A regional daily columnist has urged would-be journalists to ignore “hacks who grumble the profession is dying.”
Paul Connolly, readers editor at the Belfast Telegraph, made the call in his weekly column for the newspaper in which he discussed the best way for young people to get into the industry.
Paul, who described journalism as “one of the great careers” in Friday’s piece, served as the Bel Tel’s managing editor until moving to his current role last year.
He also sits on the NCTJ’s accreditation board.
Wrote Paul: “Whatever you read, journalism remains one of the great careers: it’s ever-changing, surprising, sometimes emotional, heart-of-your-community stuff.
“Ignore hacks who grumble the profession is dying: reporters have been saying this since the quill.
“They’re meant to be an awkward bunch. Yes, budgets are tight, but new funding models will be found.
“Thanks to the internet, journalism has never had a bigger audience, and there are more exciting ways to tell stories than ever before. It’s still a great choice for young people with inquiring minds.”
Discussing the options available to budding reporters in Northern Ireland, Paul also questioned why the NQJ is not considered as seriously there as it is on the mainland.
He added: “Oddly and worryingly, the NQJ never established itself in Northern Ireland – and no one seems to know why, nor care.
“I suspect the reason is a combination of scale, funding and the legacy of the Troubles which forced most newsrooms to continually react rather than to plan and improve.”
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Depends what you call journalism. I saw a piece in the Metro the other day which went along the lines of ‘woman thought she had mouse droppings in her pizza, but it turned out to be carbon scoring from the oven’.
I usually find people who dismiss genuine concerns over the death of quality journalism to have some kind of vested interest in the status quo, i.e they’re still employed in a decent and/or well paying job.
Everyone else is searching the classifieds for a good communications job.
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Journalism can still be a great career, doubtless, but would I recommend the local press to any young person pondering their future? No, I would not because within five years it will be mostly gone as a revenue-generating activity and, for all the arguments we make about journalistic integrity, supporting communities and the like, people need salaries to pay rent/mortgages, keep the bills under control and bring up a family. If I was 25 again and working for TM, Newsquest or Archant, for example, I’d be looking for the exit before it was shown to me.
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If it’s such a great career why do so many leave it?
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Mr Connolly makes some very valid points.
I notice he is a member of the NCTJ Accreditation Board. If he thinks the future is going to be wonderful, why have the NCTJ decided to butcher press photography training ?
We are moving in visual times. People want video and striking images, like the one that made everyone think only last week. It was the picture that got everyone to act not the words.
This article just makes me ask if the people running the NCTJ actually understand journalism in the modern world.
No one is going to want to read pages of text on a mobile phone. They want pictures and video with people telling them the news. To get that you need visually skilled journalists, they used to be called photographers in the good old days ……
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Grumbling Hack, eh! Well that’s nothing a minor intestinal operation and a strong dose of antibiotics won’t cure.
If only the same treatment could cure the British regional press. Instead, the prescribed remedy seems to be the wearing of rose coloured spectacles, and a tincture of “It Really will be OK, Trust Me I Wear A Suit”
As Kendo Nagasaki says, if journalism is such a great career choice in 2015, why are so many journalists and photographers being forced out of it?
Until somebody finds a way to replace the doomed print driven revenue model with a VIABLE web based solution that will deliver sufficient revenue to create content of quality that people really want to read, I am afraid that it is:
Grumbling Hacks Utd 1 Rose Tinted Spectacles 0
In the meantime, the best hope is a very long period of extra time. After that relegation seems inevitable.
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Sorry Paul, I would LOVE to read something optimistic about my industry but that optimism has to be based on something a lot more concrete than what you write about in your column. In fact your whole column could be boiled down to a single key sentence – “New funding models will be found”. Wow, now that is a bold statement to make. Any idea when these “new funding models” will start to make a difference to my pathetic monthly wage? Next year? Next decade? Even if they are a reality it’s a shame these “models” will arrive too late for the hundreds of experienced, dedicated editorial staff who have been made redundant over the last few years.
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1-“Ignore hacks who grumble the profession is dying: reporters have been saying this since the quill.
1-i dont go back as far as the quill unfiortunately,just hot metal and 35 years in the industry to a time when it was a great profession to be in with many opportunities for real journalism and to when thousands of people queued up to buy copies of the dailies.
Move the clock on 30 years and the whole media envoriment and how people access news and content has changed as is evidienced by current ABC figures reporting rapid decline, and to the level of use on both social media and online free news sites,the market has moved on line and with it a new breed of raw young writer has emerged and look to be succeeeding,many with little or no traditional journalisitc skills or training.
2- “They’re meant to be an awkward bunch. Yes, budgets are tight, but new funding models will be found.
remind us please where these “new funding models” are exactly?
plenty of talk but no real examples that i can see
a wealth of hyper local magazines are making a real go of it and free blogging has produced some excellent online writers but i dont think anyones making piles of cash as a result?
but thats about it,where are these new funding models ? plenty of talk and wishful thinking but no sign of any examples of such,we can all live in hope.
journalists are having to adapt and those able to set themselves up as freelancers,paid bloggers,magazine writers etc will always find work but please dont try to fool young people into thinking its a great career move,it isnt ,many of the best people and most capable journalists i work with or have worked with have either left the profession or are looking to get out asap,not just old hands,young people too,many sadly disillusioned by what the reality of working for a newspaper group is and despite the rose coloured spectacles given them at the start.
Old thinking,blinkered views,new ways to access news and the chase for a quick buck have all but killed the traditional print industry so in my view it most definately is not a place i would encourage any young person to move into who is looking for a career
Time to step into the real world and take ones head out of the sand me thinks
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Do doctors call themselves quacks in print?
