We are looking for applications from right across the BBC Journalism divisions for two prestigious fellowships which are supported by the BBC:

- The University of Michigan Fellowship

- The Reuters Fellowship at Oxford University.

These opportunities are open to all senior journalists across BBC Journalism. However, the BBC's financial support for the fellowships has been reduced, so please make sure you read all the details of how they will work this year before applying.

Both fellowships offer a great opportunity for an experienced journalist to take time out from the day job, get new insights, and bring something back to the BBC.

1. The University of Michigan Fellowship. Closing date 13 June 2011

The Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan offers a four-month placement for BBC staff at the largest research university in the world. We are looking for applicants for one semester, to begin in either September 2011 or January 2012. 

The Fellowship is designed to give the successful applicants "a broader perspective, nurture intellectual growth, and inspire personal transformation". While there, you study to complete the project you have outlined in your application form and select classes from the full range of courses offered at the University of Michigan. Additionally, prominent journalists and leading academics give twice-weekly seminars.

Typically, 12 American Fellows are joined at Michigan by six international colleagues.

As a Knight-Wallace fellow, you will get the opportunity to travel to Buenos Aires and Sao Paolo (December 2011) or Istanbul and Ankara (March 2012).

Past BBC fellows include:

Steve Titherington, Alicia McCarthy, Alf Hermida, Pam O'Toole, Andrew Whitehead, Sue Nelson, Joanne Episcopo, Caroline Finnigan, Mike Baker, Peter Burdin, Patricia Whitehorne, Charlie Partridge, David Edmonds, John Cary, Joanna Mills and Maurice Walsh.

The project

The programme of research undertaken should be relevant to your work as a BBC journalist. For example, it may be related to a specialist or topical subject or the changing nature of journalism.

To apply

To be eligible to apply, you must be a BBC journalist on a continuing contract who can demonstrate a successful career history and show the potential to make the most of this investment in you and your job.

The successful candidate will need to take unpaid leave (up to a maximum of three months) or a career break in order to take up this opportunity. Your BBC salary will not be paid during the time you are in the United States, nor will the BBC pay your travelling expenses. However, the Fellowship carries a stipend of $35,000 and covers all academic fees, health insurance and one international trip.

Before considering an application, you should ensure that your line manager is willing to support you, and to release you at the appropriate time. It is also important that you understand the implications of taking a career break in terms of its effect on your pension.

Selection will be based on career history, management endorsement, proposals for study and final interview. A BBC panel will select a candidate to recommend to Michigan for final approval.

To apply, please download and complete the application form.

Note that the form requires you to submit two separate papers of 1,500 words and 500 words respectively, and that if you are selected to go forward for consideration by Michigan you will be asked to provide examples of your work.

When you have completed the form, send it to Alison Lobo (telephone extension 02 26043) at the BBC College of Journalism, Room 2406, BBC White City Building, White City, 201 Wood Lane, London W12 7TS - BY 13 JUNE 2011. DO NOT send it direct to Michigan.

Please get in touch with Jonathan Baker, Head of the BBC College of Journalism, if you have any questions.

2. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism - Journalist Fellowship Programme. Closing date 13 June 2011

Background

The Fellowship provides mid-career journalists with the opportunity to study and research (for three to four months) a work-related project that will broaden their academic horizons as well as being of benefit to the BBC. The programme brings together experienced journalists from around the world to study at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford.

This is an opportunity to study in Oxford for one term in the academic year 2011/12. The successful applicant is expected to be a resident during the period of study.

A contribution to accommodation expenses will be paid, and tuition fees will be met by the BBC College of Journalism. The team at Reuters will help you to find a suitable place to live.

Recent BBC Fellows include:

Ric Bailey (2010/11), Emma Jane Kirby, Giang Nguyen (2009/10) and Jeremy Hayes (2008/09).

Dr David Levy, Director of the Institute, has this to say about the relationship with the BBC:

"The Journalist Fellowship Programme at Oxford has now been established for more than a quarter of a century and over that time has attracted more than 400 journalist fellows from around the world. The BBC fellowship is an immensely valuable part of the Oxford programme.

The BBC features prominently in the international, comparative research, discussion and debate of journalism that is at the heart of the Institute's activities. The international journalist fellows typically know about the BBC and want to learn more or include it in their research projects. Equally, BBC journalists can learn a huge amount from the Reuters experience, through the chance to move outside their comfort zone, engage with journalists from around the world, and have their ideas challenged through exchanges with other journalists and experts.

That experience, the network of fellows they will establish, and their excellent research projects, give BBC journalists a great deal to take back to the BBC."

The project

The programme of research should be relevant to your work as a BBC journalist. For example, it may be related to a specialist or topical subject or the changing nature of journalism.

Fellows are asked to produce a major piece of writing of between 8,000 and 10,000 words. Candidates will also be expected to show how their research could be used by the BBC when they return to work. It's important to remember that you will have only months to complete this project, so ensure it is realistic and achievable.

