A former deputy editor has chided regional press employers over badly-written advertisements for journalists.
Paul Wiltshire, deputy editor of the Bath Chronicle until moving to a group training role with Local World last month, says many adverts “appear to have been written by speak-your-weight machines.”
In a blog post, he highlighted an example of a newspaper which asked for “clean, crisp copy” before getting an apostrophe in the wrong place.
But Paul singled out some editors for praise for demonstrating the kind of passion in their ads they were also looking for in their recruits.
Wrote Paul: “Even in these difficult economic days, there are times and places where news organisations can struggle to attract top quality applicants. But they don’t always help themselves.
“Too many journalistic job ads appear to have been written by a speak-your-weight machine, or more likely by an editor’s PA (and no disrespect whatsoever to those very lovely and talented people) cutting and pasting from the last one.
“The very qualities of accuracy, invention and energy that we look for in people can be sorely missing from the messages we employ to get them.
“If we want to get the very best people, we need to make sure we are selling ourselves in the very best possible way. Otherwise, we’ll end up on the cutting room floor, too.”
By contrast Paul singled out Patrick Phelvin, editor of the Mid Devon Gazette, and Thomas Cock, news editor of the Western Gazette, for job ads which had “clearly been written by a human being.”
Paul’s blog post can be read in full here.
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My first thought was… “There are still editors who have PAs?”
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When it comes to recruitment, every profession / career / job now sings off the same sheet: almost all positions are now ‘exciting,’ often ‘dynamic,’ nearly always ‘working smarter going forward’ and frequently require ‘delivering against targets’. It does not therefore surprise that this insidious jargon has crept into the first line of defence of the language, the newspapers. For those few left who can discern, this offers an indication that the accountants now hold sway and those who used to measure quality either do not care any more or, more likely, have finally been defeated by them
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Hey, but newspapers are still better than the PR industry. Found this on LinkedIn the other day:
“Creating large-scale cultural experiences in abandoned spaces, Secret Cinema fuses film, music, theatre and installations. Audiences explore ultra-immersive worlds where fiction and reality blur. In 2007, Secret Cinema pioneered the form ‘Live Cinema’ by introducing site-specific, immersive cultural experiences. Breaking films – and recently music albums – into their constituent parts and marrying narratives with play-along action, Secret Cinema is a unique participatory social experience. Fuelled by a desire to fill the void left by an over-saturated technological world, it invites audiences to lose themselves in serendipitous, imaginary environments that challenge the way we perceive culture and social interaction.”
Doesn’t quite fit in with my Plain English ethos…
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Anyone else find it significant that many job adverts make no mention of remuneration, holiday entitlement, etc?
I accept these matters are not (or perhaps should not be) the most important factors to inspire an applicant these days, but they should surely form an important part of the package on offer.
Maybe their omission is a means of averting a coronary for those all-important bean-counters who infest the industry nowadays?
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Also the neat little requirement for a sub, sorry, content production person, to ‘harvest third party’ material.
Used to be called plagiarism…
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