A Yorkshire journalist who has retired after 65 years says that today’s news coverage is ‘awful’ and that too many stories are missed.
Alan Berry, 82, worked as a reporter, sub-editor, and feature writer on titles in Sheffield and Doncaster during his long career, which also included a spell on the Yorkshire Evening Post working alongside Michael Parkinson.
Until recently he still wrote a bygones column in the Doncaster Star.
Alan, who was awarded an MBE for his services to local journalism in 1991, fired a parting shot at the local journalism of today in a farewell interview with Star reporter Martin Smith.
“Over 65 years there have been some great stories and good times, I’ve always loved the job whether as a reporter, feature writer or sub-editor. But you get to the point where you feel you have done your whack,” he said.
“When I look at the quality of news coverage we get now I think it’s awful. There are so few reporters now and so many stories are missed. We covered all the big stories back then, newspapers were where everyone got information, not like today.
“When I first started at the Doncaster Chronicle in 1945 there were three weekly papers and two evenings in the town, all with their own staff. They used to say that the Doncaster Chronicle office ran on fags, bad language and endless cups of tea. They were different days.”
“I wouldn’t change a thing though. Journalism suited me, it’s been a great job. I have no regrets about my career or any other part of my life.”
In his interview, Alan said he had no real desire to be a pioneering journalist, “just a desire to know things about people and what’s going on in the world.”
“I remember the Creswell pit disaster of 1950 where 80 men died, that was a huge story, a terrible accident, and we covered the Munich air disaster, general elections and major events but one sticks in my mind that was something and nothing really,” he said.
“We used to be very interested in the canal and I heard a story that some people were living in a sunken barge at Stainforth. So I went out to the canal basin there and there was this Sheffield-size, Humber-keel barge with one end sunk and the other up at an angle out of the water with a family living at the dry end.
“It had all been sunk but they’d raised part of it and were living in that half. Amazing.”
Alan also recalled the time he worked with ‘Parky’ in the Doncaster office of the YEP.
“I was a sub-editor on the Chronicle when a young Michael Parkinson started work there. He certainly livened the whole place up.
“He was a good reporter, that was the main thing about him. He came in and told some of the old boys how they should do the job and of course they didn’t like that.
“He was said to have had a row with the editor who was supposed to have thrown a diary at him – but I think it might have been the other way round. “
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“Fags, bad language and endless cups of tea…”
Sounds like the South Wales Guardian in Ammanford today!
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Alan Berry is of course right and pathetic staff levels are much of the reason but there is a plus or two.The better papers no longer inflict vast column of dull routine council debate quotes or reams on politics on readers. Those subjects are a turn-off for readers now.
Pictures are used better by those editors who appreciate them and don’t turn them into postage stamps.
And the layout of the better-run papers (some are still a dreadful mess) is much brighter than say 30 years ago.
There is still some excellent journalism, but simply not enough of it and there never will be until staff levels are restored to sane numbers.
Good luck Alan, sounds like you loved your job.
I wonder if you’ll recognise it in a year!
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Those endless reports of council debates may be a turn-off for the readers, but they are also reports of democracy in action – or not. OK, perhaps we shouldn’t report them at such length but sadly we’re not even sending reporters there to listen and take notes . That may make the reporters happy but it is very, very dangerous. Local newspapers should be the first rung in the ladder of accountability.
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He could have been little more succinct. Why not just describe it as terminal decline.
When profit is the whole reason to be for most newspapers, rather than actually reporting the news, exposing misdeeds and colour pieces with real relevance, rather than the vogue for recycling press releases or in many cases, publishing them verbatim.
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I think most of us who’ve been in the trade for years agree with him. Lower staffing means worse coverage. My local will often report a quite severe fire but often don’t talk to the household. Also, example of a car spectacularly leaving a road, going through a fence, down a garden and then partly through a house wall as a family had breakfast. No pix of the family or quotes from them. Often there are no features about major issues in the district. The papers are thinner now too. Even fatal accidents are thinly followed up, or not at all.
With circulations gradually sliding, more staff going and office closures or mergers there will never a recovery from this low ebb position now.
Recent events make journalists’ images all the shabbier in the eyes of most people. A few journos have part ruined it for us all.
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All the worst journalists I have ever worked with have been ‘old timers’.
Lazy, rubbish and stroppy
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I think he makes some good points.
That said I remember my first job in journalism. At a little provincal office in the north. All we heard from readers was how much better the paper was 20 years ago.
So we got some of our old copies out and invited people down to the office to tell us what they prefered about these old editions.
For the lack of a better word they were terrible. Splashes included a lost dog, a guy catching a large fish and a snow storm (which was outside of the patch of the paper). There were very few pictures and council meetings were reported pretty much in full with little or no narrative stringing them together.
Once we got the people in and showed them the old papers, quite a few of them admitted they were not quite how they remembered them.
Most of the people who still objected to how the paper was now was more to do with scandal – in particular a teacher fired and prosecuted (and found guilty) of a relationship with an underage pupil, and reports of sexual assualts/rapes/violent assualts.
Which to be fair even the old papers had.
Yes journalism is dying a death by a thousand (staff) cuts but lets not hold the past up as this beacon of all that was great in our world.
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The standard of reporting in local papers is as bad today as it has ever been. Local papers are, in the main, written by beginners, and beginners make mistakes.
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