For the past four years I have served as an external examiner at Cardiff University’s Journalism School. I have looked after the law and public admin parts of the MA and postgrad diploma there.
The postgrad diploma is the course I started at Cardiff 27 years ago, which launched me into a career in journalism, after a law degree failed to convince me that the law was for me (though what goes around comes around and the law dragged me back in the end)
It was a magical year for me, I met some fellow students who would go on to be brilliant journalists, and discovered that I might just scratch a living by writing myself. Cardiff remains a beacon of great journalism training.
For the last exam board I added a few departing comments, and for what they are worth, here they are.
“This is my last year as external examiner for my old journalism school and it has been a huge pleasure coming back and seeing that the place, though in a different building, remains the excellent school it was when I attended back in 1987-88.
As ever, journalism looks like it is facing a crisis, assailed by plunging print circulations, combined with the mystery of how anyone can profit from digital.
Add to that that the phone-hacking scandal, the Leveson Inquiry and the trials which we have seen concluded only last week and an outsider would be forgiven for wondering why anyone would want to enter an industry so clearly doomed.
And yet, I am sure, as in my day, places on the Cardiff course remain at a premium. I still meet alumni from years before mine and after, and I am invariably impressed with their achievements after they left Cardiff.
Despite its current troubles, great journalism will continue to thrive, on many platforms, wherever people are interested in stories – so that means everywhere. I have no doubt that at the forefront of that will be the journalism produced by Cardiff graduates.
Thank you for having me as an external. My best wishes to the staff there and all your students for the future.”
David Banks Media Law 