Nottingham Trent University (NTU) has confirmed plans to close its postgraduate Broadcast Journalism and Multimedia course due to “insufficient numbers” enrolling.
The university is also closing its Magazine Journalism Masters (MA), with both courses not recruiting students from September 2026. Instead, magazine and broadcasting will be combined into one combined Journalism MA (the university currently offers a stand-alone Journalism MA).
The university will seek NCTJ accreditation for the new course, but it will not be accredited by the Broadcast Journalism Training Council (BJTC).
These are the latest in a number of leading journalism courses to close in recent years.
In August 2024 one of the UK’s oldest journalism courses, at Highbury College in Portsmouth, closed, this came six months after the closure of University of Kent Centre for Journalism.
Last year the UK government cut funding for specialist equipment at journalism courses.
It follows the closure of the Nottingham Trent’s Documentary Journalism MA in around 2022 and Notts TV in 2025, the university’s local TV station that offered placements to students including those studying broadcast journalism.
[Read more: Notts TV to close in November when licence ends]
The one-year full-time Broadcast Journalism MA offered training in newsgathering, radio and TV reporting, video and audio production and social media journalism. It cost £10,300 for UK-based students and £18,300 for international students.
The course has seen declining enrolment for several years, with student numbers falling from 26 in 2022–23 to 22 in 2023–24, 15 in 2024–25, and just six in 2025–26.
A spokesperson for NTU said: “Students currently on the course will continue to be supported to complete their master’s as normal.
“We remain committed to teaching broadcast journalism at a postgraduate level at NTU and are developing plans to integrate it into our MA Journalism course starting from 2027/28. This will allow people to study broadcast journalism alongside other journalism disciplines in a sustainable way which better reflects the changing nature of the industry and gives them the best chance to succeed in their chosen careers.”
One journalism lecturer at the university told Press Gazette that “no serious broadcast students” will enrol on the merged journalism course as it’s not accredited by the BJTC, “and the industry won’t pick graduates from it”.
“It’s not worth the paper it’s written on,” they said, adding one of the reasons the course is closing is because there is a lack of engagement in journalism at the university.
“It’s an absolute tragedy, because we are going to end up with more and more information sources led by tech billionaires, and not by people who understand how to tell stories on a grassroots level.
“I think it’s an incredibly sad day for the University, for Nottingham, for the East Midlands, and for the future of journalism education, because it’s one of the leading journalism courses – has been for the last 20 years – and they have literally thrown it away without a thought.”
[Read more: Highbury closure: 60-year-old journalism training centre ends]
Universities filling training ‘gap’ for news organisations
Deborah Wilson David, former head of department of Journalism and Media at NTU, said the Broadcast Journalism course closure is “part of a worrying trend”.
“NTU is one of only two NCTJ-accredited providers and one of only two BJTC-accredited providers in the East Midlands. Reducing the provision of journalism education is therefore not simply a matter for one university; it affects the future supply of trained journalists from across the region. At a time when we need a more diverse workforce covering news locally and nationally.”
She added institutions across the UK offering journalists training are facing “unprecedented challenges” and news organisations “no longer have the resources” to train journalists at the scale they once did.
“Universities have filled that gap for more than three decades,” she said.
“If journalism education provision contracts significantly, there is no viable alternative mechanism for developing the next generation of reporters, producers and broadcasters.”
NTU’s Broadcast Journalism MA has produced journalists including Gary O’Donough, North America political correspondent for BBC News, as well as students who went on to work for CNN, Sky News, Channel 4 and BBC Panorama.
‘Severe pressures’ on journalism education at national level
Ben Cooper, chair of the Nottingham branch of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), said the closure signals a “further diminution of journalism education in Nottingham”.
“Last year NTU chose to close down Notts TV, a highly valued source of news for the people of Nottingham and a place for NTU students to gain real newsroom experience.
“Now it’s the MA in Broadcast Journalism, which has provided first class training and education, and the vital BJTC accreditation, to hundreds of TV and radio journalists over the past 20 years.
“Journalism education is rightly one of NTU’s proudest offerings, and a major draw to the city and the region for students from around the UK and internationally. We are troubled to see it being chipped away at gradually in this way, especially in the wider context of the many severe pressures on journalism education nationally.”
[Read more: University of Kent to close Centre for Journalism]
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