On the blog this week, we hear from Franklin Nelson, UK Newsdesk Editor at the Financial Times, about how studying languages at Oxford set him up for a career in journalism.
I didn’t enrol in an Oxford modern languages degree in order to become a journalist; when I was making my UCAS application, I was thinking principally in terms of what I would like to study for a good length of time and where my interests lay. But, four years on from graduation, it’s true that doing so has helped me.
I’d always read newspapers and magazines, but my interest in news and current affairs became more active at university. Besides reading the broadsheets most weekends and sometimes during the week thanks to a subscription taken out by New College’s JCR, I got involved with the student press, first as a writer and later as an editor. Coming up with ideas for articles, and helping to produce articles by reporting them out or refining their tone, argument or scope, was not just a mental exercise but a social one.
There was plenty of reporting around goings-on in and around the university, but there was also plenty more. I remember writing about the afterlives of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, for instance, and filing all kinds of book review, and editing an essay on the approach of the Grameen Bank in Pakistan. And Oxford being Oxford, professional journalists regularly dropped in to talk to students in some capacity, sharing their insights and advice. So while I made less of a contribution as my final exams neared, I think I knew at the time that I wanted a proper taste of journalism.
Six months after graduating from Oxford, I began a fellowship at the Financial Times in London, following work experience at The Times and Prospect magazine. Six months later I joined the staff of the FT, as an editor on the UK newsdesk. I’ve since written news and features across the paper and had stints on Breaking News and FTWeekend.
Clearly, being able to show people that I had done journalism as a student was a big advantage. If you’re turning up to an interview claiming to want to pursue something, there isn’t a better substitute than demonstrating, with respect to your own age and stage, that you’ve done work in – or tried to learn more about – that area already. Yet looking back, my degree counted too.
Writing, as one of my editors put it to me, is really about thinking: what do you want to say about something and how will you say it? In news, there are times when there is only one thing to tell your reader, as when an important public figure dies or the Bank of England announces a decision on interest rates. But there are other times – when a public inquiry publishes a 600-page report, say – when deciding what the story is is down to you. The hours I spent filleting literary critics’ takes on books and authors have helped me to identify both when someone is saying something new, or bold, and to assess the weight of particular evidence. Being encouraged to think about ‘form’ as well as ‘content’ in a given novel led me to reflect on my own form, and no doubt I became a more stylish writer by dint of submitting so many essays. And of course, the ability to speak foreign languages grants you access to people, documents and even habits of mind that others will not have, at least not so immediately.
My advice to students who are reading this with the aspiration of pursuing a career in journalism is thus: read as much as you can, and as widely as you can, and always critically, and seek out all opportunities to gain experience, especially on your year abroad. We will always need reporters, writers and editors in some form, and a good starting point is to identify what you are interested in learning more about yourself and go from there. And don’t delegate the work you submit, either as part of your degree or a job application, to technology. The earlier you get into the habit of asking yourself what it is you want to say about a given topic and how you want to say it, the better.
