Industry confessionals

I thought I would charter my wobbling progress in the ‘sharky'* industry which is local journalism. It has got off to an unpromising start.

Despite having to pay City University £9000 of my father’s pension and another £8000 of rent to a Haringay landlord, I must go and work for some local newspapers. For free. I will then eventually qualify to enter City. Then I will achieve the £17,000 MA which will lead to a £12,000 job. Righto.

Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press are the two major local newspaper stables and have maintained an embarrassingly high profile over the last six months. Local print journalism has taken a massive blow to the financial broadside since the property market began its downward spiral, for a very simple reason - advertising.

Papers were once graced by a rich crop of property advertising which, since the housing market downturn, has become a thinning scalp. As the advertising funds tighten, so do newspaper company belts and hacks are forced to work extra long shifts to cover work left by gaps in the workforce. If a reporter leaves, it is more than likely he will not be replaced, and his work is quietly absorbed by the grumbling colleagues who remain. This is bad news for everyone; the quality of journalism (already questionable) goes down and hopeful graduates don’t get the jobs which overworked reporters don’t really want to be doing in the first place.

However, in our attempts to ingratiate ourselves into this loveless industry, we prostitute ourselves on a weekly basis at some middle-of-the-road regional. I begin my first placement in a bad temper - an entire summer of work experience means I have no cash to see my friends, buy any smart work clothes or learn to drive. In fact I can’t really afford to do this placement at all, but this is a problem overlooked by generations of the public schoolboys who call the shots. Polly Toynbee can call herself a social champion when she makes work experience illegal under the Slavery Abolition Act. Until then, she can shut up.

* Mary “Darey” Bishop, Bordon Post. See next entry for further info.