Today up to 250 journalists are staging the first of three 24-hour strikes over pay - and it's no wonder.
Reporters working for Express Newspapers are protesting over a proposed 3% pay increase, in what is the first walk out by journalists from a national paper since the industrial action taken at The Telegraph in 1990.
As a student journalist I am now well accustomed to long hours spent working for free in a busy newsroom, but the more I talk to the journalists I work alongside, the more I have become aware of how much of an issue pay is in this profession.
One trainee scheme offered by a national newspaper in London offers only £14,000 pa. which, for those of us who do not have the luxury of parents living in London to stay with, is barely enough to cover rent and food in the capital...and this is after we have completed both an undergraduate and a postgraduate degree.
Many of my Durham University peers have gone into banking and law, and having completed the same number of years training as me are being offered jobs with starting salaries of up to £35,000.
I am not necessarily condoning the strikes, but I am in no way surprised that it has come to this, and I do believe that pay in the media industry should be redressed.
Steve Usher, the NUJ representative for The Daily Star, has spoken out about why they have taken the desicion to strike. He said: "This is a peaceful demonstration, Wapping was an awfully long time ago. All we want to do is open the management's door for negotiations. They have firmly shut the door and we have been knocking for five months without reply and we have now ended up on the pavement outside the building."
Despite the strike today, The Daily Express and The Daily Star will still be printed and on sale tomorrow, and the website is still being regularly updated - but needless to say they are not covering the strike!
The ability of the papers to continue printing does make you wonder how much of an effect the strike will have, especially as it is also being suggested that the Express is drafting in freelance writers to cover striking journalists. This, however, cannot be sustainable.
3 comments:
Why won't you condone the strikes? As you say, the current situation is hardly fair.
I'm not refusing to condone the strikes outright, but I am unsure whether I believe that striking is the right answer to the problem right now.
All the information in the public domain at the moment is from the strikers, (since Express Newspapers refuse to comment) and thus likely to be coloured by anger and frustration. I would want to know precisely what has taken place between Express Newspapers and their employees before I pass a firm judgement on whether they should be striking or not.
But having said that I wouldn't be able to suggest an alternative to striking that would achieve the desired results.
Would you strike in this situation?
I would entirely support your stance Kat.
Striking rarely yields results - and outside of the public sector it often sounds vaguely like the death rattle of the company concerned.
The world of newspaper media is competitive; my impression from those I know in the media business is that newspapers are struggling to survive in the multi-media world. It seems inevitable that some publications will fall by the way-side. Perhaps the loss of the Daily Express and Daily Star would not be widely mourned. I have no idea of the circulation of these particular papers but I can’t imagine they are some of the more widely read. If the strikes are due to purely to limited pay-rises, then that is perhaps the consequence of the publications not being sufficiently widely read? Maybe a reduction in the number of daily papers could increase the profitability of the remaining publications and then allow them to pay better salaries. (Although, it may be more likely that it would lead to yet more competition for jobs and therefore lower wages!)
Personally, I don’t think journalists have that much to complain about, most of those writing in the national media are there because they want to be – it is a job they enjoy. If money was the main objective they would be better off pursuing a lucrative career in PR, which I would suspect many of them could stroll into!
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