Steve Schifferes to lead financial journalism MA at City University

Former BBC economics correspondent, Steve Schifferes, is to lead a new financial journalism MA at City University in London, a press release from the institution confirmed.

The new degree for 2010 - the second of its kind in the UK and the first in England & Wales - will be a standalone course in the mould of the recently launched science journalism MA, Schifferes told Journalism.co.uk.

The course will recruit directly from the financial sector as well as from students straight out of university and will be marketed in China, the US and India.

As part of the launch Schifferes, who has a held a number of roles at the BBC, has been named as the institution's first Marjorie Deane professor of financial journalism. Deane was the founder and editor of The Economist Financial Report and set up a foundation to help improve writing about finance and economics.

Prior to this appointment Schifferes was Knight Bagehot Fellow in economic journalism at Columbia University in 1993 and a BBC Reuters Fellow at Oxford University in 2006.

At the BBC his positions included acting editor of its online business pages, issues producer for its online coverage of the last general election and producer for 'On the Record’ and 'The Money Programme'. Most recently he co-ordinated the BBC's online anniversary coverage of the 2008 financial crisis.

It is particularly crucial that journalists working in the financial sector understand issues at both a micro and macro level, Schifferes said.

"They will need training for understanding macro economic trends and global imbalances, the problem of growing debt - and also how that's being applied in terms of a firm's balance sheets; how much risk there is," he explained.

There will also be short course option for journalism students that are not specialising in financial reporting: "I think it's not just financial journalists who have to understand this stuff better - it's all journalists. We need better training for journalism as a whole."

The university will look to 'capitalise on the specialisms' held within the journalism school, the Cass Business School and the social sciences department, when designing the course, he said.

Stirling University was the first university in the UK to launch a specialised masters in financial journalism.

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