A regional daily’s chief reporter says his faith in the industry has been restored by recent attempts to let its journalists find stories away from the office.
Sam Blackledge, left, of the Plymouth Herald, says colleagues are being encouraged by editor Paul Burton to go out and find “proper news” despite cuts to resources in recent years which have seen working practices turned “upside down” for those who remain in regional newsrooms.
Writing for The Guardian, Sam admitted that morale is low and staff photographers are rare, while young and talented reporters are becoming disillusioned with the industry.
However, he added journalists are “used to fighting for what we want and ready to fight to defend our vocation.”
Wrote Sam: “The reason most of us become journalists is to uncover information, to dig for truth, to highlight what would otherwise remain unseen. It is not to sit at a desk for eight hours a day, scrolling through Twitter, writing clickbait headlines to chase ever-inflating online audience targets.
“Earlier this year, realising the groove in my office chair was looking more worn than the soles of my shoes, I had something of a professional crisis. I wondered whether the adventurous reporter I hoped I was, who loved nothing more than knocking on doors in search of a scoop, was becoming yet another faceless office drone. But lately my faith has been restored.
“Our editor is encouraging us to get out of the office and spend more time on “proper news”, and we are seeing the results. We are covering some hugely important issues, including the closure of Plymouth’s GP surgeries; a police investigation into financial irregularities at a student letting agency; and worrying revelations about the restoration of a historic theatre.
“The claims in each of these stories were met with repeated denials before the truth – or some fraction of it – eventually came out.”
Sam also cited good work being undertaken at other regional newspapers, including the Manchester Evening News exposing repeated attempts by a health trust to cover-up a damning report into the state of maternity services on its patch.
Sam concluded: “I cannot speak for the people who own and run media companies. They are trying to find a new model for making money from news, and I hope they succeed. Our industry, like that of cinema, is facing an almighty fight for its future.
“But we don’t need special effects, flashy gimmicks or two-for-one offers. We need an army of reporters who still know how to ask the right questions and poke their noses into the right corners. The rest will take care of itself.”
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It’s a sad indictment of a once-great industry that ‘reporters told to get out and find some news’ is in itself reported as news.
When I was a young trainee back in the late 80s, it was one of the first things drilled into us. If we didn’t go out and about on the patch and come back with at least two original stories a week, we got a carpeting and were told we couldn’t consider ourselves journalists (in very fruity language).
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Older hacks have always thought someone would take the credit for re-inventing the wheel. Now it seems to have arrived. Get out of the office boys and girls. Wow!
How many modern journos are asked every single working day “Got any off-diary stories”. In another world, I was, especially by a very hard to please bunch on an evening paper newsdesk.
For those who don’t know about “off-diary” these are stories that you bring in to the office yourself without the news diary or the news editor telling you what to do.
Problem is you need reporters living locally in the community who know something about it and I do not see too many of them in my neck of the woods. None actually.
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It’s so irritating that whenever a story like this appears on HTFP, that we await the inevitable comments below “when I trained in the 60s”, “when I trained in the …” we did things this way, that way… “young people today don’t have the skills, the drive, etc. etc.”
Really? Because all the young journalists I know spent a LOT of money to be a journalist and once becoming one they are badly underpaid, badly demoralised by the companies they work for, and their work and character is under 24-hour scrutiny from anonymous know-it-all on Twitter, who love to observe how useless they are.
What we would have given to work in bulging newsrooms, based IN the towns our papers covered, with it’s own editor and team of subs, a team of photographers, separate reporters for court, council, crime, schools, health, each local patch. Not competing with 24-hour news, with everyone having a camera in their pocket. Give our generation that scenario, the time, the resources, and the respect and we would be bringing in off-diary stories left, right, and centre.
It’s funny because the people “who trained in the 60s” etc. created the system we have now, the training programmes, oversaw the downfall of newspapers, can’t even log into Twitter etc. never mind understand how it works and how it could be utilised, and now they are first to say how useless young reporters are now.
Maybe try fighting for us if you love this industry so much.
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