August 26, 2022

How I defended first person pieces – and what might happen next

It stood there gleaming in the office kitchen.

All shiny and new, it had no visible buttons or levers.

But this was the machine that was going to make me – and my colleagues for the week of my latest Work Experience for the Elderly – a cup of coffee.

Eventually I got to grips with the hover technique needed to operate this smartest of smart taps.

After nearly flooding the newsroom kitchen in the process, I tweeted like a grumpy old man.

What’s wrong with kettles, I asked in confected rage.

‘You should write a first-person piece,’ one office wag said. ‘I tried the new tap in the kitchen and this is what happened.’

I declined the offer.

But it was a bit of a standing joke that virtually every experience any journalist ever has could be material for such an article.

You don’t have to look far to find reporters writing about everything from giant burgers to food shopping and from transport services to unusual costumes.

Some of the ideas look like they’ve unaccountably survived Alan Partridge’s Monkey Tennis process, while others are genuinely inspired.

My London lifestyle reporter Amber-Louise Large found herself the butt of sarcasm on Twitter this week over the subject matter of some of her pieces.

But – the occasional slightly patronising headline aside – there was some great content.

I absolutely love the process of finding new things to write about – of panning through the mud of rubbish suggestions to find the nuggets of gold.

So her piece on how long it takes for an all-white outfit to get dirty on an average day in the capital was genuinely refreshing. 

I’d have been proud if one of our students pitched that at a news day.

Now that can’t be all a newsroom does.

There are stories to be told, and wrongs to be righted at every turn.

And, having spent a number of days in various newsrooms this summer, I’m under no illusions as to how difficult it can be to do challenging, time-consuming journalism.

You can see that today with the closure of The National Wales, an experiment launched with spirit and chutzpah by one of my favourite editors, Gavin Thompson.

But if there is one thing I know, it is that journalists have to be visible.

And Amber is certainly that.

The new Google regime is rightly forcing newsrooms to prioritise new, original and genuinely useful content.

So doing exactly the same as everyone else isn’t going to cut the mustard for much longer.

That ought to present newsrooms with a fantastic challenge at a time when politicians such as Liz Truss are keener than ever to undermine a media that holds power to account.

Like a pound shop Trump, she is never more pleased than when she hears people say ‘I don’t know who to believe any more.’

It’s a challenge taken up by the brilliant-looking new News Futures project at UCLAN, and one at the very centre of the wonderful MacTaggart lecture by Emily Maitlis.

One of her action points for the future for our industry is to for it to show its workings more – to explain why we do things, and how governments can make life unjustifiably difficult for us.

In a smaller way, that means editors and journalists meeting their audiences – ideally face to face.

I’ve visited two newsrooms in the last week which are geographically absolutely at the heart of the communities they serve.

We’ve also seen a newspaper get coverage of tragedy pitch-perfect in Liverpool.

All of that matters.

I am unashamedly a stuck record on this subject, and have been for many years.

We are never going to shift the dial on trust in journalism until more people actually knowingly breathe the same oxygen as a journalist.

If those first person pieces are getting journalists out of their offices and out of their spare bedrooms, that’s a small step in the right direction.

But it must lead to constructive engagement, too.

The goal must be for more of the public to come into meaningful contact with the newsgathering process – and for them to realise that it isn’t a machine, but actually real human beings doing their best to do a good job.

When more people realise they can achieve positive change in their communities in partnership with their local media, we will have begun to turn a corner.

And I’ll raise a battered newsroom Sports Direct mug of tea to that.

February 15, 2022

Journalism’s a team sport: so the team needs to be together now and again

I started today with a bit of a trip down memory lane.

For just over half an hour, I was part of the Gloucestershire Live morning meeting.

In my previous role as an editorial trainer, I used to say I ‘collected’ conferences: I never missed a chance to sit in on the various get-togethers where newsrooms discuss stories and plan their days.

Today’s wasn’t just fascinating for me: I was watching and listening to the meeting alongside three of our second years.

Every week, a group of our students work in a mini-newsroom on campus as part of a placement with our friends at Gloucestershire Live.

They get a great insight into the latest thinking on analytics, social and search, they get extra feedback on their writing over and above the huge amount of guidance we provide, they get valuable CV material, and they get the chance of regular bylines.

I worry sometimes that the traffic in terms of effort might be a bit one-way.

Getting our students’ work onto one of Reach’s websites can be time-consuming, as can be answering their questions and giving that feedback.

But almost without exception, it seems to be worth it.

The crucial thing is that every week, our students are joined by a Gloucestershire Live journalist.

