Tuesday 29 September 2009

Praise for Farnham journalism graduates

Recently Googling to check on Farnham Journalism's search engine visibility (as one does), it was nice to come across some thoughtful comment and praise for the journalism work at UCA's graduation show, on Simon Clarke's excellent Freelance Unbound blog.
There is a strong production strand running through the journalism teaching at Farnham. I think this does help make our graduates more attractive to employers. On the print side of things, yes, one has to be careful not to spend too much time on art direction and graphic design issues at the expense of writing and textual editing, but on the other hand, as Simon acknowledges, wrestling with sidebars, pull quotes, captions and standfirsts on a magazine layout does sharpen the sense of what an editor wants from you as a writer. Our students get plenty of practice in writing copy to fit those 'top ten list' or 'that timeline in full' boxes. And consumer magazines these days are full of such things.

New year, new students, new post

I have committed the cardinal sin of blogging - the last post to this Student Journos blog was more than nine months ago, and it had gone decidedly stale.

My defence is that it has been an exceptionally busy few months at UCA in Farnham. Away from this blog, we have been launching three new specialist journalism BA courses - in sports journalism, motoring journalism, and leisure journalism. Our first cohorts arrived two weeks ago, and they are an eager lot. All the first year journos have today started a blog, and links to almost all of them can be found on the blogroll (right). So now that we are all actively blogging again in the Farnham journalism department, it seems an appropriate time to reactivate Student Journos and get some digital interaction going.