How to get ahead in journalism

Don't let them tell you it's impossible. It is absolutely 100% achievable.

Photo by Iván Díaz on Unsplash

Journalists have a thing they do which irritates me a lot. They go to speak to young people - on a media course or fresh off of one - and give them this very depressing story about how journalism’s finished, it’s over, there’s really no point trying, you’ll never make any money, escape now while you can. They apparently consider it their constitutional duty to discourage people from entering the industry.

It doesn’t have anything to do with journalism. It’s entirely to do with themselves. It works to make them seem more impressive than they really are, because they somehow managed to succeed despite the industry’s decline.

Needless to say, it’s all absolute bollocks. People have been proclaiming the death of journalism my entire career, but it’s still here. It’s still possible to have a career in it. It’s still possible to make money in it. Will you be rich? No. But you will work in the most exciting job in the world. And you’ll be able to make the world a slightly better place, if you do your job properly.

I do quite a lot of mentoring to young journalists - basically as a fuck you to all the people who came in to speak to me when I was young and and told me it wasn’t possible. There’s loads of people who want to kill their dreams, so I figure it’s helpful if at least some people try and support them.

I know this seems laughable - I have a middling career at best - but the aim is to be helpful. So here is some of the advice I typically give on a first meeting with a young journalist, just in case it’s useful to someone else. Also me writing it here means I can just point people to it and don’t have to keep repeating it.

It’s not universally applicable and wouldn’t be universally accepted. I can imagine loads of journos disagreeing with it. It probably reflects the pathway I took at the time I was working. But it’s my view and I offer it regardless.

Own a patch

This is the most important piece of advice I have to offer. Find a subject area you find interesting and become an expert in it.

It could be a literal geographic patch - a city you love, the area you’re from - or it could be a subject area: climate change, education, crime, welfare. The broader and more newsy the better. If you have a passion for something which rarely gets press attention, then fuck it, do it anyway. But if you are trying to decide between things you find interesting, then pick the one which provides the most news opportunities. Similarly, if one of those is well populated by lots of journalists and another isn’t, do the one with the least amount of competition.

Don’t worry if nothing springs to mind. Most people don’t know what they want to specialise in when they start. And don’t worry if you never had that one burning passion. As long as you’re curious, it’ll come. Just being interested in the world is enough. If you’re not curious about the world, you can just go ahead and fuck off now. This career is not for you.

Don’t think that this choice has to last a lifetime. That’ll just freeze you up, the same way that people freeze up when they decide somewhere must be a ‘forever home’. Nothing is forever, it just needs to be good for now.

Become an authority on this subject. Start by going to the relevant Commons select committee page - education, home affairs, women and equalities etc - and then read their reports. Select committee reports are usually excellent. At this stage, you might struggle to secure interviews with experts, so instead click through to experts giving testimony to the committee. They’ll have a transcript and a video. Read or watch it. Look at the names of organisations which have contributed to the inquiry. Click through, read their reports. Read the whole report, not just an executive summary. Then sign up to as many of these groups and individuals as you can - get on the mailing list, follow them on social media, set up alerts.

Read the trade press. Fight your way into events and conferences. Meet people and build a list of sources. Drink with them - drinking is an underrated way of establishing and consolidating professional relationships. Do not think of this as some exotic technical process. I did that at first and I acted weird, got in my own way. It’s just a question of becoming friends with someone - literally no more and no less than that. There is no mystery to it. It’s the most natural thing in the world.

This domain expertise will give you a flow of ideas for stories that you can pitch to editors. There’ll be a new development which has only been reported in the trade press. Or you’ll have been watching a select committee hearing and a comment by an expert can be repackaged into news. That kind of thing.

You’ll hopefully be sat on a news desk doing shifts, and be able to mention this to an editor during a quiet moment. Or perhaps you’ll need to pitch online. Or maybe, failing all that, you just decide to write this up for yourself and put it on a blog or a substack. These are all good options. You want to start gradually creating a name for yourself in relation to this subject area. You want people to associate your name with it.

As you do this, you will learn the chief journalistic skill, which is to take complicated subject matter and make it comprehensible to an average reader who is pressed for time and wishes to be entertained as well as informed. It takes ages to learn this skill - to get an intuitive feel for exactly how much information people want, how to properly understand something, how to explain it to others.

This is why you should be writing on your patch regardless of whether anyone takes the piece. Start a blog or a newsletter, research a piece, write it, start again.

Get a job

Young journalists often ask whether they should try freelancing or try to get a job. Freelancing sounds much more romantic and allows you to focus on what really interests you, whereas an early job in journalism is often a heart-sapping affair on a business-to-business publication, more often than not in financial services. Back in my day, when half the industry was engaged in trying to fool Google, it often involved writing nine articles a day about concrete, or fencing, or some other godforsaken fucking subject matter. Companies would pay a journalism factory to produce these stories and publish them at speed because it was the best way to rise up the results page.

Grim, morale-breaking stuff. I remember those days, when the only thing that got you into work was the knowledge that the people on your desk would say something funny and the only thing that got you through the week was the thought of the weekend.