And every week, that journalist – whoever they are – seems to be glad to be here.

They get some things that can be quite rare for many journalists: company, a place to go – and hopefully a bit of laughter.

Plus – we hope – the occasional warm glow that they’ve helped to develop other people’s skills and confidence.

We’re hoping we can make the scheme a permanent fixture – and not just because it’s good for us.

This week provides more evidence that journalists are social beings who need others around them.

Research by Middlesex University has confirmed that the huge shift to working from home driven by covid has had a damaging impact on journalists’ mental health.

I’m really lucky in that I can occasionally choose whether to work from home or campus.

I can be incredibly efficient at home, cracking through marking or preparation with few interruptions and no tempting refectory a few hundred yards away.

But it’s not where I have the best conversations, or the best interactions with my lovely colleagues and my equally lovely students.

Last summer, I spent a week keeping my hand in at the Swindon Advertiser. It was great to be in a real newsroom, surrounded by real journalists to entertain and be entertained by, and to educate and be educated by.

We didn’t have to cope with any huge breaking news that week.

But I can see now – particularly thanks to a fantastic session with our first years and Edd Moore from Plymouth Live talking about covering the shootings in my home city last summer – how complicated dealing with a big developing story can be when everyone is working from home.

Newsroom leaders have come up with some amazing ideas to keep their staff feeling good about their jobs while working from kitchens, bedrooms and dining rooms.

But it’s so difficult to replicate the spontaneity and serendipity of a lively newsroom.

It’s clear that newsrooms aren’t going to return in the way that we’ve been used to them.

But we need a flavour of them on a regular basis.

Journalism is about people. It’s a team sport – it always has been, and it always will be.

So finding ways of bringing journalists together to breathe the same air again has to be a priority.

Money is never going to be the main motivation for journalists to stay in a job. 

But camaraderie, a sense of shared purpose and a feeling that you’re part of a bigger whole?

That just might.

And those things can’t be achieved quite as effectively in kitchens, bedrooms and dining rooms.

August 16, 2021

Journalism’s the best job in the world. So why don’t more people want to do it?

There was a slightly worried tone to the email.

It was from an editor who had posted an advert for a new reporter.

They said they’d had little response, which they described as unusual.

Sad to say, it’s becoming far from unusual in my experience.

I think I had a similar email every day last week.

And having recently spent a week working for titles where recruitment can sometimes be tough, and having seen the sheer volume of jobs on offer at the moment, it’s no surprise that some editors are struggling.

In certain areas, the life of an editor seems to be a revolving door of departures and arrivals, with the search for new staff almost a constant presence in their lives.

I used to love interviewing for new reporters.

But the joy was that it was an occasional treat – an event that might happen two or three times a year in a team of a dozen.

What I loved even more was seeing reporters develop and grow – benefitting from training, support and opportunities.

Of our most recent cohort of graduates, only two have for the moment gone into news reporting.

I’m delighted for them, and they’re doing well.

But that’s out of 17.

Why so few, particularly when there are so many jobs out there and so many editors are desperate for staff?

Well, let’s cut to the financial chase.

There is still at least one publisher starting trainees on as little as £17,100 a year.

I had originally written £17,500 on the basis of my knowledge of one major publisher, but have now discovered another is paying even less.

When our students can easily get two-and-half grand more than that for entry-level social media, PR or content creation roles, who can blame them for turning up their noses?

That’s before you add in the weekend shifts, the constant buzz of WhatsApp groups, abuse from readers, and – for some – the fact that they’ll be enduring all this in their rented bedrooms.

And there’s no getting away from the fact that the reporters of today work far harder and longer than my generation ever did.

Aside from these potential deterrents, we do need to acknowledge that a lot of the young people we teach feel a lack of connection with local and regional news.

Despite our very best efforts – and local and regional news runs through our approach like lettering in a stick of rock, they don’t always quite get it.

And it is a strange beast at times, as a much-praised new book that I’m looking forward to reading, Panic As Man Burns Crumpet by Roger Lytollis, shows.

Ironically it was a reporter I spent some time with while doing my annual work experience for the elderly stint who’d had no formal uni journalistic education that best summed up the joy of community journalism.

He told me he loved people, wanted to tell their stories, and make a difference in the town he called home.

Nowhere has the need for community journalism – the sort where reporters live and work in the neighbourhoods they cover, and look the people they write about in the eye – been better shown than in my home city of Plymouth in the last week.

There has been a stark contrast between the content, timing and tone of the reporting by sites such as Plymouth Live and ITV Westcountry, and that served up by some national titles whose staff have clearly done most of their journalism from behind a computer in London.

