Regional weekly reporters are cutting legal corners to beat opposing news outlets in today’s ‘win-at-all-costs’ digital age, a journalism training head has told HoldtheFrontPage.
The demands of the modern multi-media era are putting pressures on publishers and, in turn, staff to get information on to the web without the age-old recourse to proofing, she claims.
That’s the “unnerving” conclusion of Lily Canter as the Sheffield Hallam University course leader for 220 undergraduate journalism students returned to the news frontline after a five-year absence.
The former regional journalist, who spent two days back at the ‘coalface’ as a multi-tasking reporter for the award-winning Derbyshire Times, said the 24/7 approach to breaking news with a rolling deadline had its downside.
The once-a-week deadline has been replaced with a rush to get the digital news drop on competitors – and it appears to come at a cost, said Lily.
“In my time there I noticed the unnerving practice of reporters writing straight to the web with not many checks and balances,” she added: “This seems to be done afterwards, not before. No one bats an eyelid.
After initially getting over the shock of discovering the Times’s Chesterfield office no longer offers direct entry to the public, Lily said: “Weeklies are now operating like a daily . . . it’s more and more editorial output with less staff.
“At the advent of the web, I think publishers originally tried to protect their news in the printed format but now they see no point. There’s a ‘get it out as quickly as possible’ attitude now.
“And no one is bothered whether that information is on their own newspaper web platform or not – so long as it’s out before the opposition. Twitter and YouTube will do it seems.
“Competition is driving them on, whether the audience actually wants it or not.”
Lily, who began her career at the Wiltshire Gazette & Herald, moved on to the Northampton Chronicle and Echo as senior reporter before ending up as features editor.
In her last couple of years at the Northampton daily, she recalls the internet was starting to take off, news was “crudely broken” on the paper’s website and online video was being produced.
“We had subs, photographers, feature writers, secretaries and even receptionists to welcome the public,” she added.
She left in 2009 to do a PhD and further her academic career. In her five years away from a newsroom job, had a baby, travelled to Australia and been appointed head of the journalism team at Sheffield Hallam University – personally lecturing around 100 students on a BA Journalism course.
“That is a lot of changes, in not a lot of years. And newspapers have seen a similar amount of upheaval in that time as I discovered on my return,” she said.
She added that going back to work at the “severely cutback” Johnston Press title was “something of a challenge.”
Lily added: “I shot video, took photos, uploaded content to Twitter, Instragram and the DT website, conducted interviews, wrote copy, imported photos, wrote photo captions, wrote headlines, laid out pages, edited video, created photo slideshows.
“And this was a fraction of the work a regular reporter was expected to do. I learned that much has changed, for better and worse, but reassuringly some things remain the same and perhaps always will do.”
She sees her two-day workout experiencing life as a regional newspaper journalist “invaluable for informing my own teaching.”
In this modern templating world in which a reporter now finds themselves, she says the art of good headline and caption writing has suffered.
She added: “Journalists don’t have to just worry about the ‘copy’ they have to write headlines and photo captions and identify photographs to go with their story
“I learned that I hate writing headlines and photo captions and wished I had been trained to do this. I shall be looking at both those areas when I return to the classroom next month and reaffirming their importance to my students.”
“As someone who lectures on a NCTJ media course it’s quite worrying – the lack of final proofing and how this might affect the laws of contempt.”
A spokeswoman at Johnston Press said: “Consumers expect immediacy when it comes to their news consumption and journalists today don’t always have the luxury of time as they strive to get stories online quickly.
“That is why we have an extremely robust – and successful – training programme (as proved by our recent NQJ pass rate of 88pc against the national average of 72pc) to ensure our news teams are fully trained in journalism laws.”
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She’s absolutely correct about the mad rush to get on line at all costs. And newspaper owners are wrong if they believe that the public really want to read the news before journalists have had time to check facts and write it properly.
Worse still, they don’t make any real profits from websites.
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Erm, didn’t Dr Canter know all this anyway? Clearly not. Academics should not need a few days back at the coal face to know what’s going on in the real world. They should know already.
She added: “Journalists don’t have to just worry about the ‘copy’ they have to write headlines and photo captions and identify photographs to go with their story.
Well knock me down with a feather. You have to wonder what students at her college are being taught there.
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I agree entirely, Idle RIch. Staggeringly out of touch .
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I’m surprised she’s surprised. Regional publishing has been that way for years.
The good doctor sounds hilariously lofty.
Reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) story of the judge asking who The Beatles were.
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Give her a break. Maybe she wasn’t too well informed before, but she definitely knows how screwed up this industry is now, and she’s making the effort to get the message out there. And hopefully embarrassing some of the useless suits in our senior management. Good for you Lily.
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Never mind knocking Dr Canter, she makes some very salient comments with the fresh eye of the outsider. And the conclusion… right first time simply doesn’t work! All copy needs a second eye on it, no matter what format it’s on.
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I actually think it’s quite useful to have someone from outside the industry (or away from the ‘coal face’ as the article puts it) top confirm what’s going on.
We journalists have a reputation for being quite grumbly (to put it mildly) and perhaps it’s hard for outsiders to work out what’s causing real problems and what’s just the older statesmen of the newsroom having a whinge about things changing. What’s the harm in having it further confirmed by an academic?
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Tell us something we don’t already know. When I left the regional newspaper business four years ago, I said the headlong rush to publish on the web, coupled with continuing staff cuts, was a disaster waiting to happen. I still believe it. Add in the fact that no-one seems to understand media law these days and it’s even worse.
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Just weekly papers? Trinity Mirror/ncjMedia Newsroom 3.1 has reporters and photographers desperately wiring in copy, photographs and video to get it online as soon as possible and quality is plummeting. The reverse of protecting printed content is deliberate – digital first, then you can buy a paper to read everything that’s already been online for a day or more.
