Student journalism is often considered the starting point for many professional hacks these days. It is usually there in that under-funded and unequipped newspaper office that many modern journos get putting pen to paper and start falling in love with the publishing industry.

It is also there that many of your future contacts and friends are made. Just look at Wannabe Hacks: we are Features, Sports and News editors and even an Ed-in-Chief. We were all also writers, subs and proofreaders at some point – Wannabe Hacks is a direct result of our days in the Redbrick paper office.

I know I wouldn’t be posting here today if I hadn’t thought one afternoon in my final year to “put something more than a degree on my CV.” And – as I applied to the Redbrick editorial desk – I would never have thought that one day I might consider myself a writer, let alone making an (adequate) living from it.

This is why it brings me great pleasure to introduce the Wannabe Hacks first podcast – a look into the busy and somewhat bizarre world of student journalism. This in itself I suppose is a testament to the power of student media because it was I and the Intern who – in an ambitious attempt to update and modernize our Features section at Redbrick – recorded the Uni paper’s first podcast in 2009.

Innovation, ambition and enthusiasm: three words that seem to be stuck like glue onto the notion of student journalism. Wannabe Hacks have been there and on this occasion they decide to have a little chinwag about it.