ABSTRACT
Shall we start with the anti-social hours? Then the stress, flogging to meet constant deadlines in a world that never sleeps, and time wasted on dubious blogs, vlogs and websites or having the ear burned hot on a ‘phone by someone with a conspiracy theory that links the CIA and theMafia with your local football team in some global evil. Add some disrupted family life, or your social life is disturbed because you leave the party when you hear that a plane has crashed into city hall. Sometimes you don’t even want to sleep in case something …happens! Then you read about that man-with-a-tan who gets a dream salary for presenting
news – but stick with reality; your annual pay is about the same as his lunch expenses this week. Or there’s a woman on the radio who is being paid, yes paid, to report from a country you’ve always longed to visit. But they both had to start somewhere. But then you might think: I can make money in London banking, or on Wall
Street, or in Hong Kong or Singapore. Maybe, you just want something else? Maybe you just don’t fancy a day job after all? A school student summed it up very neatly for every hopeful broadcast journalist
in the world when she wrote in a Pittsburgh newspaper about what her journalism tutors told her: ‘They made it clear that while you may not become rich doing the work, your life would be exciting.’∗
Few professions can match broadcast journalism for its rewards in terms of job satisfaction, interest, variety, excitement, experiences, creativity – and for the select few – fame and wealth.
