Sign of the times part 2

A recent job ad spotted on HTFP.

Editor
Location: Market Rasen
Lincolnshire Newspapers Ltd
Do you want to join Johnston Press, one of the largest
regional newspaper groups in the UK, at editor level?
We are looking for a new editor for the Market Rasen Mail – a great opportunity to make a mark at a time of exciting challenges for a paper that is going
places.
The Rasen Mail is the heart of its community, a bustling market town in the Lincolnshire Wolds.
There is a very small team – and we need an all-rounder who is comfortable with reporting, editing and running the diary.
Applicants need to be NCE-qualified seniors who want to take the first step
on the management ladder and who have the right attitude to get things done.
A great package including company car awaits the successful applicant.

Please correct me if I am wrong here, when they say "editor" do they actually mean dogsbody who is prepared to do absolutely everything because they sacked everybody else.
This is supposed to be an editors level job yet they are asking the succesful applicant to do basic reporting. WTF?
I am all for lending a hand when things are tough but this is putting it in as a job requirement.
The clue to this ad is right at the bottom. Must have the "right attitude to get things done". Or in real English must work their nuts off doing every job under the sun for fuck all money because, despite being the "one of the largest regional newspaper groups in the UK", we seriously under resource our paper's editorial departments because we don't actually believe them to be important.
I imagine the company car in question is in reality a pair of roller skates and a push.
The only places this newspaper is going is straight down the shitter.

Masters of our own demise

Back in the old days journalists used to have a strange device called a contacts book.
In it they would put the names and telephone numbers of interesting local characters, councillors, gossips, cops, lawyers, judges, tattle tales and other ne'er do wells.
The journalist would use another outdated device called a telephone and ring said contacts on a regular basis to get stories to put in the paper.
Some would give you regular stories, others were less forthcoming and normally motivated by petty spite, personal ambition or greed.
We called it basic reporting.
Nowadays we call these people 'community correspondents', we are their 'mentors' and the whole thing has the twee title of 'citizen journalism'. It's all part of the great hyperlocal plan - reporting down your local street.
But shouldn't your 'local' paper already be covering each of the areas.
Oh hang on, didn't all the reporters get fired already?
Is the real reason why Captain Desperate and the rest of his management flunkies are so keen on getting more local coverage because that is what people actually want?
Hire a couple of journalists then you dumb fucks. One journalist will produce more stories per week than your army of drivel-typing curtain twitchers.
Stop trying to get Joe Public to do my reporters' jobs for them on the cheap just so when the next round of lay-offs come they have some copy to stick between the ads.
Thankfully, at the moment, the majority of community correspondents are a complete waste of time.
They sign up write one piece about their holidays, or why they think President Obama is a great/bad President, then never log on again.
Others are prolific but equally irrelevant or worse utterly reckless with no regard for defamation laws or balance. A handful, a rare, rare breed, actually do come up with one or two stories every six months.
Back in my day these last guys would already be in my contacts book rung on a regular basis and filleted for their information. But maybe that's just me.
Is someone a citizen journalist if they come in with the splash one week but are never seen again? Or is that the internet equivalent of a ring in?
I have no qualms with Mr Smith posting his results of the Tiddlywinks Championships or the Railyway Model enthusiasts telling us about their AGM. Good luck to them and the six other people interested in it.
But creating people who may be able to replace me come the next revolution is utter madness.
I will no doubt get some flak from my forward thinking internet buddies, but while you are training up the next wave of 'citizen journalists' to do your job for free spare a thought for all the hacks already laid off last year and hope 'citizen journalism' doesn't take your job in 2010.

Bulls**t translator

Journalism for the teenies. What they say and what it really means. Feel free to add your own.

Hyperlocal - Talking to people in the local area and getting stories from them. Just like we used to do when we had staff.

Web first - We really have no idea how to make money from the web but by banging up every story as soon as it is written eventually someone will write us a large cheque. Won't they?

Multi-tasking - Why can't you take pictures, do a video, write ten stories for both online and print editions, sub them, stick a headline on them, upload them and stick them on a page, get the teas on then deliver the paper on your way home? Lazy cunt.

Community correspondents - Curtain twitching wannabe journalists who lose interest once they realise they have to actually produce stuff on a regular basis.

Advertising downturn - What do you mean people want to read actual news stories in their local newspaper?

Media Hub - How many people can we cram into a shoebox building and just how far away from patch do reporters have to be not be laughed at for calling themselves local?

