Why so quiet, Mr Murdoch?
As the end of the year approaches, it’s the time of year to look back and take stock of what has happened in the last 12 months. For me, this has been dabbling in freelancing, passing my seniors and having a piece published in The Observer. However, for journalists it has been a dire year indeed.
Redundancies in many of the large media groups have been the norm, and with rumours that the Manchester Evening News is about to be sold to Trinity Mirror, signs of any shift in the decline and selling off of regional print titles seems seem a far and distant hope. The situation isn’t much better for the nationals. With very little chance of a turnaround anytime soon, I wonder if this is why Mr Murdoch has been keeping his head down lately. I suspect he is waiting for a sure sign that times are about to change before he speaks out.
Habit-forming journalism
Okay, I’ll get the apology over with – I’m sorry I haven’t posted in six weeks! The usual excuse – been busy.
I’ll kick off now with, er, kicking off – so my gripe of the day is habits. I quit smoking, it’s been five months since I had my last cigarette. I also quit drinking, and my previously hard and fast rule of drinking wine after work to unwind no longer applies. I’ve become addicted to tea instead.
So, alcohol and nicotine – easy. Other habits are not so simple. Take for instance, my formula for writing 100-word court fillers:
An (insert age) man/woman/teenager/pensioner/motorist/drink driver from Chester was jailed/ordered to pay £x/given a community order for (insert crime here). (Insert name and address) was (insert details of offence) and appeared at (insert court name) where he admitted/pleaded guilty blah blah blah
With 100-word newsfiles that I have to churn out from court registers, I suppose I can be excused for not glamming them up to the max, because the registers contain only basic information. I do at least try to mix them up a bit so they read differently. But when you go into longer stories you really should put some effort in and resist the urge to revert to a formula.
This Daily Express article has me really riled for this very reason. All the usual pick-and-mix phrases are there, plus putting certain facts together in the same sentence to gently hint at some character assassination.
Unemployed Mr White, 26, stood by his outburst yesterday when approached by the Daily Express at his family’s £500,000 detached home outside Romford, east London.
If someone is unemployed, or lives in a £500,000 house, should that mean he is not entitled to an opinion? Both? Oh, he must be sponging off the state or a criminal? Perhaps the house was bought with ill-gotten means? Whatever they are trying to say – whether or not you find his comments distasteful - it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Not just for their pro-royal, partisan reporting techniques, but for the formulaic, lazy journalism that gives us all a bad name.
Asbo fever
Yes folks, you can tell we are in the run-up to an election when the polititians pull out the Asbo promises.
Alan Johnson has announced that Asbo breaches will be prosecuted and taken seriously but I attend enough court hearings to know that is absolute piffle – I regularly hear magistrates make orders “more onerous” by imposing a variety of measures. To translate:
Residency requirement – you really must live at home. Don’t move house or we may be forced to amend the order.
Curfew – Please stay indoors at night. We’ll pretend you haven’t thought of inventive ways of removing the tag – but as we want to re-use them afterwards, we’ll only restrict you for a little while, okay? Just go to the offy and drink at home.
Supervision – can you at least try and turn up for appointments with your probation officer?
Exclusion – we’ll ban you from going anywhere coloured in on this map. But we have no idea how to enforce it. I mean, seriously – there are so many people banned from the city centre now we have problems keeping up! You’d have to be pretty stupid to get caught.
As for these so-called Booze Asbos, they breach the order and all that happens is that they pay a fine – prison isn’t an option. Oops, you haven’t got any money. We’ll take it from your benefits. Already got a fine? No problem! We’ll consolidate it. But is you have a normal Asbo, don’t worry - we can’t send you to prison until you’ve breached it so many times it’s obvious even to us that the order is unworkable. Please don’t think we have breached your human rights by saying that.
As far as treating Asbos seriously is concerned, they already are. So strict are they, in fact, that I’ve seen one defendant pulled into court for talking to a certain person in public. He could have talked to him all night if he had been in his house though. (That’ll be £85 costs for the CPS, and a warrant for his arrest if he can’t be bothered turning up, thanks very much.) Actually one decided to go home half way through the hearing and he had to be resentenced for about nine breaches when they eventually caught up with him for long enough to get him in the dock and another defendant today had to commit 153 offences before being banged up. I can think of countless others.It seems that some people really have to push it before they get packed off to Altcourse and put on a course of methadone.
