The regional press needs to accept some of its columns and editorials amount to “third rate rabble-rousing” according to a journalism trainer.
Paul Wiltshire, pictured left, regional editorial trainer at Local World, says too little thought is sometimes given to newspapers’ comment sections.
His comments come after The News, Portsmouth, took down a column on the subject of depression from its website following a reader backlash.
Editor Mark Waldron later apologised for the piece in which columnist Clive Smith had urged readers suffering with the mental illness to “quit moaning” and “get on with life.”
On his personal blog, Paul wrote: “Some of the best writing in any paper or website should be that done by its columnists. I’ve written before in praise of colleagues who every week find something new and engaging to write about.
“They surprise, they challenge, they shed light and they make sense of life. There are papers that I would buy simply because of the brilliance and insight of a single columnist. But there’s also another world: one of free plugs, diaries, anodyne blandness and third-rate rabble-rousing.
“We have to face up to the fact that some of the material we dress up as comment, columns and opinion is simply not very good. We perhaps give too little thought to this area of content.”
“For one thing, we tend not to pay for many of these pieces, relying instead on pro bono arrangements which suit the writers’ businesses, political priorities or charity choice. And we prioritise the reliable over the interesting, as we let the words touch busy newsdesks as lightly and little as possible, like some kind of pass the parcel game.”
Paul went on: “The words which have the greatest potential to engage and inspire our audiences, as well as the greatest potential to damage us, probably get the least love and attention of any in our products.
“Too often we end up having to defend the indefensible because we’ve taken our eye off the ball that could be our very best content.”
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Agreed. A lot of rubbish gets printed. The other dead giveaway is a monthly or “occasional” column. The only point of a column is to build-up a relationship with the reader, especially a love-hate one. So a columnist in a weekly has to perform every week, and dailies are just using columns as space fillers if they appear once a month or less. By the time they come around each time the reader has forgotten they existed. I lost count of the number of free “financial advice” columns I was offered and rejected, although they are all over the place now. My regional daily sometimes carries two in the same edition. They normally start with a cheery “if you have a £300k-plus portfolio to invest then why not….blah blah de blah.” Shame on the paper for printing it. Alienate your readers, why don’t you….
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Frankly, I don’t know what Paul’s talking about. Local titles in our neck of the woods include columns by every MP on the patch – all of them bywords for modesty, impartiality and lively, elegant prose – various interchangeable county councillors, to whom the same naturally applies in spades, one on child-rearing from a former paediatric nurse who now flogs parenting courses at hundreds of quid a pop, and a woman who runs a clothes shop offering tips on the latest fashion trends as exemplified by her own stock. If that sort of top-quality content isn’t drawing in readers by the thousands, I don’t know what will.
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Bravo Mr Wiltshire. We have a nail and head interface.
I’ve always taken an interest in columns and have a fair bit of experience. Some of the columns I see are embarrassing drivel. Indeed one is very close to home in my old paper.
The reason papers use these sub-standard outpourings is because they fill a hole and occasionally provoke a response. The writers of the pieces are happy to do them for free or peanuts because they’re on a massive ego trip.
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Exactly
There are too many ”columnists” who have no background in journalism but are members of the local business community who advertise with the newspapers they have landed a column with
Their work – if you could call it that- is rubbish
This is however a very widespread problem which relates 100 percent to sheer quality control.
Have just read a column in a national newspaper today which was poor beyond description but I won’t name names.
Even though it’s the same standard week by week.
Yes it’s testing to write a really good comment piece but come on…. we’re journalists!
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I like the old dictum of CP Scott: “‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred’.
Comment does indeed come cheap, but you get what you pay for. I was a columnist on a big city daily for almost 15 years, and I like to think that what I wrote stood up to scrutiny. But after repeated culls of the workforce I saw others drafted in to write comment who simply did not have the experience or, for want of a better word, weight to deliver what was required.
Come to think of it, even comment didn’t come quite cheap enough for my employer. After 30 years of loyal service, I was put at risk of redundancy and, increasingly disenchanted with the whole business, gladly volunteered for the cash.
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A lot of rubbish gets printed in the “news” pages as well. Welcome to the world of churnalism 2015.
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We’ve all been there with columnists who go too far, either because they have run out of things to say, or because they have had a meltdown. I remember, many, many years ago, having to spend a day running round a local village finding nice things to write about it because it had been slated by our controversial columnist (can’t remember if he “gave it to you straight” or “told it like it is” but you know the type). Anyway, for some reason he took against bungalows, or more specifically the bungalows of this admittedly quite low-rise village, and published a massive rant about the place (a rant which somehow got through unchecked). Sad to relate, the village had lots of readers. Who got quite cross when he told it like it was. He never ran another column. I’m not sure I found much of interest either.
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Thing is, “third rate rabble rousing” is what most people want. If you don’t believe me, just look at the papers with the highest circulations and the columnists they employ.
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Some of the worst local paper columns are the mummy blogs which outline the tedium of family life, the baby sick, the wrong shoes to school, etc etc. Perhaps I’m unlucky, but all the ones I’ve read have been dire, of zero interest to anyone outside the family circle. However, I can’t recall the last time any editor I know actually paid for a column, so they obviously see them as free filler between the adverts, rather like some of the business ‘experts’ who actually pay to get their columns in the local rag.
