Readers are being offered free cinema tickets for writing regular columns under a new scheme launched by a regional daily.
The Norwich Evening News is offering the tickets as part of the recruitment drive, which invites contributors to “write regularly or just when you feel like it”.
For every column used, the writer will win two tickets to a screening at City Cinema Norwich.
The newspaper says it is looking for people “with a flair for writing, an interesting story to tell or a strong opinion to share with others”.
The NEN suggests each piece should be around 600 to 800 words in length, and split into two or three sections if necessary.
Suggested topics include the city’s music scene, the latest fashion trends or goings on at Norwich City Football Club – with columnists considered for both the news and sport sections of the paper.
Writing on the paper’s website, assistant editor David Powles said: “We try really hard in our newspaper and websites to represent the views of our readers and this new drive will help to make that happen.
“In a city like ours there must be scores of people with an interesting story to tell, which others would be intrigued to read about. These are the people we want to encourage to get involved.
“The struggles of running a small business, ways to stay fit and active, ideas to improve Norwich are just three subjects I’d be interested in reading about – but there are so many more.
“Please do get in touch if you feel you have something to write about.”
The plan has already attracted some spiky comments from posters on the Evening News site.
One, under the name monkeyman, wrote: “Effectively paying someone £18 to write a newspaper column is an insult. Do you not have any journalists these days?”
Owen Evans added: “Sounds like the EN are looking for content with no cost! Why not employ some professional writers?”
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Sounds like the readers have this ploy sussed! The JP paper I worked for paid people £15 for reviews, which, by the time they’d sat through the event (2/3 hours) then written it, worked out at much less than the minimum wage. And that’s not taking into account their travel costs and electricity. Coming soon – JP inviting readers’ 800-word columns for a portion of fish and chips!
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You couldn’t make it up.
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Actually I take that back, you obviously can.
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maybe Mr Powles could get the public to submit cartoons too
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It’s been a dispriting week … Newsquest deciding it doesn’t need trained photographers, the wide-boys yesterday who thought saps should send them theatre reviews for nothing, and now another gem from the JP stable of ‘accidental comedy’. We’re going to need two news feeds from HTFP, so all the ‘WTF is our industry going?’ content can have its own black-edged section.
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Will the NEN throw in, generously, peanuts, too?
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Perhaps assistant editor David Powles would be happy to exchange his salary for payment in cinema tickets and popcorn vouchers?
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Whatever next? BOGOF at Pizza Hut if you work a late shift? Scan your Clubcard everytime you write a nib? Free haircut for being assistant editor?
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This once very bright regional evening paper is spiralling ever faster towards becoming a weekly and most probably total oblivion as Archant try to prop up sales of the EDP.
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Words stopped failing me years ago….
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MMMMmmmm popcorn.
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Will the last journalist in the UK please switch off the lights!! Why not do the same for editors and editorial directors? “A flair for writing and strong opinions.” Unbelievable.
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One of the suggested topics is “your job or career”. Who’s going to be the first to submit 600 words, split into three parts, on the decline of regional journalism?
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There’s plenty of free, mediocre Mustard spare if anybody wants any??
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How about the quality of the article is reflected in the quality of the film the tickets are for?
The usual UGC drivel will get tickets for 50 Shades…
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This is appalling! Paying columnists with cinema tickets is insulting and degrading. It panders to hobbyists who don’t need the money while sticking two fingers up at trained journalists and writers. Who on earth are the idiots who dream up these ideas?
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it really is a carnival of errors day after day here believe me and
it beggars belief just how desperate things have become that after letting all the good journalists go they are now touting for RGC from what few readers remain of this one decent daily( i have a long memory)
No doubt the top floor johnnies are patting themselves on the back for this latest cost saving which sees the yes men offering free cinema tickets which they get given in lieu of running some free ads for the cinema daft enough to have their name associated with this partridge-esque scheme.
i think the final nails are being driven in the NEN /Archant coffin as we speak
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Soon they’ll be more readers writing for regional newspapers than actually buying them.
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In my 35 years in regional journalism I sat through countless re-designs and editorial initiatives. Oddly, I don’t recall any exec ever suggesting that the way to retain readers was to provide them with really good writing. It seems that the bosses have a blind spot about the most fundamental aspect of the product we are selling.
