Working in Radio
I’ve been engaged in another one of those debates over on the Media UK forums this week, where the value of education gets called into questions. It’s actually not been the hostile one I’ve seen to be fair, in the past I used to feel like I was banging my head against a wall such was ferocity of the attacks against media education. The tide has turned… a bit.
This time it’s about Journalists, the shockingly poor wage some of them get and the fact that there’s an awful lot of journalism graduates out there for seemingly less and less jobs. Which means students spend lots of money on a course in the hope it will get them a job…. and it doesn’t. I can see why they’d annoyed. The thing is though often they’re priced out of the market by the work experience kid who’ll do the same job for a pittance just to work in radio. I can see why, if I didn’t have kids I’d love to jack in my job and go and work in radio again. It’s great fun, the people are lovely and it can be the best job in the world and because of that people will do it for free…or almost free.
As a graduate, you’ve done the living in shared houses with people who don’t wash-up or spend 45 minutes in the bathroom every morning. You want a life and that means a living wage, it’s only fair after all. But if someone will do the job for less than a decent living wage then commercial stations will go for that, they’re in business to make money so any savings they can make, they will. It’s been the case for a long time that in journalism at least there’s a hierarchy of stations~: small commercial > Larger commercial > BBC or national commercial > National BBC. The Beeb pay better and have more people, so you can actually get on with some proper journalism. OK, so this is a generalisation.. but it’s true.
So, who gets the blame? This is where I come in and why I say we’re back to the old debate. Universities were getting the blame here, so pushing out graduates with false promises into a market where supply exceeds demand. That’s true. But then that’s usually the case in labour markets. Now, normally what happens is that employers choose the best (cream floats and all that) but what seems to be happening is that graduates are being offered silly wages or aren’t getting that far. I really don’t believe this is because there are too graduates but simply that they’re being priced out of the market. It was suggested that we set quotas. Ok, so that in theory means the cost of the job goes up, because you need to pay well to get the staff… in reality it means employers will look to the work experience kid, send him on a 2 day legal course and call him a journalist… paying him peanuts because he lives with his mum and dad and will do anything to work in radio. I’d have done the same. So, if we set quotas nothing would change and who sets them? and who tells HEI’s that they have to limit one part of their business? If they make academic sense, eg limit the class sizes so staff can focus on students or they all get access to resources then that’s all fine but anything else is daft.
It does annoy me when I read that graduates can’t get jobs, it’s sad and irritates me that colleagues at other places have sold students a line, promising great careers if they take their degree. Sure, we all tell candidates ‘this is what our graduates are doing’ … the parents ask us and it’s part of the sales patter. But I always balance that by saying you need to something else as well, get work experience, make yourself stand out and when I can I’ll help students with that.
Maybe it’s a case that we need to lobby the radiocentre or even ofcom to set guidelines for minimum wages in radio, as surely paying peanuts gets monkeys and certainly doesn’t buy loyalty.