It’s been unbelievably hard for those local reporters – particularly as one of their colleagues lost a relative in the tragedy – to walk the delicate tightrope of illuminating yet sensitive coverage.

But I’m also sure that they have also experienced a sense of pride, team spirit and belonging that will carry them through.

There is no journalism quite like regional journalism.

We launched a new campaigns and investigations module in the last year to motivate our students to make a difference with their journalism, and we have introduced them to inspiring reporters, broadcasters and writers at every turn.

But we and the industry clearly need to work harder to light the right fires.

Some of the extraordinarily welcome new jobs on offer in the last few months have come from the major regional publishers launching new sites in areas where previously they have had no significant presence.

There are a lot of tanks on lawns at the moment – and the hope is that all boats will rise on the tide of investment. 

Sorry, I’m mangling my transport metaphors.

Weeklies editor John Wilson recently took aim at some of the new entrants to his market, saying that trainees should be protected from what he called poaching operations.

I can understand his frustration – and I know he really does care about his young reporters.

But trainee journalists can’t pay their rent with kind words, or buy food with a contract promising help with exams.

The tragedy is that, in too many cases, that training and support may not be there anyway.

I had a heart-breaking email recently from a young and talented reporter who quit their job because they see no way of ever qualifying as a senior.

Too often, young journalists have to navigate their own way through the NCTJ system, hassling for shorthand teaching, before simply running out of energy.

Those that manage it after a couple of years are rewarded with a pay rise which takes them to £21,000 – the sort of salary they should have been paid from the start.

For decades, the industry built its business model on a belief that young staff will suck up poor pay and conditions because the media jobs market is so competitive, and that if it doesn’t work out with one reporter, there’ll be another coming round the corner in a minute to take their place at the interview table.

If the difficulties so many editors are now facing don’t show the madness of that business model, nothing ever will.

Some of the new, specialist roles which have been advertised in the last few months have come with more imaginative salaries.

But general reporters – the people who form the beating hearts of newsrooms, real or virtual – are still stuck in a financial time warp.

We’ve developed some great partnerships with local employers in recent years.

But we – and other courses which also have fantastic links – could go deeper.

It makes sense to me for regional publishers to forge three-year links with our students, selling the joy of community journalism and wooing them for future employment, while ensuring their salaries really are competitive.

Editors or other senior figures should be alongside us as we develop the attitudes and skills of a new generation, selling their industry and opening eyes to the wide range of roles now being offered by major publishers.

I’d like to give some thought to developing that kind of relationship, and am about to send the first email to get the ball rolling.

It would be time-consuming for the companies.

But far less time-consuming, I would suggest, than the constant merry-go-round of job ads, interviews and resignations.

In the end, it’s not just reporters who end up poorer in the current system.

Society and democracy do too. 

March 9, 2021

Defending the vast majority of journalists and journalism means acknowledging that some of what our trade does is unacceptable

There are 80,000 of us in the UK.

That’s more than twice the population of, oh, I don’t know, let’s pluck a totally random and royally irrelevant place out of the sky….Windsor.

Journalists are all different.

We do different things, cover different stories, have different relationships with impartiality, and different relationships with accountability.

And yet there is an organisation that seeks to speak up for us all.

It’s one that has been a wonderful defender of the freedom of the press, a supporter of the regulator IPSO, a campaigner for better access to the courts, a fighter for freedom of information, and a passionate critic of those who seek to muzzle investigative journalism.

I’ve never quite got round to joining the Society of Editors, but I have long admired its work.

Until this week, that is.

Because in the last couple of days that passionate critic role has gone into an outrageous overdrive.

It’s done a great job in bringing together all those disparate groups of journalists – in condemnation of its actions.

As Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance updated MPs on the best way to beat covid, dozens of us were doing our own social distancing from a blunderbuss, tone deaf statement put out by the SoE in response to Meghan and Harry’s sit down with Oprah Winfrey.

That interview was packed with criticism of the British media, and particularly its barely-disguised hostility to the Duchess of Sussex and even more barely-disguised hostility to immigrants.

That way in which elements of the national media can pander to the lowest common denominators in our society in a corrosive and damaging fashion is a phenomenon that can be seen from space.

Everyone knows it happens. Few of us look it in the eye and challenge it.

Before the SoE issued a statement denying that the British media was bigoted and racist, plenty of journalists – particularly those in the regional sector – had already begun that distancing process.

‘Don’t tar us all with the same brush,’ was a common theme on Twitter.

