Thursday April 20th, and a busy day – which included a trip to Harlow College to lecture students on the one-year journalism course. With more than a few years experience behind me, the college authorities thought I might have some useful tips for those about to embark on what could easily be a lifetime’s enrichment in the world of media
You can be judge: here are some of the extracts from today’s talk.
‘ You will be entering a society which, if truth be told, would prefer there were no journalists, or at the very least many fewer than there are today.’
‘ Provincial newspaper managements can expect no doubt to be honoured by the next Tory Government – if not the current Labour Government- for culling so many journalists from the provinces.
‘Those of us with a long , and inglorious, career spanning several decades in the provincial newspaper and broadcasting world can all, almost without exception, point to better times in the past.’
‘The days when a newspaper office, even a small provincial paper like the one in which I am happily berthed, had an editor, a chief sub editor, a deputy chief sub editor, a deputy editor, a news editor, a deputy news editor, a chief reporter, a deputy chief reporter, a sports editor, and so on and so forth and are but distant memories. A handful of us now do the lot’.
‘The accountants have grabbed hold of our profession.
They’ve made more cuts than a disgruntled housewife attacking her husband’s suits after discovering he’s had an affair with the office secretary or the local rent boy!’
‘As a pioneer of free newspapers in the 70s (I edited the Oxford Journal post launch in 1973, making me one of the first free paper editors)I can confidently say not only did I see the future, but I was part of the unmaking of the provincial press as we see it today.’
‘You can, of course, always learn from the past, and you can always learn at least something from those who have trodden a newspaper career before you. My advice? Listen maybe, learn possibly, but unless you do it in your own, as yet to be determined style, you may miss opportunities, excitement and an uplift that no careers advisor could ever envisage.’
‘When you sit down in front of a keyboard, tapping out whatever is required of the moment, you wield extraordinary power.
‘Not necessarily the power to change the world, not necessarily the power to change the Government, and probably not even the power to change the leadership of Harlow Town Council.
‘But you do possess the power to influence, to shape and change perceptions, to grab issues and run with them, and to eventually make substantial differences to the communities in which you live.
‘Woodward and Bernstein may have thought they changed the world with their Watergate investigation all those years ago, but the secret of their work was that it was never one article that did. It was the drip, drip, drip of information filtering out through informed sources and being fed into the public arena.
‘Most journalists, most journalistic campaigns – most successful ones anyway- have been built on their steady, drip drip drip principle.’
‘In recent years I’ve been particularly proud of our campaign to get a new roundabout at a junction where a young hairdresser was killed. We pulled out the stops. Went out and got signatures for petitions, appealed to councillors for action, wrote leaders, and kept beavering away until, hey presto, we got a result.
‘So journalists even in the provinces can, and do, make a difference. You actually make a difference by writing reports on societies that need more members, about people being ignored by officialdom, about the homeless, about the dispossessed and about the wealthy and powerful who think, assuredly, they know and can treat their hold on a town or community in some feudalistic manner.’
‘Pomposity, arrogance, power used badly, greed, incompetence, - those are the targets for you to go after.
You don’t have to travel far to find them either. Whichever paper you end up on, they will be there.’
‘The fat cat councillor who’s got control of the town hall, simply because money has always given him that. The arrogant planning chief who will make your life hell as a resident if you challenge his authority.
The police force that refuses to yield up information in a proper and correct form.
The health authorities who teach all their executives Bengalese or some other such language simply so you, as journalists, cannot translate or understand what they propose to do with your health service.’
‘I’m not sure what qualities you individually possess to bring to our particular party – but happily, and despite the accountants, despite the poor pay, despite the envy you might have for PRs and the like who offer you A Way Out of your financial problems, and a nice little earner to boot, journalism still has much to commend it.’
‘But you need to know how to make good use of your skills. You need to know where to find the best stories, how to develop the best contacts, and how, ultimately, to achieve your journalistic ambitions.’
The difference today however is the fact that the precious commodity we trade in – news- doesn’t start at 9am or finish at 5pm, but it does in fact come to you 24/7. That means a new approach to how we do our job. I would say that a journalist who doesn’t do most if not all of the following during his ‘down time’ will not be adequately prepared for the days and weeks ahead.
Let me give you a typical example of a typical week and you’ll see what I’m driving at:
At home I
- write diary items, and columns either for the paper or for the web
- - write and research bits for my radio work
- - hit Google news alerts constantly to check what is being written anywhere in the world about Fenland (and you’d be amazed at the stories you can find)
- - check out all the local authority, police, and health authority websites. Most reports these days are not sent out in hard copies but are available in downloads. Who on your paper is checking them out? Who is reading them?
