About

InJournalism.co.uk is the home of the North East’s newest digital news, features and sports magazine. It is run as an independent publication by the student journalism team at Sunderland University.

Learning how to be a journalist can be intense: shorthand, news editing, understanding media law. But the exciting bit - seeing it out there, published - is worth all the effort. And to be able to do that as part of a course, from day one, makes sure the excitement stays at the centre of all the hard work.

And becoming a journalist has never been as competitive. That’s why it’s important to be publishing work, developing a style, creating a portfolio. Every commentator on journalism has been talking up the need for students to have a digital portfolio at their fingertips. For example Neil Macintosh, Director of Editorial Development at the Guardian, has said:

“I tell all the journalism students I meet this: blogs are the minimum. There’s no excuse for a student journalist who wants to work online not to have one. And no, MySpace/Bebo/Facebook pages don’t count.

“Moreover, the quality of the blog really matters, because it lets me see how good someone is unedited and entirely self-motivated. If I were to see a decent pitch with a blog address on it, I’d look, and the quality and frequency could count heavily in the author’s favour. And if a brilliant graduate didn’t have a blog, but still made interview, I’d be asking, politely, why not…”

And the conversation continues.

At Sunderland, students have the chance to build their own blog as part of our Social Media module. But there was still a huge amount of great journalism being produced that never saw publication. We didn’t think that was right. So the next logical step was to start publishing that content. And InJournalism.co.uk was born. It’s young, it’s got some things to work out, but we think it’s the best new thing happening at any journalism degree in the country. Because publishing work is integral to the programme, and look, writing for us you get your own dedicated portfolio page.

And it’s not just for students, and not just for Sunderland. To meet our own ambitions, we want InJournalism.co.uk to be professional, national, global… We’ll probably stop there though!

Want to find out more?