Then why does Paul, who sits on the NCTJ, do down his own profession in this way?
This lack of respect is an example of the decline of journalism in the eyes of those who practise it, let alone the public at large.
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He makes some interesting points.
But…I’ve never really heard many ‘grumbling hacks’ saying that journalism is dying. Just plenty of well-educated and experienced professionals lamenting the death of newspapers and most other outlets for the work of journalists.
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Ignore hacks who grumble THAT the profession is dying.
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Paul is dead right that journalism is one of the great careers. I did 35 years in the regional press, and if I had to go back to 1979 and do it all over again, I’d chose exactly the same path.
But if I was starting out on a career in 2015 it would be a very different story. My final few years were blighted by regular rounds of redundancies, a constant panic to fill pages with scant resources, people shunted into roles for which they did not have the experience and, from above, a constant management prattle about a digital future which still doesn’t show that it can turn a profit.
I hate being one of moaning minnies, but the regional press is – despite all the web traffic it is so keen to boast about – a mere shadow of what it once was in terms of commercial clout, its standing in the communities it serves and the opportunities it offers those who work in it.
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Yes, the internet has given journalism bigger audiences … the problem is that in almost every case, the audiences don’t pay for it.
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New funding models! Does he mean money? KEEP IT SIMPLE, Paul.
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I had to check the date of this HTFP piece as after reading it I thought it said 1995 not 2015.
It shouldn’t really surprise us to hear from someone with a vested interest in keeping the pipeline that feeds him full, but to try to convince those of us actually doing the job that there’s a long term or sustainable future is an insult.
Constant rounds of redundancies,staff cuts,cost savings, ‘re focusing’, changed priorities and lack of investment have lead us to the brink of implosion brought on by falling sales and dreadful ad revenues so the sooner these mythical ‘ new funding models’ are found the better,maybe Mr Connolly would care to enlighten us as to what these new funding models look like and when we can expect to see them.
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Anyone who saw the ABC figures on HTFP recently surely cannot fail to have realised that newspapers are dying. Doubtless the next set of ABCs in six months’ time will show a similarly steep decline in circulations. It seems to be impossible to stop it.
Newspapers have been shedding journalists wholesale for nearly 10 years. There is not a week when one of the big groups does not announce a further round of job cuts in at least one of its titles.
Very few would consider that print journalism has any long-term future, except for a fortunate few. I guess it will be only a matter of time before some of the dailies become weeklies and some of the latter fold completely or become frees. I would also expect that at least one national newspaper will not be with us in five years’ time.
The BBC has shed a number of journalists in recent times.
The cruel thing is that bright young people are still being lured into an industry in which they stand very little chance of getting a job at the end of their training. They are far more likely to end up as managers of fast food outlets than journalists.
Surely the time has come to reduce the number of training places for journalists at universities.
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If the men in suits hadn’t ignored the Grumbling Hacks in the first place, the industry would most probably not be in its current dire straits.
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Got your tense wrong Paul. Journalism WAS a great career. I hated taking voluntary redundancy after 30-odd mostly great years but I could see the future and didn’t fancy it. Two years on, and seeing the shambles now, it was the best thing I ever did,
By the way what is a readers editor?
Can I have the non-readers editor job please?
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Journalism was indeed once a great and rewarding career. But only when those running the commercial side had the nous, experience and intellectual capacity to match that of those pursuing it as a career. Nowadays, it’s a clickbait race to the the bottom in many operations and proper journalists who work for these basket case businesses are getting swept up in it to please the one-eyed bosses who think growing web traffic is the same as a growing business. It’s patently not, but that doesn’t stop them trumpeting that it is. It’s the King’s New Clothes of local media….shout as long as you like about “growing web audiences” but the absence of any linked comment on increases in market share makes it all just hollow words.
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Let’s be honest here, most of the people of quality have left already or been sacked, those left are just counting down to retirement – catch any of them half cut at the Christmas do and they will all admit it, all of them.
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It still is a great career for learning how to tell a story, good writing, grammar, deadlines, prioritising, and so on. Let alone shorthand, law and all the other things we learn. All these skills can then be used elsewhere if needed. What I’m trying to say is that I agree journalism can, is and should be a profession that’s aspired to, even if people eventually have to move on. They won’t get the same training anywhere else.
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Yes, the audience has never been bigger, but the audience isn’t paying. You could invite 1,000 into a pub, the one who buys a drink is the one paying the bills. What use are all the others?
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head, ostrich, sand, in – please rearrange these words!
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Well, if you work on a paper whose circulation has halved in ten years, but which can inexplicably still afford to pay a readers(‘) editor, whatever one of them is, then yes, I suppose everything in the garden’s still lovely. Out here in the real world, the view is a good deal bleaker.
As far as the NCTJ goes, I’m afraid, I work day in, day out, with young (and not so young) reporters who tick every box in terms of qualifications and whose copy is still lousy, not just because their English is terrible but because they have no general knowledge and don’t understand how to write news. Yes, they’re tired and bored and overworked, but that excuse only gets you so far. Subs do what they can to repair the damage for print, but digital-first means the damage is already done because it goes online unchecked. Any new funding model will have to take account of the fact that, in print or online, too many papers are asking people to pay good money for garbage. A good newspaper will still sell, and a good website get hits, even without a big splash because people know there’ll be something worth reading anyway. Instead, we live or die by what’s happened that day – which people will have heard about on Facebook or Twitter hours if not days before anyway.
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‘Readers editor’ does what exactly?
Edits copy supplied by readers I assume making him the editor of UGC for his paper?
So with presumably none of the readers supplying copy being trained journalists he appears to be contradicting himself
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Nail on the head TrinityEscapee. We are of a similar vintage and you share my thoughts exactly.
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