Sub-editors - Waste of money. Who needs to have a good looking paper that attracts the reader's eye when we can get the trainee reporters to slap it all up into a template?

Libel - An inevitability

Web Manager - An expert in cut and paste. Probably a journalist but not necessary

Stories - A rare beast sometimes seen in newsrooms but not actually necessary any more with the advent of emailed press releases

Pictures - Out of focus, badly framed, low res images sent in by utter idiots to highlight some awful shit that only they care about (see stories) Used to be taken by photographers.

Citizen journalism - A concept created by an utter twunt who probably worked in advertising before moving up the ranks to become a bean counting tosser (see stories and pictures)

Pay rises - As elusive as Lord Lucan. If McDonald's workers and cleaners can live on 12k a year what is your problem?

Newspapers - An inconvenient but necessary vehicle that global hyper mega corporations use to bleed local towns dry by claiming they care when they really couldn't give a shit.

Photographers -An unnecessary waste of money now that mobile phones take pictures. Who needs to see heads in pics anyway?

Internet - Like newspapers without the fussy printing, distribution and high cost base of newspapers. If only the greedy wankers could make real money out of it! (see web first) Great for porn.

Pay attention to the small print

A very interesting debate at Westminster took place yesterday regarding the rise of the council newspaper.
I agree that council newspapers are a very real threat to local papers and should be either banned or forced to actually run as a business on the budgets they claim to cost and see how long they survive.
But a more interesting question emerged during the debate. What are the management companies going to do to improve the newspapers they already own.
Many complaints were levelled at the lack of cover of local politics in their local paper and the demise of the High Street office, both evidence of cost cutting to increase profits to the big companies.
The best point was made by John Randall a Conservative MP from Uxbridge

In my borough of Hillingdon the demise of local papers has been going on for some time. .........One of the problems has been chronic lack of investment in local newspapers.

Large multinational or national companies have come along and diminished the number of journalists, and diminished their skills, to the point where the Gazette series, which is the one we have in the London borough of Hillingdon, has its offices in Chertsey, which to all intents and purposes is a million miles away.

The people one talks to - the reporters, of whom there are one or
two on the ground, operating with a laptop and a digital phone - tend not to understand the area, so people are not interested in what is in the newspaper. Advertisers like me do not think it is worth while to advertise, so things go down the pan.

The local newspaper is a fundamental part of the whole. The internet will never replace it, because many people, including many of the more
vulnerable people, do not have the internet. The local newspaper is a very important thing, and we must do something, but it is no good just blaming one set of things.

Bravo.
Dear management, please wake up and realise the fundamental flaw with your business plans (if you actually have one). It is not so much due to changing tastes or new competition that revenues are dropping but largely down to creating a largely irrelevant product with your ridiculous cost cutting measures.
If council newspapers get the heave ho will the management dickheads put that extra revenue back into the papers. Will they fuck.
They will just carrying on bleeding the market dry until it's time to discard the husk the local paper now is and move on.

Bye bye naughties, hello teenies (well tweenies first)

So it's hello 2010 and goodbye to rotten old 2009.
Now we are finally out of recession, according to our illustrious leader Mr G Brown esq, will the management have to come up with new excuses to trim back newsroom staff this year?
For I fear we will see more job cuts over the next 12 months despite also seeing a marked increase in advertising revenues.
You see, that increase just won't be enough for our bean counter bosses obsessed with forecasts, budgets and profit and loss pie charts. It will probably fall short of the money we were making before the credit crunch and recession and so other ways to balance the books will have to be found.
And that will mean we will lose more jobs to satisfy those greedy wankers who rule our lives and fuck the effect it has on the quality of our papers. Long term, shlong term, they say as they secure their jobs for another quarter by culling us.
What this industry needs, now more than ever is investment. Let's stop the downward spiral into extinction.
How about telling the shareholders to fuck off for six months and ploughing the profits back into the company? I am pretty sure advertising, editorial and distribution departments could spend this money frugally.
Sure, share prices will drop for a while but the net result will be long term growth and security for our industry - and increased share prices.
A couple of reporters in the newsroom would help immensely in increasing our coverage and improving the quality of our products.
Proper photographic coverage, court reports we can actually pay for, weekend/night rotas back on.
More better trained ad sales staff (who actually understand what they are selling) would go a long way to increasing monthly profits.
Increased circulation for frees, in-town promotion for the paid fors.
If everyone is reading your paper, people will undoubtedly want to advertise with you. At the moment I am hard pressed to find someone who gets a regular copy of my papers through their door.
It's not like I'm asking for better wages or anything, I realise Christmas miracle time is over.
In 2010, let's start treating our newspapers as a pivotal part of the community rather than a means to take as much from local businesses as possible (until they realise their advertisement is getting to about 10 per cent of the population).
Too much to ask? I live in eternal hope.