Nevertheless, my advice is to take the job. Financially, the benefits are obvious. It’s a regular steady income - low but survivable. Emotionally, the benefits are less obvious but very important. Freelancing with no contacts in the industry is horrendous. You spend days perfecting a pitch - discover the story, research it, hone the pitch, find the right person at the right publication to send it to, trawl through the internet to get their email, send it and then… nothing. It’s a day or two later before you give up. Just soul-destroying, firing off these beautiful ideas into the void, hearing nothing back, wondering if you definitely exist, feeling like a fraud. Having a job sidesteps this nightmare until you are in a position in your career to make freelancing viable.

Practically it is also invaluable. Having a job gives you practice. Perhaps you’ll have nine stories a day - horrific. Or perhaps nine a week - less bad, still a lot. Regardless, you will be writing and publishing, writing and publishing, honing skills. Eventually, the structure of a news story will be second nature to you. You’ll be able to do it in seconds. You’ll develop eyes which scan information for the headline.

These will not be good years. You’ll get fuck all money and you’ll be nervous a lot of the time and the work will be boring and stressful. But you’ll develop the skills of the job. In future, you’ll forget how miserable it all was and remember only the friday nights in the pub or that office flirtation you had, or how good your skin was. But at the time, it’s a bit fraught and tenuous.

Obviously jobs are not easy to come by and plenty of people do make it through freelancing. But my advice is to keep looking for one, to lower your expectation as to what that job entails, to take basically any job which is even remotely connected to journalism, and then to carry on working on your patch in the meantime.

This is the crucial thing. Having a job does not mean you stop working on your patch. You will follow a twin track approach - paying the rent and honing your skills with the job, then working on your patch in your free time. You will not have weekends - sorry. I still rarely take weekends and I almost never take bank holidays.

Most employers will not let you publish in other publications. If your employer is one of them, try to convince them to let you do a substack or a blog. Some of them won’t even allow this - it’s pitiful and absurd, but the world is full of sexually-frustrated hyper-controlling cunts who misdiagnose themselves as common-sense alphas. In this case, publish anonymously. It’s sub-optimal - it gets in the way of you establishing a name for yourself - but it still builds your knowledge base and your skills. If the blog is successful you can always quit your job and identify yourself.

Write headlines

Everything is a headline. I am shit at headlines. I hate writing them. So believe me when I tell you this, because I wish it were otherwise.

Everything is a fucking headline. You cannot escape them. You cannot leave them to the subs. You must learn this skill.

You are watching an expert give evidence at a select committee. But in fact you are scanning their words for headlines. That point that they say something, often buried in a long answer, which can be turned into a headline. Perhaps they’re talking about hospitals - lots of stats and analysis - and then they say something about how one patient came in for an operation and was kept in a side room for nearly 24 hours. That’s it. That’s your headline.

You are listening to a source talking in a cafe. But in fact you are scanning their words for a headline. You are reading a report, but in fact you’re scanning for headlines. You are checking social media, you are listening to a debate in the local council, you are attending a press conference. In fact you’re scanning for headlines. This is not all you’re doing, but it is a radar that must be switched on the whole time.

This does not mean that you simplify. In the body of the article, you should include all the nuance and the detail. But you need something to hang it on. You need a shop window, a Harrod’s-at-Christmas display, which gets people’s attention and gets them reading. And then you have them, and you can give them the more detailed information about what’s going on in the world. Headlines are not a substitute for deep information, they are a prelude to it.

Headlines are not just the way we structure stories. They are how we describe them to our bosses. When an editor asks you about a story, you should be able to answer in one sentence. That is the headline. ‘Man X was given Y million pounds by Z donor’ and so on.

This serves two functions. First, it lets you sell the story internally - not just to readers, but to whoever has to give you the OK. Second, it gives you clarity about what you are doing. I used to get really bogged down if things became complicated, and would need my editor to sit me down and just say: ‘OK, stop gibbering. What is the story?’ Being able to summarise it in seven or eight words clarifies what you are doing and helps you organise the research - it provides a test of what is relevant. Does this bit of information substantiate that headline? No. Therefore you can ignore it for now.

This applies to five par news-in-briefs and four-hundred page books. When I was writing How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn’t, I used that title whenever I started to get lost. It was like a lighthouse. I’m quite liable to get seduced by some tangentially related bit of information, so being able to think - ‘Stop, is this actually about things going wrong in Westminster?’ - was actually very useful.

You do the same thing with columns. I guess everyone has their own relationship with editors, but every column of mine starts with an email which outlines a proposed headline. ‘Top line: It’s time for Starmer to go’ or ‘Top line: Farage is a dwindling rat-faced cunt’. The subs may or may not use your headline. That’s not the point. It’s a way of selling it to the editors, who will want to be able to use it at the morning editorial meeting, and of clarifying your own thoughts and what the purpose of the column is.

If you are freelancing and you are pitching to editors who do not know you, this becomes much more important. In fact, it is the single most important thing you will do. The headline is the difference between an opened email and an unopened email.

