There aren't as many journalists as most people think on the newsdesk, especially outside the usual weekday hours. Newsrooms across the country are chronically understaffed, and there are fewer people working behind the headlines than there really should be.
There might be one online editor at a time running an entire national news website over the weekend, while there are television bulletins that have a dedicated staff of two - presenter and producer. Major newspapers might have just a few reporters to cover the whole city, and forget about finding anybody when things break overnight.
This has been happening for some time, with almost every media company facing an ongoing decimation of its workforce for the past 20 years. Arseholes who moan about the lack of proofreaders on news stories really need to catch up with the programme, because the subs and general editors who catch mistakes before they go to print, air or online were the first out the door, a long time ago.
The problem is, those arseholes are still right, because a lack of people power inevitably leads to a shabbier product - nobody to catch that misspelled word, nobody to make that crucial fact check, nobody to do the ground work needed to get a story in the first place.
The lack of staff doesn't just have an impact on the quality of the product, it also affects the poor bastards who haven't bailed on the industry already. It means rosters are stretched so thin that reporters often accrue huge amounts of holidays, because they just don't have the time to take a break, leading to more stress and discontentment (an issue not helped by the fact that journalism is a 24/7 job, so reporters are also racking up a large amount of stat days in lieu after working on holidays).
And it means everyone has to do everything. A reporter has to have all sorts of skills. It's not enough to just have shorthand anymore, a reporter also need to know how to edit a video package, or do a live cross, or do web copy, or dozens of other small tasks that used to belong to specialists, and are now dumped on the people who remain.
No wonder there is so much burn-out in this industry, especially when the most pressure is put on journos who are just starting out in the business, and dive out again because they can't handle that crush
The other major issue with the nearly-empty newsrooms is that there is no more fat to cut. The decades of cutbacks means the media companies are at a point where there is nobody else to get rid of, because there will literally be nobody left to produce the work.
Everyone is needed now. There are no freeloaders, nobody is just cruising through the job. Everybody is working their fucking arses off and will be severely missed if there are any more redundancies.
It's come to the point where if anybody is going to be cut, there won't be any product at all, and if you're not producing anything, you're out of business.
That's what we're facing now, and it's causing real dread in this industry that we've reached this point. When there are no more staff to cut, there is only one thing left, and that's outright closure.
Look at Stuff's recent moves to shut down several of its community titles. They had to, because they couldn't cut them back any further. There were only seven poor souls working their butts off on those publications, and they're couldn't make any of them redundant because there would be nobody to do the work, so the work will not be done anymore.
There are fewer and fewer journalists left manning the phones, and nobody wins when there aren't enough people to go around. The industry suffers, the product suffers and the consumers suffer. It's not just the poor journo, trying to hang on while they can.
- Margaret Tempest
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