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Dr Canter was invited to the DT as a favour to see how newsrooms nowadays work so she could prepare her students for the reality of modern journalism. In the years she has been out of the business it has changed massively. Instead of attacking the DT for moving with the times perhaps she should use the experience to improve her students’ knowledge – so they don’t leave university completely unprepared for what they find!!
Properly trained journalists are competent enough to write directly to the web and therefore are trusted to do so!
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XJP – Dr Canter is not from outside the industry. She’s the course leader for 220 journalism degree students! As such her lack of knowledge about the real world out there is staggering.
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Angry journo. Properly trained journos might be competent but they all lack one vital thing to keep them
out of libel or contempt court…experience.
Their work (web or paper) should be checked thoroughly before going to web for at least the first six months
of their career, preferably a year. But the industry would grind to a halt..it is run on cheap and very green labour.
On many weeklies reporters’ copy probably only gets checked once by a “content editor” before going to print. No check at all for web.
On my paper it had at least three checks until the cuts and the stupid central hubs came along.
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As someone who lectures on Journalism…and is surprised after two days working on a weekly…how the hell does she manage to hold her job down………….
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It makes you wonder about the quality of some university journalism courses – though I am sure Sheffield Hallam’s and Dr Canter’s lectures are the exception and quite possibly exceptional.
But I know of at least one journalism lecturer who entered academia barely a few years after getting their NCE and another who approached me in a shop (no, not the Disney Store) to see if I would do a few lectures -‘it’s really good money’ they told me!
When I asked where their cohort got jobs after graduating I was told ‘who knows?’.
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It is the worrying demands put on trainees that is a problem. Many unqualified reporters have been sent to court and thrown in at the deep end. Perhaps not so much now…hardly any courts get coverage from weekly papers.
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Just how out of touch was this training whizz kid?
I expect she would also be ‘surprised’ to learn that senior management in most local newspaper groups no longer appear to give a toss about quality on- or off-line.
Johnston Press management is even putting the facility on its paper’s websites to let anyone and everyone upload ‘their’ stores. They don’t seem to understand they are turning their previously trusted newspaper websites into something no better or more trustworthy than Facebook.
She should worry about her own job security when managements like Johnston Press’s care so little about the professional skills of the journalists she trains. They’re more interested in free user generated crap and won’t care if it goes in unchecked until a mega libel or contempt of court action hits them.
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Angry Journo,
I take it you work for the paper in question. I take it you produce liretal-free, sparkling copy, with perfect, punctuation I take it you’ve never made a single screw up. I take it your stories are so amazing you have to publish them now-this-very-minute.
Surely you should be on Fleet Street. Oh wait, you aren’t…
(And, Ms – it is not clear whether she had completed her PhD – Canter (nearly wrote Carter – now I will never get on the Derbyshire Times) should have wrote fewer staff, rather than less. ‘Fewer members of staff would be a better sentence).
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Weekly deadline rush to get it out, eh? Sounds like a weekly paper operating where there’s an evening or daily -i.e. everywhere.
We used to do it by getting different stuff and presenting it with a different nuance – though I admit to being lucky to work on a weekly that wasn’t a compilation of the evening, at least until the bean counters completely took over.
And while a PhD – in one of the ‘soft’ disciplines by the look of it – might further an academic career, five years out, two days back in, a trip to Australia and a reproductive event don’t quite make it – we all enjoy sunshine, sex and a good skive after all.
This is nothing short of a PR
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Weekly deadline rush to get it out, eh? Sounds like a weekly paper operating where there’s an evening or daily -i.e. everywhere.
We used to do it by getting different stuff and presenting it with a different nuance – though I admit to being lucky to work on a weekly that wasn’t a compilation of the evening, at least until the bean counters completely took over.
And while a PhD – in one of the ‘soft’ disciplines by the look of it – might further an academic career, five years out, two days back in, a trip to Australia and a reproductive event don’t quite make it – we all enjoy sunshine, sex and a good skive after all.
This is nothing short of a PR
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…stunt
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Weeklies “cutting corners”.
Bears “defecating in wooded areas”.
Pope “somewhat fond of Catholicism”.
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Part-time Hack – what is a liretal?
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Part Time Hack. Google her. She’s a Dr. Hope the comments on here serve as a reality check for the content of her course. The world of academia is a very closed, introverted one. I know, I am in it.
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Part time hack. Don’t make the mistake of assuming reporters who stay on local papers are not as good as those on nationals. They are often just not so ambitious or just aren’t cynical enough.
I can’t make any claims for myself, but in my career I have worked with local reporters and sub editors (do you know what they are?)who would have coped easily with a job on nationals. They just did not want to.
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Why only “weeklies cutting corners”? People on Archant’s dailies tell me the same happens there. As for Angry Journo: everyone’s writing should be checked because you ‘read’ what you expect to see there if you check your own work.In addition, a lot of the staff doing this are inexperienced because managment prefers people it can pay a pittance to on the excuse that because they are new they don’t have responsibilities. You have to remember none of the directors has newspaper experience so they think trainees only write about village fetes and never do anything that might lead to a legal action.
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Nationals don’t correct their mistakes as assiduously as weeklies do (ie they dodge out of corrections).
Also, when you are writing about big international stories (Ukraine, Gaza etc) you can put down any old rubbish as long as it fits in with your publication’s right wing slant. Who’s going to ring up to complain? Putin?
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This follow-up blog post explains a little of the context of this Hold the Front Page story: http://lilycanter.co.uk/2014/08/27/on-the-receiving-end-getting-caught-out-by-my-own-professions/
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