The reporting – and particularly the commentators and headlines – that can be seen in the Mail and Telegraph is a world away from the whites-of-their-eyes journalism practised by tens of thousands of responsible writers and broadcasters. People who live with the consequences of their journalism, because they live in the communities they write or broadcast about.

But that indignant statement – bristling with bruised pride and confected anguish – provoked a whole new set of ‘not in my name’ clarifications from journalists from across the spectrum.

And confirmation of the society’s inability to read the room came a day later when its executive director Ian Murray endured a car crash interview with Victoria Derbyshire.

This was a whole new orchestra of tone-deafness.

A white middle-aged man shouting at a woman questioning him about the racist bullying of another woman.

He might have thought he was defending journalism.

But that interview – like the statement before it – has done a disservice to our profession and the majority of the people in it.

That penny now seems to be dropping, with a hard-hitting letter to the SoE from senior journalists of colour, and some internal soul-searching among the society’s board.

Defending the vast majority of journalists and journalism means acknowledging that some of what our trade does is unacceptable.

The SoE should be driving up standards, with a new tide of ethical journalism that lifts all the boats, and makes it impossible for anyone to keep dredging the depths.

Otherwise the very best of journalism in this country will forever be tarnished by the very worst.

November 5, 2020

What’s the point of an inverted pyramid?

It’s an instinct that’s as old as the human race itself.

The first people to walk the earth used stories to teach their children, to keep themselves safe – and to make each other smile.

Nine thousand years on, those ambitions are still at the heart of the BBC’s famous mission statement: to inform, educate and entertain.

And they were at the heart of an uplifting online festival that our media school staged this week.

Telling Tales 2020 brought hundreds of students together to be inspired by journalists, sports stars, film-makers, actors, writers, musicians and digital artists.

Each of them in their own way is a storyteller.

Yesterday we gathered seven of our graduates together to discuss their career journeys that have taken them into broadcasting, social media, PR, regional journalism, video-making and marketing.

They were all beautifully complimentary about the teaching and support they received here.

But are journalism tutors like us teaching the right storytelling techniques?

In the last few weeks – as I have done for the last five years, and as hundreds of journalism lecturers have done before me, I introduced our first years to the concept of the inverted pyramid.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

For anyone outside our eccentric industry, the phrase would mean nothing.

After all, what’s the point of an upside-down pyramid?

What indeed.

The argument is that a story should gently peter out. The argument is that it should pack its first few paragraphs with all the juiciest information. The argument is – often – that there should be argument, with the to-ing and fro-ing of a row woven into a story’s structure.

And the argument, finally, is that a sub – those unsung heroes of print newsrooms – should be able to cut the story from the bottom up without having to spend too much time checking that vital details weren’t being lost.

To a generation blissfully unaware of the other meaning of words such as stone, leg and hamper, this rightly sounds like madness.

And they’re not the only ones.

I spent an hour recently having my own instincts turned as upside down as the very best inverted pyramid by the inspirational Shirish Kulkarni.

He has incredibly wise and striking things to say about a lot of journalistic life, particularly about the media industry’s continuing complacency over diversity.

And it’s that tendency for monolithic, white middle-class male thinking to dominate news judgements that also fuels his desire to tell stories in different ways.

Ways which are more digestible, natural, accessible, and constructive.

Rather than stoking rows between politicians, can we shed more light than heat by downplaying their contributions to stories?

Rather than repeating the kneejerk, painting by numbers, coverage of annual fixtures like the Budget or the January rail fare increases, can we explore the issues involved in a more constructively challenging way?

Rather than covering marginalised communities only when they launch photogenic protests, can we bring them into the centre of our conversations?

Rather than turning off younger audiences with our outdated journalese, can we enthuse and engage them to be more participative citizens?

And rather than offer predictable takes which only serve to reinforce polarised positions, can we gently provide better information to anaesthetise conspiracy theories?

Shirish is a master storyteller himself, and so there’s no better way of understanding his mission than reading it or seeing him talk about it yourself.

I’m still not entirely ready to ditch the inverted pyramid altogether.

There are some situations and stories – emergency incidents spring to mind – where it’s a useful way of concentrating the journalistic mind.

But it shouldn’t be the only news storytelling show in town.

July 31, 2020

Baby steps and eating elephants: how to help journalism students become employable

There’s a famous Chinese proverb that says a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.

On our uni course, we have our own version of this, which involves the only slightly less well-known concept of how to eat an elephant.

I regularly tie myself up in inappropriate knots at open days and interview days by asking this question of a room where I can guarantee utterly bemused vegans will be present.

It literally becomes the elephant in the room, until I explain what the hell I’m talking about.

