Is it really that important for a journalist to be first with the news?

IT'S that time of year when various regional newspaper groups frantically sell off their silverware, cut resources or announce recruitment freezes. 

If there are more savings to be made to resources already cut to the bone, or any imaginative changes to working practices which can be implemented before the end of the year, then these will be lapped up by head office accountants with all the enthusiasm of a hungry rough sleeper being offered a Christmas Day meal.

Why? Because, the banks are calling the tune to newspaper groups heavily over-borrowed. If they are to avoid penalty charges or suffer crippling rates of interest on their borrowing, then they have to satisfy some rigorous financial fitness tests to their end-of-year accounts.

Despite the demands of the digital age and caution from advertisers whether the web works for them, newspaper groups are making money, but far less of it. Here's what Hold The Front Page published last August:

Regional publisher Johnston Press saw revenues fall by 4.3pc in the first half of 2014 while profits rose by 3.6pc, according to half-yearly results published today. Overall revenues fell to £135.8m in the period January to June compared to £141.9m in the same period in 2013.

And this is what The Guardian wrote about Newsquest in October this year:

Newsquest has reported an 11% slump in adjusted profits to £67.3m last year, as the regional newspaper company’s chief executive took home a £600,000-plus pay packet.

Parent company Gannett UK, the subsidiary of the US media conglomerate that owns Newsquest, also said that revenues across its more than 200 titles dropped 5.4% to £288.6m.

Newsquest, which owns titles including the Herald in Glasgow, the Argus in Brighton and Southampton’s Southern Daily Echo, said that adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation fell by 11.1% from £75.8m to £67.3m last year.

Operating profits fell from £58.9m to £52.8m. An intergroup loan of £76.7m resulted in a pre-tax loss of £17.7m, flat year-on-year.

These remain tough times for the newspaper industry. In truth you sensed an undercurrent of the tricky waters which the regional press is navigating itself through from editors attending the NCTJ Journalism Skills Conference in Sheffield the other week.

It is a shame that the digital revolution is happening at a time of numbing cost-cutting when newspaper groups should be heaping huge investment on staff and equipment instead. How different the landscape would be with undiluted ambition and investment.

Sadly, the industry is having to embrace this new era by taking creative short cuts and heaping a huge level of expectation on its journalists, having lost many of the more experienced operators from these now traditional end-of-year culls. Hence, the point in my blog last week that quality in the newsroom is being lost at the expense of speed.

When it comes to the regional press, I've never subscribed to the view that being first necessarily makes you best with the news. Will the reader remember you more because you were first with the news, or will you be held with greater respect because of the quality and accuracy of the content?

Let the rolling TV news channels make tits of themselves over every scrap of breaking news, but the regional press doesn't have to go down that road. Why do readers turn to regional platforms? It is because they trust what has been written, and they are looking for the proper authority and context.

I told my reporters to get the story right first time. Get it accurate, deliver the sources, and write it with understanding and gravitas so that it becomes a credible piece of journalism. And that's what I'm telling the journalists of tomorrow.

I subscribe to the view that readers will always turn to a regional newspaper or website, not because it was first, but because of the accuracy with how the news was told.

I remember my primary school teacher regularly berated me in class for trying to complete a task first, simply so I could be noticed and recognised by my peers for what I had done - or not done!


My balloon was rapidly burst by my teacher scrawling her red pen through the an exercise book littered with inaccuracies, pointing out loudly my needless mistakes and telling me to do it again. "Check your work, David and check it again," she would often say. "More haste, less speed" - and this was a mantra which I took with me into professional life.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not describing a model of the regional press being slow and dull with breaking news either in print or through digital.

Twitter, Facebook and websites allow newspaper titles which have long histories and proud reputations to connect with their audience like ever before, with a reach far greater than in the narrow furrow days of print. These are exciting times for the media which have to be embraced fully.

The regional press is at the coalface of news and should be breaking it. However, the media has to get out of the notion that being first with the news is absolutely paramount. Break the news and aim to break it first, but please get it right and don't waste resources and miss the jump with bland and mis-informed speculation.

It is all about trust - a word which crucially sits paramount to the integrity of the regional press.

This is about the need to tell the story accurately, with depth and understanding, but not behaving like a child running home to his mother to tell a half-baked anecdote with very little substance.