I’ve done hard news, features, leader-writing and bylined columns, and I can say that opinion writing – be it a pungent column or a theatre review – is one of the most difficult things to get right. Yet newspaper managements obviously feel that opinions are like a***holes – we’ve all got one and we are all equally capable of exercising it. We’re not. Opinion-writing is a rare and hard-won talent and it should be rewarded.
All these daft schemes to garner free ‘content’ will only lead to more pages being filled with crap and more readers feeling that their newspaper is insulting their intelligence.
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Do you have to declare free cinema tickets on your income tax return?
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Will contributors be entitled to free copies or is this a ploy to boost sales to those wishing to impress family and friends with their published words of wisdom?
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How the suits think…….
Readily available special offers on seats at the three main cinemas in Norwich mean a couple of tickets should cost no more than a tenner.
Let’s say 20 untrained, legally risky community columnists provide a weekly average 700 words each to the city’s paper.
That’s 14,000 words of “content” for the price of 40 cinema tickets.
Bottom line: £200 a week, just over ten grand a year.
Just one senior reporter chained to a desk, slaving away five days a week and using every trick in the churnalism manual could match that output.
But he or she will earn twenty grand a year – double the cost of the 20 cheap space-filling rivals.
In the context of putting cans on a corner shop shelf, it’s a no brainer.
In the current economically flawed, dumbed down culture of regional newspapers, it’s the mismanagement of the madhouse.
I can think of a few highly respected regional MDs who would have made decent editors, such was their commitment to journalism.
Sadly, many of their successors, along with some national suits setting group policy, appear to treat editorial values as an irritant on the balance sheet.
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centralise the readership
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@Muker Boy – if you search out the story on the EN website, it seems that they’re not even paying for the tickets.
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I went to see Citizen Kane and it was very good but not in colour and about a man who grew roses and had newspapers (subs please check). Right, can I have my free tickets, please, and a family-size tub of toffee popcorn?
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I don’t know why everybody is being so negative. I for one think Archant should be commended for bucking the industry trend and giving its writers such a generous pay rise.
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I am almost laughing out loud! What a giggle – pay peanuts for the UGC. It’s all you deserve
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This may seem like a cheap way to get columns written, but it’s still more payment than some of Archant’s employees get for writing columns. Many in the past have been expected to write them in their own time for absolutely nothing. I think they would be quite pleased with a couple of cinema tickets.
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Not this again.
Second time in three days that free tickets are being offered to professionals instead of the folding stuff.
Do they think we are idiots?
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Does anyone have a friend or neighbour who can sell some cheap ads in the EN or EDP in exchange for a couple of tomato plants or a second hand jethro dvd?
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Just when you thought it was impossible to dumb down the Evening News any more…
An insult to all those journalists who sweated blood for the Evening News for so many years. Shameful. The final nails.
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Lots of regional papers do not pay reviewers. They don’t even pay their mileage or petrol. It’s probably the biggest scam ever, but a lot of wannabies out there are happy with it! Same with pictures, sadly.
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Maybe Archant should suggest other professions should adopt this strategy. How about:
Medicine – bring your own knife and take out an appendix. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t been trained, no one will notice until the patient dies.
Teaching – You think you know everything about everything, so take lessons at your local school.
The law – Anyone can talk up a storm in court, so why not let Joe or Joanna Public have a go?
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ah, so this is the kind of thing that jeff Henry meant when he spoke of making Archant the leading regional news outfit in the uk.
Good thinking jeff’ If they’re not buying the paper maybe they can write it for us?’
and there was us who work here thinking he might try to dumb UP the company not dumb it down even more with this kind of embarrassing scheme to save yet more costs.
That’ll teach us to believe what the tie less wonders tell us, no wonder morale is on the floor
But at least we’ve been told we are all getting a new standard company email signature so that’s ok then
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Sorry, but to everyone arguing against this, you’re all idiots if you don’t see it.
There are thousands of amateur bloggers up and down the country writing perfectly acceptable copy about a variety of topics every day. Yes, some are complete with gramatical and spelling errors but they are still perfectly acceptable articles.
Why is this acceptable from ‘non-professionals’? Well, it’s acceptable from anyone if they write in an interesting way, talk with authority on the subject and engage with their readers on a personal, social level.
