Alexander Chancellor: Do you think you should read this piece for free?

I was in Nottingham last Sunday to address university students about journalism. The occasion was a one-day ‘media conference’ organised by the Nottingham University students’ magazine, Impact, for the purpose of encouraging students to embark on journalistic careers. The conference, it promised, would give them a ‘kick start’ in this direction. I hadn’t realised until I got there that this was the intention, for I had planned to say how it was now almost as bad an idea for a young person to try to go into journalism as it had been, in Noël Coward’s song, for Mrs Worthington to put her daughter on the stage. I decided to tone down my remarks a bit when I saw how warmly many of the students cherished this ambition and how they clutched at every encouraging piece of advice offered them by other visiting speakers. When, for example, Paul Radford, a former sports editor of Reuters, told them that there might be opportunities for one or two of them to help with the coverage of next year’s Winter Olympics at Sochi in Russia, he was almost mobbed by a dozen or so would-be applicants.

I didn’t want to be a wet blanket, to say anything that might dampen their youthful enthusiasm; but all the same I couldn’t conceal my gloom about the present condition of the fourth estate. Where were the new jobs going to be when every news organisation in the country seemed to be getting rid of people instead of hiring them? What was the future of newspapers going to be when they were losing circulation at an ever-accelerating rate? I felt obliged to point out there wasn’t a single national newspaper that hadn’t lost circulation during the past year — the Daily Telegraph by 4.75