State -sponsored public relations & "communication" degrees wreck craft pay base claims club president
Internet by-product the free model coupled with the state sponsored promotion of public relations and "communication" qualifications are the chief destructors of paying journalist jobs National Press Club president Peter Isaac told the annual general meeting 2010.
For the past 15 years he noted the club's executive had warned ministers of tertiary education about the contradictory effect of public relations/communications students stealing the jobs of their journalism class mates.
The government was additionally culpable, he said. It was the largest employer of its own tertiary public relations and communications students. They now did the work of journalists via the free flow of information from press secretaries and others in the state information apparatus. Much of their output substituted for reported news.
The trade press, once a training ground for journalists, was now being filled by the output of communications graduates in both the state and corporate employ. He described as a form of cruelty, masked by good intentions, the determination of the tertiary education sector to boost its roles by offering training in jobs that either did not exist, or did not exist in the form that students were being trained for them. Or that did not and could not pay them
As a taxpayer funded practice, in its application the policy of encouraging young people into these fields of vocational study delivered the opposite effect of the one intended.
For tertiary education establishments to couple together journalism and public relations education was similar to running the one and the same school for "gamekeepers and poachers. "
Most recently, the issue had been taken up with ministers of tertiary education Anne Tolley, and Steven Joyce, he said.
Isaac focused on this issue in presenting a Life Member plaque to Ian Lackey (at right in picture) the first non-journalist to receive such recognition from the club. A retired shipping executive Lackey served as club secretary until this year. This was a sign of the times, Isaac said. The club's inclusion of non journalists on its committee over the past 18 years demonstrated how the club had anticipated the era of the citizen (i.e. unpaid) journalist and also the era in which journalism would become subsumed by the technology of its delivery.
Fear of libel and advertising imperatives blended with the tendency of journalists to take mercantilist declarations at face value contributed to loss of faith in the established media and its ability to deliver value news such as that of structural financial malfeasance. Purveying what he described as the "contrived" news such as entertainment and travel or property advertorial no longer covered up this deficiency, he said. Old media techniques unraveled in new media formats, he claimed
The club he said would accelerate its campaign to flesh out in tertiary education craft journalism from communications and public relations studies which he said properly belonged in the marketing sector of the tertiary curriculum.
In terms of the free model threat the club, he declared, would urge government tertiary institutions to balance and match their roles with the actual number of available paying jobs in the industry. Not just the notional or citizens ones.
Well-financed and free of vested interests, the club was the only organization with the independence to act in this watchdog role he said, a view endorsed from the floor by emeritus member Derek Round, a former president. |
