City St George’s retires 50-year Newspaper Journalism MA for broader digital course

City St George’s, University of London, has ended its Newspaper Journalism MA after 50 years and replaced it with a broader Journalism MA, recasting a course long associated with print journalism for an online news environment. The new programme retains core reporting and production training while offering an elective on artificial intelligence and the future of news. The renamed MA attracted three times as many applications as its predecessor, with 56 students enrolled compared with 30 on the previous year’s Newspaper Journalism MA. Fees rose to £13,000 for home students and £26,680 for international students, from £11,930 and £24,440 respectively. Paul Solman, who took over the old course from longstanding director Jonathan Hewett in 2024, said the decision reflected changes in the industry. “For many, the word newspaper still has connotations of a paper product,” he said, even though newspapers are now online. City decided to revise the programme about 18 months before the Press Gazette report. Its core syllabus still covers newswriting, features, editorial production, media law and journalistic ethics, but the core assessment has shifted from making a mock newspaper page in Adobe InDesign to editing a live news page. The university’s current course information describes a 180-credit MA that teaches reporting, multimedia, media law, ethics, interviewing, audience engagement and social-media strategy. Modules include breaking-news reporting, multimedia production, live production, audience strategy and data journalism. Students can complete either a dissertation or a final practical project, and work-related learning is delivered through a core work-experience and placements module. A credited Career Development module is now compulsory across the department’s postgraduate journalism courses, teaching students how to secure work experience and freelance assignments. City also continues to offer specialist MAs in investigative, international, magazine, global financial and broadcast journalism. The AI elective, listed as “AI, Journalism, and the Future of News,” asks students to analyse an AI system already used by the industry and turn a raw dataset into a short social-media news video. The university says AI is transforming news gathering and production, and has made an AI elective available across its journalism master’s programmes. Its 2025-26 electives handbook also lists Journalism Innovation, covering technology, competition and financial pressures on journalism, as well as the development of new content and potential news start-ups. The change follows a longer shift in how British journalism courses are branded. Cardiff University renamed its Newspaper Journalism course News Journalism in 2015; Sheffield removed “Print” from a course title in 2017, followed by Nottingham Trent in 2019. City’s original programme began as a postgraduate diploma in October 1976, led by Tom Welsh. It admitted 13 graduates from 120 applicants and taught law, public administration and shorthand alongside reporting from courts, council meetings and Parliament. Ten members of that first group later entered local journalism. The programme benefited from the university’s proximity to Fleet Street and became a route into national newspapers. The Reuters Institute says newsroom leaders have treated AI-driven innovation as an urgent priority since ChatGPT’s public release in late 2022, although few newsrooms had applied the technology routinely in their operations.