Abstract
There's more than a sentimental reason to keep those journalism files. Some day they could be useful
On May 16 I was to give evidence in the high court for 156 tradesmen who had been blacklisted by employers in the construction industry for political or trade union activity. Just a few days before I was due in the witness box the defendant companies opted to settle, issuing an apology and paying damages. It was the last in a series of successful cases involving hundreds of workers.
Back in 1988, David Leigh and I, then at The Observer, exposed the infamous blacklisting organisation the Economic League, working with our television counterparts from World in Action. In January, I was approached by Julie Carlisle, a lawyer from OH Parsons acting for the UCATT union on behalf of the claimants who had been subject to blacklisting. She had heard I had kept the leaked documents from the Economic League story and drove over to my house one Saturday morning to spend some hours reading through a pile of dusty lever-arch files.
Obviously delighted and describing it as “the best morning of my life”, Julie told me that the archive could play an important part of the claimant's case linking the defendants more closely to the blacklisting system. Apparently among the papers were memos on “Services Group” headed notepaper – this was an employers’ group not the Economic League, which the lawyers argued showed that it was an entity separate to the league. I had lists of meetings and attendees that the lawyers believe showed the extent of various companies’ involvement and that suggested they were not, as they had claimed, just consumers of a service.
I was able to find a note of a 1988 conversation with the Economic League's north-west manager who had defected, spilled the beans and handed over documents, but had since died. When I was told of the court win I was delighted, as blacklisting is an insidious practice. It made all those years carting of dozens of large archive boxes from place to place seem worthwhile.
I offer this story as an example of the advantages of journalists keeping the archives of their “greatest hits”. Most do not. As Leigh says: “Journalists divide into two groups, those who keep archives and those who don't. I'm in the latter. When I retired from The Guardian I weeded out a lot. I don't have the space to keep them.”
Ian Cobain from The Guardian keeps an archive and says: “Quite a few of my stories have concerned matters that I've returned to again and again over the years, and I realised some time ago that journalists not only need the skills of the researcher, salesman, professional traveller and writer, they also need the skills of the archivist and librarian.”
The ideal solution for archives is to have space at one's place of work. Cobain is a model of good practice: “I keep most of my files in digitised format, some of them sorted into Gmail folders. But I also have paper files, some held at the Guardian archive and some in a small cupboard at home. One of the keys to good record-keeping is disposal. Every couple of years I go through the paper files and work out what I'll never need again.”
Cobain is aware, as most journalists are, that if not working for an organisation registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) they must be registered individually for £35 a year and conform to data protection legislation that requires journalists to dispose of any personal details of people from our stories that we no longer have good reason to keep. “As far as the Data Protection Act is concerned, it's essential that journalists be aware of the ICO's guidance to the media,” he says (https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1552/data-protection-and-journalism-media-guidance.pdf)
Keeping documents in the workplace can have its own problems in the volatile world of the news media as the former BBC producer Meirion Jones discovered. “At Newsnight I was able to keep almost everything I wanted – paper, tapes the lot in big cupboards behind my desk and sensitive stuff at home,” he says. “But when I had to spring from Newsnight to Panorama to make the Savile film I had to grab everything I could and take it home in a matter of hours. I had also started to transfer some active files to the new Newsnight office in New Broadcasting House.
“Since then I've been squeezed out of the BBC altogether and moved house after 20-plus years. The net result is I've got most of my main files – Trafigura (probably a cubic metre), nuclear weapons, vulture funds, Savile, bogus bomb detectors etc but I'm missing some stuff I was still actively working on in Sept-Dec 2012.”
The archive space problem is most serious for journalists who worked in the pre-electronic age of hard copies on paper. The journalist who revealed the phone hacking scandal, Nick Davies, is a self-confessed, obsessive archiver.
“I have kept every single notebook since I started out on local papers 40 years ago,” he says. “That is not because I think they have any practical use. They are full of shorthand and scribble on stories which are long past. I keep them because – for some psychological reason – I don't like throwing away personal things. They are stashed away in dark parts of the house where they cause no trouble.”
Hundreds of files that may be important
He adds: “I also have hundreds of files of information that may be more important – documents of one kind or another which were involved in the background of stories I've written. They might contain things which ought to be preserved. From time to time, they turn out to be useful.”
I suspect that for some of us – and this may be mainly a bloke thing – our documents are another narrative in the story of our lives, like large LP collections and cuttings books that prop up our psyche. But there is a wealth of material sitting in boxes in these journalists’ archives. Over the years I have done a huge number of interviews with people with remarkable stories that are now dead. They include spies, military, criminals, politicians and much more of historical interest. I was reading a note recently from an interview with the Soviet head of the equivalent of RAF Strike Command during the Cold War. I have never seen another interview with him. It is also remarkable how the same people come up over and over sometimes with a decade or more gaps. Mark Thatcher was one, Brian Reader “the Diamond Wheezer” of Hatton Garden robbery fame, another.
Jones points to advantage of keeping rather than binning documents. “A simple example of use of keeping files is this: when the Wonga coup story broke (Mark Thatcher, Simon Mann, Equatorial Guinea) I got hold of the contract for the coup and we ran that story and got pick-up for it. Years later, when Mann was released, I was able to fish out the files and we got coverage all over again.”