In this case, the headline is the subject line of the email. It will be seen, if it is seen at all, by someone who is very busy and under a lot of stress. So that subject line must do several things. It must jump out. But also it should make the editor’s day as easy as possible. They should be able to take that sentence and use it unchanged as the headline in the publication. It will explain the article to them instantly, and it will demonstrate why the article will be attractive to readers.

Successful social media also relies on headlines. Look at the videos which do well on TikTok or Instagram. They start with a headline: ‘England are going to lose against Norway and here’s why’, ‘This is how to get 40g of protein with just 200 calories’, ‘This moment in Succession was peak TV’, ‘These are the funding tricks politicians use to evade scrutiny’. They’re all headlines, the same old techniques reporters have used for decades in a new context.

Our job is fundamentally about headlines - internally in how we sell our ideas to editors, externally in how we sell the story to readers and personally in how we organise our work. Headlines are the beating heart of the whole fucking thing. You need to be good at them. You need to learn to distill what you are saying into one sentence.

The main piece of advice I have is that it is possible to have a career in journalism. It seems vanishingly unlikely in your 20s and many people will try to convince you that it cannot be done. It can. There is a tremendous appetite for good journalism. People want to know how the world works. And it is a civic fucking duty to do that job in the best and most honourable way that you can.

Obviously plenty of journalists have no interest in reporting responsibly. As an evidence base, I would point you to the front page of the right-wing newspaper any day you go to the supermarket. But I believe most journalists - on right and left - go into it with better intentions.

We are in the midst of a war against objective reality. Look at the things populists denigrate: Universities, NGOs, expertise, institutions, standards inquiries, parliaments, science, objective reporting. They despise truth because truth holds them to account. And that, ultimately, is what journalism is about: Establishing the truth, spreading the truth, as best as we can grasp it at that moment in time. It’s an honour to be part of it and we need more people doing it, and doing it well. You can do it too.

If you’re a young journalist and you’re struggling you can email me at ianduntmedia@gmail.com and I’ll see if I can help. I will fail to reply to most emails - I know how this shit goes, they flood in and if there’s just too many to deal with - but I’ll check in whenever possible and answer when I think I can be remotely useful.

Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

Couple of pieces in the i paper this week - one on Nigel Farage looking like he might be a bit fucked and then another, post-Binface, in which I conclude that he definitely is a bit fucked. My Late Night Live segment was on the same topic, as you can imagine. A good time was had by all.

We released the season finale of Origin Story this week. It’s on the Luddites, the much maligned and misunderstood workers who smashed machinery in the early 19th Century. The libel against them was first inflicted in their own period and has lasted until our own, completely intact, through popular usage. They were the final squeal of irrational resistance to modernity, anti-progress, bashing their head against the inevitability of history.

In fact, the Luddites did not hate machines, or technology, or progress. They hated the use of machines to undermine the position of the worker. Their story is about fighting capitalism, the desperation of men whose legitimate grievances are ignored, the secret social history of Britain, and our moral relationship to technology. It is told through a mad cross-dressing, highly disciplined secretive political movement, operating on pain of capital punishment, organised by a mythical character. And from that story, we see the early seeds of British working class consciousness and popular resistance to power.

If you’ve never heard Origin Story, this is as good a place to start as any. And if you have and you want to see it live, come to the beautiful Union Chapel in September. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch below.

The cultural highlight of my week, and probably the year, was the aftermath of the England Mexico game. I’ll never forget the experience of the game itself. It’ll stay with me forever. But the days afterwards were more important.

As a British-Latino, I’m pretty invested in the relationship between Latin America and Britain, which is generally not a good thing to be invested in. Latin America never thinks about Britain and Britain never thinks about Latin America. But in the aftermath of the game, Mexico and England developed what looked like a new relationship.

I glugged down social media videos: England fans emerging with disbelief at what was happening - first the fiesta friendliness of Mexico on their arrival, then the frenzied cut-your-heart-out-hostility of that stadium, and finally the warmth and respect which came after the match. They literally formed a guard of honour to applaud England fans as they left the stadium. Who does that, as bona-fide World Cup hosts, after your dreams have been dashed?

Have we ever seen better losers than Mexico? I know how that reads, but it is meant in the most flattering way imaginable. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a country which is so gracious in defeat. What a contrast to Donald Trump’s lazy corruption, wiping away any honour from his national side, blundering in without a damn bit of thought to eradicate any goodwill the US has built during the tournament.

In the end it was summarised in just three words: “Gordon, fuck you.” I have watched this five second clip of Mexico manager Javier Aguirre perhaps a hundred times now. I know every second off by heart. His chat with Jude Bellingham asking for his shirt, the way he sees Anthony Gordon, who has just run his full-back down the line and is making a mess of Mexico’s defences, looks him up and down, then instantly tells him “fuck you” and starts laughing.

The clip is glorious. It is a testament to a kind of humour - to a manner - which Latinos and Brits share, to a joking abuse that forms the primary social currency in both cultures.

Big week for British Latinos. And if we can get past Norway, England will have the additional support of every single Latin American country against Argentina.

See you then.