workplace


m, kill the news?


messy and, above all, rebellious space called a newsroom”. Even before home working became so commonplace, ‘paper palaces’ were being replaced by ‘bland, corporate structures’ amid the “hollowing out of journalistic endeavours and their replacement by profit- and metric-driven imperatives”. Working from home is not new to many journalists,


especially freelances. But many will have spent decades in the office beforehand. For Alan Jones, PA’s industrial correspondent, time served in newsrooms gave him the skills and experience that allow him to work largely from home today. His first job was at “a local paper… an upstairs, windowless room” where “everybody smoked and drank”. He recalls: “[On] the one-day work experience I had there as a dewy-eyed 15-year-old, two of the reporters had a stand-up fight… right in front of me. One of them set fire to the other one’s newspaper that he was reading. From that second on, that’s all I wanted to do.” Perhaps counterintuitively, a physical office can provide opportunities to get out. “We used to spend a lot of time out of the office, with people, covering meetings or courts, or meeting your contacts, doing vox pops in the street, doing door- knocking,” Jones says. “That was the kind of run-of-the- mill stuff and I just loved it, that was when I got the best stories and that’s the culture I’ve always kept really.” Journalists today, however, may


rarely get the chance to leave their desks in the office or at home alike. “The difference is quite staggering, and I think working from home has just speeded up that culture,” Jones adds. “I still speak to people all the time, but speaking to people [face to face] is so different to speaking to them on the phone. When I’m up in London, I always arrange to meet a couple of my contacts, and that’s where I, anyway, have always got the best stories, the best gossip.” Jones fears for the future. “The lockdown forced working from home but it’s largely stayed. I honestly think it’s going to damage the quality of journalism, because – getting back to that first few days of my


first job – it was drummed into me that you have to get out and meet people, meet contacts.” Not all organisations are heading the same way. Some, like


DMG Media, owner of the i, the Mail titles and the Metro, encouraged staff to return once pandemic restrictions were lifted. Greater Govanhill magazine and The Ferret, a Scottish investigative journalism platform, recently moved from blanket home-working to a “community newsroom” in Glasgow.


“When I first started Greater Govanhill, it was just me working on it, so it wasn’t about newsroom culture per se - it was about being open to members of the public,” says founding editor Rhiannon Davies. “It came out of working with The Ferret, working on a collaborative project together about health inequalities and the solutions to them. We wanted it to be


community-led so it seemed logical to think about creating a public space in the heart of the community.”


The space, a shopfront on a small parade in a poor but vibrant neighbourhood, also offers co-working spaces, “ideally [to] people working in the media and people who might be open to collaboration”. Davies explains: “There are so many huge differences and benefits – having had conversations with other people who use newsrooms as well, there’s so much learning


you can do, particularly for more junior people. “There’s lots of training that


happens just from sitting in the same room as others. That’s a huge benefit. That’s being lost in terms of the training of new generations of journalists.” In the view of O’Reilly and Vine, “journalism in a


SIMON SPILSBURY


liberal western democracy… cannot exist without a social licence”, obtained by communicating values to both journalists and the public through, at least partially, the design of newsrooms and their buildings. Amid worsening trust in media and the spread of corporate disinformation, renewing that licence is perhaps more important than ever. Whether the virtual newsroom has the tools to pull it off, however, is another matter.


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