This is what so many of them already do way better than most ‘professionals’ within the local newspaper industry. And guess what, they do it for FREE!
If they’re now going to get something out of it, they’ll be happy and the newspaper gets better content for a fraction of the cost of employing a bunch of ‘professionals’.
I hear plenty of ‘professionals’ moaning about having to fill space and web quotas but see very few of them writing passionately about their interests and engaging with others. I frequently hear ‘I’m working on a novel’ or ‘a series of short stories’ but rarely ‘I blog about x and have x-hundred/thousand regular readers’.
Working for a newspaper no longer makes you an authority. Those days are gone! All it does now is provide you with an additional outlet to reach and engage with more people.
Don’t moan when the amateurs start doing it better than you!
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This is embarrassing. Cinema tickets for the printed equivalent of a banal Facebook status.
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I tend to agree with Oliver. Especially in a city like Norwich, there are going to be plenty of “amateur” critics capable of delivering a pretty insightful film review. Whether the logistical difficulties and unpredictability of dealing with them rather than a staff critic is worth the new voices is another question, but presumably one the Evening News is prepared to deal with.
What I find weird here, actually, is the offer of free cinema tickets. It seems to be saying “look, we know you wouldn’t actually want to write for the local paper in normal circumstances, when you could just blog instead – so here’s something to make the pain a bit more bearable”. And that displays either a lack of thought or a sad deficit in self-confidence.
– former Evening News and EDP staffer and occasional music critic
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@Oliver Yes, they do it for free on their blogs. They don’t do if for free for a publisher that then sells their product without giving them a share of the profits. They also don’t do it to fill pages which would otherwise be filled with professionalism journalism – you know, the stuff holds people to account and that.
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Norfolk ‘n good, I get your point but it’s not quite true. There are plenty of free blogging platforms which are only free because they present adverts which you have no control over to your audience. Besides, what’s wrong with making profit from other people’s work? That’s called business, isn’t it? When did any reporter get ‘a share of the profits’?
I also don’t think that this idea is intended to replace court stories, investigative journalism or sifting through council papers to find the buried treasure. If it does manage to replace a few lacklustre columns in the what’s on guide or irrelevant comment pieces and, in turn, manages to save a couple of good reporters from the axe, I’m all for it!
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@Oliver – clearly you haven’t read to Evening News, where court reporting, council stories etc are increasingly few and far between.
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Oliver . journos always got a share of the profits. Wages.
Every free story, review and PIC denies a professional journalist a job. Sadly free copy is often unchecked and not edited properly, if at all, and papers\websites look a mess.
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I wrote two full page columns per week for seven years, in addition to my daily workload, and was never paid an extra penny, so the cinema tickets would equate to a pay rise. But what an insult to the experienced, fully trained journalists offloaded in three separate purges since 2006.
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Dear nelsons column
There’s so few experienced journalists left at Archant now as all the quality staff have gone that this is the level they’ve had to stoop to to fill the pages of this embarrassing morning evening daily.
And although he’s nowhere to be seen on this story its interesting that the ‘managing editor’ of the NEN makes an appearance on a more upbeat story on HTFP
Delegating nicely there
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Thebes, reporters are a fixed cost. Maybe a few received a Christmas bonus in the good old days, but their wages have never been paid on the basis of how well or poorly a newspaper is performing, hence they have never had ‘a share of the profits’ as suggested by Norfolk ‘n good.
You also miss my point. Yes, free copy is often unchecked, poorly written and littered with grammatical errors but, if it’s engaging, informative and interesting no one really cares – and surely that is the whole purpose of anything a journalist writes.
I do not agree that this type of content puts reporters out of a job. What’s been doing that is publishers’ historically late adoption of online publishing techniques, such as blogs, social media, e-newsletters etc. Instead they’ve been filling pages with boring columns by self-proclaimed local ‘experts’ instead of looking to the wealth of talent they’ve had in their newsrooms.
This has also been compounded by the apathy of some ‘mature’ reporters to try these free publishing methods themselves, often citing the ‘we get paid to write’ mantra. Others, who took the opportunity to carve out their own digital niche, have gone on to develop successful careers in online journalism for a variety of different companies or as freelancers.
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