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Local press reporters ‘will miss Rotherham-type scandals’

Mounting pressures on today’s regional press will lead to reporters failing to spot stories like the Rotherham child abuse scandal, it has been claimed.

The continuing decline of the industry means local journalists are failing to root out municipal malpractice in holding public authorities to account, warns writer and PR consultant  Kevin Meagher.

Kevin, who is associate editor of Labour Uncut, says a whole new structure is needed to support a local independent media and repair the market in political scrutiny.

Writing in the New Statesman, he said it was “no surprise” the child sexual exploitation scandal in Rotherham was revealed by a national investigative journalist, the Times’ Andrew Norfolk, and not a regional daily or weekly reporter.

Wrote Kevin: “The chances of all but the most dedicated local reporter finding the time to wade through reams of documents to unearth municipal malfeasance, amid the demands to churn out copy, are remote.

“Yet for our democracy to function properly, we need to be able to hold decision-makers to account.

“The past decade has seen the precipitous decline of local and regional media titles and the hollowing-out of careers on local newspapers.

“Hard commercial imperatives for struggling media groups means they are never going to devote the labour-intensive resources necessary to hold local public agencies to account in the future.”

Kevin’s warning comes as a report commissioned by the NCTJ highlighted the impact of the “increasing intensification of work”  on traditional story-getting.

The report, published yesterday, said it was leading to a “general lowering of the quality of work, with less originality and creativity, with less time being made available for ‘proper’ investigative journalism.”

In his article, Kevin proposes a “local scrutiny tax” levied on councils, the NHS, universities, FE colleges, schools, the police, transport bodies, and even utility companies – which would generate a pot of money to finance public interest journalism in each town and city.

There would be a new accreditation for “public interest journalists” which would ensure quality control and those working for commercial players, would see their workloads ring-fenced, he suggested.

The ‘PIJs’ could then bid for money from the local pot, “depending on their expertise, the reach of their writing and the amount of time they will guarantee to set aside to report on and investigate public bodies.”

Added Kevin: “The point about the scandals in Rotherham, or at Mid-Staffordshire Hospital, is that bodies that serve the public sometimes make a bad job of it. Without a vibrant independent local media bringing these matters to light, how will we know?”

16 comments

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  • September 10, 2014 at 7:45 am
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    The proposal is a ridiculous one. Anyone who was worked in this industry for five minutes will know that. Quality of staff, motivation and opportunity are all issues, of course, but the bigger issue is higher up the food chain. Most local newspapers now would not take on the big organisations because they are warmly tucked up in bed with them, either commercially through advertising and sponsorship, or simply because hospitals/councils/schools/ utilities/police fill column inches for free with their self-promoting press releases. Why bite the hand that feeds?

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  • September 10, 2014 at 8:12 am
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    I agree with Kevin. I’m a reporter on a regional newspaper and the work load put on me and my colleagues is such that we are stuck at our desk 8 to 12 hours a day. And that’s not even the half of it. Most my exclusives come from sources I meet over a weekend. We no longer get to rural council meetings because we don’t have the staff. The other issue is the high turnover of reporters has meant a relationship of trust isn’t built with contacts because no-one is there long enough. What reporter wouldn’t want to get their teeth into the gritty stuff and unearth a hard news story like Rotherham? The reality is they don’t get the chance anymore and with it the age of ‘Churn-alism’ continues.

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  • September 10, 2014 at 9:00 am
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    Too true Idle Rich. A regional media group not a million miles from me is now letting it be known it will only cover businesses if they are advertisers. If Editors resist this diktat from get-rich-quick bosses we have all witnessed what happens to them….

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  • September 10, 2014 at 9:52 am
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    Er, excuse me? Local reporter WILL miss Rotherham-type scandals? Did the local paper break the Rotherham child abuse story? Shouldn’t this read local papers ARE missing Rotherham-type scandals, or even local papers MISSED THE ROTHERHAM CHILD ABUSE SCANDAL?

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  • September 10, 2014 at 10:34 am
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    What nonsense. Technology makes it easier to do this kind of investigative work in a much less labour intensive way than before. I suspect the real reason for local reporters ‘missing’ this kind of story is that they are not sufficiently connected to the local community. They need to be out on the streets, not office-bound.

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  • September 10, 2014 at 11:48 am
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    Any reporter who misses a story that involves 1400 victims and their families, plus hundreds of potential council / political / police / other sources should resign, or retrain.

    There were probably around 2,000 potential sources for this story. That’s nearly 1% of Rotherham’s population! I’d question a reporter’s contact-gathering skills if they didn’t have at least one whistleblower in their contacts book.

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  • September 10, 2014 at 11:59 am
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    Reporters at both the paper where I work and our local rival are increasingly receiving instructions from publishers/proprietors that they do not want hard news in the paper. They don’t want anything remotely precarious because even if the paper is in the right, it costs too much to defend an action. Editorial staff have actually been forced to apologise for completely accurate stories. Humiliating.

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  • September 10, 2014 at 12:34 pm
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    Absolute garbage.

    Local reporters DO “find the time” to wade through a sea of council documents.

    They MAKE the time to do it.

    And if they don’t, it’s got nothing to do with “commercial imperatives”

    It’s because they’re rubbish at their job.

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  • September 10, 2014 at 2:17 pm
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    Derbydigger, no editor worth his/her salt would apologise for a completely accurate story, surely? Not if they had any pride left in their job or respect for their staff. And Bluestringer, a good point, well made, but surely the best council stories, the ones they don’t want you to know about, are not in that sea of minutes?

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  • September 10, 2014 at 4:14 pm
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    Erm…. surely one of the scandals about the scandal is that it was missed for decades and was going on, unspotted by local journalists or anyone else for that matter. Bit tenuous to blame the modern era, methinks

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  • September 10, 2014 at 4:22 pm
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    I agree Idle Rich, you need a whistleblower or two in your contacts book.

    But the seeds of many scandals lie buried in those dusty minutes, and they’re often a good starting point.

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  • September 10, 2014 at 4:42 pm
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    Idle Rich – The sad reality is, the editor either does what the publisher tells them, or the publisher finds a new editor. How many editor positions are sitting unfilled at the moment? Not many.

    So it’s a nice ideal, but it doesn’t work in practice.

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  • September 10, 2014 at 5:21 pm
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    Take your point Derby, but it’s a sad reflection on the editors of today. I always found – and I was a biggish cheese for quite a while – that if you did a good job in the round you could, when it was necessary, tell your MD to go do one. In fact, he/she would know what response was coming and would not make the mistake of asking or demanding. Appreciate not all relationships are like that now. And, glory be, what do I know? I’m out!

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  • September 11, 2014 at 9:40 am
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    Unfair to single out the local press when the national press sat on this story for years. That, of course, was because the subject matter was too unPc to handle.

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  • September 12, 2014 at 11:27 am
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    Exactly reason I quit local hacking. 10 hours a day at computer and never where I should have been….out getting contacts and scoops.

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