Local Journalism in Crisis

With the current trend of recruitment freezes and redundancies, there has not been a worse time in living memory to become a local or regional journalist.

More than 900 regional journalists were made redundant between July 2008 and March 2009. The HoldtheFrontPage website did a timeline of the crisis in local and regional journalism that gave a sense of how bad things were.

And they have not got any better since then.

Reasons for Journalism Crisis

The main reason is the rise of the Internet and the fact that declining advertising sales have hit the local media particularly hard. For example, websites such as rightmove.co.uk and eBay have taken away adverts that would have traditionally gone to local papers.

Meanwhile, councils have started to publish newspapers that have further squeezed the local press. Council newspapers such as Greenwich Time and East London Life come out once a week and, according to the Evening Standard, these publications employ about 120 people in London alone.

Thirdly, as Nick Davies suggests in Flat Earth News, the rise of the PR industry means that newspapers can still be filled even when the number of editorial staff is cut. There has been something of a backlash against council-run newspapers recently

Should You Become a Journalist?

According to Ian Reeves, director of learning and teaching at the Centre of Journalism, University of Kent: "No sane person involved in journalism education can feel anything but uneasy about preparing students for an industry where so many senior jobs are disappearing and so few entry-level positions are becoming available."

So bad is it in newsrooms at the moment?

“The job and remaining colleagues help to keep one smiling,” said one journalist working in the north of England, “but we are being murdered. Morale is down and the culture of journalism nurtured over decades - is compromised daily and at every turn.”

“I would not like to be a newly qualified NCTJ-trained reporter in the current climate,” added Henry Ellis, news editor of North London and Herts Newspapers.

“People are staying longer than normal because there just aren't the jobs for them to move to on the nationals at the moment. I am in the odd position of having an office with no junior reporters. I also take on a lot of work experience people and, normally we would recruit new staff from among them, but nobody is moving on.”

And even if you get a job as a local journalist, many newspapers cutting resources means journalists have to write more stories per week. This means you are less likely to have time to concentrate on the really good stories.

There are ideas for resolving the crisis, such as Guardian editor Alan Rusbridge recently supporting public funding of the Press Association.

And with traffic to local newspaper websites increasing 25 per cent in 2008, there is every chance that local newspapers will find a sustainable business model that puts good journalism at its heart.

“As the saying goes 'reports of our death are greatly exaggerated,” said Sam Holliday, editor of the Bath Chronicle. “The regional media has faced many challenges over the past couple of hundred years and has probably been written off more times than most press commentators has had hot dinners but we're still here, still believing in the communities we serve and still making a difference in the lives of local people.”

But if you are thinking about whether to become a journalist, you need to decide if journalism is important enough to you to stick with it when other careers represent easier options. Personally, my advice is that until the future becomes clearer, it is only worth becoming a journalist if you are so enthusiastic about it that you could not imagine doing anything else.

After all, things might seem bad at the moment, but they are probably going to get worse before they get better.