Union members at two Midlands dailies have passed votes of no confidence in management over plans to set web traffic targets for individual journalists.
As previously reported by HTFP, Trinity Mirror is planning to axe 19 editorial roles at the Birmingham Mail and further six at the Coventry Telegraph as part of the move towards digital-first publishing.
Those journalists who remain in the new structure will be given targets for online audience growth which will be written into their job descriptions,
However the National Union of Journalists’ chapels in Birmingham and Coventry have now passed motions of no confidence in management over the plans, calling them “unworkable, counter-productive and unprecedented in the industry”.
The new job descriptions make clear that journalists’ performance will in future be measured in terms of how their stories perform online.
“Your performance will be assessed regularly, taking into account audience traffic to your stories and therefore encompassing page views, unique users, local audience and other metrics. You will be expected to grow your page views and uniques in line with the growth we require as a business,” they state.
A statement from the NUJ’s Birmingham chapel reads: “The introduction of individual targets continues to be a huge area of concern for members.
“As such chapel members unanimously backed a vote of no confidence on the proposal to introduce individual audience targets.
“On the face of it these targets would be unworkable, counter-productive and unprecedented in the industry.
“Members urge the company to use this extra time to present clear proposals to members on how these targets would work.”
According to the NUJ, journalists in Coventry believe the new targets will be a threat to journalistic quality, rewarding “easy, fluffy stories and listicles” over long-term investigative projects and stories which need time to develop and check.
They claim it will force them to go for “click- bait” stories at the expense of covering important, local issues and community stories which may attract fewer clicks.
Both chapels have also expressed no confidence in aspects of the redundancy process and are concerned at the lack of information about what the newsroom will look like after the proposed job cuts, with fears unqualified staff will be asked to do reporting jobs.
However it has also emerged that the deadline for voluntary redundancy applications has been pushed back from 16 June to 22 June – a move that has been welcomed by the chapels.
Trinity Mirror has yet to respond to HTFP’s request for a comment on the issue.
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‘Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the profession known as journalism with high ideals about reporting the facts, with balance and the truth?’
‘Well I guess I have always tried to be…’
‘Answer the question, ANSWER the question…’
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10 Things you will only understand if you are a journalist on a local newspaper in the digital age.
1. Content is King, but User Generated Content is cheaper
…Fill in the other nine yourselves.
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Good for them, imagine an individual journalist being held accountable for newspaper sales? It’s absolutely laughable.
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I guess this means that the hack who manages to slip the word ‘Kardashian’ into a report of a council meeting will keep his/her job longer.
What a grim world regional journalism is becoming.
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OMG poor babes being asked to write content that people actually want to read!
The great thing about the web is we now know precisely what stories people are consuming and to target journalists to write relevant and timely content must be a step forward. It’s not the amount you write, it’s the relevance. What next – getting sales people to sell advertising that actually delivers response for customers ?
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I thank the Lord I no longer have to deal with these lunatics. But my thoughts are with those honest hard working folk who have no choice.
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The truth is the more facile a story is the more hits.if that is your style you are made. Philistines writing for philistines. It is the future.
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Harry Kari is Sly Bailey and I claim my five dollars.
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The lunatics have taken over the asylum!! Unfortunately the people in authority in the newspaper industry these days have absolutely NO IDEA of how to run a successful newspaper. All they seeis £££ signs with digital having no print or transport costs. They are so greedy and stupid they cant see the real picture that you can give away news on the net for free all you want but the bottom line is DIGITAL NEWS DOSEN’T MAKE MONEY!!!
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Interested in Harry Kari’s thinking here, and so I logged on to Yahoo to see what was trending on the internet.
Here we go:
Vampire fish are falling from the sky!
Lesson learned: Don’t try and take a selfie with a sea lion
Pickle the minipig slurping ice cream — as cute as a button
Taylor Swift ‘twin’ cashing in on her appearance
Kid has major freak-out after stepping in dog poop
OK you Trinity Mirror journos you’ve got your briefs. Get out there and make those clicks count.
PS: I didn’t find any mention of the council’s plans to increase town centre car parking charges by 500 per cent, or the approval that has been given for a a nuclear power plant on the green belt just outside town.
But, hell, what’s that compared with minipigs slurping ice-cream?
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I had the misfortune to work for a JP weekly covering a news starved area (few murders, fatal crashes etc that papers like)but we had to file a minimum number of web stories every day. It was laughable, and probably still is, unless people start losing jobs over it. Then stupidity of all senior management because serious stuff because families, mortgages , rent all come into picture. Think carefully dumbrains at top. Please.
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I worked in a similar set up to @Realist and it was soul crushing and surprisingly stressful work.
Smaller papers are being put under huge pressure to up their web numbers and they are ending up writing absolute drivel clickbait to achieve it.
Eventually all regional newspaper websites will merge into a one size fits all pattern and people will get bored of it, if they are not already, and if they are anything like me they will quickly glance the articles in Facebook pages to avoid the ludicrous amount of advertising served on the pages.