Fellows are given access to Oxford University and Green Templeton College facilities and services, and are assigned their own academic adviser to help them with their project. They also take part in seminars and other special events involving distinguished speakers.

To be eligible to apply you must be a BBC journalist on a continuing contract who can demonstrate a successful career history and show the potential to meet this investment in you.

The successful candidate will need to take unpaid leave (up to a maximum of three months) or a career break in order to take up this opportunity. Your BBC salary will not be paid during the time you are in Oxford.

Before considering an application, you should ensure that your line manager is willing to support you, and to release you at the appropriate time. It is also important that you understand the implications of taking a career break in terms of its effect on your pension.

To apply, you need to complete the application form, which

- details your career history

- provides a supporting statement from your manager endorsing your application and confirming your release for three months

- outlines your proposed research topic. This should indicate a planned approach to your research and the sources you might seek to use.

Selection will be based on career history, management endorsement, proposals for study and final interview.

This form should be sent to Alison Lobo (telephone extension 02 26043) at the BBC College of Journalism, Room 2406, BBC White City Building, White City, 201 Wood Lane, London W12 7TS - BY 13 JUNE 2011.

Help and support

Here is the link to the Reuters Institute site but ignore the section on 'How to Apply' as we have our own selection process as described above.

Please get in touch with Jonathan Baker, Head of the College of Journalism, for further details.

Journalist and writer Malachi O'Doherty is the new BBC Louis MacNeice Writer in Residence at Queen's University, Belfast. This is his first blog post for the College of Journalism and it heralds a year of events in Northern Ireland examining key issues in journalism, broadcasting, writing and academia.

Ideally, journalists and academics would be complementary parts of an endeavour to explain the world.

Instead, there is a clear division between the types of approach they take, the ways they write and the audiences they address.

The terms 'journalistic' and 'academic' can both be used derisively; for writing that aspires to being the one fails if it sounds like the other.

Queen's University in Belfast, like many academic institutions, has a writer in residence. This year it is me, and what's different about that is that I am a journalist. I have an office in the Seamus Heaney Centre of Poetry. I don't feel like a trespasser, for Queen's is elevating the importance of journalism.

But before we take this as evidence that the barrier between journalistic and academic perspectives is breaking down, let's be clear about what the differences are and how strong they are.

The first thing a journalist wants a story to have is an angle. And the clearer and sharper the angle, the better.

'Political crisis follows Irish bailout.' 'Prince to Wed in Spring.'

A story, in a journalist's hands, tells us clearly that someone has resigned or been shot or been made president, and then it delineates the background to this intriguing development.

The academic, by contrast, often works with details that build slowly into a - sometimes very small - increment in our understanding of epilepsy, or dark matter, or Japanese foreign policy. Most of the discoveries of academics are not what we journalists would call newsworthy.

When we do find their stories worth retelling, they often accuse us of being superficial and putting the emphasis in the wrong place.

They believe, at heart, that there are some things in this world that really can't be explained in simple language. Every journalist instinctively rejects that; or at least is committed to communicating as much as possible to the non-specialist reader.

We think that they labour the point too much. The old joke about academic writing is that it requires you to first describe the point you are going to make - the abstract; then say it - the body of the article; and then say that you have said it - the conclusion.

Journalists don't want to hang about. It is not that we want to rush ahead without evidence or authority; the good ones stand over what they do. But we will cull a long paper or speech for the core point.

They say you can't understand that point unless you have considered the evidence and the limitation.

A producer of mine called this "death by a thousand qualifications".

He hated interviews with academics because they could not say what they believed without including the counter view.

We journalists suspect that academics have incentives to pad out their work, quote more sources than they really need and write about very small advances in understanding. And they do. Universities depend on published, peer-reviewed research, so it pays to push out articles that haven't taken the big strides in human knowledge that would excite the ordinary reader and viewer.

On the other hand, the academic will say we skim the surface of their great ideas and then move on to the next story.

But maybe they wouldn't be so miffed if as many people were reading their work as are reading the morning paper or listening to the news.

If you think the paywall debate has got nothing to do with you - think again. Whether the Times experiment works or not, it will probably change the game.

Whether you work for the BBC - whose journalism isn't free, as James Murdoch claims; it's paid for differently - or for one of the news organisations that's determined not to build paywalls, a player the size of News Corp experimenting with paid content is bound to have an effect.

Whether that effect is cutting the Times out of the national conversation (define that as you will) or enabling it to mount incisive investigations in the public interest ... we will see.

Here's a chance to catch up with James Harding, Times editor, and the ubiquitous Steve Hewlett, presenter of BBC Radio 4's Media Show.

So what do we learn from the The Sun, the PM's letter to Mrs Janes and the recorded phone conversation? 

