism schools, in particular, over an alleged “lie” and “little integrity” of journalism education.
“Between 2002 and 2012, enrolments in journalism degrees almost doubled,” she noted about what was troubling her across the Tasman. “We now have the bizarre situation where there are more people studying journalism than there are working journalists.”
She concluded that journalism schools were creating false career hopes; Australia didn’t need any more journalists, but needed nurses and doctors, engineers and actuaries and so on.
“Poets, screenwriters, novelists, scribblers – we writers all need a day job now. You can’t eat integrity.”
