first person


StartingOut


Experience on a campaigning local paper paved the way for specialist work, Conrad Landin found


L


ife, as they say, is just one damned seaside town after another. Well, they don’t. But it may be how I


look back myself one day. When I became the Morning Star’s


industrial reporter two years ago, I was aware I was in for something completely different. What I didn’t countenance was quite the volumes of fish and chips, alcohol and standing orders reports I would consume. Nor the two dozen lanyards I would accumulate each year and nor, for that matter, the sheer range of bizarre merchandise produced by the British labour movement. I was 16 when I set my heart on


journalism. Getting bored too soon into a two-month post-exam holiday (now the stuff of dreams), I fired off emails begging for work experience. I got just one reply – from my local weekly, the Camden New Journal. After a four-day stint, I was asked to come back every Wednesday afternoon to help out on press night. And that was that. One week I’d be


dispatched to a Finsbury Park tower block where a woman had run down the stairs in flames. Another I’d be writing up picture captions for a church fete. For some of my university friends


later on, the realisation that you couldn’t walk straight into a staff contract on G2 was the end of their journalistic ambitions. But years of the weekly slog in Camden Town had taught me that it’s all worth it for the camaraderie, the pleasure of working with words and the occasional feeling that something you’ve written has


18 | theJournalist


made a difference to one person’s life. Through my years at university, I blagged my way into subsequent work experience placements – but there was nowhere I was trusted more, and learned more, than where I started. By the time I was applying for jobs, I had literary magazines and an undercover assignment for the Mirror under my belt. But it was the CNJ’s unabashed campaigning style that was most useful – not least when it came to the odd specialism that happened to be advertised just as I found myself in a position to apply for full-time work. I’d only been in post at the Star a few


weeks when I decamped to my first foreign mission – the Labour party’s national policy forum in Milton Keynes. Not allowed in, I spent the day lurking in corridors. I knew I’d landed on my feet when I ended up in a camper van in the car park where all the real negotiations between the unions, party activists and even the shadow cabinet seemed to be taking place. Fast forward to July this year and my


ninth seaside excursion since Christmas. The fates had left me the only journalist at the Unite union’s policy conference in Brighton – when Jeremy Corbyn arrived to make his first speech after that crunch meeting where he was finally permitted to stand in the leadership election without nominations from MPs. And, bizarrely, every news desk in London appeared to be relying on my tweets for an account. In the age when every paper had a


dedicated labour team, this would have been inconceivable. But, as union membership has fallen and national bargaining declined, the industrial


“ ”


It’s worth it for the camaraderie, the pleasure of working with words and the occasional feeling that something you’ve written has made a difference to a person’s life


specialism has become more or less extinct. This has coincided with the decreasing likelihood of news covering the role of ordinary people in public life. Corbyn’s connection to the unions and his insistence on their importance has prompted an surge in interest from journalists. However, lobby correspondents are frequently misinformed about the details of industrial relations and even the machinations of the Labour party, which are far more similar to union structures than they are to those of other parties. References to “union barons” and “bloc votes” abound. And with just three industrial correspondents in print – the other being Press Association’s Alan Jones and the Mirror’s Mark Ellis – setting the record straight is an uphill struggle. Not that old hands don’t stick around to give advice. “If I pay for it, will you get a haircut?” Paul Routledge asked me in Brighton last year. This was constructive criticism compared with the RMT delegate who just looked at me and muttered: “Never trust a man with unpolished shoes.” The biggest lesson I’ve learned is this: the unions are still a fantastic source of stories – economic, political and real-life sensational – no matter what a paper’s news priorities are. Any journalist who forgets about them is missing out. Meanwhile, I’m taking my newly polished Doc Martens to Cardiff for the best disco in the British labour movement – with the National Association of Probation Officers.


@conradlandin


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28