I think it’s about time someone stood up and questioned whether Asbos (and community orders, for that matter) really work – and if not, what other options do we have?
Technology – friend or foe?
A blog post on the useful tech employed by a freelancer has led me to consider how useful it is for me as a staffer. Is all this tech really helping me to become a better journalist or hindering it?
After a seminar on web-based journalism – taming searches, RSS feeds, SEO etc – I have incorporated a few things into my daily routine. So, along with the google news alerts, I subscribed to Bloglines and spend the first few minutes of my day ploughing through it to find anything of value or items that could have a local angle.
This worked brilliantly last week with a story about Chester going for the UK City of Culture 2013, something which even the council press office knew nothing about until I put the call in.
I go through court registers to dig out important cases – one in particular this week was a corker – so I can pretty much guarantee that we catch 99% of what is happening there.
But the difficulty is that I am beginning to feel that all this help is doing the job for me – giving me stories on a plate, really - and I am becoming detached from the real kind of journalism I signed up for back when I was an enthusiastic and wet behind the ears student on my Journo degree.
Take my patches for example. I have two – Blacon and Tattenhall – and I have been neglecting them of late. I haven’t been out and worked my patches at all in the last six months, and my contacts book is nothing more than a list of phone numbers that I occasionally dip in to where it should be an essential piece of kit in maintaining relationships with the communities I am supposed to serve.
The opinion of the Boss is that if we rely less on tech we will sharpen our news sense and begin to nose out the kind of stories that deserve page leads and bylines. Is it really as simple as that?
Call yourself a writer? A meme
Journalist and blogger Louise Bolotin has tagged me in her meme about writing. Louise is a mentor, all-round journalistic authority, wise-ass, bona fide rock chick and friend so I was flattered to be tagged. Not to mention, the blog needs a kick up the backside.
Which words do you use too much in your writing?
I, me, my… having looked over the blog it seems hopelessly over-indulgent and narcissistic. I’ll have to work on that…
Which words do you consider overused in stuff you read?
Definitely “definately”. Is there anyone left in the world who can spell it? And apostrophes. If in doubt, slap one in there? No, no, no. Don’t. I get really annoyed by sloppy spelling and punctuation.
What’s your favourite piece of writing by you?
Probably the piece I wrote for the Observer. Um, because it was in the Observer.
What blog post do you wish you’d written?
I envy those blogs where the writer uses big words I don’t understand. These are usually technical things so, for examples, see Dave Lee and Andy Dickinson.
Regrets, do you have a few? Is there anything you wish you hadn’t written?
Probably the piece in last week’s Chron celebrating a 27p drop in the price of an off-peak return ticket to London, thanks to the RPI. A shameful reproduction of a pointless press release.
How has your writing made a difference? What do you consider your most important piece of writing?
On more than one occasion I gave someone a voice who otherwise wouldn’t have been heard. The father who lost his baby to abuse and wanted the truth about what happened to her; the elderly couple who were attacked in their own home and wanted to move to a safer area; the market trader who fought the council for his rights. I’m most proud of the David v Goliath, Fourth Estate stuff.
Name three favourite words
Maybe. Obsequious. Seriously.
…And three words you’re not so keen on
Residents. Councillor. Normal.
Do you have a writing mentor, role model or inspiration?
Louise Bolotin, Kelly Rose Bradford, Christina McDermott off the top of my head. All are excellently observant and witty. I also have a soft spot for Toby Young, though I know I’ll get stick from some people for that admission.
What’s your writing ambition?
To earn a bloody good living as a freelance and still have enough time to enjoy life. Even better, to be paid lots to enjoy life and write about it, or to spout my opinion. Aside from just not having to struggle financially, I think it would be beyond cool to write something that people have heard of, something that has changed minds and improved lives.
