Jeremy Tunstall, writing in his seminal 1971 work Journalists at Work, chose to feature the ‘personnel management
decisions’ in his dissection of the constituent roles of the editor. Calling
these decisions ‘considerable’ he highlights the ‘hiring and promoting of wide
range of journalists’ and the financial responsibility of ‘controlling salaries
and expenses of over £1 million a year’, which equates to around £13.8 million
a year in 2019 when taking inflation into account, according to the Bank of England
(Bank of England, 2019).
While Tunstall
was basing his comments around national newspaper editors there is still a
considerable financial burden for regional newspaper editorial leaders to bear.
For instance, a mid-sized newspaper with 50 journalists earning an average of
£30,000 per annum would leave the editor looking after a wages budget of
£1,500,000. Jeremy Clifford, editor-in-chief of JPI Media, has overall control
of 800 journalists, so using the same formula he is ‘controlling salaries’
totalling £24,000,000.
Recruitment is
also taking up a good proportion of the working life of the editorial leader.
At the time of interview Marc Reeves, West
Midlands Editor-in-Chief for Reach, said he had invested in the past
five weeks “a good 50 or 60 per cent of my time to recruitment”.
What employers
are looking for
Like many of the
facets of the editorial leader’s job, recruitment is a skill that has to be
acquired, either through training or practice, but is an expertise that
publishers expect to be in place, even if the individual in charge has relatively
little experience. Everyone appears to have their own style and approach,
especially as there is no necessity to follow a ‘fixed formula’ of
questioning as required of public institutions like the police, health service
or universities who could find themselves on the wrong end of a Freedom of
Information request by a disgruntled unsuccessful candidate.
There are a range
of qualities that editorial leaders are looking for in recruits, including:
·
Flexibility
·
Inquisitiveness
·
Energy
·
Intelligence
·
Spark
·
Passion
·
Hunger
·
Can-do attitude
·
Self-motivation
These conceptual
qualities are difficult to assess at interview and a candidate may end being
ruled out by nervousness, unfamiliarity of surroundings or a lack of
understanding of the process.
On top of this
recruiters are looking for more tangible skills that can be tested, either by
looking at previous work or in a live interview scenario:
·
Communication skills
·
Skilled multi-tasker
·
Practical skills
·
Story-telling online basics
Also evident was
the requirement for a ‘good news sense’, which is both a quality and a skill
but continues to defy definition despite academic efforts.
Exploring the
‘qualities’ expected in recruits
Clifford offers
this clear outline of what he is looking for, citing communication is a core
skill, especially verbal communication:
“The first think I still look for is
something I’ve always looked for and that’s passion, because you can teach a
lot of the other things but you can’t teach a hunger and a passion.”
Along with that
enigmatic ‘news sense’ Ian Carter, Editorial
director of the KM Media Group wants potential recruits to demonstrate
‘flexibility’:
“Probably flexibility is the thing that
slightly differs nowadays, because I need to know that if they stumble across a
story on the walk home from the pub, that it will be on the website by the time
they’ve got through the front door.”
The recruitment
process will typically start with an application, and things can go wrong even before
they have started. Helen Dalby, Senior Editor and Head of Digital for Reach
North East, says the basics are as important as ever:
“I will reject a CV with a spelling
mistake out of hand, as if a would-be reporter can’t manage to proofread a
document as important as that, I can have little faith that their copy will be
clean.”
Even at interview
it may not be what the candidate says that matters, but how they present
themselves. Clifford is looking for “really good signs of communication”.
“I remember when I was interviewing
someone for a job, I told him there and then he wasn’t going to get it because
at no point did he make any eye contact with me. I said if you are not going to
look me in the face, or not make any eye contact you’re never going to get a
story off anybody.”
Dalby feels it is
important for interview candidates to be well-prepared: to know the websites
and newspapers, to have followed the outlet on social media and to be ready to
express a view on a recent story or Facebook post. “Considered criticism is far
preferable to the dispiriting response of, ‘I’m not sure’ or, worst of all, ‘I
haven’t looked’,” she says.
Carter turns the
tables on applicants and researches them a lot more thoroughly:
“They quite often again look shocked
when you repeat something they put on Twitter or Facebook a week ago and they
sometimes feel quite awkward and embarrassed by it. You might say ‘I see you
went to see Ed Sheeran last week’ – nothing wrong with that at all, but they
seem to be quite surprised that you’re reading it. It’s a useful skill to learn
that what you put on social media people are looking at and taking notice of
and its yes, we are more fully armed with stuff about them that we can that we
can throw them sometimes.”
Journalism
education and “young dinosaurs”.
As if cementing
stereotypes, there seems little love lost between employers and the further
education colleges and higher education universities sending out people with
journalism qualifications.
While
acknowledging that young people are getting better equipped as the educators
belatedly recognise the role as it is now, Reeves has this forthright view:
“Sometimes the colleges were giving us
young dinosaurs because they were training them for an industry that stopped
existing 10 years previously. Colleges
have now largely caught up or are catching up so those online story-telling
digital basics are now being much better baked in.”
Carter is a
little more forgiving of the candidates, saying that sometimes people are not
prepared for life in a newsroom through no fault of their own.