- This week, for example, I spent an hour or so reading the Government report on bus fares for OAPs, reading the draft corporate plan for Cambridgeshire county council, running through a massive report on Hanson bricks expansion to their Cambridgeshire depot at Whittlesey, and ploughing through pages of Google news alerts until I found at least a dozen stories I didn’t know about before (2.9 million sale of a leisure centre a good example, or a story about Fenland’s twin district in Maroochy, Australia).
…. ‘how much better it is to arrive for work having read the daily papers on line, checked the local BBC web sites, done a few googles, and read up on anything your council is doing that day. You suddenly become not a junior reporter looking for a comfortable niche but someone whose news sense and ability will be quickly recognised.’
With fewer resources at their disposal, all newspapers are coming under increasing staffing pressures. So half a dozen stories a day, which used to be the norm, is now more like a dozen and a half stories a day.
You need to be versatile, well read, and above all well prepared. A useful motto? Failure to prepare is to prepare to fail.
‘Possibly because of the few years I spent out of newspapers helped refresh the soul – and the bank balance!- but I can honestly say I retain the same passion, the same excitement and the same commitment I had when I first started out as a village correspondent at the age of 13’.
‘So what of the future? Well I’ve got plenty more years left in me yet so I am looking forward to it immensely.
‘But I do see the future as offering a more precarious career for journalists than before. Not only do we have more legislation to worry about – data protection act , privacy laws, human rights, you name it its out there somewhere- but as I said earlier there will be fewer of us doing even more of the work.
‘But that aside I think the biggest challenges will come in doing our bit to break down this bloody, secretive world in which we live – whether you end up working in Luton, Leith, London or Los Angeles.
‘Our biggest challenge is not having too much information ( we surely do have that, the Go East offices in Cambridge, for example, the regional arm of government, have something like 12 press officers , and believe me they will keep you busy!) but discovering the real information that might exactly be what our readers want.
A good example is Ofsted reports. Local councils get them. Their press officers read them, and then spin them out so that, if they are to be believed, every school in the country is fine, every teaching is satisfactory, every attendance record is good, and every classroom observed by inspectors is improved from their last visit. You need to get the source material and check for yourselves. Irritate the hell out of PRs to make sure you do, and then read the document alongside the spin. I guarantee you in 99 per cent of cases you won’t recognise the two versions!’
‘Be prepared to read and keep digging. The Freedom of Information Act is another useful tool in our armoury – use it, and use it again. Keep the beggars on their toes. And if they complain, well tough.
‘They did with me – until I pointed out an email from a local government press officer, exasperated at being denied some pretty useless information from one of her bosses, wrote to me with those immortal words ‘I sense another FOI coming on.’
‘When you sit down to write the feeling can be electric but to see those words in print or on line (who’s got a web blog anyway?) is about as good as it gets.
‘Hope you’ve not been bored. Hope you never get bored with your careers. When you’ve been doing it a quarter of a century and fancy a break, by all means drop out of sight for a while and make some money or have some fun ( yes, I do commend running a pub) but once this damn job is in your blood, nothing is likely to remove it.
‘I haven’t one single regret. Not for walking out of a highly paid job in Oxford. Not for telling one boss that if I met him in a dark alley, I would have no hesitation in breaking his legs.
‘And I most definitely don’t regret not becoming a full time press officer with the Billy Graham Organisation in America or running the press office full time for the Nationwide Initiative in Evangelism – both jobs I did part time many years ago during a peculiar ( yes that now sounds the right word) phase of my wayward life.
‘I might yet regret any indiscretions I may have shared with you this morning.
‘I’ll learn to live with it.’
IT’S not often, I suppose, you get to quote Napoleon but the past few days has seen me drawn to his statement that ‘ the people to fear are not those who disagree with you, but those who disagree with you and are too cowardly to let you know.’
It’s an interesting statement upon which no doubt many within Fenland Council will be pondering as some return from their respective trips abroad (chief executive Tim Pilsbury from Australia, Councillor Kit Owen from his son’s wedding in America, Council leader Geoff Harper from China on a business trip, and Councillor Peter Skoulding from the USA).
For while a united front from the ruling Tory group on the council is the name of the game, the phone calls to my mobile and the interesting engagements with various councillors at meetings, suggests a mild paranoia settling in.
