Working the Wires

I've been venturing out of the student garret recently, poking my nose back out into the real world of journalism. It's not a pretty place at the moment, with cutbacks and redundancies all over the place (keep an eye on my Media Notes blog to get an idea of the full impact of the news recession).

There is a lot of good journalism still going on however, and I've had a great few weeks seeing how others do it - first at The Star, and last week at The Press Association in London.

At PA I worked on the video and news desks, and had a few pieces picked up in the national press:

• I covered the Court of Appeal, where the Stockwell Strangler slept through his hearing. Picked up by The Sun and the Daily Mail.
• I also wrote about Camden Market's relaunch after it burned down last year. The BBC used the piece.
• I covered a double suicide in a Finsbury Park hotel. A few local papers picked up my interview with the hotel owner. 
  

 The Stockwell Strangler

I also worked on the video desk, and interviewed Henry Cooper and some Olympic gymnasts.

If you have access to PA MediaPoint check the videos out here:

http://www.mediapoint.press.net/business/article.jsp?id=5761657

and here:

http://www.mediapoint.press.net/business/article.jsp?id=5761661

Ice-cream vendor keeps licence

Anyone who was worried about John McNeil, the ice-cream van owner who faced losing his licence after a Sheffield school tried to ban him, will be glad to know he has kept his livelihood. The school withdrew its objection days before the licensing board hearing.

Published Date: 29 April 2009

By Ben Spencer

AN ICE cream man from Sheffield is to continue trading from the business his grandfather started - after the school which tried to ban him withdrew its objection.

John McNeil - who sells from a van near Handsworth Grange Community College - faced losing his licence after the school complained about the "unhealthy" ices he sells to pupils.
School business manager Steve Wild wrote to Sheffield Council complaining of the "cheap, unhealthy goods laced with all the wrong E numbers" sold from Joe's Ices.

SEE FULL STORY IN THE STAR

Sheffield forging company to cut a third of workers

Front page exclusive in today’s Sheffield Star:

Firth Rixson at Meadowhall, Sheffield

JOBS AXE HITS STEEL WORKERS

By Ben Spencer

Exclusive

Around 50 jobs are to go at Sheffield forging plant Firth Rixson – just days after stainless steel giant Outokumpu announced the loss of 110 jobs.

Staff at Firth Rixson Forgings have been told “up to 60 jobs” will be cut from the 156-strong workforce at the Meadowhall site.
Workers have received letters saying 42 staff from the shopfloor must go, and that another five workers from the offices will lose their jobs.
One employee facing the axe said every member of staff has been told they must reapply for their own jobs and, once the process is complete, 47 workers will go …

FULL STORY IN THE STAR

Sheffield school tries to ban ice cream van

A Sheffield school is trying to stop an ice-cream seller renewing his trading licence - claiming he is hindering its efforts to meet Government nutritional standards. The school has complained that the e-numbers in the trader's ice-cream are bad for pupils and is affecting their behaviour in class. The school is opposing the renewal of his licence at a council meeting on Tuesday. See full story at THE SHEFFIELD STAR.

More of my stories in The Star:

• A buyer has come forward for a demolition-threatened pub in South Yorkshire, after a local campaign stopped developers turning it into a block of flats. FULL STORY HERE.
  
• A Barnsley man has been hailed an 'inspiration' to male slimmers – after shedding a mammoth seven stone in 14 months. FULL STORY HERE.
  
• Plus a handful of fillers and NIBs.
  

London

This is the first in a series of posts showcasing my photography. Get in touch if you'd like to use any of the images, or need a photographer for an event.

All images © Ben Spencer 2008

LONDON

The City from the South Bank

St Paul's from the Millennium Bridge

On the tube

The Green Lanes

Turnpike Lane

The Number 29

Finsbury Park

The Harringay Ladder

The Green Lanes

Reflections of the BT Tower

The Green Lanes

Media Notes and the future of journalism

My Media Notes blog is starting to hot up: a discussion of how newspapers will be produced in the post-recession era is attracting hits, comments and controversy. Charlie Beckett, the Press Gazette, and Milne Media have all discussed my report of a lecture given by Telegraph digital editor Edward Roussel.