Which is the importance of breaking big, intimidating things down into tiny, digestible pieces.

It’s about baby steps. It’s about the beautiful principle that small is beautiful.

It’s an approach we’re now having to apply to the challenge that is at the heart of everything we do: getting our students into a position where they can find work that will satisfy both their soul and their bank balance.

The environment into which we were about to release our oldest students has gone from slightly chilly in places to arctic wipe-out in the last four months.

Placements abruptly stopped, newsrooms have closed, publications and websites have been shut, and the number of media jobs now under serious threat is well into four figures.

We’ve laid on as much help as we possibly can for the resilient, hard-working, tech-savvy, lovely band of people who received their final results a few days ago.

One of the things we did was organise a Zoom Q&A session with employers and freelancing experts, which produced some really useful takeaway points.

We’ve now got a year before the Class of 2021 go out into the big wide world. And it’s a world that may not be a whole lot more hospitable.

The BBC won’t be offering placements again until next April at the earliest – a month before the formal end of our academic year.

There’s little sign of other mainstream newsrooms getting back to normal, with most non-production journalists expecting to continue to work from home for the foreseeable future.

I asked a friend in another part of the industry when he expected to have anyone other than non-essential staff back in his office.

“I don’t think anyone knows. We’re all waiting for a vaccine, aren’t we?” was his understandable reply.

Another friend told me of a regional reporting job vacancy that attracted no fewer than 60 applications. 

The conversations I would regularly have as recently as a year ago about smaller newsrooms’ inability to generate decent quality interest when advertising jobs are, I suspect, well and truly over for the moment.

So what’s to be done?

How do we break up this huge mammoth that stands between young people and a hopeful future?

How, equally importantly, do we ensure there are journalists and other communications specialists at a time when explaining the world to itself has never been more crucial?

I think the answer has to be by providing bite-sized opportunities.

Mini-meetings with key media employers. Micro-placements and projects, many of them internal or with charities. Tiny training blocks, working your way through the Google News Initiative suite of micro-courses. Gentle networking on social media, especially LinkedIn. 

Making the most of the webinars organised by great people such as the Freelancing for Journalists podcast team. Regularly and engagingly blogging. Finding news stories and content in every situation. Establishing targeted mentoring arrangements – something we hope to do for all our third years next year.

We’ve always told our students to treat every encounter as an opportunity.

Now it’s vital.

An industry contact told me this week that whenever he was emailed about work placements in the old world, he would always offer the chance for the hopeful person to have a quick tour of his newsroom, and meet some of the staff.

Most of the time – 19 times out of 20, in fact were his words – he never heard from that person again.

I’ve been helping one of our students today as she debates the best way to seek help and advice from some of the journalists doing the kinds of jobs she’d like to do.

Be brave, I said. Be brave, and interested, and interesting. And ask specific, knowledgable questions, rather than sweeping ones about general advice.

The help is there, even if the jobs may not be yet. 

Getting young would-be journalists to their goal is going to be difficult.

The opportunities won’t be so big and grand and conventional.

But vegan or not, they will eat that elephant.

Baby step by baby step, micro-opportunity by micro-opportunity, we will try to get them there.

(Picture: Denise PS)

June 23, 2020

No pictures: why editor was right to refuse to publish police appeal images after Colston statue removal

They used to drop into my newsdesk inbox several times a week.

Sometimes the pictures were dramatic and vivid, sometimes laughably bad.

Sometimes the information was detailed, engaging, helpful and comprehensive. Sometimes almost every question that any vaguely curious human being would have went unanswered.

Sometimes they were bang up to date. And sometimes they were a month old.

Those that fell in the last category were often the ones I never used.

But when it came to police witness appeals, it was rare for us to turn our noses up.

It was only annoyance at being expected to publish details of a crime that happened several weeks ago but which had only just been passed to the press office that stopped me from time to time.

It was the idea that actually informing the media about an incident should be some kind of last resort activity which stuck in my craw.

There are times, however, when there’s no sweeping an incident under the constabulary carpet.

One such event is the toppling of the statue of slave trader and benefactor Edward Colston in Bristol.

It couldn’t have been more public, or more extensively covered.

Rightly at the time, the police commander at the scene let events take their course, allowing the statue that was an insult to generations of black people in the city to be knocked off its perch, dragged to the waterside and pushed into the harbour.

But there was always going to be a reckoning. That same officer acknowledged that an offence had been committed, and that the police would want to try to bring the people involved to justice.

And so it was that earlier this week, Avon and Somerset Police released a collection of images of those people, after the city council confirmed it believed a crime had been committed.

