An exclusive kind of fellow

John Lloyd will head Oxford University's new Institute for the Study of Journalism. Huw Richards meets him

Young man, journalism is a course of study that Oxford does not do!" John Lloyd is growing rather fond of that line, which is directed by the stereotypical crusty old don at the central character in the 1938 film comedy A Yank at Oxford . It expresses a reality that has held good for most of the time since but that Lloyd now has a key role in consigning firmly to the past as head of journalism at Oxford's new Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

It could be argued that Lloyd wrote his job application some time before the post was created. Among the central elements in his 2004 critique of modern British journalism, What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics , was a call for the creation of a centre for analysing and debating journalistic practice and issues in a leading university. He restated this when he gave the Reuters lecture in Oxford in late 2004.

He was co-opted as an adviser to the group - led by Tim Gardam, principal of St Anne's College and former director of programmes at Channel 4 - who plotted the creation of the institute. It is a development that follows Oxford's usual pattern of acceptance of the academically fashionable. As with business studies, its relationship with what certainly could be (but equally certainly will not be) called media studies has followed a sequence of initial wariness mixed with disdain, then cautious piecemeal acceptance followed by full-on engagement, underpinned by a sizeable endowment - in this case £1.75 million in funding from the Reuters Foundation over five years. The institute is affiliated to Green College and to the faculty of politics and international relations. It also has public backing from the university's leadership - vice-chancellor John Hood made the public announcement of its creation earlier this year while chancellor Lord Patten will chair the advisory board.

Lloyd, 60, brings with him the advantage of credibility in the industry the institute will analyse. While his book did not receive universal acclaim from journalists, it was taken extremely seriously. Journalism, as Lloyd himself points out, tends to be dismissive of outside critiques. It could not, however, reject unconsidered the views of the editor of the Financial Times Magazine - formerly the paper's industrial correspondent and Moscow correspondent, a reporter on London Weekend Television's Weekend World and editor of the New Statesman - as it would that of Professor X, however distinguished he might be.

Knowledge of that dismissiveness is what motivates Lloyd to continue working part time as a journalist - although he also acknowledges that the income comes in handy: "The FT have been very good about it. I'll retain a column in the magazine and write some other pieces, particularly profiles.

I'll be part-time and spending an increasing amount of time in Oxford, but I think it does help to keep one foot in the industry."

The institute will be devoted to asking the questions he regards as fundamental: "How do journalists do what they do? What does that do to politics in both democracies and non-democracies? And what is journalism becoming?" These are, he argues, vital issues not just for journalism but for society as a whole. But they are inadequately discussed: "The only place where this really happens is in the US, where places such as the Columbia [University Graduate] School (of Journalism) and the Shorenstein Centre (on the Press, Politics and Public Policy) at Harvard University are major institutions that not only teach journalism but critique it, holding a continual conversation involving both academics and journalists on the ethics, practices and impact of journalism."

There is nothing like this in Britain: "On the one hand you have media studies, which grew in academia out of sociology and aesthetics, with strong influences from French thinkers such as Lacan and Foucault, and from Marxism and Post-Modernism. On the other hand, journalism studies tend to be about how you write an intro. There is a huge divide between high aesthetics and low professionalism."

Lloyd is dismissive of neither. "While some of what comes out of media studies is pretty obscure, I think that there is a great deal of interest.

And we need the trade-school stuff as well. But we also need something in between that analyses how journalism is done with reference to concrete examples and the context both of the media and society as a whole."

Most of all, he argues, "The media have to be self-conscious, aware of what they are doing and prepared to hold it up to the light and talk about it."

His own critique argues that the media fails to acknowledge that it is now an active player rather than merely an observer in politics, that it is fixated on process and personality rather than policy and takes a cynical view of the motivation and purposes of politicians. He accepts that there is a risk of the institute being too closely identified with his views: "If people think we will simply be doing the John Lloyd book of journalism, we will have a problem. But that certainly isn't the idea. I want people like Trevor Kavanagh [of The Sun ], writers from the Daily Mail and those who will argue that 'a story is a story is a story - that's just the way it is and no amount of analysis will change it' - to come and teach and talk to people here. Maybe people will conclude that they are right and I am wrong - the important thing is that you have the debate."

The importance of that debate is one reason, along with the logistics of setting up a programme, that the institute will not, unlike its US models, be training journalists, initially at least: "If you did, you would have little alternative but to replicate what is already on offer at places like Cardiff (School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies) and the department of journalism studies at Sheffield University." There will, however, be research programmes, all of which will have to be self-financing. One, logically, will look at political reporting in the UK, while another is a comparative study of journalism in Europe. A third is planned to study the line between investigation and intrusion.

Lloyd says: "This will look at ethics and where you draw lines and allows us to draw on the resources of a great university in philosophy, political science and possibly contemporary history to examine the very serious issues that are raised. To take one example - my view is that the motivation for reporting (former Home Secretary) David Blunkett's affair was mostly prurient. An investigation started with those motives, then uncovered a serious abuse of power. Does that then justify every investigation of this type? Again, the important point is that we have the discussion and think about what journalists are doing."

He also hopes to see PhD and postdoctoral students at the institute, and close co-operation with Oxford's established media-related activities such as the Internet Institute and Templeton College's Media and Law Project. He is aware that while Oxford's name is an asset, particularly in the US, its location is unhelpful to London media folk, so he plans to hold a fair proportion of events in the capital.

He hopes to see an institute website hosting an international conversation on journalism and has on site the group of international journalists brought in for periods of one to three terms by the already well established Reuters Foundation Fellowship Programme. His own experience of Russia will help inform debates undreamt of when Robert Taylor's eponymous Yank enrolled at Oxford.