Looks like little has changed in UK journalism since I started out at the Western Morning News in 2001. This from a correspondent to the excellent Churner Prize blog:
Two years ago my first interview after completing my NCTJ [National Council for the Training of Journalists] prelims was at a news agency. I turned down the job because they offered me £10k and expected me to run my own car. The office was in one of the most expensive parts of the country and living on £10k would have been utterly impossible. I often wonder if they found anyone to fill the role.
The good news is that it made my first job at [well-known publishing group] seem like I’d won the lottery. I was getting paid a whopping £13,838 a year and was still expected to run my own car. I was 32 years old.
In an effort to earn some extra cash I enquired about handing out the publisher’s free commuter paper at my local train station and was not entirely surprised to learn that the hourly rate was more than mine as a trainee reporter.
My starting salary at the WMN was £10,700. I was expected to have my own car, work every other Sunday and often late into the night with no overtime. I remember I used to rejoice at getting sent out on stories, just so I could earn a bit of petrol money.*
If I did manage to earn an additional £40 or £50 a month, I had very little time to enjoy my windfall. I was too busy churning out a couple of leads a day, plus a pic story, a couple of fillers and a column of nibs (news in briefs). On a good day, I probably filed about 1,000 words. On an average day about 1,500. And on a bad day 2,000 words or more.
In a stroke of genius, our uber bosses at Northcliffe Newspapers worked out a way of saving even more money by cutting down on sub editors and getting page designers to send templates directly to reporters. That way we could write our own headlines and picture captions, and sub our stories to make sure they precisely fit the page. Often we were reduced to padding stories with facts and quotes from press releases and the Internet just so we could fill the template.
We weren’t journalist, we were page fillers in a word factory. It’s a wonder that anything original makes it into local and regional newspapers nowadays when you consider how few people are filling those pages every day.
*I admit, we did earn time and half on bank holidays. And about a year after I joined the WMN, Northcliffe increased its starting salary for trainees to a colossal £12,000.
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