Journalism is a rapidly changing and always exciting sector to be involved in. Our degree will equip you with the technical and incisive critical thinking skills you will need to tell stories across platforms and hit the ground running in the fast paced and exciting journalism and communication industry.
Our degree places employability at its core, with modules designed to help you develop your own sense of the type of journalist or communication specialist you wish to be. From broadcast and sports journalism, to digital or magazine publishing, fashion and long-form documentary journalism, our degree provides you with the scope and choices you need to make this happen.
This degree is designed for anybody interested in journalism and the role the media plays in our society and would equally suit those coming from college or sixth form, or mature students with experience who wish to enter a different field.
We have strong ties with industry, with work placements usually available at a number of high-profile news outlets, such as BBC London, ITV and London Live and you are encouraged to gain work experience from day one. Modules such as Entrepreneurship and the Independent Project allow you to take work placements and teach you how to stand out and market your skills in the workplace.
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You will be learning technical skills in journalism technologies, and shooting and editing news packages from the very start of your degree. You will progress through the modules ensuring you can produce and tell stories across platforms. You will develop key journalistic skills such as finding and gathering news, engaging wider and diverse audiences, and writing neat and accurate copy. You will be able to analyse, deliberate and write effectively, whether for essays and constructing arguments, or online for a specific news audience.
You will gain knowledge in the wider communications field, covering how campaigns are used by media and affect society and how politics can influence news. You will learn how to work independently and as part of a team to produce stories. You will know how to work effectively in a variety of roles in a newsroom, whether you are presenting, writing or editing news material.
Further, the virtual learning experience of the course in academic year 2020/21 will enable you to develop skills that are much-needed in our changing world, including:
This module will be an opportunity for you to engage with realistic scenarios you are likely to encounter in one or more periods during any career in the media industries. Through seminars, directed study and experiential learning, you will explore the employment and self-employment opportunities in these industries.
The independent project represents the culmination of the theoretical and practical learning and assessment you have engaged in over the course of the degree. This module allows you to choose one of two pathways. Pathway 1 includes either writing a dissertation, or a final creative project. Pathway 2 is a work placement project.
This module prepares you for researching and producing long-form journalism from conception to consumption. You will take a systematic approach to long-form journalism, developing in-depth research methods and storytelling techniques, along with practical skills in writing, broadcasting, or digital journalism.
This module introduces the relevant concepts concerning professional newsroom environments and practices, including professional socialisation, production workflows, gate keeping practices, and the impact of convergence. It also aims to give you the practical skills in operating in a multi-platform and digital newsroom environment through a series of Newsdays.
How tangled are politics with economics, and how does journalism perform its watchdog function by holding power to account if they themselves are suffering from their own form of crisis? What are the power structures behind journalism that affect and influence its production? How do journalism, money and power interrelate? This module interrogates and deconstructs a number of issues to better understand the role journalism plays at the centre of mediating power: shaping it, supporting it, representing and framing it, and holding it to account.
The approach of this module is two-fold: to analyse how the news media landscape is responding to a globalizing world, but also to understand some of the nuances that can be found within different countries and cultural systems. How can we understand this new phenomenon, including the ways different countries and different cultures report – and are reported on?
This is not a Journalism module, but we are offering it to our students. The outline provided would need to be checked with the PR, advertising and marketing programme.
This module is exclusive to students studying at HKU Space.
The purpose of this module is to introduce you to the developments and debates regarding the relationship between identity (collective and individual) and consumer culture, and will be divided into three blocks of histories, issues and ethnography. The first block introduces the emergence of modern forms of subjectivity and identity in the Enlightenment. It goes on to consider various twentieth century challenges to these ideas about personality and identity. The second block considers how recent in the nature of work, leisure and consumption have impacted upon our experience of ourselves and our understanding of our relationship to others. This includes, for example, the branding of the self, celebrity culture and ethical consumption. The third block introduces advanced ethnographic methodologies and allows you to reflect on the issues raised by the modules in your own ethnographic practice.