You’d have seen them on BBC Points West, and in the Western Daily Press.

But you wouldn’t have seen them in the Bristol Post or on its Bristol Live website.

Not for the first – or last time – editor-in-chief Mike Norton has proved himself the thinking person’s editor.

As far as he was concerned – and coverage of racial issues in the city is never far from the top of his in-tray – he had no duty to help police find those responsible.

In a piece for the site he said the investigation into the statue damage was “at odds with what the majority of Bristolians believe should happen.”

Clearly neither he nor any other media have any obligation to publish any police appeals.

I don’t know how much soul-searching other media did before deciding to use the images.

I hope there was some, because this was a highly unusual crime.

So is it for the media to pick and choose which incidents it decides to help the police with?

Or is that principle already well established?

I think the answer to both questions has to be yes.

Every hour of every day, media organisations make decisions about which stories to cover, which sources to turn to, which issues to prioritise.

And there is a rich and noble tradition of editors refusing to act as agents of the state or the police.

It’s a fascinating debate – and one which pitted former colleagues of mine against each other.

But news websites and their editors have to read the rooms of their audience.

Mike has publicly admitted that there have been times when his paper has been on the wrong side of history when it comes to its reporting of the city’s BAME community.

This time, I think, he was quite firmly on the right side.

June 17, 2020

How to find work in a hopeless time

Scour the current vacancies sections of most major publishers today, and you’d be done before the kettle’s even boiled for the cup of tea you were going to have while job-hunting.

On the Reach site this morning is one editorial vacancy – for a local democracy reporter in Surrey: a role funded by the BBC. And on the Newsquest site: nothing. Nada. Nowt.

And the picture isn’t hugely different in broadcasting, where there is still uncertainty over at least 450 jobs at the BBC, along with today’s request for voluntary redundancies, and the magazine sector, where firms such as Dennis and Bauer are tightening their belts.

This time last year, more than half of our graduates had found work in the media by now.

This year, none have.

The pandemic has crippled spending on advertising, played havoc with buying and shopping habits, and turned many assumptions about working life on their heads.

So what can our newest graduates – and our existing students – do to put themselves in the best position to get work?

We hosted a Zoom session with some of our key regional media employers – and dozens of our students – yesterday to find out.

Here are my main takeaways:

Be resilient

Editors from online, TV and radio all spoke of a rise – well documented elsewhere – of abuse against them and their staff. On Facebook, in the streets, and beneath their own stories, reporters are at best being questioned, and at worst threatened or physically attacked.

Newsroom leaders are now rightly trying to call time on much of this, but there’s no getting away from the fact that you do need to develop a thick skin in this job.

And that’s not just for protection against the audience you’re trying to serve; it’s also to deal with a whole range of other knockbacks, from the battle to get work in the first place to unhelpful press officers.

Now, more than ever, the ability to pick yourself up and try again – preferably with a smile on your face – is crucial.

Be versatile

All our editors and freelancing experts agreed that the ability to tell stories across multiple platforms was key.

So it’s not enough to be a good writer: you need sharp video and editing skills, and an understanding of what’s going to work for different social media platforms.

One advised our students to spend their summer ‘honing their skills’: filling the gaps in their skill set. Look at job adverts – if you can find any – and see how you match up with the skills and abilities being demanded. Whether it’s finally crossing the shorthand line, developing your confidence with InDesign, or practising Facebook Lives, it could be time very well spent.

Be productive

One of my mantras has always been to keep writing, to keep the muscles active and the words flowing.

No journalism student should be without a blog.

And my heart is frequently touched by the emotional honesty – and neat turns of phrase – in some of our students’ first person pieces.

But our panel was clear that this is base level blogging.

What’s more valuable is blogging that brings in expert sources, new voices, and fresh insights.

Unless your experience or situation is really unusual, the personal sort of blogging is unlikely to be your passport to commissioning or employment success.

It goes without saying that good ideas – ideas that no one else has had – for content are gold dust. Always. So keep thinking, keep riffing, keep talking to friends and family about what’s on their minds.

Which perhaps is a good place to mention pitching: our magazine friend stressed the importance of answering the question ‘why should I write this piece?’ You should also answer that other hugely significant one: ‘why would anyone else read this piece?’

And stress-test your idea by coming up with your own headline. Never mind how would you tell this story, make sure you understand how you’d sell it, too.

Be prepared

We spent a good amount of time discussing how to prepare the ground for success at getting work – whether that be landing pitches or getting jobs.