Certainly by this morning - three days on - the balance of both press and popular opinion seems to be against The Sun and sympathetic to Gordon Brown ... though whether sympathy is what he needs right now is another matter.

One of the questions for non-Sun journalists is whether they were right to give The Sun's stories the prominence they did.

Lord Mandelson - who as plain Peter Mandelson told a Guardian interviewer back in 1997 that it was his job to 'create the truth' - during his interview on BBC Radio 4's Today this morning put his finger on something that's worth some thought: 

"When The Sun creates the news in this way, this is then followed up by Sky, which then puts pressure on the BBC to follow suit, and I think that this has wider implications for the election which in my view is of wider public concern."

Now, it's reasonable to assume this is, at least in part, Lord M getting retaliation in before the match has even begun - prepare now for complaints of this kind when the election campaign gets going. 

On the other hand, there's a reasonable argument that The Sun's stories had a prominence in other outlets that they didn't deserve. And that stories of moderate or no consequence can be propelled onto and up running orders by virtue of conventional journalistic wisdom ... aka crowd or, heaven forefend, mob psychology. 

So why did the stories get that prominence? And more or less everywhere?

Well, put yourself in a newspaper or programme editor's seat: you know that these collisions of power and 'ordinary person' can, if everything else is in the right place, become 'defining'; you know that 'conventional wisdom' at some point in the future may well judge THIS moment to have been a turning point.

Do you really want to be the (only) editor who said 'it's not a story'? Even if you genuinely believe it isn't? 

It's a phenomenon that's far from rare and yet we journalists - especially those of us who've been or are in that editor's chair - hardly ever look back to ask whether we should have acted differently. There's not a lot of evidence that we journalists, as a tribe, are terribly good at learning from experience. 

There were at least as many reasons not to go with The Sun's stories at all as there were to lead on them. Some of the arguments for were captured by Andrew Sparrow in his article on Tuesday, only one of which has any real substance: Mrs Janes' argument that Mr Brown, as Chancellor and PM, had underfunded the Army.

The rest - that the PM can't admit a mistake; that he isn't good at empathy; that he won't appeal for sympathy and cite his own misfortunes - are pretty thin stuff.

Plus you have to wonder how we reached the state where we not only require our politicians to be monogamous, moderate drinkers, moderately spiritual and more or less self-funding but now also insist they have the soft skills of a psychotherapist and good handwriting to boot?

And in any event, without both sides of the taped confrontation - and there could never be a question of the BBC using a surreptitious recording of the PM without the over-riding public interest purpose that was singularly absent in this case - you learn something about Mrs Janes (and can have nothing but respect and understanding for her anger) but zilch about the PM or, more importantly, what he thinks about what he's doing in Afghanistan.

In other words, you don't even have the story that The Sun has ... let alone adding something extra.

Fourth estate 

But there's something else here too. Journalism's claim to the 'fourth estate' rests on it being that part of the public domain where all we citizens go to find out what we need to make important decisions about ourselves, individually and collectively.

The Sun - on this occasion and more broadly - is essentially reductive at the very moment we require the debate over Britain's options to broaden. 

As journalists, we should be concerned that for the most part media stories about British involvement in Afghanistan focus on helicopters and kit (important, of course, but far from all there is to talk about), how long British troops might be there and why is President Obama delaying his decision on the US' next steps?

It's relatively rare, for example, that we read, watch or hear any discussion of the cost/benefits of the British presence in Afghanistan compared with a uniquely UK-based focus on terrorism -

In other words, we as journalists risk selling our audiences short if we take what are, in effect, the soft but journalistically safe options. It's surely in the public interest to continually look beyond the narrow, well-trodden themes and actively hunt out as many approaches as possible, as regularly as possible.

And if that means going one way when The Sun - and the rest - are going the other ... well sometimes the tough option is the right one. 

If you have ever run a team of journalists then the following should sound familiar:
- They know their worth; that is, that their skills are not easily replicated.
- They ask difficult questions.
- They are organisationally savvy.
- They are not impressed by corporate hierarchy.
- They expect instant access to decision-makers.
- They are well connected outside of their organisations.
- Their passion is for what they do, not who they work for.
- They don't want to be led ...
- ... and even if you lead them well, they won't thank you.

And, let's be honest, you're probably thinking it applies to you too :)

Gareth Jones (formerly of this parish) and Rob Goffee are two of the most widely respected business academics writing on the subject of management and leadership, and, given Jones' background in the media, their work resonates with media folk in a way that other management gurus' work does not.

Their latest book is called 'Clever' (read an interview about it here) and it looks at how you lead awkward 'clevers' who you have to make room for because they are very good at what they do. For once it is a management book refreshingly free of platitude and politically correct thinking. It should be on the reading list of anyone in a leadership role in the media - and probably their boss, and their boss' boss, and ...

Click here to read the Harvard Business Review edited hightlights of the book.

There is no truth in the rumour that their next book has the working title 'Thickos'.