“THE newsroom was a huge, dingy place, apparently full of huge, dingy men.”
That’s how journalist and broadcaster, Andrew Marr, describes his first day as a trainee in The Scotsman offices in the preface to his history of journalism, My Trade.
The previous year’s trainee was “a defiant woman called Melanie Reid”, news editor George Barton was like a sergeant major, and “hardly anyone there had had a university education”.
The situation was very similar in my first newsroom, the Evening Sentinel in Stoke-on-Trent in the 1980s, where the news editor’s most frequent instruction was “fetch me some fags”.
But what about now? The change is quite dramatic, according to the Journalists At Work survey, commissioned by the National Council for the Training of Journalists and published this week.
