#1 Write (or say) a lot. Publicly.

A nice thing about journalism is that you can do it without anyone’s permission. There is no licence. No required qualification. Get yourself a free blog. Get on YouTube. Twitter. Tiktok. Just start saying things. The more you write or present to camera, the more feedback you will get, the more you can try to adapt and the better you will get.

If you write for an hour a week, then at the end of the year you will only have done 52 hours of practice. But that’s 52 hours more than you did last year, and 51 hours more than a person who knocked out a single blog and now is sitting around wondering why someone didn’t turn them into a journalist yet. Just think: if they do 1 hour and you do 52, you will be 52 times more experienced than them. That’s just in one year. Do an hour a day and you just 365-timesed your experience.

#2 Get a niche

Journalism jobs come in all shapes and sizes, so it’s a good idea to stay flexible. m

BUT there is a lot to be said for having at least one niche – even if you only write about it for free in your spare time. A niche makes you memorable.

With my own writing, I initially wrote a lot about education politics back when I was a secondary school teacher. A friend who was starting a thinktank needed content for his site and asked me to do a fortnightly blog based on current education news. I did that for two years. Then, I took a break from teaching to study in the US. While there, I woke up at 3am every Tuesday to watch the Education Select Committee back in the UK, and would both live-tweet the committee. I did that for another two years. Gradually, I became known as the education policy lady. The one who knows about free schools. Or funding. Then I became the “education expert”. These days, if the BBC or ITV want someone to come on and explain an education issue, they come to me. It took about ten years to get to this point.

So start your niche, and start soon.

#3 Read books about journalism

Here’s a secret: most journalists don’t take their professional learning as seriously as you. m As a journalist, if I asked for recommendations of books that would teach me how to be a better journalist, people mostly laughed and offered fictional accounts of newsrooms. There’s a sense that you just get out there and it all falls into place. It’s not true though. You will always get better if you’re deliberate about the way you practice.

Newspaper writing is a craft. A real one. A difficult one. And not one that you will happen upon by accident. If you are interested in news writing, at the very least you should have consumed News Writing by Anne McKane, Letters To A Young Journalist by Sam Freedman, and the books that form the core part of the NCTJ qualification. Also: read newspapers every single day. And not just the papers that you like, or the stories that you like. Read several papers and all kinds of stories. Analyse first lines. Watch how facts are interwoven. Start practising now. How would you improve the intro? What crucial fact was missing?

#4 Learn to edit

I am not a good writer. I’m not even a good proofreader. But I have learned to hack away at my words and make them vaguely understandable. It is not easy and I wasn’t a natural. But I’ve gathered a few tricks to help. First, I write sentences so that I could understand them if it was in a second language that I vaguely understand. Second, I use Grammarly, which is ridiculously expensive but I’ve continued shelling out for years so it must be doing something right.

#5 Live a little

First off, I am suspicious of people who do journalism undergraduate degrees. Why? Because knowing the technical aspects of newspaper reporting doesn’t actually help when you are investigating crime squads, or financial documents, or the scientific policies of a regulator. It is much better if you know something. This does not mean you must avoid journalism degrees. When I was the editor at SchoolsWeek several of our best journalists had these degrees – but also had to do the hard work of getting specialised in the school sector and it often took a while. How much easier would it have been if they had worked in a school for a bit first? I’ve also worked with journalists who didn’t go to university at all, and instead spent time out on the beat from when they were about 10. (Don’t worry, this wasn’t a child labour law issue, they just did it themselves).

Outside of your studies, you can be a journalist everywhere. Challenge yourself to go on a walk and see how many stories you can find. Are there roadworks? What’s on the local noticeboard? Find a lampost or building with a planning permission note tied to it (they exist!) These are stories. Write about them. On a blog, in a notebook, make a Tik Tok. Use every opportunity to practice your craft.