You might think the influence 36 out of 40 seats guarantees on a council would mean something, and in practice it obviously does. But what fascinates me is the lack of unanimity in private, yet the public face remains relatively unaltered.
Of course we have seen periodic breaking of ranks – witness the opposition to the tourist centre closure in Wisbech led by Councillor Ann Carlisle, the portfolio holder actually responsible for such things.
Now we have the added spectacle of Cllr Carlisle opposing the closure of public conveniences – again after she was allegedly meant to have sanctioned their closure during her chairmanship of a review team. Anne told me she didn’t recognise the official and final report of her team published in recent days. Nor, too, did other members of the team and especially not the recommendation that the public should be encouraged to use pubs or council offices in places where the public loos are set to disappear!
Back to the drawing board on that one, but there’s considerable anger simmering away in the background from those councillors wondering how the blessed report came to be written in the first place.
A useful topic, no doubt, for the inner sanctum of the Tory group – the monthly meeting of members where such things would normally get debated – and as usual yours truly was among the topics for debate, in the light of supposed leaks which many would like stamped out, except of course when it suits them, however elevated a role the perpetrators might hold!
For the problem remains unpopular thoughts that are destined to translate into action will always, or should mostly, find their way into the public domain so that they can be tested in the area of public opinion.
Governments at national level do it all the time, and the leak, as practiced through the lobby system, is a wonderful expression of the British way of life, seeking as it does to entertain and inform us through informal briefings that enable untried policies to be floated which can always be consigned to the Parliamentary equivalent of cyber land should their unpopularity or impracticality become obvious.
This is a proposition never quite grasped locally, whether it be the future of Wisbech Market Place (who did leak the fact that councillors recently held a secret briefing in the town to discuss options for parking?) or the costs of re-furbishing Fenland Hall in March, a topic no doubt we will return to once the information from both officers and councillors (now being leaked by the bucketful!) is put into something of an orderly shape.
With a possible Cabinet re-shuffle imminent, the options for change are relatively few but the faithfulness of former leader Alan Melton to Cllr Harper is both touching and sincere- so perhaps we may see the former leader returning to head up a portfolio come May.
Meantime, however, Napoleon’s words continue to reverberate through the corridors of power – and not all councillors are as direct or as lacking in subtlety as Councillor John West, returning to the fray after a month’s suspension for his ill tempered remark to an officer.
Happy to see him? Some colleagues may be but most definitely not all, especially the council chairman Pam Potts who last week urged the Fenland Standards Committee to write to the Standards Board of England complaining that a barrister representing the standards board at the recent disciplinary hearing into Cllr West’s behaviour appeared to offer more succor to Cllr West than they expected!
And should anyone expecting it to be a quiet summer in Fenland, they are liable to be disappointed.
Former deputy leader Pop Jolley is still festering on the sidelines and can reasonably be expected to become a conduit not only for disaffected councillors but also, and surprisingly, for disaffected council officers.
And that still leaves unresolved the perplexities of whether Fenland should sell off its council house stock (don’t put too much money on a yes vote, the narrowness of the first expression of support was only marginally pro) and, of course, the perennial of whether Fenland car parks should still be free. The jettisoning of the recent review team after nearly two years work (no report is now due until July 2007) will stop this becoming an election issue next May, but some councillors are privately furious that yet again Fenland has shied away from a decision.
As I frequently observe Fenland can sometimes be exasperating, often excruciatingly annoying, and occasionally wretched.
But dull? Not in a word in my lexicon.
IF anyone ever wanted confirmation of the fact this is the best job in the world, let me give you a flavour of what it was like in the office on Thursday morning (for those of you reading this in November let me tell you it was Thursday April 6!).
Arrived at work, to find an office bereft of all editorial staff. Holidays, conferences, days off, usual sort of stuff but it all combined to leave just yours truly to be 'seeing off' the proofs of the Friday editions of the Cambs Times and Wisbech Standard.
Our deadline is 10.30am, and by 9.30am all looked in place- excellent lead stories for Wisbech (about pay and display parking) and an interesting refresher on family reaction to the body in the garden murder in March in the 90s. All looked well.
However at the very moment of supping the second coffee of the morning, a call came through to tell me of the arrest that morning of a prominent hotelier in March.
Without embellishing you with details ( they remain sub judice) it was a breaking story that needed to be told.
With no time to put on a jacket, I dashed through the town to the hotel, scouted around for info, spoke to a couple of contacts - who surprisingly had some good info- and then set about finding a photograph of the hotelier.
