The following is from my first draft of a review of Michael Leapman’s examination of Fleet Street and the British national newspaper industry after the Wapping dispute (look it up rather than me try to outline it here). In it I mention how substantially disparate were the wages national newspapers paid their reporters and sub-editors (US copy editors) and those paid to hacks in ‘the provinces’.I married a woman in North Cornwall, south-west Britain in February 1996 and our first child was born six months later, but I carried on working on the nationals in London, commuting by train for spend four days a week. With a second on the way, I was under continual pressure to ‘work locally’ though I really did not relish the thought of working a local paper.
I have posted it separately (and as a blog entry) because did slow down and bloat the review rather. Here’s an example of how piss-poor wages in ‘the provinces’ were.
I was earning the annual equivalent of around £28,000 ($37,000, today about £51,000 / $76,000), though travelling costs other expenses of spending four days week soaked up some of that. But I finally gave in and I wrote to the Plymouth Herald, the city’s evening paper, asking whether they were looking for sub-editors. They were (and were always short-staffed) and took me on immediately but could only pay me their top whack of £18,000.
Cynics might suggest I could have negotiated for more, but in this case – unusually, I have to say – the cynics might be wrong. As it turned out I was the best paid of the ‘down-table subs’.
I found out that two of my younger colleagues, both graduates of art college and about 23 years old (though untrained in any form of journalism – papers are not as particular as they like to make out) were on one-third of what I was getting – £6,000 / $8,000 (£11,000 / $14,500)!
Far worse and wholly typical ‘newspaper reasoning’, when they were fired, both had been promised that although they start out on that very lowly £6,000, after six months their salary would be reviewed and presumably bumped up a little as no doubt the two twenty-something woman, hoped, expected and, frankly, will have been led to belived.
Their salary was reviewed by the Herald’s totally useless editor Rachael Campey, but she or possibly upstairs management had decided not to increase it. I’m pretty sure that was no reflection of the work of the two young women, just the standard provincial paper penny-pinching.
. . .
Campey and I did not get on. She had an extraordinary high opinion of herself and her abilities and had been hired to edit the Evening Herald after she had edited the Exeter Express & Echo and raised its circulation a little. Her stint on the Herald was not as successful and she was eventually sacked when circulation fell rather badly under her editorship.
Her conceit conceit might be gauged from a memo she sent around reminding subs to check spelling in the dictionary even if they thought they knew a word. ‘Even I sometimes have to look up words,’ she wrote. The ‘even I’ did it for me.
Then a little later, when for some reason we were really down on numbers, she joined us on the subs’ desk as a ‘revise sub’ (a sub-editor who checks subbed stories before they are sent for typesetting).
I had subbed a pretty typical local paper picture story about some guy who had built something or other – a cathedral, a battleship, some kind of bollocks – out of several tens of thousands a matchsticks. My headline – above or below a large piccy of the work of art so it was clear what the story was about – was something along the lines of ‘Strike a light! Mutley [or whatever part of Plymouth he lived in] man show’s how it’s done’.
That is just an indication of my heady, though pertinently I did use the colloquial phrase ‘strike a light’. Here’s how Collins Dictionary describes it . . .
When the story appeared in the paper a few hours later, Campey had revised it and changed the headline to ‘Don’t strike a light! Mutley . . .’ etc. I asked her why, for God’s sake!
Well, she explained, because the model was made of matches, it would go up in flames if you did strike a light – so better not! The woman had less newspaper nous than a slow-witted hedgehog.
Aroung that time, I was tactless enough in private conversation with another older sub – I was then 46 – to describe her as an amateur, a slight that was overheard by some snitch or other and passed back to her. I know this because a little later she threw it back in my face as in ‘you think we are amateurs’.
But Campey certainly was an amateur: a month or two after I left and returned to working in London, she was sacked because circulation had cratered so badly. She then became ‘a deputy news editor’ on The Times in London, impressive on the face of it, but her position was certainly not as grand as that might sound and I don’t doubt after being booted out of the Herald top spot, she was on her uppers.
A friend who was working on The Times at the time told me Campey’s ‘a deputy news editor’ gig consisted of admin duties, organising reporters’ rotas, holiday cover and hiring casuals. Eventually, she got a second chance and landed the job of editing the Yorkshire Post, then and possible now a highly respected provincial morning newspaper. That also ended unhappily and did her rep no favours at all.
She resigned after just a year and a half in the job soon after a motion of no confidence in by editorial staff who were members of the paper’s National Union of Journalism chapel was passed unanimously. She later moved on to be an ‘associate editor’ (which usually means very little and is a title usually a sop to salve feelings) of the very short-lived weekly the North-West Enquirer. That packed up barely a few months in.
NB A taste of some of the bull that hacks can come out with is this from the Enquirer’s editor, quoted in the UK Press Gazette in the run-up to the paper’s launch in spring 2007:
‘[Waterhouse] told Press Gazette in December “The paper will be editorially led and stand or fall on the quality of its reporting and of its whole editorial”.’This begs the obvious question: in which universe is a newspaper not ‘editorially led and does not stand or fall on the quality of its reporting and of its whole editorial’?
. . .
Finally, let me tackle the obvious question: is the above a hissy fit? Make your own mind up. Campey treated me like dirt and was a sodding amateur, so I’m not just not here best friend but don’t want to be. I began on a three-month contract, but when that came to an end, she had to offer me a new three-month stint as someone was leaving.
What got to me that, although I was certainly not the best sub in London, I did learn a little about standards and how high standards all-round tend to encourage everyone to try to raise their own. When I got to the Herald, I tried to write good headlines and not make do with the usual boring shit and stale puns. But when your work – my work – sat side-by-side be a crock of crap, it was more than a little dispiriting.
So life on the Herald was a chore (not least that every now and then some sub or other was obliged to hang one for 90 minutes after the end of their sting at 5.30 to wait for the Press Association weather report. This was unpaid, but we had no choice in the matter.
It all had a happy ending, however. When my six months were up and I was cast adrift, I had a call from the chief-sub of the Daily Mail features desk to come back and work shifts in London. I did, for the next 18 years.
The Herald – it has to be said like all other provincial papers at the time – knew every trick in the book to chisel and pare, always at the staff’s expense. At some point long before, the paper had negotiated reducing the hour-long lunch-break to just 30 minutes for an extra pound or to. That arrangement carried on, though the ‘extra’ dosh in our pockets by then amounted to zilch of fuck-all.
The Express & Echo was demoted from appearing daily to a weekly in September 2011. The Herald is still a daily print circulationg is pitiful: when I worked there for six months in 1999, it was around 15/16,000 a day.
In 2023 it had plummeted to just 3,872 copies, though, like all local paper groups, it has an online presence.
What we don’t know and sure as hell will not find out is how much it earns from online advertising. Speaking or circulation, it has collapsed all-round. When I joined the Birmingham Evening Mail as a trainee sub in January
Now? Take a look (right). (ABC is the Audit Bureau of Circulation.)