These were the key thoughts:

• social media: clean up your accounts, or have professional ones. All employers will audit your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts – so make sure they shout ‘engaged, interesting but impartial professional’ from the digital rooftops. It’s obvious that Ofcom-regulated organisations such as Sky are now cracking down on what their staff can tweet about, while the BBC has launched its own review of its staff’s social media use.

• CVs: make sure you tailor your CV to the role or part of the industry you’re targeting. But have your own website or blog as well, and make sure it’s up to date.

• networking: the editors on the call stressed they were always prepared to give up 20 minutes of their time to talk to students to help them get into the industry. But there are some ground rules. Be clear on exactly what you want advice about. Make sure you’ve researched the brand, station, or publication. And make sure they remember you for the right reasons. And then gently follow up, to keep reminding them of how good you are. Join Facebook groups for freelancers, and follow people such as Sian Meades-Williams and the Freelancing for Journalists podcast on Twitter.

Be optimistic

Good luck to anyone looking for work at the moment. Don’t give up. The qualities you’re now having to show are precisely the ones needed in the job itself. And of all those qualities, optimism and positivity are the ones we all want in the people around us.

May 29, 2020

Trump, Johnson and the Barrow thugs: When journalists are threatened, the blame goes right to the top

It’s nearly 3,500 miles from Washington DC to Barrow in Cumbria.

And they’re very, very different places.

But, for one journalist in the industrial town famed for its nuclear submarine production, there’s a clear line between her community and the White House.

For there in the Oval Office, sits a man who daily seeks to undermine trust in objective and responsible reporting.

A man for whom truth is a fluid, malleable concept, and who has at every turn attacked any media organisation which dares to even mildly hold him to account.

Trump makes it his business to whip up hatred of journalists, to encourage his voters to treat all reporting, any reporting, with at best suspicion, at worst contempt.

Slightly closer to Cumbria, in Britain’s own version of the Oval Office, Trump’s equally eccentrically-coiffured mate Boris Johnson is now pursuing a very similar path.

Neither Trump nor Johnson have cast doubt on the reporting of Amy Fenton of the Mail in Barrow.

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They haven’t directly whipped up the crowds of protesters who have demonstrated outside the Mail’s offices.

And – devoted Twitter user though he might be, Trump hasn’t been posting evil social media messages about Amy and her family.

But I do think we can draw an arc from Trump’s cynical undermining of honest reporting to the horrendous agony now being suffered by Amy.

This is a professional reporter who has been forced to move out of her house purely because of her dedication to chronicling the truth on her patch – and her publication’s refusal to break the law.

The Mail is under fire for not writing the sort of story that bigots want to read.

Talking of bigots, Boris Johnson clearly has form in encouraging really nasty behaviour. Leaving aside his willingness to supply information which would have helped his mate Darius Guppy get a journalist beaten up, his comments likening women wearing the burka to letterboxes  have been blamed for fuelling racist attacks.

His Downing Street regime has been ramping up – to use one of its favourite phrases – a war on challenging and investigative journalism.

Whether it’s the Guardian, the Sunday Times, the BBC, Good Morning Britain, Channel 4 News, or the brilliant Jen Williams of the Manchester Evening News, Johnson’s press office has been willing to sweep aside convention to launch lengthy but flawed rebuttals, and to personally target individual reporters.

All of this has come to a dangerous head with the Dominic Cummings affair, where the Number 10 press office chose not to respond to requests for a comment for weeks on end, and then attempted to grab the moral high ground over the very limited areas of the storytelling where speculation had got the better of the facts.

That wasn’t their finest or most transparent hour.

But on Monday, Cummings had the chance to give his account of events, direct to the British people, unfiltered by the media.

Those British people were not, by and large, impressed, with 71 per cent of them concluding he had broken the lockdown rules.

Let me just repeat that. After hearing directly from the horse’s mouth, rather than from the media, most people came to the conclusion that Cummings had behaved wrongly, and more than half decided he should leave his job.

And yet on Wednesday, his alleged boss went specifically out of his way to labour the claim that much of the reporting had been false. Two days after Cummings had set out his case, Johnson was still trying to undermine reporting from five days before, still trying to shoot the messenger.

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On the one hand, it was like some ham-fisted attempt to rewrite that Two Ronnies sketch where the contestant answers the question before last.

The comments came as Johnson appeared before the Commons liaison committee in a performance that could quite easily be portrayed as comedic.

But, leaving aside the fact that these are matters of life and death, Johnson’s media strategy is also far from a laughing matter.

It is straight out of the Trump playbook: a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters so that the public feel that no reporting can truly be trusted.

