Storm Ciara’s impact on communities across the UK prompted regional dailies across the land to splash on the weather yesterday.
The storm’s effect on localities across the country over the weekend provided some eye-catching photographs for the regional press, with floods and winds taking their toll.
The storm has already claimed the life of a man in Hampshire whose car was hit by a falling tree.
In North Wales, the Daily Post examined the “chaos” wrought on its patch – showing how different towns and villages had been affected.
At its Swansea-based Reach plc sister daily the South Wales Evening Post, the “trail of disruption” was highlighted.
The Burton Mail showed how one house in particular had borne the brunt of high winds.
A fallen tree also appeared on the front page of the Hull Daily Mail.
At the Huddersfield Dialy Examiner, the effect of flooding on its patch was conveyed.
It was a similar story at the MEN, which also ran with a headline describing the “chaos” caused by Ciara.
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Storm Ciara highlighted how little actual journalism and reportage happens at a local level, certainly in my neck of the forest anyway .
Calls for readers photos and stories, Twitter and FB posts asking ‘ have you been affected?’ and countless copy and paste pieces lifted wholesale from the public’s own Facebook posts or police PR shorts was the sum total of local reporting throughout the day here in the east.
The opportunity to fully cover this major weather story by going into the communities,villages and out with the emergency services, or even obtaining first hand quotes from those affected was completely missed in favour of desk bound ‘journalism’ pulled together from the warmth and comfort of an office in all likelihood far removed from the places where the news was actually breaking.
This underlined for me just how far the quality of local reporting has fallen, not the fault of the journalists who know nothing else,rather those who’ve cut staffing to the bone which has resulted in lazy and cheap news gathering supplied by the very public they’re supposed to be serving.
That isn’t journalism but in the last few years it appears to have become the norm.
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Well said, From the Word furnace. I’m also guessing that anyone who wanted comparisons between this week and the storms of, say, 1987 and 1990, might have been disappointed, since the staff who lived through them or, indeed, knew about such events at all have long since been “let go”. All too many people on weekend duty wouldn’t even have been born then. By the way, this isn’t being ageist; rather it’s a comment on the limited age range of editorial teams now and the obvious resultant limited scope of stories.
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