The BBC figures is based on a survey they have conducted with universities. It is timed to coincide with the more official launch of the Universities UK report, which suggests the current cap should be lifted.

UPDATE: Debate now going on over at InJournalism.co.uk – have your say on tutition fees.

Universities UK has set out the consequences of fee levels of £5,000 and £7,000 – arguing that if fees reached £7,000 a market of differently priced courses would emerge.

The Daily Mail, of course, focuses on the effect on the Middle Classes, its core constituent, rather than thinking about those from lower socio-economic groups.

Speaking to the BBC, Higher Education Minister David ‘understatement’ Lammy said there was an “important debate to be had”. But what he didn’t say is that both parties, but particularly Labour, don’t want that to happen until after the next election–the last tuition fees debate caused the biggest back bench revolt for a decade. Backbenchers are already mobilising:

Labour backbenchers are also mobilising on the issue – with MP Paul Farrelly, a former fee rebel, putting down a motion in the House of Commons warning against any plans to hike fees.

According to Education Secretary John Denham, however, the debate on fees won’t be until after they’ve already decided what the funding framework will be. This approach has been blasted by universities as lacking consultation.

What can I do?
The National Union of Students is actively campaigning against the rise, particularly in difficult times. NUS president Wes Streeting has said:

In the context of the current recession, it is extremely arrogant for university vice chancellors to be fantasising about charging their students even higher fees and plunging them into over £32,000 of debt.

So particularly today, during the last day of voting for your own Students’ Union reps, you could ask them what they are doing, and how are they aligned, with the NUS – Sunderland left the NUS in 2003.

Background
Most students think that it’s the university that introduced the idea of tutition fees. But that’s not strictly the case. Back in 1997, the Dearing Commission on higher education, produced its report on how to sustain the sector, and presented a ‘jigsaw’ of 93 points that, when all working together, would maintain UK universities as world-leading. These 93 points included tuition feeds, but also many other mechanisms.

The newly elected Labour government cherry picked a few of those points, rather than the whole jigsaw–basically, more money from students to pay for their education, and less money from government. Universities didn’t really have too much choice to start charging fees, which resulted in today’s situation. According to Push.co.uk, students already leave University owing up to £18,000.

(x-posted at GreenJournalism.co.uk)

What’s your view? Did you know about the Dearing Commission and government policy? Do you want the University of Sunderland to rejoin the NUS on this? Let us know and we’ll follow up with another post.

Jobs in Digital is the leading recruitment fair for careers working within new media, IT, software and videogames companies (and more).  The fair includes around 30 employers offering a wide range of roles in areas including:

• Videogame development
• IT
• Web design & development
• Advertising and marketing
• Computer programming

In addition, they’re also running three workshops looking at how you can start your career in videogames or IT with Ubisoft or British Airways.

Who should attend?

• Experienced candidates looking for new challenges and career moves
• Recent graduates looking to further develop their career
• Students studying a relevant discipline and looking for a sandwich year placement

What can I get out attending?

• Meet leading regional IT and digital media employers
• Get advice on how you can develop your career in the creative and digital industries
• Attend one of our informative and inspiring workshops
• Make useful contacts
• Chill out and network in our interactive games hub

The fair is free to attend. Codeworks hope to see you on the day. If you’d like any more info you can email jackie.boyd@codeworks.net

To sign up for Connect Talent, visit their website: http://jobsindigitalfair.co.uk/

He would say that, though: Future has been selling a successful 1.7m magazines a month through the recession with its hobby and geek-lad magazines. As written elsewhere, you could call 2008 the Year of the Niche as people look to do things at home, cheaply, and the things they love most during the economic downturn.

Others were not quite so confident, for two main reasons. Louise White, Group Marketing Director at B2B publisher Incisive Media was clear that the publishing business model was broken and needed fixing: classified and recruitment revenue was dead, a sentiment echoed by a number of editors in the b2b market. And second, Ashley Norris, founder of commercial blogging network Shiny Media, emphasized the new generation of media consumers just aren’t in the habit of buying a magazine, or buying media in general. That meant organised packages of content from one media product–such as a magazine–was at an end. “The world has changed, guys.”

But from the panel came six reasons why magazines as brands, whether print or online, do have a future:

1. Andrew Davies of idiomag, the music content personalisation site, emphasized the possibilities for each unique user building their own magazine of content through companies, like his, developing software sophisticated enough to be ultra-niche; and the advertising opportunities that provided were unrivalled for buiding consumer relationships.