Duly armed with the info, I dashed back to the office, phoned production with those immortal words ' HOLD THE FRONT PAGE', and started the task of writing the following day's new lead story, processing the pictures as I went along, and re-jigging the page one to give space to the new lead.
Amazingly the story was written, edited, and proofed - and dispatched to our printers- with 90 seconds to deadline. A remarkable turnaround.
I caught my breath, phoned the editor ( who I think secretly enjoyed being called out of a meeting at head office to be told the events of the morning), and sat back and enjoyed, for the moment, the whole experience of late breaking news.
Journalism may not be to everyone's taste. It most certainly would not necessarily be the preferred choice of many parents for their offspring.
And as someone who worked for some years in another industry - after deciding to take a break from journalism- you need to work around the incredibly poor financial rewards the provincial press offers you.
But on days like Thursday it mattered not. The scoop was dug out, written and splashed across the front page - and you can't put a price on that!
PS: Coming soon in the Cambs Times and Wisbech Standard, a list of my choice for the top 20 movers and shakers in Fenland. The men and women who make the biggest waves, wield the most influence, and who carry the Fenland flag furthest and loudest. If you have a suggestion of who your choice might be then drop me an email: john.elworthy@archant.co.uk. If you want to know who makes it the final top 20, then read the paper the first week in June.
ONE the joys of my job is always to expect the unexpected – so little fazes me when someone tells me something that in lesser hands could be construed as sensational. Take for example the woman who phoned me recently, in tears, and asked what I thought about the website which her daughter, who lives in March, had put together. The mother had heard of the website, but only through other family members, and wondered what I thought.
Ok, I said, I’ll track it down. It turned out to be a gothic, ghoulish, nightmarish scenario of some pretty heavy activity, and to give too much detail away in this column might cause offence. However it’s fair to say the activities photographed on the pages I looked at, would not be familiar to most of the population of the Fens.
I phoned back the mother. “So were you shocked then?” she asked. “Er no, not really” I replied. “So it’s it not too bad then.” she replied.
“Well not exactly,” I retorted. “It’s just that it didn’t shock me personally.”
Broadminded? Possibly, but such graphic images shock me far less than some of the information people do persist in telling me about more mundane, but ultimately more important, issues that affect our lives.
There’s a hardly a week goes by without a phone call, a letter or an anonymous email from someone keen that I should know about something that’s happening in our community.
Take, for example, this week’s leaking to me of a document setting out, in 25 pages, confidential details of a proposed re-structuring at Fenland Hall, home to Fenland District Council.
Some 35 jobs are threatened, although most are likely to be redeployed in other, or similar, roles once the dust settles.
How did I know about the document? Well, I have to confess that five full sets of the documents were leaked, and one or two extracts also landed on mine or my boss’s desk. And did the documents reveal anything terribly sinister or significant?
Not really, although part of the document looks set to have to be abandoned now Fenland has decided not to press ahead with the immediate closure of Wisbech Tourist Information Centre and to preserve the status quo pending what will inevitably be a lengthy review. Power to the people? Most definitely but there are other aspects to this document that bear scrutiny.
I’ve read and re-read the document and am amazed by the lengths the council proposes to go to achieve what might appear to a layman to be very little. That aside, what struck me as amazing was during several conversations this past week with councillors, all of whom would have received the document, how few had actually read the document in its entirety (to give an example three councillors spoken to at random a few days ago, including a Cabinet member, had actually realised the council proposed axing its public relations officer).
You have to wonder how affective our elected representatives can be if important documents like this go unread.
It’s not an isolated case. Over the years I’ve been regularly to planning committees and watched in amazement as the odd councillor arrives at the meeting and unseals the envelope containing the agendas and background papers just before the meeting gets under way. The system should demand these papers be read well in advance, but the curious nature of our democratic way of doing things still permits badly prepared members to sit in judgement on important issues such as planning.
Perhaps it’s time we accepted a trimmed down local council, say with 20 councillors instead of 40, but offered the posts as full-time with a salary commensurate with the skills and knowledge required.
And if you believe local councils don’t exercise real power these days, perhaps you should take a closer inspection of the issues now being tossed around in the public domain. They range from the whole future of which land in the future will be developed in Fenland for housing, the council’s response to primary care trust re-organisation, the selling off of council houses, the development of the Nene waterfront in Wisbech, the air pollution in Wisbech and Whittlesey, the growth of houses in multiple occupation being used by migrant workers, the possible privatisation of Fenland’s three leisure centres, and the future of Wisbech Port.
Need I go on?