In support of the Ocker..........

In 1969 a brash Aussie took over The Sun newspaper and changed the face of British journalism, for good or ill.
This "Dirty Digger" was derided and scorned by media pundits and the Establishment and his paper branded a "shit sheet" and a "six month wonder".
Rupert Murdoch now faces similar derision and naysaying from the pundits, self-styled"experts" and Establishment figures for his decision to set up a paywall for his online products.
"It won't work, " they bleat. "No-one will put up with it," they cry. "Everything on the Internet should be free," they wail.
Well I say fuck them, I hope Murdoch succeeds, not least for the fact it will secure jobs in journalism for a long, long time.
After all, if our websites really can make as much money as our paper products they will have to be treated far more seriously than the one-man-band operations many of the big "web is the future" corporations are running now.
If anyone can do it Murdoch can and, if he does, you can guarantee all of the whiney bitches who are knocking him now will jump right on board.
My concern is how to get Joe Punter to stick his hand in his pocket every time he wants to view a story or indeed pay a subscription to one or more newspaper sites.
I like the idea of micro payments. How about one pence an article?
It appears to be small beer at first but on a concerted web search session you can soon rack up the cash.
Twenty articles a day and you have hit the cover price of the Sun.
Or double it, treble it even and you are still only talking about three pence a click.
Offer a daily unlimited access for a discounted paper cover price to reflect the lack of printing, paper and distribution costs on the web.
Monthly and yearly subscriptions offering archive search, exclusive offers and articles can be available at even heavier discounts.
Grouped products, ie all News Ints libraries globally, available at seriously low prices. Lexis Nexis charges a fortune for its newspaper cuttings service and gets hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
It is not beyond the realms of possibility to create a similar system for much less cash
The real problem comes with the copying of articles onto other web-sites, blogs, forums etc.
I think this has to be tackled head on with an extremely aggressive team of lawyers stamping down hard on plagiarism and cut and paste merchants. The cost initially would be large and, yes, there would always be those "freedom fighters" out there determined to buck the trend but overall it could have an effect. Super injunctions, anyone?
Google alerts and other links go straight to the site and a charge is made per link, with some of that fee going to the original forwarding site.
Internet geeks will have a whale of a time with this "censorship" but ultimately news costs cash to produce.
If all you want on the web is a bunch of navel gazers commenting on comments that other commentators have made then carry on arguing about paying for your news feed.
Without cash we journalists stop doing what we do because we get fired.
Forget the rather ridiculous notion of citizen journalism taking over because it is a fallacy to believe your average punter would bother to do what we do on a daily basis for shag all.
There are some great hobbyists out there but the majority write libellous, biased chod or shit about what they did on their holidays.
And tell me those hobbyists wouldn't love to start making some cash for what they do.
I think the single biggest obstacle facing pay walls is not an unwillingness to pay for news but it's the method of payment.
If you could click on a link to a story that automatically debited your bank or online account by one pence, would you really umm and aah about the cost. Probably not.
But you can guarantee you will not pull out your credit card and type in your number, address and other details in order to read about the latest upset in Emmerdale.
If the newspaper organisations can put aside their differences and create a universal payment system that allows one click debiting from an online cash account (something like Paypal would not be too far off the mark) with free vouchers offering significant initial funds to use those accounts, I think the plan to charge could just work.
After all if senior management had seriously thought about paywalls before deciding to give away the farm online in the first place would we really be having this discussion?

To those incapable of snow driving.....grrrrrrr*

If you feel not confident or incapable of driving in the snow please leave your fucking cars at home during a snow storm you utter, utter wankers.
Three hours to drive a journey that takes me half an hour on a bad day because some tossers shit themselves at a few flakes on the road.
Yes, it's a bit slippy and yes, you will skid and wheelspin a little but that does not give you the excuse of stopping every five metres while driving up a hill.
Your shit driving is causing this traffic chaos and if I was driving a company car I would have shunted you off the road by now.
Keep moving, use a higher gear and treat it like bad rainfall or better yet use public transport you total bastards.

*This is not strictly about journalism but it is a story on our website so I am entitled to unleash a little.