The hidden valley of Zanskar - at bigworldmagazine.com

Over a year since I actually wrote it, a story I put together about Ladakh has finally been published in start-up New York-based travel magazine, Big World. 

The article has been heavily cut down - see full version here.

Ladakhi prayer flags. Image: Ben Spencer

Update: Ben in February 2009

I haven't done much with this site recently, having been focussing my attention on another blog -- Media Notes -- discussing media issues as the global news industry undergoes transformation. Check it out.

The last year has been busy for me. I spent six months at The Week magazine, working as a researcher for a small team at Britain's most successful press digest. Lots of news reading, research, fact-checking, subbing, copy-editing, and a bit of writing.

In September I started a journalism masters in Sheffield, learning more about multi-media reporting, as well as getting to grips with some essential journalistic skills such as shorthand and media law.

Working in a different part of Britain has been interesting. South Yorkshire and Derbyshire have only just begun to recover from the decimation of mining and other heavy industries in the 1980s. The current recession is having a devestating effect on the regional economy. I've spent much of my time since moving north researching the economic downturn, and how it is affecting local people.

One example can be seen below.

Communities that Work: getting people back to work in Chesterfield

A Chesterfield community employment centre has helped put 77 people back into work since it was saved from closure in April. 

Communities That Work (CTW), a Derbyshire Primary Care Trust scheme operating in Chesterfield’s most deprived wards, was threatened with closure this year when funding from the Coalfields Regeneration Trust ran out. But local people petitioned Chesterfield Borough Council for assistance, and secured £300,000 – a years’ funding – from the council’s Working Neighbourhoods Fund.

Eight months later, CTW team leader Jane Pashley is preparing next years’ funding bid. This time, however, she is confident the scheme will survive.

Working out of a converted terraced house in the heart of the Rother estate in South Chesterfield, Mrs Pashley said: “We have beaten our target of 75 new jobs this year. The key to our success is we are right in the middle of the community, and we work with every aspect of an unemployed person’s welfare.”

The CTW team works in communities with some of the highest rates of unemployment in the East Midlands. Eight percent of Rother’s 18- to 24-year-olds claim benefits, compared to a national rate of five percent.

“Some families in Rother have three generations living off benefits,” Mrs Pashley said. “There are households which haven’t had anyone working for 20 or 30 years.”

Mrs Pashley, who previously worked for Job Centre Plus, thinks CTW offers a more rounded approach than other agencies.

“The job centres have 20-minute slots to get people work, and they are actually trying to decrease footfall,” she said. “We recognise that it may take five years or more to get a person who has always lived on benefits to a position where they can apply for work.”

Ricky Brown, 34, of Sycamore Avenue, Chesterfield, heard about the CTW scheme last year, when they helped his brother.

“He hadn’t worked for 10 years, and they got him a job,” he said. “He didn’t have a car, or smart clothes, so they lent him a shirt and drove him to the interview.”

Mr Brown was made redundant from Gunstone bakery in Dronfield last month. He came to the CTW drop-in session for help with his CV.

“I’m applying for a job with Tesco,” he said. “The advisors said I can put all kinds of things on my CV, even things I’ve done out of work. I just had my GCSEs and my jobs on there before.”

Rose Boaler, one of five guidance officers crammed into CTW’s small office, said: “The idea is to give people confidence in what they’ve got. They come out of school without qualifications, and some can’t even read. We try and give them confidence to go out to work.”

A Chesterfield-based recruitment agent said: “CTW do a good job and we took one person from them ourselves. But employers need workers who can fit in quickly and don’t need to be trained. The problem with the CTW people is they need a lot of help even once they’re working.”

Mrs Pashley recognised this could be a problem: “At the moment there are a lot of skilled, highly trained people being made redundant, and they are going to the top of the queue. It’s making it harder for us.”

Chesterfield Borough Council confirmed they are considering applications for funding from next year’s £1 million Working Neighbourhood Fund. 

