Why the region’s newsrooms should help train journalists alongside their degrees, rather than wait for them to graduate

By: Dr. Muhammad Naim Muhamad Ali

University of Wollongong Malaysia

Journalism schools across the region keep running a training system that almost everyone privately admits is broken. Each year, final-semester students are pushed into newsrooms for twelve to sixteen weeks, and this is called the bridge from the lecture hall to the profession. It is nothing of the sort. The first month disappears into onboarding and house style; the next two go to transcribing press conferences and chasing routine quotes. Just as a student begins to grasp how defamation law behaves in practice, or finds the nerve to press an evasive official, the placement ends and the calendar sends them home to graduate. This is not the students’ failure, nor the newsrooms’ negligence, but a design flaw: a single semester is too short to grow what makes a journalist useful, the trust of an editor, the reflex for a story, the command of a beat. We are not training journalists so much as giving them a supervised tour and a degree for the visit.

Rather than help repair this, the industry has settled into a comfortable complaint. At forums and advisory boards, editors say the same: graduates arrive unready, without news sense, needing too much hand-holding. The criticism is fair, but it is also convenient. Newsrooms cannot fault universities for the quality of graduates while assuming talent is a finished product they had no hand in making. Journalists have never arrived fully formed. They were once shaped by the in-house cadet schemes that regional media houses ran for decades, pipelines that corporate cost-cutting has quietly dismantled over the past twenty years. Having pushed the cost of training onto universities, whose job is to build foundations, not run corporate boot camps, it now complains about the results. A university cannot stage a breaking story at two in the morning with real legal and ethical stakes. Only a working newsroom can. If the industry wants ready journalists, it has to help make them.

Governments, at least, have tried to close the gap. Malaysia’s Ministry of Higher Education promotes work-integrated degrees, among them the 2u1i model, two years on campus and one in industry, and its 2u2i variant, which splits a four-year degree evenly. These schemes are right that sustained immersion beats a short internship. But for journalism their structure creates a new problem: they split the two worlds into different calendar years. Students leave campus in a block, and the connection to the classroom goes cold.

Both the brief internship and the block placement miss the same truth about how adults learn. Andragogy, the study of adult learning, holds that grown students absorb most when the work is self-directed, drawn from real experience, and aimed at problems that matter now. Few fields fit that as neatly as journalism, where news does not wait for the syllabus but happens daily. Universities should build journalism studies around that principle, not the lecture alone.

The better answer, then, is not to separate newsroom and classroom but to run them together. In a concurrent cadetship, final-year students would be attached to a partner newsroom for a full year while continuing to attend lectures. Media law stops being a topic to memorize when you are the one deciding whether a quote is safe to publish. This is no experiment. American educators call it the teaching hospital model, borrowed from medicine: students, faculty, and professionals under one roof, producing real journalism for a real audience. The University of Missouri has run this way for decades, calling it The Missouri Method. Its students staffing an NBC-affiliated television station, an NPR radio station, and a daily newspaper, meanwhile, Australia’s public broadcasters still rely on year-long paid cadetships as their main pipeline. Few universities here can own stations, and need not. They can embed students in the newsrooms that already exist.

Nor is the model an overseas curiosity. I lived it myself, on a more demanding schedule than this proposal even asks. My classmates and I were cadet journalists from our second year on in UiTM. I recall chasing crime and society stories while still attending class. It was hectic, but good stress, the kind that readies you for a newsroom rather than shelters you from it. The work was coursework, yet real editors assessed it against professional standards. No lecture taught me more.

Now, turning that experience into policy raises fair objections, but each has an answer. Scheduling is the first: cluster theory into the first two years, deliver lecture-heavy modules asynchronously, by third year, focus on courses that are project based, and reserve that academic year for newsroom shifts instead of internship. The cadetship becomes a credit-bearing core of the degree, graded on portfolios and editors’ evaluations. A year also solves the mentoring problem, since editors will invest in someone who is staying. Over twelve months a cadet can follow a court case to verdict or a data project to publication, becoming a contributor rather than a burden.

Beyond logistics lies the risk that matters most: a cadetship must not become a source of cheap labour. If a student is filing published work under a byline, driving traffic, and meeting editorial quotas, they are working, and they must be paid. Agreements should guarantee a training stipend, medical and liability insurance, and firm caps on weekly hours to protect academic standing. That turns a loose arrangement into a contract that protects the student and obliges the newsroom to teach.

Done properly, a concurrent cadetship shares the work of making journalists. Universities supply grounded, ethically literate thinkers; newsrooms supply the pressure that turns them into reporters. This matters most now, in trying times for the profession. Audiences are drifting to social media, younger generations barely turn to traditional news, and the industry’s finances are under real strain. The region cannot afford to treat the final year of a journalism degree as a waiting room. It should be the front porch of the profession. Students would graduate not as visitors who once passed through the industry, but as journalists it already knows by name.