PA story was ‘inaccurate, astounding, ridiculous’
HAS IT really come to this? Fed up of not getting recognition and high membership at PA, you decide to run an article complaining about staff being asked to keep the kitchen tidy, Sky News being on the TVs and people not being able to leave early.
Apart from making the Journalist, and the NUJ, a laughing stock among the news subs at PA in Howden, the article also makes the members up here feel that you, our union, have belittled our efforts, our work and our skills, just because one disgruntled ex-employee has an axe to grind.
I am really offended that my union’s publication has branded my work as a “McJob”. With any company, you can find things to gripe about, but is it really just to moan that people are expected to arrive in time to start their shifts on time?
If a sub, as your correspondent claims, just shovels wire copy onto template pages, then they are not doing their job. If your anonymous correspondent did that, then he was letting his own journalistic ideals down, and creating more work for their colleagues who would have to do the actual work for them
A lot of the complaints made seem to be about having to be a sub-editor. Maybe the job, and not the employer was your correspondent’s problem.
I have no idea what reaction you hoped to get from the staff on the ground floor of the Operations Centre in Howden, but I am guessing it was not laughter, mocking and ridicule for a very petty and poorly executed hatchet job.
Nathan Walker
Howden
AS A FORMER employee of PA, who in the past two years has worked in the Teletext department of its Howden operations centre, I might be expected to have read “The chicken shed” and seen in it a horror from which I felt fortunate to have escaped.
It is therefore quite astounding to me that I do not recognise anything of the “battery hen atmosphere” of “McJournalism” described by the piece.
A piece indeed which is riddled with inaccuracies — from the claim of high staff turnover to the reported absence of natural light — and the bizarrely wayward contentions as to what is acceptable conduct for members of staff. For a company to be condemned because subs are not allowed to spike stories without consultation with the chief sub and for the fact that they do not have a right to leave work half an hour before the end of their shifts is ridiculous.
There may be valid criticisms to be made of PA, but they are not the fact that TVs on the newsdesk are tuned to news channels or that kitchens have signs about cleanliness.
The journalists who work in the Teletext department are often the same journalists who will work on the PA wire. These are excellent and highly skilled journalists who do a complex and demanding job and who I always felt it a privilege to work with.
The opinion of a single anonymous source should not have been a basis to malign these journalists as having “McJobs” and I hope readers who may have construed that the distorted viewpoint of the article was accurate will note that it is not an opinion which other former employees of PA share.
Jonathan Haynes
London