2. Mike Soutar, founder of Shortlist Media and “pioneers” in quality free magazine content, was confident that print magazines had found a model–brand-to-hand distribution and outsourced costs, keeping magazine teams very small–that would mean print magazines could continue to do what other forms of media just could not: be there where a screen wasn’t, or where people didn’t want them to be.

3. Sarah Clegg, chief executive of John Menzies Digital and provider of magazinesondemand.co.uk, delivering digital editions of top brands, believed they had passed the tipping point and, critically, persuaded publishers that they couldn’t charge their normal cover price for a digital magazine that had no transport, printing and retail costs attached to it.

4. Ashley Norris of Shiny saw a future of 20-30 blogs in a network doing the work–and replacing–the work of 2-3 magazines, and brokering creative sponsorship between brands and social media as central to the business model for producing great experiences online.

5. Simon Wear of Future, perhaps the most positive and persuasive, believed that his magazine company would be growing as they had a) remembered they weren’t software companies, and also b) had remembered how to write realy strong, probing news around their niche interest sectors, whichs translates well online, and meant their nice-to-have content had found its way back to need-to-have status.

6. Finally, the most hopeful and most sceptical at the same time, Louise White of Incisive said their b2b titles were not magazines any more, but information providers that found their way into their audiences’ work flow–”platform agnostic” content that was as important to be on someone’s Blackberry than online or in print.

Why did you go for a turn-page magazine format?
There were a number of good reasons, not least it is a fairly straightforward skill to learn. We purchase the technology on license so we don’t need to know much about coding, we can just concentrate on the journalism and design side.

Also we think it adds a familiar process to the art or reading. People are used to turning the page of a newspaper or magazine, and this allows them to retain the ‘idea’ of that. We see it as combining the traditions of print with the best of the web and hope to build a community around it. At this stage not everyone has had a chance to play with digital magazines yet, so there is a certain novelty factor.

Is this your vision of what Web3.0 will be?
Not completely, no. I do think it’s a step on the right path to where Web.3.0 will lead us in terms of greater interactivity, tracking and understanding of user habits. But as technology adapts further, so will publishers. We’ll have more touchscreen availability which will allow people to turn pages with their fingers; we’ll have mobile phones with five inch pull out screens; and e-paper itself, all of which if done the right way can have huge eco and financial benefits.

But the Holy Grail will be whoever can crack the best way to let readers decide themselves what content they want delivered to their handset or computer on a daily basis.

Is it to prepare for a paid content model, or will revenue come through advertising and sales, e.g. merchandise?
We could easily DRM protect the content and charge for it, but that’s not the plan at all. Given that we’re linking to a lot of content and video already available for free on the web, it would be a bit cheeky, and goes against trying to get people to share the magazine, forward it onto friends, colleagues and clients.

We hope that it’s an enjoyable, maybe even useful read, but it is in many ways something of a Trojan horse. By having a digital magazine, we expect people will read it who have never come across the format before, and won’t even realize they’ve broken their duck doing so. If we can educate people that digital is an easy, viable alternative to standards sites and print, then it can only be good for our business. Potentially it could be a loss leader for some time. But if we get the content right and attract the readers, then hopefully advertising will follow and at least cover costs.

What kind of user community are you building with the site?
Feedback so far suggests we are attracting a lot of hits from people at various levels of Government in Scotland and around the UK, quangos, charities, campaign groups, specialist businesses, dozens of PR and marketing companies – the target market you’d expect.

We’re thrilled with that, but we also want the general public to get involved. We want anyone and everyone to feel they can use the magazine. That could be a parent who wants to educate their child; it could be a business wanting to adopt the mag for their customers for CSR uses, or simply those interested in the environment.

That’s why we’ve set up a Facebook Group, a blog and Twitter alerts to sit alongside the website and, ultimately, the digi-mag which it’s all about, and begin to mould the content accordingly.

How will people interact with your content?
We hope people will start contacting us with their own ideas, stories and letters, but for now we’re just presenting information in a readable form. We’re using lots of Flash for interactivity. With the Facebook Group and blog, we’ve opened up a forum of sorts that they can use down the line, or simply keep up to date by signing up to Twitter or our subscriptions on the main site.

We’ll be able to track the way people read the pages, how long they spend on an article, what links they click, if they download, print or forward a section on; that way we will learn to understand what areas are popular and which are less so.

Is eco your thing, or was it a commercial decision?
Essentially we thought there was a gap in the market for a title like this and thought well, we keep telling our clients and future prospects how eco friendly these things are, why don’t we do something ourselves.