Plug alert! List any work you would like to tell your readers about:
I work for the Chester Chronicle, so I suppose I could show you my page on the website…
Tag time. Some colleagues I hope will also do the meme:
The rules:If you havetime to do this meme, then please link to the original, then link to three to five other bloggersand pass it on, asking them to answer your questions and link to you. You can add, remove or change one question as you go. You absolutely do not have to be what you may think of as a “published” or “successful” writer to respond to this meme, I hope people can take the time to reflect on what their blogging has brought them and how it has been useful to others.
AWOL
I’ve been away – again – but this time I have an excuse. I’ve been under the weather and then I broke a bone in my foot… not the best of times! But I’ve done quite a bit of reading and have started to recharge my batteries.
The down side to all of that is that I’ve been offline quite a bit so I really need to get posting, Tweeting, Facebooking and Journobizzing before the weekend, when the new camping gear will finally get its first airing!
Twilight and camping
I’m never quick to catch on – I only started reading Harry Potter after the first movie came out – but I’ve been especially slow with Twilight. Having watched the film, I wondered what happened next and found myself reading the books. I read each one in a day.
But what intrigued me most is that, on her website, author Stephenie Meyer says the characters of Edward and Bella came to her in a dream. No matter how I try, no such dreams (ie multi-million dollar moneyspinners) come to me… I wonder… if I came up with a series of novels about a teenage witch… who fell in love with a vampire… before being enrolled at a magical boarding school… and fighting off evil wizards would work? Um, maybe not. But it infuriates me when someone comes up with an idea when I know it is something I could have come up with if only I’d had the imagination to do so. It seems so obvious after the event.
Back in the real world, my new enthusiasm for healthy living (not to mention my ongoing efforts to part my 14-year-old son from his X-Box) after giving up smoking has led me to venture into the previously unknown world of camping and hiking. I convinced my husband that buying a tent would be a great way of getting the kids out and active and I have been taking a rather unhealthy interest in walking boots. That’s not normal, surely?
So… where have I been?
I feel like Martin Blank returning to Grosse Pointe after 10 years – I have neglected the blog due to a combination of an epic workload and apathy. But I’m here now, so I suppose I had better think of something to say, hadn’t I?
Today is Day 6 of the struggle to give up cigarettes and I have to admit I am experiencing some fairly huge cravings, despite a 25mg patch. Whether this has anything to do with the fact that this is the first day of the summer holidays remains to be seen, but at the very least I am enjoying having a week off work!
As far as the freelance thing is going… well, it isn’t. I met with a contact last week who has passed on the name of a business mentor who may be able to put me in touch with a few people, so I may give her a call this week. I also need to kick myself up the bum and get networking. After all, the work won’t come to me – I will have to go looking for it. One freelance piece for the Observer doesn’t make me into an overnight success, you know…
The first success
My first freelance piece was published in The Observer today.
Though shorter than the piece I submitted (a case study, a quote from money saving expert Martin Lewis and a naming and shaming of one of the companies involved were taken out) the article is basically unchanged. I’m particularly thrilled that they kept my intro (the hacks among you will understand that).
As I have said, the difference was that I phoned in the pitch so that will be my method of choice from now on – but dark clouds are looming. The latest rumour circulating on Journobiz is that some editors are being forced to take on less freelance pieces in order to cut spending.
I am really thrilled at my first success – but getting into The Observer with my first ever pitch is going to be a tough act to follow, especially now there could be less work available for all of us.
From where I’m standing
My first ever freelance piece will be in The Observer’s money section on Sunday. It was a tremendous boost to have the pitch accepted and the positive feedback I received from the editor afterwards was the cherry on the cake.
I am wary of being too honest on here because you never know who might be watching. There are people – and I know who many of them are – who can’t wait to see me fall flat on my face just because I had the cheek to try.
But I know where I stand. I was brought up on a council estate and sound more like Kerry Katona than Joanna Lumley, though I try to disguise it. I can’t afford to eat in fancy restaurants, buy the pair of Christian Louboutin Mary Janes I have coveted for so long or treat my husband to the Aston Martin he dreams of. But I badly want to succeed and I know I have what it takes because someone saw fit to bless me with determination, intelligence and (so I’m told) a flair for the written word.
Sometimes I want to scream with frustration but I’ve come a long way in the last five years so I’d be stupid to give up now. The question is, in this race we call life, how far will I be allowed to go? Does where you start really determine where you finish?