A former union rep at the regional daily has given a frank appraisal of the state of the industry, claiming it is “gutting itself.”
In an interview with the Media Reform Coalition, former Yorkshire Evening Post journalist Peter Lazenby described regional journalism as a profession which is “completely in crisis.”
Peter, who led several strikes at the paper, said that when he began working at the YEP in 1972, there were more than 200 journalists working across the Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post.
When he left in August 2012 to join the socialist daily the Morning Star, there were just 60.
Said Peter: “The industry has been under sustained pressure for several decades, and it’s no exaggeration to say that regional journalism is now a profession completely in crisis.
“Some of the best stories I ever got, started out life scribbled on the back of a beer mat in the pub talking to some local character or other.
“I interviewed the last professional mole catcher in Yorkshire in a pub in the market town of Otley,’ he says.
“We used to dispatch a reporter and photographer on spec for three days to the Yorkshire Dales, or over to the east coast to talk to fisher folk and people working on the docks, just seeing what we could pick up – and as a direct result of that the most wonderful stories used to occur.”
By the time Peter left, however, the job had changed almost beyond all recognition.
He said: “Due to the proliferation of television channels and the dramatic growth in new media due to the rise of the internet, both advertising money and sales revenues have decreased substantially. And this has only been exacerbated by the financial crisis.
Peter said that local papers were still profitable, with UK residents spendinf £690 million a year on regional and local papers.
But he added: “Over the past two decades newspaper proprietors’ strategy has been to wring as much profit out of papers as possible before eventually closing or selling them on. It amounts to an industry gutting itself.”
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Peter’s comments bring back memories of my cub reporter days at the Coleraine Chronicle. At the time, in the early 1990s, we had one reporter covering the Ballymoney edition and she was always tied up with council stories and the like. Although I was based on the Coleraine edition, the Editor often encouraged me to go out with the Ballymoney photographer on his jobs (I lived in the town). More often than not, we came back not only with pictures – and the full story in the bag – from the job, but just by talking to people I’d pick up little gems that made some cracking human interest stories. The best one I remember was by pure chance. We were driving through a housing estate and spotted an eccentric looking woman walking her cat on a lead. We stopped and she was happy to give us her full life story and an explanation why she walked her cat. To her, it was just the same as having a dog, so why not, she thought. And it turned out she wasn’t really an eccentric, just a bit of a character and it made a nice colour piece for the front page. After a while I was granted permission to take the work computer home and spend most of my time out in my patch and write the stories up as and when. I thought nothing of knocking out 500 words at midnight and going straight to bed. It’s amazing what you pick up on the ground.
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Never met the bloke, but recall the name from NUC conferences, the YP and suchlike for many years. Hard to disagree with his thesis.
Would certainly make a change for a regional publisher (or even one paper) to invest in its titles, rather than the incessant and dispiriting rounds of cost-cutting, followed by middle-management reshuffles and then grand announcements of ‘a new media strategy, followed by all of the above.
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Pete Lazenby speaks a lot of truth here – and he speaks from experience, as he was a phenomenal NUJ rep in his time at the YP and YEP. We all know readership has plummeted, and other media channels have taken market share away, but it’s the proprietors’ mad pursuit of profit, without properly investing, which has hastened their titles’ decline. If they’d woken up earlier to the threat from the online world, held their nerve and invested sensibly both in print and web, they need not be in the perilous position they are now.
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The Yorkshire dailies from Leeds used to pick up excellent hard news and feature stories from places like Scarborough and Whitby, some of which would be up followed by the nationals in Manchester. Many readers in the Leeds circulation area would spend their main annual holiday on the East coast so they were always interested in what was going on there.
One old sub now long dead used to fondly recall a competitor paper, the Leeds Evening News. At lunchtime, the sub editors there used to pile into somebody’s car and go along to where they could drink Ramsdens Yorkshire bitter (long gone). One of their number, a former miner, regularly downed five pints at lunchtime and could still hold his pencil during the afternoon’s copy subbing. I honestly don’t think this is an exaggeration, though I believe the air often turned blue while the print room overseer stood waiting for copy.
There was a great sense of comradeship, partly I think because many of the journos had been in the forces together and had come through the war.
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Peter is right to note the impact on regional publishers of the “proliferation of television channels and the dramatic growth in new media.” I also tend to agree with GDK’s view that publishers might not be in such predicaments if they had “woken up earlier” to the online world.
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For years, senior management in regional papers has been made up largely of former ad reps, accounts clerks etc who had no knowledge of, or respect for, the editorial side of the business.
They have traditionally regarded journalists as an expensive luxury whose input had no positive impact on the bottom line. The strategy for decades has been to cut, cut, cut…usually in the editorial department.
As a result, the industry is in the process of disappearing up its own rear end. Soon, there will be nothing left of it. The culprits will then disappear into well-pensioned retirement. Sad but true.
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