Journalism when it all began (for me)

When I first arrived at journalism school, I didn’t realise I’d turned up just as the scene was starting to shift. It was September 1999. The pillars of journalism were in print, radio and television. Broadsheets were massive and came with extra sections, local radio presenters made personal appearances and turned on Christmas lights and most people ignored Sky and Channel 5 to manage with four television channels and gave each other DVDs as birthday presents.

The prospect of university was exciting and terrifying in equal parts. I was independent and alone; confident but unsure. My course was a two-way split too. BA Broadcast Journalism. Half radio, half TV. It was the first part that I’d already fallen in love with. Radio was fun, exciting, free. The chaos of Chris Evans at breakfast, the Irish curl in Alan Green’s commentaries, the farce of late nights with Scottie McClue. I was hooked on Radio 1’s Newsbeat. 5:45pm every weekday. The day in 15 minutes, explained with energy, colour and polish. It spoke to me, not at me; about me, not above me. That was the sort of journalist I wanted to be.

Television, meanwhile, seemed far less relaxed. I often found bulletins hard to watch. Particularly on the BBC. Even with Sir Trevor's calming demeanour on ITV, network news seemed too serious and scary, formally dressed with hard facts and long faces. Regional news reminded me of visits to my Auntie Ann. Still, I recognised television as top dog in media. It was a platform to aspire towards in a landscape that appeared timeless but has since been bulldozed.

Tabloid titles dominated newspaper sales. The Sun was the UKs biggest selling weekday paper. It cost 30p. The News of the World owned Sundays. Both had a bite that bordered acceptability. Break-ups, bust-ups, kiss and tells. Topless pictures on Page 3. Mazher Mahmood’s ‘Fake Sheikh’ stings winning awards for the News of the World. They formed attitudes as much as agendas; a boyish banter culture, in love with the excesses of fame, big egos and English football. Lads mags ‘Loaded’ and FHM were piled high in newsagents. Sports commentators were all men. Women who played hard were coined ‘Ladettes.’ The world was so used to casual misogyny, the title was adopted into dictionaries.

Diversity also had a long way to go. Britain woke up to a choice of just 8 nationwide radio shows, all of which had white presenters. The BBC had Zoe Ball on Radio 1, Terry Wogan (Radio 2), Petroc Trelawny (Radio 3), John Humphries, Ed Stourton and Sue McGregor presented Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme, Julian Worricker and Victoria Derbyshire were on Radio 5 Live. Commercially the options were Chris Evans on Virgin, Nick Ferrari and David Banks on Talk Radio’s ‘Big Boys Breakfast’ and Henry Kelly on Classic FM. Change was just beginning. By November, more stations would be available nationally as first digital radio multiplex went live.

Meanwhile, local radio was thriving. The BBC’s stations had characters of their own to match their communities. The names of the big commercial stations were synonymous with the cities they served. Piccadilly in Manchester, BRMB in Birmingham, Clyde in Glasgow, Hallam in Sheffield, Trent in Nottingham, Radio City in Liverpool, Capitol and LBC in London. Each lived around a sea of static on short (FM), medium (MW) or long wave (kHz) frequencies. Our Students Union ran a radio station that was given a 28-day licence twice a year. The frequency sat on 97.5 FM - directly between the city’s commercial station on 96.2 and Radio 1 on 97.9. To our delight, listeners would frequently join by accident as they attempted to retune their radios from one to the other.

Local newsrooms were well staffed across radio and print. In towns and boroughs, papers went to press once a week, in cities they were daily. First editions began arriving on news-stands late in the morning and sometimes there were several more versions during the afternoon. Sellers had recognisable cries. People paid for small ads and met others through lonely hearts columns.

Most computers were stand-alone PCs with big towers that sat under monitors that were almost as deep as they were wide. They took time to fire up, not least because Windows didn’t automatically open when the computer turned on and needed prompting. Going online meant powering up a modem that sat alongside the machine and made a series of scratchy bleeps and buzzes as it established a connection. Completed work was saved on plastic disks with small memories. You wrote details of what you’d save on the label on the front, or you’d end up spending ages searching disk after disk to find the right document.

Google was in its infancy as a search engine. It didn’t run ads until the following year. Some people used Ask Jeeves or Yahoo! instead. Online shopping had barely begun. Amazon only sold books. Many smaller companies still didn’t have websites at all. To contact someone directly, it was usually quicker to thumb through a copy of the Yellow Pages for business numbers or use BT’s Phone Directory for personal landlines. BT also ran a directory enquiries service - 192 - that was particularly useful if you needed to call people outside your local area. Facebook hadn’t been invented as Mark Zuckerberg was still in High School.

News websites existed, but they were still finding their place. The Guardian separated out strands onto separate sites, each called ‘Unlimited.’ I used news, football, cricket and media. The BBC’s presence was growing but it still held big stories back for big programmes. The Sun put all its content on a site called ‘Currant Bun’ but its confidence in online content was so weak, it sold off the site the following year. The Daily Mail had a single page that updated every day with a picture of its latest front page. Channel 4 sent an email, signed off by its main presenter Jon Snow. I used to receive my Snowmail every weekday at about 4:30pm. It once accidentally included all the recipients in the ‘To’ column and I realised there were about 200 others who received it too.

Mobile phones were rarer than landlines. I arrived at university without one but decided to change that during my first term. The sales assistant made a big fuss demonstrating how to send text messages, but I couldn’t see that becoming a thing. Everyone left voice messages and anyway I was only able to send 10 a month on my plan. Cameras took pictures. I carried around a pocket diary and a small A to Z map book and had no idea how many steps I took a day. People played ‘Snake’ on their Nokias.

I chose my course, in part, because it felt like the real thing. The University had just moved into an old BBC building called York House, a huge angular office block with sad metal-framed windows that loomed over a main road into the city centre. The old radio and television studios had been left largely as they were to be spaces where we could practice. I was trained to be multi-skilled - to report, record and edit my own radio and television pieces. Tutors saw that as the future. Most in the industry couldn’t do all three. Digitisation was making everything easier, although we arrived between the old world and the new. We used minidiscs to digitally record our audio, then played the material into a PC in real time to cut digitally on Cool Edit, then played the finished clips and packages out onto large light blue carts so that someone could manually play them out in the studio. Final assignments were handed in on cassette tape.

For TV lessons, we used large Panasonic video cameras that took S-VHS tapes. They were handed out in large dark green boxes alongside tripods that had to be carried in oversized cardboard tubes. We were encouraged to work in pairs to carry the help each other carry the kit. We still shot in 4:3 even though everything was gradually migrating across to 16:9.

The wheels of change turned heavily over the past 25 years and continue to gather pace. Change has been universal but it happened in all sorts of different ways, at different speeds and for a plethora of reasons. Television has ceeded status to tech. But now, just as then, the landscape is shifting. Some say we are entering an era of AI. In another quarter of a century, we'll know for sure. But a quarter of a century on, finding stories and telling them well remains just as important as always. I hope this year's under-grads feel just as excited as I did back in 1999.