A City student on his work experience sentence disembowels the health of British local papers

November 07 2007

When you're on a journalism course, they tell you certain things about the local press. It's all experience, they say. It's a great place to start out. You can work your way up, like generations before you.

The reality on the ground, though, is a disaster – a disaster on a scale that few fully appreciate. I just returned from a year doing a tour of the country's local papers, and I can tell you that 99 per cent of local journalism today exists in a twilight world where reporters never leave their offices, never question anyone or anything, and desperately want to leave their jobs at the first opportunity. When they should be pounding the pavements looking for stories, they're pounding their PCs looking for job vacancies – please, I'll take anything, just get me £20k, a quiet life and a place on the housing ladder.

Modern local paper editors are never, ever spotted in the wild – they've got a corner office and email, you know – and news editors, chosen for their managerial viciousness, spend their days cracking the whip and enforcing deeply dubious news judgements. They are incredibly desperate to fill their pages – stories that barely even deserve 50 words are turned into 500-word monsters, full of the kind of quotes no-one would ever actually say: “we thoroughly welcome this development, and feel the holistic partnership will be invaluable for all stakeholders”. Press releases are not only used in full, but with as much spurious padding added as can be gleaned from the website of whichever bore-a-thon quango is involved, plus a 'fact box' nicked from Wikipedia for good measure.

At several papers I was simply given a seat at the table and carte blanche to throw a lot of shit at the wall and see what stuck. Turns out it all stuck – they published every word, usually unchecked and unsubbed. At one paper I had to make sure not to store anything unfinished on my computer, for fear they'd nick it when I wasn't looking and use it as the page four lead.

The news diet of today's local papers is easy to sum up:
1. Press releases. Of course.
2. Schools – especially well-resourced private schools with their own photographers, and double-especially if they have some colourful face-painting pix.
3. Self-publicists who do a charity 'fun run' or 'coffee morning' once a week, raising approximately £10 a time. If they have a pic they might even make front page.
4. Random cranks who call in to complain about something, or write green-ink letters with their phone number scrawled on. The game here is to get them to make as many wild allegations as possible while taking great pains to disguise the fact that they are, in actual fact, completely and utterly barking mad.

Rare is the local reporter nowadays with any contacts whatsoever, even in the police – crime coverage consists of PR-stunt 'raids' and rampant abuse of the word 'crackdown'. Even death-knocks have been replaced with the noble art of going on the poor stabbed teen's Facebook and/or Myspace and indulging yourself in the delights of copy-and-paste. No muss, no fuss.

One news editor put me to work 'investigating' a story that was entirely a figment of his imagination, based on a Facebook group with about ten members. I reported back that the story didn't actually exist, but was sent back out and told to be “more persistent”. It was at this point that I got on a train and never came back (the news editor in question was kind enough to denounce me on his blog).

In fact, I've walked out of papers more than once, and I'm no prima donna – the saddest thing about it has always been the feeling that the real reporters were almost jealous of the unpaid workie with the freedom to stand up to the managers' bullshit.

One of my darkest days was when a paper put me to work writing puff pieces about its advertisers, to run with no advertorial labelling whatsoever. When I asked, as you do, about the separation of editorial and advertising, I was told tersely that “we don't believe in that here”. Oh, and could I write all the “readers' letters” while I was at it? Ta.

So what's the problem? How did local papers get into this state?

Contrary to popular belief, it's nothing to do with the big 'threat' of the web – local paper advertising is in rude health, and few papers have anything resembling an online-only competitor for local news. Local papers are, in fact, massive cash cows – all that's happened is the people at the top have realised they keep being cash cows whether they're written by journalists, press officers or unpaid work experience kids. I was asked to come and work for one paper that employed a single part-time 'editor', with all the other desks kept free for unpaid work experience. I declined the placement, lovely as it sounded, mainly because I couldn't afford the train fare.

Local papers today are bought and sold like pieces of meat, to the point where most reporters seem only dimly aware of who they're working for this month, but conscious that the company's internal career path to a national paper just disappeared.

There is no 'multi-skilling crisis' – a monkey can use a simple web publishing system and take their own digicam photos – but there is a severe penny-pinching crisis. Out-of-the-arc computers that are broken enough to be an active impediment to reporters' work, telling reporters to bring jumpers instead of turning the heating on, making people bring their own teabags because having a machine is 'too costly' – all these are symptoms of budgets that have been cut to near-zero. Once you take into account the amount of unpaid overtime most reporters do, it's pretty easy to argue that most earn less than minimum wage - and once you factor in costs like travel and lunch for work experiencers like me, we're not just working for free, we're actually paying to work.

By Anon

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