Some good letters in the latest issue of The Journalist in response to my article in the March/April issue on the local press and Town Halls.
The team behind Tower Hamlets Council's weekly newspaper East End Life, seen as the model for newspaper-style council papers, have a crack back at the local newspaper industry.
Helen Watson and Claire Rudd, on behalf of 14 NUJ members at Tower Hamlets, say: "The East End Life team are professional journalists, mostly from local, regional or national newspaper backgrounds. Many of us worked for years as editors, subs and reporters on papers up and down the country. . .We "jumped ship" because the papers we worked on did not pay "grown-up" wages - try paying a mortgage and bringing up kids on less than £20,000 a year for a 45-hour week, especially in London."
The letter calls for unity among journalists. "We should all strive not to play the newspaper owners' game - its classic divide and rule. If we blame each other for the crisis in British newspapers, we'll be too busy to see who the real culprits are - those who have profiteered for years off our labours, slashed jobs and driven down wages, only to complain about how editorial quality is plummeting.
"If journalists stick together, we have a fighting chance of stopping the rot."
Paul Daniel, a local government PR from Teesside, writes: "The dilemma on your side of the fence is that the industry's crumbling and I'm in a multi-million-pound industry that isn't."
And Nigel Jarrett, of Chepstow, sees local newspaper having gone through a fundamental change when they switched to tabloid formats. "Certain stories were classified as boring, among them reports of council meetings. Many were. But with their eradication went the town-hall reporter and what passed for a lobby system. Council publicity departments filled the void, ready and able to promote the council's line, and there was little expertise in the newsroom to question their pronouncements."
Really? Less than £20,00 for a 45-hour week? Surely a typo there somewhere. I know journalism doesn't pay well but two grand a year is frankly ridiculous :)
ReplyDeleteThanks Weeny,
ReplyDeleteIt should have read £20,000 and I've changed it.
Will link to all the letters when the latest issue of The Journalist goes online.
If the East End Life "journalists" wish to stick together with their colleagues in the commercial sector, they should perhaps start by dropping the tactic of holding back good news council press releases until after the East London Advertiser goes to press on Wednesday.
ReplyDeleteA tactic deliberately designed at undermining the ELA. Amazing how those press releases come flooding in on Thursday and Friday in time for East End Life's Friday deadline...
...perhaps they could also start printing the true cost of their publication on p2...and not the pennies per copy they falsely claim.
The 'woe is us' tone of their letter is quite extraordinary given the lengths they go to to hide how much their total costs are.
"If the East End Life "journalists" wish to stick together with their colleagues in the commercial sector, they should perhaps start by dropping the tactic of holding back good news council press releases until after the East London Advertiser goes to press on Wednesday."
ReplyDeleteMight I humbly suggest the ELA shouldn't be relying on council press releases quite so much? If the stories are that great that it's a crying shame to miss them, why aren't they getting them from the councillors and officials first hand?
Well, Rich, we'd love you to head up comms in Tower Hamlets. As a former reporter, you'd be able to teach the councillors a thing or two.
ReplyDeleteWe're not talking stop press stuff here, but more the page fillers, the good news stories, schools stuff etc.
Precisely the kind of thing that the council should be proactively sending out, which makes it all the more curious why they don't, don't you think? Do you think it could be because they want to make EEL as fresh as possible?....(ie acting as a competitor to the ELA).
I'm not necessarily supporting what they do - holding back stories for themselves isn't exactly fair - but like you say, they're page fillers, mid to back-end stuff. You're surely not waiting for these to come through on deadline are you?
ReplyDeleteI don't want to be flippant because this issue is an important one - that Jon and Greenslade are right to be discussing - but it's sometimes a little easy to have a pop at council comms teams (and as well as being a reporter I've worked in one on those too) when the problems in local media sit pretty squarely with the bosses in my view.