NCTJ Wants Gen Z to Rethink Journalism Careers

Britain's national journalism training body is on a mission to change how teenagers see the news — and who makes it. The National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) has launched 'Where your story goes', a campaign aimed at 14-to-18-year-olds, after its own research found "declining youth interest" in journalism, according to reporting by HoldTheFrontPage. The research found many young people don't fully trust the news or feel it represents them — and still picture the trade only in its traditional roles. In short, the NCTJ wants Gen Z to rethink journalism careers, starting with who the jobs are for.

The surveys behind the campaign, commissioned by the training body, paint a blunt picture. Young people told researchers they don't see journalism as a career for them, and many still think of it in terms of a reporter with a notebook rather than the spread of jobs the industry now holds. That perception gap is the problem the new push is designed to close.

At the heart of the initiative is YourStory, a dedicated website carrying an interactive personality quiz that matches teenagers to journalism roles that might suit them. The site pitches itself to a generation raised on feeds: "Media moves fast. With AI, it's even faster. But truth, balance, and nuance are here to stay." Visitors answer a set of questions and land on a persona — truth seeker, creative, connector — with suggested routes into the industry attached.

The site also carries video testimony from five young journalists already working across the industry, produced by Sata Studios: Hamzah, a football reporter at The Times; Cree-Summer, a presenter at ITV News; Calum, a presenter on BBC Newsbeat; Aaron, a reporter at Attitude Magazine; and Evie Flynn, a journalist at Southwark News. Their interviews walk through what the jobs actually involve, from matchday reporting to reading the news on national radio.

Alongside the website, the NCTJ has produced a careers guide distributed to more than 35,000 teachers and education providers across the UK in partnership with the Financial Times, setting out the careers available and why its training is pitched as the strongest route into the industry.

Why the industry is worried about its pipeline

The campaign was built with Livity, the youth-focused arm of communications agency krow Group, and launched in March 2026. It sits inside a wider outreach effort: the NCTJ has run an ambassadors programme since July 2024, with recently qualified journalists visiting more than 60 careers fairs and school talks across the UK to make the case for the trade in person. The body is now recruiting more ambassadors outside London and across Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and it used the YourStory materials at its own awards for excellence this year.

The training body also leans on a striking employment contrast. Its own research found 74 per cent of working NCTJ graduates landed a journalism-related job, compared with 28 per cent of working journalism graduates in the wider HESA graduate survey it cites, according to Roastbrief. In other words, most of its trained graduates find newsroom work while just over a quarter of journalism graduates overall do — a gap the campaign uses to argue that accredited training is the route that pays off.

What teenagers actually get from it

For a 15-year-old wondering whether media is for them, the offer is threefold: the quiz for self-discovery, the five mentors showing real routes in, and — via their teachers — the printed guide landing in schools. "Journalism is one of the most important professions in a democratic society, yet many young people still feel it isn't a career for them or don't fully understand the opportunities available," Joanne Forbes, the NCTJ's chief executive, said in a statement.

Forbes said the campaign is designed to open up that world and show young people the many ways they can build a career in journalism today — "from reporting and investigations to podcasting, video production and data storytelling." The contrast is deliberate: the old image is a single job title, while the modern newsroom also needs audio producers, camera operators, data journalists and newsletter writers. It's a generation already crowdsourcing career strategy in public, from viral Reddit threads ranking jobs by pay and effort to day-in-the-life videos — and the campaign is meeting them in that spirit. Livity's chief executive Alex Goat added that the integrity of journalism matters more than ever right now, and that inspiring the next generation to enter the industry is one of the ways to rebuild young people's trust in news.

Will a quiz rebuild trust in the news?

Sceptics may reasonably ask whether a personality quiz can fix something as deep as distrust in the media. Trust is mostly earned or lost through coverage itself — how fairly stories are reported, who gets to tell them, and whether young audiences see their lives reflected. A marketing campaign can't paper over newsroom job scarcity or the disruption AI is bringing to entry-level media work, and teenagers weighing their options are entering a labour market where rising hiring costs are already squeezing young people out of UK jobs.

The campaign's implicit answer is that the pipeline is the long game: if more young people from more backgrounds enter training, newsrooms gradually look more like the audiences they serve, and trust follows representation. Whether that logic holds will be tested by what happens after the quiz — the applications to NCTJ-accredited courses, the ambassadors turning up at school fairs, and the guide sitting in staff rooms. For now, the site is live, the guide is on its way to teachers, and the industry has at least named its problem out loud: the next generation isn't convinced the news is for them, and the NCTJ wants Gen Z to rethink journalism careers before ruling the trade out entirely.