The result has been dramatic on everyone in the office. I’d say we have all in some way become greener. I live by the beach and felt I was fairly aware, but we’ve done all sorts of things in the past few months from starting a compost bin, to recycling our waste, turning the heating down, walking to the station rather than drive. It’s just made us more aware of the eco benefits, regardless of whether it eventually turns out to be a success in its own right.

Why did you choose to go solely online?
We’re all former national newspaper journalists so it would have been the easiest thing in the world to stick to the programme. But we felt strongly that, since we could use the technology, there would be little point trying to do something promoting the environment while using newsprint, ink and heavy machinery, long before we look at distribution issues.

There are drawbacks in trying to alert people to the fact that the magazine is there. It’s much easier to, say, flood the supermarkets and newsagents with copies, or put them in dump bins, to make the product easy for people to find.

And apart from the eco benefits, there is so much more you can do with digital – include video, audio, moving images and links. The way we consume news is changing, digital will be part of that, just hopefully without destroying the planet at the same time.

(x-posted at OnlineJournalismBlog)

It can go without saying (because it has already been said, by Martin Stabe, Mindy McAdams and the Iconoclast, amongst others)  that the transition between journalism student to journalist professional requires some form of online presence and marketing of the self.

What that looks like depends on what it is you want to do, and how much effort you’re going to put in. Do you run a blog, or launch a slick portfolio brochure? Do you open up to all your online presences (and show your reach and influence), or do you keep some hidden away (to hide your 4am shame).

To get us started, here are six (well, more than six) of the best examples of student journalist sites, portfolios and blogs to help you develop your own ideas of what it is you must develop during your student progression:

Blogs

Dave Lee (now BBC Internet editor, having just graduated)
Dave ran his blog all the way through his three year journalism degree, on the subject of… journalism. Question for you: do you have enough to say to run a regularly updated blog on the defined subject of your choice?

Jessica da Silva (student editor of the Alligator student newspaper and website)
Jessica became famous online for blogging about the redundancies made while she was on her work placement–she was attacked, praised, discussed by Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen… and has now made a huge number of journalism contacts for her future career. Question for you: are you blogging your work placements?

Meranda Writes (’I've been blogging two years now…’)
“I’m a reporter at a newspaper, eh hem, information center. • As a young girl I would leave our table at restaurants and walk up to strangers to say hello. • I began teaching myself HTML at age 10. • I picked journalism as a major expecting to fail. • My dream jobs are producing content for the NYTimes.com and writing for WIRED magazine. • I love what I do.” Question for you: do you love what you do? (And if you walk up to strangers and say hello, stop it!)

Holly Setter (writing about student life, politics, lectures…)
“As a way to prepare herself for the big time, Holly decided to start this blog where she fully intends to share her views on journalism, politics–in particular the upcoming election, school, and life in her free time. As free time is a bit scattered in her overscheduled college career, her peers should not be surprised to see her carting around her laptop to blog during water breaks at band rehearsal, while climbing the fifty-million stairs on the way to the Pleiad office to work on the newspaper, or even while flipping back and forth between her notes during lectures (SHHH! Don’t tell.).” Question: what are you doing to prepare for your ‘big time’?

Portfolios

Rachel Youens (multimedia journalist)
If you’re going to call yourself a multimedia journalist, you need to profile your multimedia work. A blog may not be the best way of doing this. Question: what are your strengths, what do you need to profile?

Brett Roegiers (recently graduated journalist)
I really like this portfolio site, but maybe that’s the obsessive compulsive in me that likes straight lines and square boxes. Either way, there is a massive wealth of work here, looks hugely impressive, and also a great choice of colours. Question: What is your personal publication plan for the next six months to fill a page like this?

Nick Trost (student journalist)
A great way to turn those ‘celeb holiday photos’ you’d normally send in to Loaded into a portfolio… Only joking Nick, you’ve made the ‘6 of the best’ for the simple and elegant site. Question: have you clicked on the apples yet? How cool is that…

Networks

Tommorow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists
This month’s question for the young journalists blogging network is “what have you done to build up your online brand”, posted by Greg Linch, who’s got a great personal site over at the LinchPen.

Twitter (’what are you doing right now…?’)
If you’re not using Twitter, then you’re not really using social media as a journalist. This is my twitter feed, and four of the first five are…. other journalists.

QUESTION: What networks are you a part of? What networks could you be a part of, or even start yourself?

GOOD THING: Most of these are American, so you’re not behind the tmes for UK students. But now is a good time to build your own web presence.