The move towards churnalism

It was recently reported that Birmingham Live editor Graeme Brown last month emailed journalists on his team to say that they should file at least eight stories per day unless they were newsgathering out of the office.  

“We need to make more of shifts where people are not going out as drivers of volume," said Brown, as first quoted by Hold The Front Page. "In practice, if you’re on a general shift and you’re not on a job, it should be at least eight stories a shift.” 

Urgh. I can imagine the intense pressure these journalists are under already and then to be told they need to file eight stories a day.  

I know local, like national, publishers are struggling but insisting on such a number of stories just creates even more churnalism; if you want good quality local journalism, then you can’t insist journalists knock out eight stories a day.

There's plenty of important stories that don’t have to involve stepping outside the office, but instead battering the phones and say, calling the emergency services to follow up on as story, chasing leads, and conducting interviews. This can't be achieved if journalists are forced to write eight stories a day. I can just imagine the burn out, exhaustion and low levels of job satisfaction these journalists are living with when it's all about volume, and not quality. 

When the story broke, journalist Olivia Devereux-Evans commented on X: “As someone who has done this… a 7-3pm shift means writing at least a story an hour, sometimes more. Sometimes I didn’t take a proper lunch break as I felt pressure to hit 8 stories and was consistently stressed about page views…” 

Similarly Louis Staples said: “As someone who used to work in clickbait content farming: this puts reporters at professional and personal risk. It burns them out and leads to mistakes and a loss confidence, not to mention questionable ethical judgements in pursuit of traffic. End this model!”

Maybe instead they should focus on creating useable websites that doesn't bring up annoying pop-ups every time you try to read an article.