Colin Hampton, co-ordinator of the Derbyshire Unemployed Workers’ Centres, sits on the fund’s steering committee. He said: “The CTW scheme is very good at working with individuals. But if we’re really going to get people back into work in Chesterfield, we need to attract industries to the town, and that is not being done.”

Chesterfield MP Paul Holmes said: “It is wonderful news that in its first six months alone the project exceeded its whole-year targets for getting people back into work in areas of high unemployment like the Rother area.”

May Day Blues

Exactly eleven years after the British people emphatically kicked the Tories out of government, voters turned out in the May Day elections to give David Cameron’s revamped Conservatives their approval. With 44% of the national vote, a new mayor in London, and 260 new Conservative councillors, the Tories are back in favour.

Gordon Brown’s government is in trouble. The Labour share of the vote slipped to 24%, taking them into third place behind the Liberal Democrats. A British government has not performed this badly in local elections since 1995, when John Major’s government received similar results two years before being buried by the New Labour landslide.

This is more than a mid-term slump, more than a protest vote against unpopular policies. This is a routing. Labour has been badly hurt in its heartlands, losing councils in North Tyneside, Bury and Southampton. Working class people have turned to the Tories, registering their anger at the 10p tax betrayal, and expressing their worries about the economy and rising food and fuel prices.

The message is clear: the British people have lost faith in the Prime Minister and his government. Less than a year after taking power Brown has lost his reputation as a skilled economist. James Purnell, the work and pensions secretary, yesterday defended Brown’s record: “At a time of economic uncertainty surely the person you want at the helm is the person who is seen as the most successful chancellor in British history.” But after his mismanagement of the Northern Rock bailout, the fluffing of the non-dom tax, and the climbdown over the 10p tax, Brown’s reputation is in tatters.

Tony Blair had a great deal of respect for Brown’s capability as an economist, but he was most in awe of his skills as a political strategist. In the past few months, however, Brown has shown little of the tactical nous he is famous for: in November he backed out of an election he would have probably won; in March he backtracked on a green budget that would have been welcomed; and his mishandling of the 10p tax issue has been farcical. The decision to axe the 10p tax band, which Brown introduced in 1999 to help low-earners, was a disastrous desertion of classic Labour territory. Abandoning the low-paid to appeal to the middle classes was a bad move, but the climbdown last week displayed political weakness and fiscal incompetence. Brown refused to reinstate the 10p tax band, instead offering to compensate people who have lost out in the tax restructure. Unfortunately reimbursing the 5.3 million people who have lost out is no simple task. Using a clumsy system of tax credits and allowances, the compensation package, designed to pay back the £700 million to those affected, will actually cost £3-6 billion. Many middle-income people will benefit twice from this blunder: first from the 2p cut to the middle tax band; and again when they pick up the unwieldy tax credits aimed at the poor.

So how will the Labour Party act to avoid losing power at the general election? David Miliband has been touted as a replacement for the Prime Minister, and as a young, charismatic politician in the same mould as Cameron and Clegg he is a tempting choice. But charisma and youth is not necessarily what Britain needs to face the challenges ahead. Brown has the skills, experience, and strategic awareness to get Britain and Labour through the economic downturn. He needs to act with determination, stop pandering to the centre-right, and assist those worst affected by the credit crunch.

Senior Labour Party figures have suggested that Brown has six months to prove that he is capable of winning the next election. The temptation will be to move to the right to get back the voters lost to the Conservatives. Ed Miliband told Radio Four on election day that in this time of economic uncertainty the Labour Party is the right choice for Britain, because its ideology allows the government to intervene in the economy to steer the country through difficulties. In order to survive, Brown needs to heed his Cabinet Minister’s point. The British people do not know what this government is about, what its aim are, what the plan is. Trying to take the Conservative’s centre-ground is a recipe for disaster, as the 10p tax fiasco has shown. Brown has six months to show what Labour means to do, and show that he has the determination to implement Labour policy. That is the only way he can win back Labour's natural supporters and gain the respect of the rest. Or Cameron will be celebrating in May 2010.