Raymonds, one of the country's biggest regional news agencies, has gone into voluntary liquidation and ceased trading, adding to the crisis over the lack of coverage of courts by the media.
Raymonds which is based in Derby, with a branch office in Lincoln, specialises in covering Crown Court, general news and sport across the East Midlands for the national and local press as well as broadcasters.
All six journalists employed by the agency have been made redundant and a letter has gone out to creditors saying a creditors' meeting will be held on November 1.
News agencies have long complained about the poor rates being paid for copy and pictures by national newspapers which have cut their freelance budgets and commissions. Some agencies claim national rates are lower than they were 20 years ago and say its common to wait six months for payment.
Built up by Klaus Jacoby, John Twells and Neil Hallam, Raymonds once had a network of offices based in Chesterfield, Ipswich, Norwich, Nottingham and Stoke-on-Trent as well as those in Derby and Lincoln. It was the largest regional news agency in the country.
Raymonds started in the 1930s and at one time employed 25 journalists and gained the financial backing of free newspaper publisher Lionel Pickering in the late 1980s.
Journalists who have worked for Raymonds include ITV News editor-in-chief David Mannion and his former ITN colleague, foreign correspondent Terry Lloyd who was killed in 2003 while covering the invasion of Iraq.
In January this year another regional agency, Kent News and Pictures, started by former Evening Standard journalist Chris Eades in Maidstone in 1993, ceased trading. Around 10 editorial staff lost their jobs.
The worrying question facing the media and the law is if news agencies cannot make money covering the courts and newspapers have too few reporters to send to them, how is justice going to be seen to be done?
I worked for Raymonds in the 1980s at Eastern News, its Lincoln office.
Pic: Lincoln Crown Court, one of the courts covered by Raymonds.
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3 comments:
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Shame, great bunch of people at Raymonds. I worked there in the early 90s (at Leicester). Tough business to be in, and who's going to cover all those courts for the minimum wage now?
I had a similar problem getting access to employment tribunal records in Bury St Edmonds, Suffolk, knowing that a legal clark would be expensive.
I googled for family history and genealogy reseachers to find one who said that, although it wasn't her period, she would give it a go.
A concise accurate email of library research came my way for a reasonable and well-publicised price a few days later. I discovered that my former employer, then called Alcohol Recovery Project, had been sued by some 2% of its employees for breaches of very lax law that only covered those of us who were not temps and in practice those of us who were a the ends of our careers. I published on a site called http://employees.org.uk
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