See the course specification for more information:
Optional modules are usually available at levels 5 and 6, although optional modules are not offered on every course. Where optional modules are available, you will be asked to make your choice during the previous academic year. If we have insufficient numbers of students interested in an optional module, or there are staffing changes which affect the teaching, it may not be offered. If an optional module will not run, we will advise you after the module selection period when numbers are confirmed, or at the earliest time that the programme team make the decision not to run the module, and help you choose an alternative module.
Our course has strong links with industry and previous students have found work placements at:
Our annual Employability in Journalism event is attended by many organisations who offer a great range of work placements, the society of editors, the employability service, and we hold mock interviews.
We also run a Journalism Conversations series where high profile journalists are interviewed and students are able to take on various journalistic roles in the production as well as learn from the best. Recent guests have included:
Dr Sophie Knowles is programme leader of BA Journalism and Communication at Middlesex University. After working in newspapers and then a global corporate magazine, she completed a Masters and a PhD in Journalism from Murdoch University in Western Australia. She has spent time at both City and Cambridge University in different research capacities. Her research is focused on the intersections and interrelations between the news media, the public and sites of power. She is co-editor of media and austerity: comparative perspectives, and is working on her book ‘watchdogs, lapdogs, or canaries in the coalmine’.
Dr Maja Simunjak is a Lecturer in Journalism at Middlesex University. She holds a PhD in Political Communication from the University of East Anglia with a specialism in media reporting and electoral campaigns in authoritarian and transitional societies. She recently participated in several international research projects that examined media trends and freedoms, such as the Media Pluralism Monitor, Varieties of Democracy and 2014 European Elections. Before joining Middlesex, Maja worked at the European University Institute, Bell Cambridge, and University of East Anglia. She also has extensive experience as a professional journalist and editor in various media outlets, which includes the position of an editor and news anchor at a national television station, section editor in daily newspapers and a radio journalist and anchor.
Francis Shennan is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Middlesex University. He was previously Programme Leader in Football Business & Media at UCFB, headquartered at Wembley Stadium, Module Leader in Print & Online Journalism on the Masters and International Masters in Journalism at Westminster University, in Financial Journalism and in Media Policy & Regulation at Stirling University, and in Media Law Strathclyde University. A graduate in law from Edinburgh University, he gained two distinctions from the National Council for the Training of Journalists before becoming a sub-editor on the Daily Mirror and its sister paper, the Daily Record, and later Scottish Business Editor of the Sunday Times. His work has appeared in every UK and Scottish national daily newspaper except the “red tops”, and won one Scottish and three UK Press awards.
Kurt Barling is a Professor of Journalism at Middlesex University. He is an award-winning investigative journalist and documentary-maker who built a reputation working at the BBC from 1989 until 2015 partly by covering alternative narratives in the mainstream media. Kurt gained a first class degree in Languages and Politics before graduating with a Masters and PhD from the London School of Economics where he began his career as an expert in International Relations. He is author of 4 books including the latest published in Germany this year called Darkness over Germany, the book described by the Times as an "eloquent polemic" in 2015 - The R Word: Racism and a revelatory book on the security services role in sheltering Abu Hamza from scrutiny in the early noughties.
We’ll carefully manage any future changes to courses, or the support and other services available to you, if these are necessary because of things like changes to government health and safety advice, or any changes to the law.
Any decisions will be taken in line with both external advice and the University’s Regulations which include information on this.
Our priority will always be to maintain academic standards and quality so that your learning outcomes are not affected by any adjustments that we may have to make.
At all times we’ll aim to keep you well informed of how we may need to respond to changing circumstances, and about support that we’ll provide to you.
Start: October 2021, EU/International induction: September 2021
Duration: 3 years full-time, Usually 5 years part-time
Code: WP85
Start: October 2021, September 2021: EU/International induction
Duration: 3 years full-time, Usually 5 years part-time
Code: N567
Start: October 2021, EU/International induction: September 2021
Duration: 3 years full-time, Usually 5 years part-time
Code: P307
