It would be easy to claim that, for me, journalism was less of a career choice and more of a curse that’s been about my person since birth. My father is a journalist. My cousin is a journalist. My mother is a copy editor. My grandfather was a newspaper compositor. Cut me open and I just might bleed ink (although as far as I know the average press interview stops just short of physical butchery). Incidentally my grandmother owned a sweet shop, which explains why I write best when fuelled by a pound of hard-boiled rhubarband- custards. Yet the allure of the media must run deeper than a genetic predisposition towards hackery (or an innate desire to invent pithy words for my own pleasure). I should, considering the marked lack of ponies and namebrand fizzy pop in my childhood, have clocked the fact that journalism is unlikely to make me rich. Indeed, the increasingly saturated industry means it is becoming near impossible for those not blessed with an Arabian thoroughbred and a cellar full of quality vintage cherryade to claw their unmanicured way into the industry.

Known as the “Serena syndrome” (stay with me), this is the factor hugely limiting staff diversity in the media and resulting in the dominant representation of the white middle-classes on our newspapers and magazines. Frankly, it gets my goat (note: far harder to win showjumping ribbons on a goat). The catch is this: finding your way into a media job with a salary and your own uncomfortable chair generally requires several years of trudging through unpaid internships, having aneurisms over sandwich mixups and believing the photocopier is your only friend. And the vast majority of those who can afford to work unpaid for several years are, to be delicately classless about it, flaming great, toffee-nosed, hooray Henrys and Henriettas or, minus the alliteration, Serenas and Ruperts. I believe the PC term is “trust-fund dependent”. So the Serenas and Ruperts and Countess Bletherington-Smythes of the world trot from their Mayfair flats right into the best jobs. Meanwhile the rest of us byline wannabes are left moonlighting in a friendly Soho brothel while trying to secure jobs off the back of drama soc write-ups in the uni magazine. It’s a long and rickety ladder upon which to start at the bottom, so why are increasing numbers of students pinning their career hopes (and colossal debts) on a life in the media? Even when, as annual graduate review What Do Graduates Do? helpfully reminds us, the media sector is “one of the most difficult areas of the economy to break into”?

Unfairly harsh

However, while most intelligent people realise the actual glamour of the job is fairly minimal, it might be fair to assume that proximity to glamour is enough to lure a considerable number to the profession. After years of quietly beavering away in the background, today at least some journalists seem to be finding their own limelight. Admittedly only a tiny portion make their way on to the hallowed ground of the TV panel show, but there remains the idea that working in the media somehow equates to making something of yourself. It can be a creative outlet, or an adrenaline rush, and your Granny can keep all your clippings in a folder to show people at coffee mornings. In today’s cultural climate, where every nobody can be somebody for as long as it takes to wear a leopard-print thong and launch your own fragrance at Asda, it seems even the meekest among us yearn for a bit of notoriety – if you can’t see your name in lights, see it in print. If you can’t be a celebrity, write about them.

The truth is that my generation, moreso than any before it, thrives on communication. The media world – the big, official one where Jon Snow works and everyone wears sensible shoes – is becoming less of a distinct entity. Instead, each social group creates and maintains its own little media industry, distributing its information and ideas through blogging, social networking sites, communal texting, fanzines, flyering and, occasionally, wearing sandwich boards in the street. The end doesn’t appear to be nigh for this kind of gossip circulation, and I think we can partly attribute the growing graduate interest in journalism to the tell-all communication culture. We are egotistical exhibitionists. We are a confessional community, feeding on gossip and driven by a compulsion to unload every thought in our buzzing little minds on as wide an audience as possible. While our grandparents were taught never to air their dirty laundry in public (the sight of a soiled knickerbocker being enough to bring on communal bilious attacks all over the neighbourhood) and limited themselves to a few muttered words about Mrs Next Door’s thingummy with the whatchamacallit over the greengrocer’s counter, we think nothing of broadcasting every detail of our trivial lives on Facebook, MySpace, Youtube and the like.

