Alexander Chancellor: Do you think you should read this piece for free?

I was in Nottingham last Sunday to address university students about journalism. The occasion was a one-day ‘media conference’ organised by the Nottingham University students’ magazine, Impact, for the purpose of encouraging students to embark on journalistic careers. The conference, it promised, would give them a ‘kick start’ in this direction. I hadn’t realised until I got there that this was the intention, for I had planned to say how it was now almost as bad an idea for a young person to try to go into journalism as it had been, in Noël Coward’s song, for Mrs Worthington to put her daughter on the stage. I decided to tone down my remarks a bit when I saw how warmly many of the students cherished this ambition and how they clutched at every encouraging piece of advice offered them by other visiting speakers. When, for example, Paul Radford, a former sports editor of Reuters, told them that there might be opportunities for one or two of them to help with the coverage of next year’s Winter Olympics at Sochi in Russia, he was almost mobbed by a dozen or so would-be applicants.