Bring back the unique selling point of regional newspapers and get back to news and information please rather than the populist listicle and buzzfeed clones! ‘Quirky news’ is not a sustainable business model at all.
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The absolute best thing about online stories is the featured content at the bottom.
“Undertakers absolutely HATE this free funeral trick!”
“This girl walked in on her boyfriend eating ALDI baked beans, you’ll never GUESS what she did next!”
Don’t try and patronise me with the ‘old guard’ nonsense. People who hate this garbage aren’t somehow stuck in the past, they just know utter nonsense when they see it.
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I think Smileys would be useful, especially on the (wisely-anonymous) post from Mr Kari. I think it’s a droll spoof, with the delightful use of ‘consuming’ to indicate the writer has embraced the language of digital. If it’s serious though, and if it’s written by a journalist, I am most concerned. As everyone else (at the chapel meetings and on this thread) realises, there is all the difference in the editorial universe between cynically penning something simple to attract clicks, and taking the time to research and write original content of genuine relevance to one’s readers. As a former news editor, I wonder if my core role would now be to hand out lists of SEO words to clickbait-hungry reporters, rather than to consider/assess suggestions for possible stories, coming from chief reporters in the district offices, and/or my colleagues on the news desk.
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As I have said on here previously; regional newspaper circulation has been on the decline for the past 25 years. This is long before the World Wide Web, Mobile, tablets, smartphones and for god sake smart watches….
People are less and less interested in what we do or the news we report on. They’ll look at it in passing online but has been proved up and down the country, they are not prepared to pay anything for it online.
It’s easy to kick out at this round of Management, fact is the problem started a generation ago. No one, management, editors, reporters, sales people has a clue how to reverse what is a sunset industry. It’s ok for the Union to bleat on about saving jobs and ridiculous votes of no confidence that have no more impact than a sixth form protest group, but it’s not going to help or change things; other than to vent dissatisfaction. As businesses Management will squeeze as much out of them while they can, or until such a time as they can make digital work financially. If they can do that then I am afraid the landscape will look more and more like Trinity Midlands now than it used to look 15-20 years ago. That ship has sailed.
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Edward J Smith’s valedictory address to an entire industry is unfortunately accurate in every respect. Those of us left must view ourselves as farriers probably did 100 years ago – here today, maybe, but certainly gone tomorrow. I just wish they’d stop recruiting young people for a career path that ends at a cliff edge.
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Dick, I really don’t think it has to end that way.
Newspapers just need to change, but they still have a future – weeklies certainly do anyway, in my opinion.
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What’s the next step — get rid of all proper journos and fill the websites with material from amateur wannabe writers?
Wait a minute, though……
Welcome to the mad, mad world once known as journalism.
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Jeff: True that weeklies still make money but readership in chronic decline and presumably of a certain age. I’m trying to outrun the tsunami, I guess, and as a mature person (ahem) may just do it. However, I have an inkling you may be right, that there is a solution, but it’s hard to discern details. Sacking reporters and subs from profitable outfits isn’t the way, though. There’s plenty of non-wealth making, non editorial fat to trim off the bones where I am.
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What’s also sad about the decline of the industry, and you see it with some of the comments on here, is the lack of value placed in the skill and training of journalists.
Journalists aren’t just writers, they’re (hopefully) trained to report the world objectively, and you can’t put a price on that – especially now, where it’s so hard to separate the fact from the fiction.
I reported once on some brouhaha involving payday lenders. I personally despise them but the stories were told straight down the middle, with both sides getting a fair share of column inches.
I used to take get called all sorts online for ‘not telling it like it is’, all the while every blogger and their uncle – even MP press releases – were full of libelous guff like ‘pay day lenders deliberately target mentally ill people’, well yeah – prove it and I’ll put it in, can’t be bothered? Just write it anyway.
It’s a nonsense. The more journalism they give away free, the less people value your skills.
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The danger is, of course, that if newspapers give up because the complacent public can’t be bothered & only want to be entertained…what will said complacent public do when the bulldozers arrive on their lawns a la Hitchhiker’s Guide & it’s the first they’ve heard of it?
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I’d like to set a target for the current crop of senior managers who are engaged in wrecking our industry. Either they can start doing their jobs properly and implementing policies which help local and regional papers thrive…or they can seek alternative employment elsewhere.
And if they have the cheek to regard this as an “unrealistic target” then perhaps they should consider not setting such ridiculous objectives for their own editorial staff.
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Everyone else in your businesses has targets. Newspaper Sales, advertising, pre-press, the press, finance, credit control. It’s a business. You’re there to make money. It would be utterly pointless to write something that was only read by 1 person, (although I’m sure many of you have). If you want as many people as possible to survive in this industry for as long as possible, then it is imperative that you know who your customers are, where they are and how many there are. And as journalists you have to play your part in that. Long gone are the days when anything you produced would just sell. (Check out your latest ABC’s for ample proof of that). These targets, unwelcome as they are, have to be introduced. They’re not unprecedented. South Wales’ TMR outpost, Media Wales has had them for a couple of years. I don’t know whether they are built into the contracts of individuals, but story counts, video and picture views etc are very closely monitored and targets reset every month or so. Doubtless the Midlands memo could have been better communicated and thought through, but essentially the idea is sound. This isn’t about selling more newspapers – we’re well past the point of no return in that area – it’s about traffic and as a consequence of that, the sales proposition you can put to advertisers. Don’t forget that the financial model you all operate under will soon have to do without 40% of your current revenue (Cover price revenue), so you all need to get on board with whatever analysis will help you stay in business. By all means continually have a pop at the management, but I think your time would be better spent talking to them and coming up with better, workable ideas if you have them.