The internet has taken the media canvas and stretched it to infinite proportions. For many consumers, “dead tree” journalism is falling short while the net churns out vital stories in the time it takes to locate the news in the supplement-and-leaflet mound of your average weekend paper. Meanwhile, everyone and their goldfish has discovered the delights of the blog – around 112 million inveterate bloggers were live on the web worldwide at the end of last year. And when there’s so much room for everybody to splatter themselves across the web, it is understandable that young hopefuls are going to believe they stand a chance of landing a media career. It’s an alluring, if untraditional, way into the industry – what begins with a vaguely witty photo caption on Bebo can evolve into a web journal with at least, ooh, let’s say 12 fans in Latvia, and then a whole site, and then, factoring in a publishing deal and several sex scandals with some minor MPs, bingo, you’re a journalist. Everybody thinks they have their right to a slice of the media pie, because everybody nowadays believes he or she is a disproportionately interesting person. I’ve written a column for two years in the belief that I am a disproportionately interesting person, and I’d thank you kindly not to burst my bubble now.

This might explain why recent years have seen such a shift towards the fluffier end of the media spectrum – few people, it seems, want to report actual news any more. Aspiring journos choose to write the material they want to read, and the traditional newspaper format is rapidly declining in popularity as web-based pages and other news mediums become more integrated into our lives. With a recent survey conducted for the House of Lords Communications Committee showing a 37 per cent drop in newspaper readership among 15- to 25-year-olds, it seems logical that fewer graduates should be plumping for the old allure of Fleet Street and instead finding their way into internet journalism and the ever-growing clutch of fanzines and red-top gossip mags. When you can earn a living drawing comedy circles around Coleen McLoughlin’s cellulite, who would choose to pen pieces about the future of the country? Oh, Coleen McLoughlin’s cellulite is the future of the country? My mistake.

A sentence of servitude

Interning is inherently a fairly hideous experience. Being launched into an environment where you are only marginally of more use than the office pot-plant is not the warm, fuzzy induction to a career most likely to ensure you stick at it rather than giving up to work in Costcutter. Nobody likes you. That is a given from the start. More unnerving is the realisation that nobody needs you, either. You are the office equivalent of a screaming newborn at a dinner party. You can do some colouring in, some cutting and sticking, or you can just weep quietly in the toilets until hometime. Don’t talk to, look at or breathe near anyone senior, and if confronted with the boss, endeavour to leave the room backwards, bowing as you go. Unfortunately, any sense of achievement I might have felt at the end of my first day was marred somewhat when I looked in a mirror and realised my face had been covered in news-print smudges since 10am, and nobody had thought to tell me. I may have packed Chanel jackets, rung Lanvin in Paris using my very best GCSE French, and procured everybody the right low-carb bagel, but I had done it all with an impressive, inky-grey moustache. It would never have happened to Audrey.

Messy and maddening though work experience may be, it is still by-andlarge the best way to get a head-start on that job in journalism. On graduating with his English degree in the early 1980s, my dad was rejected for no fewer than 200 newspaper jobs – a tale that strikes fear into my heart, knowing that the subsequent decades have made the struggle only more ferocious. I have occasional nightmares in which I must fight off the other 60- odd BA English students in my year at UCL for a tiny chair marked “media career”, armed only with a heavy copy of the OED and a particularly jabby Biro. And that’s not to mention those emerging from the scores of other courses with qualifications that promise to act as gateways to a job in the industry.

Despite popular derision for its “Mickey Mouse” status, annual graduate review What Do Graduates Do? revealed in 2007 that media studies is the third most employable degree, with a healthy 72.1 per cent of students finding work within six months of graduating. These graduates are also the most likely to crack their way into the media labyrinth, though still only a paltry one in seven land a job in the industry. Depressing though these stats might be, they are unlikely to quell the appeal of journalism in a world growing ever more dominated by the media. For some it may be a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them”, while for others the chance to contribute to global communication will always be a sexier option than a career that reaches only as far as a till or spreadsheet. We know we’ll be broke, stressed and possibly covered in ink smudges, but we’re prepared for the fight. Lauren Bravo is a 20-year-old English student at University College London and writes a weekly column for the Worthing Herald. She lives in Highgate with four flatmates and an inflatable kangaroo named Burt.