In late 2014 the Dorset Echo published some shockingly lazy journalism on the death of a Weymouth resident. Paul Bush died on a stag weekend in Budapest – see the piece here. There was an outcry from the public at large against the paper because rather than doorstep friends and family on the incident it copied and pasted comments on the man’s Facebook page to show the outpouring of emotion. This is not the first piece of lazy journalism in the last few years and is probably a symptom of pressure on the journalists at the Dorset Echo newsdesk.
One of the worst jobs any journalist has to do is doorstep a grieving family to hear how they feel at the loss of a loved one. No one likes to do it but it is a technique that we all have to learn in order to produce good copy. Perhaps under pressure, this wasn’t done by the newsdesk. Instead they reported private messages of loss on Mr Bush’s Facebook page.
In 2008, Guardian journalist Nick Davies published a seminal book that suggested that journalists in the UK have a third of the time they once had to write each story. This has led to rushed and ill considered copy being published on a regular basis.
In January 2013 I was living on Preston Rd in Weymouth. There was a major traffic jam due to a fatal car accident. I naturally sought to find out what happened and found an article on the Dorset Echo website which basically accused the driver of not being fit to drive. This article has since been edited to tell the truth – the 75 year old man had died of a heart attack while driving. His family were mortally offended by the assumptions the paper leapt to and commented on the website. See the story here.
So, we have a paper which treads on dead families’ toes in the name of being the first to publish? There isn’t much you could do to be less offensive. This isn’t malice on the part of the journalists. Reading Nick Davies’ book, Flat Earth News, you see that journalists work in sweatshop conditions and are under extreme pressure to churn out as much copy as they can.
Largely, ‘churnalism’ is down to cuts in editorial budgets. One journalist has three times the workload of his predecessors in the profession. Nick Davies suggests that this is as a result of the collapsing advertising budget and the pressure to keep profits high.
As a freelance journalist I have seen the market shrink quickly over the years. Where staffers are galley slaves we freelancers just don’t get the work we did. Staffers resort to lazy assumptions to get the copy out to short deadlines to meet the demands of their iron fisted editors. Most of the stories you will read in the Echo, as well as most other papers is recycled press release copy which has only been modified to hide the source of the bulk of the text. Have a look at the Press Gazette article by Davies here and Stories untold and injustices ignored: Former Brighton Argus editor Mike Gilson on the decline of local journalism and what can be done to save it to get a fuller understanding of the job of being a staffer today.
So to the backlash. This is another example of below the belt piece of lazy journalism by the Echo. What can you do as a reader? In the Information Age you can get far more information on the goings on of Dorset from other news sources. Vote with your wallet and don’t buy it any more.
Where freelancing is unremittingly tough and I don’t like the idea of more of my brother journalists being thrown out of work, this story suggests that the paper is too broke to do any meaningful journalism anyway. Perhaps the few at the Echo newsdesk would like to try freelancing? Many more offensive news stories and you may have no choice…
Richard Shrubb
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