Unfair competition? Council chapel replies
WE WERE interested to read Jon Slattery’s feature on how the exodus to PR is undermining editorial quality.
We are part of the editorial team that produces Tower Hamlets Council’s weekly newspaper East End Life, which was mentioned in the story. We have become accustomed to reading articles about our paper and our alleged part in the destruction of the newspaper industry. Most of them quote newspaper owners, editors, PR chiefs and media commentators. As ordinary NUJ members, we would like to add a few points of our own to the debate.
The East End Life team are professional journalists, mostly from local, regional or national newspaper backgrounds. Many of us worked for years as editors, subs and reporters on papers up and down the country.
Most of us came here because it offered better conditions than the publications we were working on. Our wages were much improved and it allowed us to provide a better standard of living for our families and achieve a decent work/life balance.
We “jumped ship” because the papers we worked on did not pay “grown-up” wages — try paying a mortgage and bringing up kids on less than £20,000 a year for a 45-hour week, especially in London. It might be feasible if you’ve just left uni or have benefactors who can help you pay the rent while you struggle through on poverty wages. But those options are not open to most.
Many of us are women with children, qualifications for low-status, low-paid jobs in a lot of industries. Working for a local authority allows us flexi-time, decent maternity leave and pay and better holiday entitlement — benefits won by long years of struggle by public sector trade unions.
Low pay on local and regional newspapers has nothing to do with the rise of council publications or the recession. Journalists’ salaries have been pitifully low for years.
Many of the group editors and senior managers on these newspapers, who bemoan the demise of editorial quality, have been enjoying the benefits of boom, whilst squeezing the staff who write the stories, take the photos and sub the pages. We all know this to be true — every month the pages of the Journalist are teeming with examples of poor newspaper practices and fellow members standing up against them.
Our team is 100 per cent unionised, with all of us members of the NUJ and Unison, the union that represents most staff in our workplace. We participate in the campaigns run by the public sector unions, against privatisation, budget reductions or cuts in services; we strike with our fellow council workers over pay and pensions.
So it is a bit dismaying to see fellow journalists try to undermine the basis for our jobs or argue that funding should be cut so our posts will be deleted. If our newspaper ceased to exist tomorrow, would the rest of the industry raise wages and create more jobs in the newsrooms? We think not.
We all have commonality of purpose — we are part of the trade union movement, not a narrow-minded trade association with protectionism at its heart. We are all workers in the same industry. We must stick together to defend the jobs, pay and conditions of all of our members, regardless of who they work for.
We should all strive not to play the newspaper owners’ game — it’s classic divide and rule. If we blame each other for the crisis in British newspapers, we’ll be too busy to see who the real culprits are — those who have profiteered for years off our labours, slashed jobs and driven down wages, only to complain about how editorial quality is plummeting.
If journalists stick together, we have a fighting chance of stopping the rot.
Helen Watson and Claire Rudd
On behalf of 14 NUJ members at Tower Hamlets council