In the latest instalment of her "Backstory" series, Gill Moodie writes exclusively for journalism.co.za:

The New Age newspaper has launched its own in-house training programme for cadet journalists this year and a survey of the SA’s big newspaper houses has shown that all are continuing to invest in their training programmes despite slowing economic growth driving cost-cutting measures pretty much across the board.

This year, nine bright young people will be taught the basics of journalism at The New Age in a course being designed by news veteran Raymond Joseph, joining the nine-strong intake at Independent Newspapers under Jonathan Ancer and 10 at Avusa under Paddi Clay.

Media24, meanwhile, has converted its cadet school – started three years ago – to a bursary scheme and, this year, 23 people will have their university tuition paid by the company while working at Media24 titles or online channels during holidays. This is followed by a one-year internship at Media24. The company is also doing an intensive six-week internship for 20 people, from which the best 10 are selected to work at the company’s titles.  

For The New Age, which is just little more than a year old, this is a substantial investment.

“It is an investment but part of why we’re doing it is that everybody’s complaining about the standard of journalism going down and the best way to address that is right at the beginning,” Ryland Fisher, the editor of The New Age, told Journalism.co.za. “But we also believe that journalism is a very practical profession.”

The New Age was, in fact, hoping to have more cadets but they settled on nine after an extensive recruitment programme. They all needed a tertiary qualification to qualify for the six-month porgramme but this wasn’t restricted to journalism and, unusually, one of the new recruits selected, says Fisher, studied electrical engineering.  

Fisher says that he hopes to place all the cadets – who will do six weeks of classroom training led by Joseph and then work in different parts of the newsroom such as news, features and business – but it depends if they are all up to scratch at the end of the training. Last year, the paper placed three of the four people it took on in a more informal internship.

Jonathan Ancer, who runs the Independent cadet school that is on its third intake this year, says it can be hard to find permanent placements for all his cadets at the end of the 10-month training programme because of shrinking newsrooms. However, he managed to place all nine of the 2011 class in jobs at the company though not all were permanent positions while 10 out of the 12 interns of the 2010 year are still with the company.    

Like Avusa and The New Age, Independent Newspapers does not limit its interns to journalism graduates and will take people with any kind of degree or diploma. Ancer says that this means he gets a large number of applicants – more than 1 000 last year – an indication perhaps, of the shortage of jobs for graduates in South Africa today. So the recruitment process is lengthy and rigorous, requiring written tests and interviews, to separate those who are genuinely keen in journalism from those who are not.

The bursary scheme at Media24, however, is only for people in journalism honours programmes at Wits, Stellenbosch and North-West universities and the post-graduate journalism diploma course at Rhodes University.

Shelagh Goodwin, Media24’s head of people management, says: “We decided to switch our investment from ‘Academy Interns’ – who received 12 months of practical journalism training, including rotations through newspaper, magazine and digital environments and a number of months of classroom-based training – to a greater investment in bursaries.

“We believe that partnering with top local universities is a more effective way of providing education to journalists, especially when followed by an internship. Although the rotation of the academy interns between different departments gave them quite varied exposure, editors found it quite frustrating to have only a short time to train and work with a particular intern. The model is thus now, in short: 1. Super-stringent selection process for bursary holders; 2.  Close bonds between each student and a specific Media24 title or digital channel during the year of study (including vac work); and 3.      Full year of internship at that publication.”

Like The New Age and Independent’s programme, Avusa’s cadet school that grew out of a business-journalism training scheme at sister company BDFM, is a mix of the classroom and practical work for and in newsrooms.

Clay, who has been running the Avusa programme since 2001, says her interns do a general-news component and also specialise in an area on which they are particularly keen such as business or sport. This helps them to get placements in the company after the year-long internship because of the range of skills on offer to newsrooms. There is also a sub-editing training programme at Avusa, for existing staff members and new people.

So, after 10 years of having cadets pass through her programme, what stands out for Clay in terms what training they do and don’t need?

“They are all bright and, increasingly, the writing has been getting better and better,” she says. “The people we get in can actually write so then it becomes a whole thing of understanding the world and being very curious and asking questions...

“It’s the questioning part – the knowing where to go or how to look for things... It’s knowledge of life, in a way, and how things work (that) is some of where I think they need input. Because, increasingly, we’re getting them better educated, with better language skills and, in a social-media world, a lot of their information is received from elsewhere. So it’s originating information that is the tough part – defining your own agenda and coming up with your own ideas.”    

One may ask why it’s necessary for newspapers to train journalism graduates in in-house programmes when they should have a very good idea of what expected them after three or fours of studying. But, point out the training managers, a university’s function is not to turn out ready-made journalists . It’s broader and more intellectual than that.

“I think it’s very difficult going from university into a newsroom,” Ancer says. “I’ve seen it when I was working at The Star. People who come in really struggle as resources (in newsrooms) are very stretched and everybody’s got a lot on their plate... (Training young reporters) puts a lot of pressure on the newsdesk and the newsdesk has a lot of pressure on it anyway. This is a way to provide a bridge from university and some scaffolding for them, to mentor them.”