Abstract
“Get off the bloody phone and get out there and find some stories!”
Most journalists will have heard this, or a variation of it, at some early point in their careers. It’s probably no coincidence that my weekly paper editor sent me out to do a vox pop on my first day as a working journalist. Talking to people – and having the nerve to approach strangers – is a key skill. Some would say it was the best part of the job.
But the phone was also, of course, always an essential tool. In my first week on the Mid-Devon Advertiser, I was told to make the regular weekly call to the Buckfastleigh correspondent (a job that clearly fell to the new boy). I could barely understand a word of the old chap’s Devon accent…just enough to decipher, among the village gossip, the basics of a story that gave me the splash that Friday. It made a page lead in the Sunday Mirror two days later - and a cheque equivalent to three weeks of my pitiful trainee’s wages taught me an early lesson that phone calls can be worthwhile. Less fruitful was a call to Brother Adam, the famous bee-keeper at nearby Buckfast Abbey. His hives were a long way from the abbey’s only phone, so I had to wait nearly half an hour for the elderly monk to arrive. And he turned out to be almost totally deaf.
At least I was familiar with phones – like most of my contemporaries, I had grown up in a home where the heavy old receiver was tethered to the wall in a draughty hall. Bernard Ingham tells us, in his autobiography Kill The Messenger, that his first day on the Hebden Bridge Times in 1948 introduced him to both the phone and the typewriter: “I had used neither before and was as terrified of the single telephone, which sat menacingly on the window-sill, as I was enthralled by the typewriter. I broke out into a sweaty panic answering Hebden Bridge 106 in my first few days.”
These days, of course, everyone has a mobile, and young journalists have grown up with phones in their hands, so there shouldn’t be any problem getting them to make calls. Except, it seems, there is… young journalists are refusing to use those phones to actually speak to people. Freelance journalist Jill Foster recently tweeted: “Journalism students, if I can give you ONE piece of advice to get ahead, it’s to use the phone. Answer it when people call. I promise, it will give you the edge because while text/email is great to set stuff up, you NEED TO TALK to get the story.”
Obvious stuff, but the response was extraordinary. Jill, who lectures at Sheffield Hallam and mentors young journalists, told me (over the phone): “I fired off that tweet without thinking too much about it, but it just blew up - it obviously hit a nerve.” She got hundreds of likes, retweets and supportive comments. One said: “I lectured in journalism at various universities and the one thing I had the most difficulty with was persuading students to PICK UP THE PHONE. They would literally do anything to avoid it.”
Jill told me: “I noticed that young journalists are so reluctant to phone anyone up – they’d rather use text, WhatsApp, Snapchat, anything. Students say ‘I’m not calling them – I’ll drop them an email’. You can’t conduct an interview with someone who’s lost a baby or has cancer by social media – but they do! They probably add kiss kiss lol lol too…”
And it’s not just the students: “I know one journalist, an established journalist, who was trying to carry out an interview on Facebook Messenger…Facebook Messenger!”
What has gone wrong? Novice journalists have always felt self-conscious making their first phone calls in a newsroom – what if people overhear them? One of Jill’s Twitter respondents wrote: “It took me a long while to feel at ease on the phone when it’s a work call, to feel like I wasn’t going to make a tit of myself.” Many of us can identify with that. I’m pretty sure my first chief reporter deliberately raised queries on my copy when he had heard me endure an uncomfortable phone call just because he knew I would have to phone that awkward interviewee again. But we all got over it, because we had to.
Journalists these days are lucky to have so many more newsgathering and checking tools available. Email is obviously great for making initial contact, and even texts and WhatsApp have their place for contacting people rapidly when they might not pick up a phone. Twitter, of course, has proved invaluable for journalists – once they got the point of it. Others will no doubt have their own timelines, but I would date my understanding of Twitter’s importance as a newsroom tool to May 22, 2013. The PA newsdesk, where I was working, began to pick up on a growing number of tweets from Greenwich, in south London. There was clearly some sort of incident, but what had happened was unclear: lots of #Greenwich hashtags and people complaining about bus diversions. Twitter had not only tipped us off about the murder in the street of soldier Lee Rigby, but it was providing us in real time with witness accounts.
So there is no argument that online resources, telecoms advances and social media have made journalism easier. What is odd is that the generation that grew up with mobile phones in their pockets should be so reluctant to use them professionally.
Lecturer Paul Wiltshire, from the University of Gloucestershire, told Hold The Front Page last year: “We absolutely recognise that new generations of potential journalists aren’t used to making phone calls, particularly to people they don’t know. But that sort of communication has to be at the heart of journalism, and we want to make sure our students are given the confidence to take it in their stride.” His course is now “hammering home such basic skills”. He’s not the only one who is concerned. I contacted veteran trainer Peter Sands (on Facebook Messenger) and he told me (on the phone): “When I asked trainees about using a phone, they looked at me as if I was strange.” Peter runs the Mail Online training course, which sends trainees out on attachment to other media organisations, including regional papers and agencies. They were coming back and telling him: “It taught me how to use the phone.” He too now includes “how to use the phone” sessions in the course.
Basic? Certainly…but definitely essential, even in this age of social media – and especially when lockdown meant no face to face. It’s all about direct communication and creating a relationship, albeit a brief one, between one human being and another. Another of Jill Foster’s respondents wrote: “I’ve been a journalist 25+ years and I still love, love, love interviewing people. How can you be a journalist and not???”
Indeed. As Jill told me: “Face to face is always best, but phone is second best. Email is way down the list. What next? Semaphore?”