Nothing gives Johnson and Co greater pleasure than hearing the public say: ‘I don’t know who to believe.’

For them, that’s job done. That’s earth thrown in the face of scrutiny, compromising clear vision and thought.

It becomes, as Paul Lewis of the Guardian has described it, government-endorsed trolling, and it’s a slippery slope that leads us to the rather more savage version conducted by thugs in Barrow.

However much some of us despise this country’s leadership, we take our moral tone from the top.

If the word in Downing Street is that it’s ok to attack journalists for telling the truth, we shouldn’t be surprised if on the streets of Barrow, that message is taken literally.

 

May 4, 2020

Be busy and be positive: how journalism students can best survive this crisis

This time last year, the first of our third years had found themselves jobs.

They’d all pretty much completed placements, emerging from their work experience in newsrooms, broadcasting studios and PR offices with renewed confidence and focus.

They were tying up the loose ends of their studies, cracking on with final year project features, surviving the odd wobble, and getting us to review their CVs and career plans.

We were laying our own plans, for one of the best weeks of the year: a final news week, culminating in a One Show-style TV programme, online magazine, and podcast, followed by a gloriously emotional end-of-course celebration.

It felt good. We’d brought them as far as we could, and we were sending them into a world where we had confidence they’d be able to stand on their own two feet.

Things look very different 12 months on.

Our latest final year students will be graduating into an economic recession the likes of which most of us have never seen before. Placements suddenly ceased just before Easter, and some final year projects have had to be hastily redesigned as face-to-face interviewing became largely impossible.

There has been no lack of support for that unlucky cohort: we’re doing regular video personal tutor calls and advice workshops, and we’re lining up plenty of industry guests via Zoom.

But it’s not quite the same.

Our final news week will, we hope, still offer our students the chance to showcase their journalistic skills and instincts, but it won’t quite have the same magic. And that end-of-week, end-of-year, end-of-course, celebration will be a virtual one, where my mission is to recreate that very special and heady cocktail of mixed emotions on Zoom.

And then what?

I always tell students they have life membership of the Paul Wiltshire Support Service. We’re there to advise on job applications, office wobbles, and careers crossroads for as long as graduates need our help.

And this year, that after-care will be needed like never before.

So, what advice is there for those third years – and for all our students at the moment?

The biggest danger is to put yourself into some kind of deep freeze, to go into summer hibernation.

The real world is so difficult – particularly if your travel plans are also on hold, if you’re worried about family members, or if you’re apart from a girlfriend or boyfriend – that hiding under the duvet for the rest of the year seems like a decent plan.

My mantra has been to encourage all our students to cast off those duvets, and to be as creative and productive as they can for the next few months – at least.

SO:

  • Write – blog about life in lockdown, review stuff you care (or don’t care) about, and find news stories about the impact of our new ways of living in your area.
  • Create – make video shorts, launch podcasts, and produce radio shows.
  • Consume – read, watch, and listen to journalism. The more you read, the better your writing should become.
  • Keep your skills fresh – get that shorthand speed, really get to grips with those InDesign short cuts, master that video-editing technique. Even, and I know it’s a cliche, learn a new language.
  • Network – keep in gentle touch with people you’ve met on placements or news days, interviewed for features, or heard from as guest speakers. Tell them what you’re up to, send them links to blogs and videos. Take an interest in them and their work.

That might involve offering some work or time for free for the moment: it’s not something we’d normally recommend, but these are indeed unprecedented times.

I’ve asked Twitter and Facebook to help with some advice, too, so here goes…

 

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In short, then, be busy, and be positive.

When someone asks What did you do in the lockdown?, you need to have stories to tell.

As always in job interviews, you need those little stories that, just as in the best features, can be employed to tell bigger stories.

This crisis will change the media industry, and not always in a good way. Offices are likely to shut and products will close.

But there will be jobs again.

More than ever, the need for people who can tell stories clearly, and who can connect and communicate, is crucial, and it will be in future. That’s certainly true in public sector PR, but it will be true in many other media fields, too.

When an employer looks for someone to join their team, you can be pretty sure of some of the qualities on their wish list: emotional intelligence, resilience, creativity, determination, resourcefulness – and a sense of humour.

Those are the attributes I’m encouraging our students to show now. These are the muscles that need their own daily exercise regime. They also happen to be the qualities that all of us need to get through this madness.

We don’t know what the future holds, and it’s not healthy to dwell too much on the long-range forecast at the moment.

None of us knows what that awful – and increasingly inaccurate – phrase ‘the foreseeable future’ means.

But one day, one week, one month at a time, we keep going.

And one day, it will be better.