Although I don't really have space I have paid to keep it securely. I have shredded all those that I just could not see being useful in the future but I still have a lot. I have a large repository on major UK crime – want to know about the Baker Street, Brinks Mat or Security Express robberies? I'm your man. I have an archive on spies and another on cold war Strangelovian goings on. Such space consuming obsessions do not go down well with partners. At various points my archives have taken over the basement, the shed, the garage, more recently a rented secure storage facility, rarely to my partner's appreciation.
Andrew Fowler, who has worked for ABC's Four Corners programme for many years, told me: “On the question of what my other half thinks of ‘those boxes’ – that's exactly the phrase she uses and is possibly self-explanatory.
“The old files are certainly useful,” he hastens to add. “I have about 30 years of notebooks and assorted files stored in boxes at home under lock and key in a stone cellar. It's usually dry, except when the local storm drain gets blocked and water runs down the side of the house. Other sensitive documents I have stored elsewhere, in hopefully non-easily traceable places. This is the material I think would be good to digitise and share with others through a journalists’ central archive, though I would have to talk to others before this could be done.”
Sue Bishop, the former Mirror Group, Channel 4 and BBC investigator, says: “I have boxes in my attic of old files, notebooks, cuttings and Newsnight and Watchdog films. The main times they have come in to use have been during the run up to the Goddard inquiry (my old children's homes child abuse investigations, an inquiry now led by Alexis Jay) and a return to the Profumo Affair because I did a long filmed interview with Ivanovich the Russian spy – the only one in existence – for which the BBC has brilliantly lost the rushes.”
Mark Hollingsworth was also able to help on the Blacklist campaign because he kept the archives that he used for his book Blacklist, published in 1988. “Some documents are almost impossible to digitalise – for example, an actual Blacklist of construction workers on A3 paper given to me by Paul Foot when I wrote Blacklist.”
Keeping archives does have its other more fiscal benefits. I have a set of photographs that were given to me in 1982 when I was investigating police corruption. They include Brian Reader with his comrades in crime and families taken in exotic locations abroad when he was avoiding the attention of Scotland Yard, which suspected him of various robberies. I'm also regularly contacted for interviews for real-life-crime documentaries. These have provided some useful extra income. You do get known to be a resource.
Hollingsworth says: “I have lost count of the times newspapers ask me if I know anything about a businessman or politician from the 1980s and 1990s and I find something.”
One approach is to scan all the material so a house full of documents can be reduced to a large hard drive. Hollingsworth says: “The problem with scanning and digital archiving is that it is incredibly time-consuming and I find it so much easier to pull out the filing cabinet draw.”
Journalists have given documents to universities
So how to get “those boxes” out of the house when it all gets too much? Some keep them in storage warehouses but that is expensive, as I have discovered. Andy Bell, former deputy editor of Panorama, is one of a number of journalists who have given sets of their documents to universities. “The University of Northampton has taken all my papers related to crime and the extreme right. That was the stuff I thought worth keeping together. Most of the rest got binned.”
Tap in the name of Laurie Flynn, the former World in Action producer, into a search engine and you can see he has handed his documents on the asbestos industry to the University of Strathclyde.
In terms of archive size, Duncan Campbell, the investigative journalist who first revealed the existence of GCHQ in 1976, takes the biscuit. He is working with his partner to log and box his archive of story documents collected since the 1970s. They are going to the special collections department at the University of Edinburgh library. Campbell estimates the archive size as the equivalent of 60 filing cabinet drawers. So far they have dispatched some 40 archive boxes to Edinburgh but estimate they have a further 150–200 to go. What made Campbell hand his archive over? “The number of occasions I was referring back to the material was tiny. But the number of times I was contacted out of the blue by researchers wanting material was several or so times a year.”
The university sent archivists on a scoping exercise and they spent several days going through the material. “They thought it was valuable material and archivists have their own special knowledge of what is important,” says Campbell. He is pleased that the archive is going to a good home. “It is nice to be memorialised in this way.”
Increasingly, a lot of archive material comes in the form of emails and scans, and though they take up less space they can be hard to manage. Jones has some advice. “I also keep a hell of a lot on email and I had to try to copy them across from work to personal. It was labour intensive – 100-plus hours. I would recommend anyone working for large organisation to set up a system to duplicate all emails into their personal account as they go, in case they leave.”
Several people I spoke to felt would be useful for a not-for-profit organisation that would archive professionally so they could be available to future researchers. Anyone who has visited the home of the director of The Centre for Investigative Journalism (TCIJ), Gavin McFadyen, knows it is creaking under the strain of a library and files collected over the past five decades. This inspired him to scope a central archive project for investigative journalists and he has been looking at options for a year or so.
McFadyen says it would be in the national interest to archive this material regardless of whether it is on paper or tape, or electronic. He believes the problem with archiving is that it can be time-consuming to weed material and make sure that personal information from sources or unproven information from inquiries is not released into the public domain. And scanning can be expensive. So setting up a funded organisation to help journalists with this would provide for a useful long-term archive.
Davies fears this might have its problems. “I don't know about storing these files in an archive. I can see that that could possibly be useful for some future historian, but I'd be worried about handing over something that could disclose an off-the-record source or allow some evil bugger to start suing somebody. So I'd have to read every document before handing it over, which would be a big job.”
Meanwhile in basements, lofts, and storage facilities around the country, once hard-won documents of the great stories of yesteryear will await their place in history.
