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.

All hail the freelancer fighters

There’s been some good news over the past month with both the Guardian and BBC upping their freelancer rates. I’ll share what these are as I expect many people not be familiar with what kind of rates freelancers receive.

Firstly, the Guardian has increased its rates for casuals and freelancers by 2.5%. This no doubt took a lot of grafting from freelancers such as Donna Ferguson and the NUJ staff reps who push for stronger rates for us freelancers, who aren’t often given as much thought as staffers. It means lineage rates will rise to 37p a word across the Guardian, and casual shifts will increase to £215 a day this year. Meanwhile the BBC has increased its article feature rate to £369.60. 

I wish these were larger amounts but I'm thankful for the small wins and the people who have campaigned for such increases.

Does AI spell the end of journalism?

It’s no secret that journalists have had a rough ride for a long time: hello stagnating rates, falling print circulation rates, publishers dropping out of the sector. Shall I go on? Well, yes, because we have another huge challenge hurtling at us. Come on at us, artificial intelligence (AI).

ChatGPT has prompted huge debate and column inches since its launch at the start of year. Standing for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, the machine-learning platform is a very nifty tool enabling users to type in queries and the AI responding in just seconds. If you haven’t tried it already (it’s quite easy to sign up and give it a whirl), you can see the gist of it with the picture below.

I started by asking ChatGBT to first write an article on the impact of Airbnb on communities across the globe. I followed this up by requesting a closer look at the impact of Airbnbs in Margate in the UK. You can see the response below:

Ok, so after testing the technology, I've decided I won't start rereading What Colour Is My Parachute? just yet.

As you can see, the very basic response did cover some of the key concerns of the platform, but I couldn’t see a national newspaper replacing its human crafted articles with this pared down content just yet. It’s lacking depth, critical thinking, and facts - and then it would need to be fact checked. But arguably, it forms the start of an article (or a GCSE essay). However, one of many other concerns is that the AI isn't providing you with unique copy; instead it's regurgitating the same content to people who have asked similar questions.

Still, some titles have jumped in and are already experimenting with the automated technology. CNET for one has been trialling the tech and using it to help write news articles or gather information for stories.

Editor-in-chief Connie Guglielmo said their plan was to find out whether the tech could “efficiently assist” their journalists “in using publicly available facts to create the most helpful content so our audience can make better decisions”. She said the articles were always “reviewed, fact-checked and edited by an editor with topical expertise” before going live.

For now journalists with insider knowledge and a book of strong contacts can’t be replaced – I’m not sure the robots have learnt how to door knock just yet, and I feel we’ll still be yearning to read opinion pieces from actual real-life journalists. But this is just the beginning, and of course, it doesn’t just impact journalists. There’s thousands of other jobs this will have a huge impact on.

Writing in The Spectator, author Sean Thomas believes the end is nigh for writers. “That's it. It's time to pack away your quill, your biro, and your shiny iPad: the computers will soon be here to do it better. ... The machines will come for much academic work first - essays, PhDs, boring scholarly texts (unsurprisingly it can churn these out right now). Fanfic is instantly doomed, as are self-published novels. Next will be low-level journalism ... then high-level journalism will go, along with genre fiction, history, biography, screenplays. ... 5,000 years of the written human word, and 500 years of people making a life, a career, and even fame out of those same human words, are quite abruptly coming to an end.”

Sober reading but hopefully it will spawn a huge creation of jobs we'd never heard of (hopefully beyond just servicing the robots and machines), like many of the past industrial changes have.

Thanks for reading.

Susie