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Unfortunately though, the media business model as practiced by TM, JP and the rest is to dream up their Newsroom 4.2 theories in isolation, then to issue them as diktats to their editorial teams.
For a decade and more ‘consulation’ on such ‘strategies’ has been retrospective and meaningless.
Ironic, of course, that these tiers of digital managers always witter on about engagement with their audiences, but never stop to consult, discuss or debate their latest proposals with the (ever-dwindling) number of journalists they employer to deliver them.
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What a sould destroying post by They Think It’s All Over.
Journalists do have targets, they’re usually for story count and quality, and they’re set by their news editor (remember them?) rather than Google adwords.
Modern SEO isn’t about keyword stuffing any more anyway, it’s about quality content – good luck producing some of that under this model.
Yet again we hear the battle cry of ‘get with the programme this is the only way to survive’, except it’s not – is it?
People don’t lament this nonsense because it’s rubbish, they lament it because they can see it isn’t – and won’t – work.
Mobile phone footage of a reporter trying on clown shoes is not, I repeat not, going to save the local media industry.
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Jeff Jones: do you mean that about the clown shoes in your last par? Damn, I really thought I was on to something there. However, your rebuttal of They Think It’s All Over is spot on. Of course we’re in business and need to make money – it’s just that the bods on six-figure salaries (and some really are) supposedly drawing up blueprints for our survival are hopeless and don’t give a hoot about quality. I’m cynical enough to believe most senior managers know this but are determined to squeeze every last quid out of this industry before they walk away to milk another one.
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Again another futile exercise by the NUJ. Why doesn’t the NUJ be held to account?? How many publisher policies that effect it’s ever dwindling membership has the NUJ actually been to change over the last 8 years….
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It’s easy to hide behind a made up name and accuse everyone of being fools on here isn’t it Dick?
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The old vote of no confidence move, eh? Now there’s a powerful shot across the bows.
Honestly, our union has become about as pointless as the papers we work for!
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” By all means continually have a pop at the management, but I think your time would be better spent talking to them and coming up with better, workable ideas if you have them.”
To my certain knowledge managements have been looking for “better workable ideas” to exploit the web and save the regional press for the last 15 years.
They somewhat belatedly sought ideas to save their classified advertising – and failed abysmally.
Now after 15 years this Trinity Mirror scheme is, one imagines, the epitome of out of the box thinking.
If anyone seriously imagines that this represents a viable path to the future for the British regional press, the are, I am afraid, sadly mistaken.
It may buy a few months or years of profits, but that is all. Sadly, the appetite for good regional journalism has been in decline for years. The lack of appetite for bad regional journalism of the kind advocated by TM here, will rapidly gain the momentum of an an avalanche.
In easier times, profit-hungry managements simply balanced the books by hiking cover-prices and advertising rates. The reaction to harder times has been to cut, cut and cut staff whilst attempting to keep up the profit stream with totally unjustified cover price increases for products which are plainly shadows of their previous selves.
The real truth is that newspaper managements have, on the whole, have been complacent, blinkered and unimaginative for the last 25 years at least.
The saddest thing of all is that they are not picking up the bill. That is the final task for the embattled and rapidly declining journos forced by economic circumstance to put up with these management super plans.
Now what’s that phrase about brave men led by donkeys?
Credit where credit is due – They Think It’s All over – but there is precious little credit due to the managements of the British regional press.
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Dick Turpin: Sure is, Dick. What a proper pair of Dicks we are.
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The sad fact is that no one needs journalists. Way back in the Winter of Discontent in 1979 I led my brave band of NUJ brothers and sisters out on strike. At my great age I can’t even remember what is was all about but we were gone for two months. No one noticed. Management rolled up its sleeves as it’s still doing now and waved the newsprint lorries through our picket lines though we still managed to turn away a beer lorry. The paper never missed an edition. It didn’t need to. It was filled with press releases and yes sent-in pix of kittens. The writing has been on the wall for decades. In fact it will soon be the only place where you will be able to find original thoughts and material.
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Jane
I sympathise with your angst there! And I kind of feel the same way, but for me, journalism isn’t something you can switch off. Even if you’re not working in the industry you still have that kind of mind.
I think the powers that be, corporate britain, entities like councils and the police, would love it if the last good journalists packed up and went home, so that’s exactly what they shouldn’t do.
Journalism isn’t a job, it’s a defender of freedom in a so called democracy. Rage against the dying of te light! (Ahem)
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