“One of the things you get at
university is usually state of the art equipment and you’re used to operating
on Macs. Sometimes people come to us and they finish up working in our
Gravesend office, which has still got an outside toilet and old equipment and
they think ‘wow!’ and you can see the shock in their faces.”
Carter complains
that the recently qualified students are not fully prepared for the commercial
realities or the expected workload because they demand a lot from people.
“We get students from the university of
Kent come in and spend two weeks with us and I think even after that period they
don’t quite get what the expectations are from a journalist in this day and
age.”
Can they do
the job?
Reeves says the
trainees his company takes on have already completed “pre-entry stuff” at
various establishments around the country. They’ve had an immersion in law,
public admin and other elements, such as shorthand. He says they make sure that
the candidates have experience in different story-telling, have a view about
how things can be told and have an ability and an interest in exploring
different ways to get their content to people via Instagram, Facebook and other
channels. But his message is:
“At the heart of it: Do they know what
a story is? Do they have a view of what people will be interested in? It’s what it’s always been, it really, really
is.”
Carter says news
recruits can learn new technology in a matter of weeks, but for him they have
got to come in with and demonstrate good news sense and flexibility, which he
rates as most important:
“So often now people come into an interview …
but when you say give me a story, they look at you like you’ve asked them to grow
a second head. It’s just, you know, that’s what I want, everything else you can
teach them.”
The contemporary
reporter is a skilled multi-tasker, maintains Dalby. Writing, taking
photographs, shooting and editing video, broadcasting via Facebook Live and
managing their outreach on social media are all part of the day job. The
technical elements of that can all be taught, she says, “so above all we’re
always looking for can-do attitude and self-motivation”.
Funded
reporters, apprentices and diversity
Financial input
from the BBC, via the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme, and Facebook, which has
given £4.5 million to fund the Community News Project has changed the nature of
editorial recruitment in the UK regional press. Now there are other avenues
into a job, rather than the traditional FE/HE/NCTJ qualification route, with
apprenticeships also gaining traction.
With the £4.5m ‘charitable donation’ from Facebook, 82 newsrooms across
Britain were able to recruit new reporters under the umbrella of the Community
News Project, managed by the National Council for the Training of Journalists
(NCTJ).
The 82 new appointments are dominated by the big three publishers with
Reach having 28, Newsquest 23 and JPIMedia 19. The others go to Archant (4),
MNA Media (3) and a little belatedly KM Group (2) and one each for Baylis
Media, Barnsley Chronicle and Newbury Weekly News. The publishers have received
more than 4,200 applications, averaging out at more than 50 for each job (NCTJ,
2019). The positions were open to
people with no journalism experience, or some training, and those who have
passed their preliminary NCTJ exams.
Clifford, as one
influential editorial leader, is a supporter of the apprenticeship route and
when interviewed reported that his organisation had taken on 10 apprentices in
the previous 12-15 months. He said:
“These are young people, kids if you
like, who are at college or finished school and have not gone to university.
They are desperate to come into a newsroom and these are people who’ve almost
been brought up with the brands. As kids their parents have got it into the
homes. I remember someone who was interviewing them said she felt quite
emotional listening to them. I see absolutely hunger in these people and I see
it as an absolute privilege to walk in a newsroom and work with them. We don’t
know what will happen during their training programme but if you can just
bottle that and keep it and point them in the right direction then I think
they’ll succeed.”
Clifford concedes
that apprenticeships have been ‘faddish’, but attributes the success of the
movement to onerous university fees and the pressures on students through
education. He feels apprenticeships have become re-established, much like the
traditional indentureship programme.
Carter takes a
dynamic approach to the recruitment process with apprentices:
“When we’re recruiting apprentices, we
kick them out into middle of Medway at some point and do what we’ve done
before, and tell them to come back with
a story. If they do brilliant – even if
they don’t as long as they’ve gone out and spoken to somebody and demonstrated
that they can talk to them – that counts in their favour.”
In a more
philosophical reflection Clifford feels all these schemes enables newsrooms to
tackle some of the diversity issues of newsrooms dominated by “white, middle
class, university graduates”. He continues: “We get people who may never have
gone to university, never had the opportunity, but actually are part of,
brought up in their community, so I think it will help diversity as well.”
Wider HR and
financial responsibility
Returning to
Tunstall’s assertion that ‘the personnel management decisions are considerable’,
Reeves reflects that things may not have changed that much: “You know your
staff costs budget and your freelance budget, there’s nothing new there. Both
have been under more pressure and you know constant pressure, in the past 15
years, so there’s nothing new there.”
Joy Yates, Editorial Director of Johnston Press North
East, has learned to understand circles of influence and control as part
of her editorial leadership role. “What is out of control just don’t worry
yourself about, just concentrate on the things that you can make a difference
with and influence. You do you want to be involved in everything, you do want
to change the world and do this and do that, but you just have to be sensible,”
she says.
She acknowledges
that she is open to challenge and thinks it is really important for people to
know that. “Just because I have the title of divisional director doesn’t mean
I’m not infallible,” she says. “We’ve got people who can recognise people’s
strengths, so whereas I can direct and advise and guide do the HR element of
sport, I don’t know what those guys know. A combination of our talents and what
we do gets us there.”
