From student journalist to media player

From the 1970s onwards, activists from NUS began to make their careers in journalism. Among the first were Anna Ford (above), who cut her teeth in the students' union at Manchester University; Andrew Jaspan, also at Manchester, now the editor of the Sunday Herald in Glasgow; and Alastair Stewart, the ITN newscaster who presents the news show London Tonight and Police, Camera, Action.

Alastair Stewart was a student at Bristol University from 1970-74, he studied economics, politics and sociology, but actually spent a good deal of time in student politics and journalism, editing Bristol's Nonesuch paper and helping to establish Baccus, the paper for all students in the Bristol area. Elected vice-president of the students' union, he was catapulted into national politics, being made deputy president of NUS.

Later, he jumped ship for journalism. His first job was on Southern ITV; in 1980 he moved to ITN as industrial correspondent, becoming a newscaster and then Washington correspondent. "I have always believed student journalism is important to our democracy," he says. "It explores what is good and bad within further and higher education today, casting light on matters often of little interest to the national press but fuelling quality debates within institutions."

Jon Snow, the presenter of Channel 4 News, went to Liverpool University to read law the same year as Alastair Stewart started at Bristol. But he did not fare so well. It was a time of ferment on university campuses and Snow, as a member of the student executive, became caught up in protesting about the university's investment in South Africa.

Liverpool University had never seen anything like it before. Jon Snow and his fellow protesters were sent down for bringing the university into disrepute, although their demonstrating was peaceable.

"I was absolutely shattered," he says now. "I did not have the ideological commitment or roots to withstand it. It was a very extreme thing for Liverpool to do, a bit like foot-and-mouth disease. It [the student action] had cropped up everywhere but Liverpool. They obviously decided on a slash-and-burn policy. I often look back on it with anger. It was a complete denial of natural justice." He redeemed himself by getting a job in a drug dependency unit in the West End of London, where he stayed for three years, before finding work on the new radio station, LBC. The rest is history.

Like Jon Snow, David Aaronovitch, a columnist on The Independent, was also kicked out of university, this time Oxford. Again, there had been student unrest and Aaronovitch failed the German part of his modern history exam. He moved to Manchester University, ending up on the NUS executive as part of the Broad Left ticket. Later, he was made national secretary of the NUS during the time Trevor Phillips was president, and from 1980 to 1982 Aaronovitch himself was elected president.

By this time Phillips had found work at London Weekend Television. Aaronovitch followed him there. "What I wanted to be was Michael Parkinson," he says. Instead, he was hired by Weekend World where he made a seminal programme about how the Soviet Union was heading for big changes. Later he moved to BBC TV's On the Record and became trapped in management, he says. "I was terribly miserable. You have to work out who you are and what you want to do, but it can take a long time."

He was saved by Ian Hargreaves, the former editor of The Independent, who made him chief leader writer. Later he wrote parliamentary sketches before being given his own column, a job he does for the paper today.

This article, written by Lucy Hodges, originally appeared in The Independent.

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