Call of the town hall
The exodus from local paper newsrooms is not just down to redundancies, but also to journalists leaving of their own accord to go into better-paid jobs in PR. JON SLATTERY tells how this is undermining editorial quality
REGIONAL JOURNALISM in the UK has been through recessions before but nothing as bad as the one it is suffering now. More than 600 journalists’ jobs have been cut or left vacant since last summer and many commentators are warning that major players in the industry could collapse under the weight of the huge borrowings they took on to fuel expansion.
As the job cuts take hold the number of experienced journalists jumping ship for a safer and better-paid berths in public sector PR — working for councils, police authorities and health service trusts — is bound to accelerate.
Even when companies like Johnston Press were making 30 per cent profit margins, their journalists were working for far less than they would have been paid in the public sector. Add the new threat of redundancy and the temptation of public sector salaries — and, just as crucially, job security — becomes even stronger.
In London the differential between working on a local weekly and a local authority can be more than £10,000. One photographer working on a council-funded newspaper in London is said to earn £40,000. The education correspondent of a Trinity Mirror regional daily on £28,000 a year recently left to join a local authority press office for £32,000. And the job of head of communications at Croydon Council was recently advertised in The Guardian at £75,000 a year.
No wonder these jobs are attracting high-calibre experienced journalists. There is a danger this editorial brain drain to the public sector will tip the balance, with professional publicly financed PR material filling the vacuum left by under-staffed and poorly paid journalists.
The editor of one council communications department says that its journalists “are writing good stuff. It needs very little editing and can be easily downloaded from the council’s site — but responsible newspapers should hold it up to some sort of testing”.
Miles Barter, the NUJ’s new campaigns officer, was a freelance communications officer for Lancashire County Council for 18 months. He says: “A reporter rang and said ‘we would like to use your press release as a page lead but it is too short. Can you get some quotes?’ They could have got a perspective from someone else, instead of coming back to us. You can tell that some releases have just been cut and pasted into the paper.”
Some PRs say that it’s common for their material to go straight into local papers unedited, particularly on free titles. “We have a good local paid-for weekly but the frees just slap our press releases in untouched,” said one.
Miles Barter also points out that by producing editorial that goes straight into print, replacing the work of reporters, councils are allowing the big groups to cut their staffs even further. He asks: “Why should the poor council tax payers of Burnley and Accrington subsidise the shareholders of Johnston Press and Newsquest?”
Paul Ilett, head of communications at Basildon Council, provoked outrage in the Journalist last August when he wrote that local paper reporters would “find it very hard to fill their pages” without the communications team. “They live on our work,” he wrote.
But while some journalists were angry at the slur, he says most of the reaction to his article was positive, from reporters who appreciate the work of communications teams. “If you pick up a local newspaper a significant amount of the editorial is provided by communications teams working for the police, councils and hospitals,” he says. “Communications do employ people with a journalistic background who understand what newspapers want and know about human interest stories and deadlines.
“The feedback I get from a lot of reporters is that they respect a lot of the work that communications do and do understand that we do help them out.”
A sub on a regional daily — who replied anonymously to Paul Ilett’s article — believes there has been a change in the newsroom culture, whereby journalists do not want to upset local councils because they would risk losing the supply of stories from their PR departments.
“They’ve established a Faustian pact in which it’s ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’. The attitude is if we put the council or the police’s nose out of joint then the boil-in-the-bag pseudo news will be cut off.
“There used to be a pride that if something came from a PR you did your best to find opposing voices and new angles to ‘make it ours’. That attitude has now gone. There is a lack of journalistic nous. There’s no awareness that a local authority might have something to hide. It is just a matter of filling a hole on a page.
“Local papers should not be ringing up local authorities asking ‘have you got a story?’. It is servile. But some papers want to be part of a ‘good news’ agenda promoting their town. They are hand-in-glove with the local establishment. The sense of distance has totally gone.”
Councils are not just sending out press releases; they are producing their own papers, which newspaper companies regard as unfair competition and journalists fear will further drive down the standard of reporting.
For the last couple of years there has been something of a stand-off in east London, between the East London Advertiser, owned by Archant, and Tower Hamlets council, which produces a weekly called East End Life.
The council communications department has more staff than the Advertiser, whose editor Malcolm Starbrook has complained that the money spent on the paper by the council is under-reported. “It has a team of reporters in addition to its press officers. But East End Life regularly prints stories bylined to the press officers.
“When I queried this with the district auditor I was advised that the communications team’s stories are freely available to any publication and East End Life was free to use them. But the ‘stories’, while written in a journalistic style, are merely promoting a party political agenda and do not carry any alternate or opposing voice.”
With the ready supply of information from Town Halls, papers have cut back on their own reporting and have stopped sending reporters to council meetings.
Even PRs complain about this. One says: “I have noticed that the local papers hardly ever send anyone to cover council or committee meetings, preferring to check agendas and call the press team to ask about what happened after the event. Truth is, if they attended meetings they’d get better stories.”
Lynne Anderson, director of communications for the Newspaper Society, warns: “It is probably not an exaggeration to say, in the current economic climate, that in some parts of the country the local authority may become the only source of news.”
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger was even more apocalyptic in his pronouncement last December that the crisis engulfing the industry could lead to city newspapers folding. “We have to face up to the prospect that major cities will be left without any kind of verifiable news,” he said on BBC radio. “That hasn’t happened for 200 to 300 years. I think it will have very profound implications.”
WHO’S TO BLAME for all this? Some argue that the big regional newspapers failed to invest during the good times when they were making big profits and were able to keep staff levels low because they had a monopoly on local news.
A news editor on a London weekly claims: “Newspaper owners got away with savage cuts to newsrooms in the past, when there was no real alternative to them. But with the rise of bloggers and council papers and websites, this is no longer the case, and those valuable eyeballs are beginning to drift away at a frightening rate. I just hope the newspaper bosses will have the foresight to reinvest in the reporters who provide the draw for readers.”
This may be a forlorn hope at a time when the regional publishers’ answer to the economic crisis is to axe journalists’ jobs. But the news editor adds that she does “have faith in the public’s ability to spot propaganda when they see it. However useful the council papers might be for community information, there’s always an ‘aren’t we doing well?’ spin on everything.”
One journalist who has edited two local authority newspapers confirms this: “Some council papers are trying to ape the look and feel of a local paper, but what we do is propaganda. When I report the council’s budget proposals I look for positive stories and don’t mention the £6 million worth of cuts. If I reported that I would be sacked. I don’t tell lies, but I always look for positive stories.”
One council editor says: “Whenever the regime changes the incoming councillors look at the communications budget and cut it. Then, after a few months, they are all running around asking ‘why are we being slagged off in the local paper?’ and invest more in communications and PR.”
It would be wrong to see all newspapers as rolling over to the local authorities’ communications team. PRs acknowledge there are still good papers with specialist local government reporters. In some ways, they say, an investigative, well-resourced local newspaper can help the councils.
Chris Rushton, the former editor of Trinity Mirror’s Newcastle Sunday Sun, who is now head of Journalism and PR at Sunderland University, conducted a research project into local papers’ use of PR editorial. He says: “The research showed that news editors themselves acknowledged they used more press releases than ever before, printed a greater proportion of them unchanged, and accepted that they were a lot better written than in the past.
“When I asked news editors to rank the releases they received, nine out of eleven named public authorities as the best.”
One editor had told him that he used to have four reporters covering local authorities. “Now we have just one — and the rest work for them.”