Bachelor of Arts - Journalism (Honours)

BA (Hons) Journalism trains reporting as a professional practice: news writing and story construction, interviewing and sourcing, media law and ethics, shorthand and research skills, multimedia and broadcast production, and data journalism, developed through newsroom-style working and portfolio building.

Deadline conditions are simulated seriously — students file to real word counts and turnarounds, work newsdays as teams, and take editorial criticism as routine — because journalism recruitment tests speed and accuracy under pressure far more than academic knowledge.

Shorthand deserves specific mention because students routinely underestimate it: the qualification remains a genuine hiring criterion at many British newsrooms, it takes months of daily drilling to reach usable speed, and students who start in the first year rather than the third graduate with a credential their competitors lack. The course also builds the media-law grounding that communications employers value. The £16,800 fee applies across the three recorded September cycles, with student media involvement strongly advisable alongside, since editors hire from clips and the campus newsroom is the easiest place to start producing them.

Legal and ethical training is central rather than peripheral, since defamation, contempt and privacy govern what can be published, and this framework also makes graduates valuable to communications employers who need staff who understand media risk.

Newsroom entry pays modestly at £19,000–£23,000 while communications roles start considerably higher, and the writing-to-deadline skill transfers widely across content and corporate work. The completed honours degree confers Graduate Route rights at the 18-month post-January-2027 length, with dependants excluded on taught undergraduate routes.