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Lauren Bravo…..”What the young person in your life is thinking.” Wrote a weekly column for the Worthing Hetald from age 13 to about 23. Consistently brilliant.
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Herald I meant to say…..predictive text has invented the word Hetald.
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JP for one forced papers to write leader columns as part of their design even though hacks hated them.
Sometimes if seniors were away they were hacked out by kids barely out of the journalistic womb. Style over substance, but sadly without even the style.
And still you see them!
If you ain’t got anything to say, don’t say it. Readers do know when you are taking the urine.
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CORRECTION: ‘Most’ regional press columns are not very good.
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It’s not just business owners and mummies talking about baby sick, some journalists are also guilty of writing terrible columns. There’s a seasoned journalist in Northants whose weekly column is so terrible it’s almost required reading.
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Much of it stems from the fact that many top quality journalists aka columnists have gone from the business leaving staff who are incapable of producing good quality sustainable copy that’s anything more than churn,added to the fact that editors are happy to accept rubbish from someone on an ego trip who wants to be able to tell their friends they write for the local rag.
The fact that much of it comes at no cost too is, in their eyes, an addition bonus.
and yes as was mentioned previously, editorial space is happily given over to an advertiser who likes the sound of their own voice and to be able to tell the chaps at the golf club or the ‘networking ‘ event that he writes a piece for the paper and with ad revenues at all time lows it keeps a local businessman happy which these days seems to be all that matters.
We are very close to the tipping point where a large proportion of a papers content is reader supplied and when that happens we might just as put out the lights and leave
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With the exception of sport, unless you’re a national or local celebrity, no one is going to read your column in a newspaper today anyway.
Anyone writing quality content who wants to their opinions heard and shared will already be an avid blogger or YouTuber with a prominent social media presence.
Even Mr Wiltshire’s own comments on this subject were discovered on his blog, shared by HTFP and discussed on here by people with an interest in the topic.
It’s really not worth anyone’s time and effort to write a dedicated column for a printed publication for which they have no metrics or idea of how many readers are interested, if any.
Scrap the columns in print, write more online, if possible, then share them within appropriate forums, Facebook pages etc to build the beginnings of an online following.
With the right content, there is so much potential to expand upon this and develop a number of loyal, niche audiences that your blogs, social media profiles, e-newsletters etc which complement it can become useful vehicles for positioning relevant adverts.
Imagine that; a business reporter being allowed to engage with the business community; an education reporter helping local schools, colleges and universities to share issues; a features reporter providing a platform to share opinions, information and reviews of local arts.
Hang on! Couldn’t we employ journalists instead of content generators? No, silly idea. Head office can sell a £20k national banner ad for impressions across the regional network if we create 100 ‘stories’ a week about cats or the weather.
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Fortunetely the UK’s best regional newspaper group, Archant, has solved this problem by giving cinema tickets to random members of the public to write sparkling, engaging and always grammatically correct columns. Time the rest of the industry caught up.
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Oliver
That’s all irrelevant unless the content is worth reading in the first place,jumping on the social media bandwagon is of little interest to the board as its free and doesn’t drive sales so is pointless.
And yes at Archant they’re so afraid of losing the money from the estate agents in Norfolk that the daily papers and dusty old Norfolk magazine has churn and dross features on local estate agents top tens or agents sales staff in party dresses,crusty agents in ‘ fashion’ photo shoots and other such cringeworthy nonsense just to appease and fawn around advertisers , yep at Archant it’s been reduced to that ,estate agents writing columns and even being given air time on Mustard tv although luckily if it most of us no one will see it .
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Archanteer, I’m sorry but what are you on about when you say ‘driving sales’? Not a single thing this industry has done in the last 30 years has driven sales.
Sales have halved in the last 10 years alone and, at that rate, there won’t be much left of the industry in the next 10 unless alternative revenue streams are found.
Only a die-hard print journal could still say that social media is a bandwagon! This year it has driven a record number of referrals to online content and commercial sales. It’s not going away anytime soon so of course it’s relevant!
The whole concept of modern publishing is to develop a platform which demonstrates your expertise in a particular niche then to share it and engage with an active audience via the medium with which they choose to consume it.
That doesn’t mean blindly posting everything to every available channel. It means tailoring your content for the most appropriate and effective ones. If you do this successfully, relevant adverts which don’t affect the user experience will be more effective in creating new revenue streams across a variety of platforms.
The local press industry is like the Titanic. We know it’s broken and sinking. There are plenty of lifeboats, but no ones using them properly. Among the chaos, there are still people who insist on being part of the band, playing while it goes down.
Appeasing the estate agents is a prime example of that as it’s only a matter of time before they ditch anyway. One of my close friends runs several branches of a national estate agent franchise and she says that most agents have discussed scrapping the local papers and even Rightmove for some time now but no one wants to be the first… yet!
They’ve effectively already established that the cost of the ads probably isn’t worth it. How long before they figure out that the reach of a printed column isn’t either?
If you still think trying to find alternative publishing methods and revenue streams is pointless… gentlemen, I bid you farewell!
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*journo (autocorrect again)
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