Flawed research methodology?

Back to the blog after more than a month's absence which is not good. For the last month, marking, one of the least exciting elements of a lecturer's job, has badly skewed my work-life balance. But I have managed to fit in writing my first academic assignment for more than six years - a critique of a the research methodology of a published paper on the links between media systems in four different countries and levels of public knowledge in those countries. The assignment was for the research methods module I have been doing as part of my PhD research training programme at Sheffield and I found it worryingly easy to critique the methodology of the paper. Worrying for two reasons: a) I may be wrong and my tutor will think I'm at best naive and at worst, stupid or b) I may be right and research papers get published regularly with flawed methodology. We'll see. I won't name the paper until I see what grade I get....



In the meantime, I'm catching up on what else is going on. The BBC hasn't been idle and has launched a new journalism training academy. The BBC Academy is not just for journalists but for all licence payers. All the BBC training materials I've seen are slick and expensive, as befits an organisation with plenty of licence fee money at its disposal. Will university journalism schools buckle under the competition?

Journalism, the exclusive middle-class profession

Journalists has become "one of the most exclusive middle class professions of the 21st century", according to a government report on social mobility to be published tomorrow. This will come as no surprise to anyone working in journalism or teaching it at university level. The depressing reality is that journalism is fiercely competitive but the industry is also contracting. There are few graduate jobs around this year. Often the only way recent graduates can get a job is to spend months working as an unpaid intern in a newsroom which has lots of vacant desks after a sweeping cull of reporters and is delighted to have someone keen and competent who the company doesn't have to pay. As long as this exploitation continues - and why shouldn't it if demand continues to exceed supply and companies can take advantage of new journalists who have paid for their own training? - the middle classes will dominate the industy. What working class graduate can afford to work for free?

Having got that out of my system, I'm off on holiday to the Lakes, with no internet and no mobile reception. For the next two and a half weeks, I'll be experiencing the restricted rural broadband access which so concerns Gordon Brown. I suspect the first thing I do when I get home will be to log on.