Simone, on the freelance email forum, has just noted that freelancing is “harder now as there are more journalists about. There weren’t that many post-degree courses/evening classes eight years ago”.
What does this say about the “dumbing down” of journalism? What about the pressure on existing journalists to produce what the market demands/the owner allows?
I guess if you want to write about, say, the media concentration in few hands, eight years ago your editor would have found the following disjunctive: “if I do not accept this, I have an empty page”. Now, the disjunctive is “I’ll take one of the ten articles offered by freelances and write this one on my black list”.
To what extent is this proliferation of “post-degree courses/evening classes” a real reflection of a demand for media training? There may be a boom in the demand of journalism training, but four years ago, when I enrolled a one-year journalism course in London, it was cancelled because of lack of people.
So to what extent is this new demand not "created"?
