Digital Journalism,MSc

With an industry-informed curriculum, this future-focused MA combines computing and media and communications to reflect digital journalism at its most current.

• Imagine getting your work recognised by Tim Berners Lee, having your project featured in the The New York Times, or winning the Guardian’s student digital journalist awards. These are the kinds of things that happen on this dynamic programme.
• It’s really important for us that you graduate with a set of core digital journalism skills so half of the degree focuses on the computing side of the discipline and half on media and communications. This means you get a holistic MA, where you study the foundations of digital journalism and practise it in its most current forms.
• From delivering news on wearables, to the latest developments in live reporting, the questions we ask are informed by an industry panel featuring the heads of digital at organisations including The Guardian, the Financial Times, and the BBC. We want to define the transformative nature of digital journalism so we explore critical and entrepreneurial approaches and get hands-on, experimenting with the latest journalistic innovations.
• You’ll have the chance to study multimedia and interactive journalism, look at interactive documentaries, data journalism, digital reporting, and video journalism. You’ll learn coding and data analysis techniques, so you can get to grips with web production, data-led investigations and using visualisation in stories. Modules cover specialist skills such as OSINT, verification, generative AI, machine learning and social media analysis to monitor what’s going on behind the screens and break new stories.
• Through our partnerships with BBC news labs and The Times’ development team, we make sure we’re keeping up with industry but also working with it.
• We want you to reimagine the medium while you’re here, so you get the chance to specialise in your own area of interest for your final project. This could be anything from an interactive website to a video production using interactive story telling and text. We offer a lot of support when it comes to the coding side of the course. If you do not come from a technical background, you will have the opportunity to take a Digital Bootcamp before the start of the programme to give you an introduction to some of the techniques and languages.
• What you go away with are the core skills for news writing, video, and computational techniques and some amazing industry contacts.
• This degree is part of our School of Journalism.
• The Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies has been ranked second in the UK for 'world-leading or internationally excellent' research (Research Excellence Framework, 2021) and 16th in the world (third in the UK) in the 2024 QS World Rankings for communication and media studies.

Contact the department

If you have specific questions about the degree, contact Miranda McLachlan.

You should have (or expect to be awarded) an undergraduate degree of at least upper second class standard in a relevant/related subject. Applicants with significant work experience and/or a professional qualification in a computing, digital technology or social science-related subject are encouraged.

You might also be considered for some programmes if you aren’t a graduate or your degree is in an unrelated field, but have relevant experience and can show that you have the ability to work at postgraduate level.

International qualifications

We accept a wide range of international qualifications. Find out more about the qualifications we accept from around the world.

If English isn’t your first language, you will need an IELTS score (or equivalent English language qualification) of 7.0 with a 7.0 in writing and no element lower than 6.5 to study this programme.

If you need assistance with your English language, we offer a range of courses that can help prepare you for postgraduate-level study.