Month: January 2020

January 21, 2020

Why I’m sticking with shorthand

What’s the hardest part of my job?

Is it trying to maintain our 100 per cent satisfaction rating in the National Student Survey? Is it managing to hit our student recruitment targets? Is it helping our students navigate their way through the rocks of anxiety, multi-tasking, money, relationships and job applications?

Keeping our teaching bang up to date?

Is it keeping our two accreditation bodies happy?

Well, you’re getting warm.

It’s shorthand.

That weird invention with its roots in the first half of the 19th century, still taught by methods that would be familiar to a pre-war school pupil.

It’s bloody hard, and it’s never far from my consciousness.

Keeping our students on the straight and narrow with it is probably the biggest of all my challenges.

Most of them accept the importance and usefulness of shorthand – but that doesn’t always make it any easier to swallow a very difficult and sometimes bitter pill.

Today it was shorthand boot camp time for our second and third years as they prepare for exams next month.

They were practising their outlines as a debate was reignited over the priority newsrooms should give shorthand when recruiting journalists – and whether it was time to consign poor old Marie Cartwright’s 2009 classic Teeline Gold Standard for Journalists to the recycling bin.

It started with a tweet from one of my favourite editors, the Yorkshire Post’s James Mitchinson, who urged an unnamed university in his proud county to abandon any consideration of plans to drop shorthand.

The identity of said university remains a mystery, with Press Gazette revealing three key providers of journalism education in Yorkshire all toeing the teeline.

But that tweet spawned dozens of sub-threads, as journalists up and down the land weighed in.

At one point, the big three publishers seemed to have drawn up ever so friendly battle lines, with James backed by his JPI boss Jeremy Clifford, and by Newsquest editorial director Toby Granville, while senior people at Reach – led by its digital editorial strategy director David Higgerson – questioned whether shorthand should be a red recruitment line.

A fascinating debate ensued, opening up discussions on all aspects of diversity – especially disability and class.

David – as always – brought wisdom to the party, making the point that achieving 100 words a minute at shorthand shouldn’t be seen as a proxy for young journalistic gold.

It’s certainly doesn’t say anything about someone’s ability to serve up the most prized skills and qualities needed in today’s newsrooms: finding stories and engaging content, making contacts and developing ideas.

And there are roles – in social media, analytics and video, perhaps – where shorthand is never going to be particularly relevant.

But achieving a decent shorthand speed is, I would argue, a proxy for something else that’s vital for journalistic success. People of a certain age might call it stickability. James calls it minerals. It certainly requires determination, a refusal to give up when confronted by difficulties. And passing the NCTJ’s exacting shorthand exams shows the sort of attention to detail that good journalism also demands.

In all the threads, there was agreement that if your job takes you into court, council chambers and investigations, shorthand is a must.

But these are far from the only situations where the material you’re producing needs to be bomb-proof.

And there’s something else. Shorthand can be read back immediately. It’s there on a page, where all manner of colour-coded lines can be sketched in to prioritise killer quotes and dropped intro anecdotes. It helps you think angles and toplines as you go along, without having to check a recording.

A poll organised by Behind Local News found a majority for shorthand being ‘needed for some roles’ rather than an ‘essential skill for all.’

I think that’s about right.

Newsrooms that refuse to look at recruits unless they’ve got 100wpm could just be missing out on some real talent – as well as some different voices.

And I know that the smaller newsrooms of some of those big publishers can’t actually be that choosy.

But shorthand will be staying on our timetable.

For one thing, it’s far from easy to get NCTJ accreditation for a mainstream journalism course without it. I’d have to persuade our industry advisers – who include a Reach editor – that we’d be better off putting our resources elsewhere.

My overriding motivation, though, is the need to ensure that our graduates go out into world equipped with as many advantages as possible.

We want their skills, attitudes and instincts to be the very best, and if shorthand gives them the edge over their rival for a role, happy days.

So I’m keeping on keeping on, digging deep to find the stickability that got me through my 100 words a minute more than 30 years ago to help the next generation across the line.