The Belfast Telegraph’s Northern Ireland editor Sam McBride has described himself as “one of the most privileged journalists in the UK” because he still has “enormous freedom” over his work.
McBride won the Local Journalism accolade at the British Journalism Awards in December for his investigation into the IRA murder of young Ulster Unionist politician Edgar Graham and into a blue-green algae crisis at Lough Neagh, the UK’s largest lake. The judges praised them as “strong, compelling stories, meticulously researched and told with flair and authority”.
McBride was highly commended at the same event last year and shortlisted for three further consecutive years before that. He was also highly commended for the water investigation in the Energy and Environment category this year.
McBride said there are “loads of good journalists” in the UK but that “you’re much more likely to be able to do that sort of journalism if you’re at somewhere where that’s prioritised, rather than somewhere where you’re almost rebelling against your editor to take a week to work on something or do an in-depth investigation”.
McBride’s remit as Northern Ireland editor, a role he begun in 2021, includes writing a two-page Saturday column which can encompass politics, environmental issues, infrastructure, health and investigative work.
He said: “The central element of it is that it involves a lot of time, involves a lot of research, involves a lot of work, and my editor gives me that time.”
He also writes a weekly column for the Dublin-based Sunday Independent in which he attempts to explain Northern Ireland to “people in Cork or Galway for whom Northern Ireland seems to be a very long way away who really think it’s not totally relevant to their lives”.
McBride also noted that traditionally if journalists want to climb the ladder of their newsroom they had to move into editing and management. “So being able to have a senior position at a paper, but it’s purely writing, there are no other strings attached to it, is a very privileged position.”
Sam McBride: ‘Short-termism’ making newsrooms suffer
McBride was previously political editor at the Belfast News Letter, owned by National World (previously JPI Media/Johnston Press, and now about to be taken over by Media Concierge).
He suggested publicly-listed companies like National World suffer from “short-termism” meaning they end up making cuts or pushing newsrooms towards clickbait to have something positive to report to the market. Financial Times chief executive John Ridding made a similar point last year, saying a short-term view is “not a recipe for success or survival” and the “major changes that we are all facing can’t be conquered on a quarterly rhythm”.
McBride said Mediahuis, which is headquartered in Belgium with titles around Europe and has owned the Belfast Telegraph and other titles on the island of Ireland since 2019, “has a very different approach to business” including a subscriber-based model.
“While they obviously want to make a profit every year… they are always asking questions both internally and in terms of what they say publicly about what does this mean for where we’ll be in two years’ time, in five years’ time, in ten years’ time, are we building a sustainable business, and that, for the first time, I suppose, in my career as a newspaper journalist, gives me hope that there actually will be a sustainable business in ten or 15 or 20 years’ time.”
He added that many news organisations plaster “guff” across their websites “and we know that it’s guff as journalists, readers know that, and yet they just want to get hits at any cost”.
“So I do genuinely feel like one of the most privileged journalists in the UK because I’m able to work somewhere where I am given really enormous freedom to write about almost any topic, and given the time to get into things properly. I’ve got good editors. We’ve got good in-house lawyers. All of the stuff that costs money, we have access to some of that.
“And it’s not that we’re driving Ferraris, it’s not that it’s a lavish place to work, but the basics of what is required for good journalism are there, and they’re encouraged at the heart of the business.”
He added that “a lot of the time you talk to people at the senior level in the industry, and certainly in the regional media, they will say, yeah, that’s all well good but people just won’t pay for that, the sums will not add up.
“And there is an element of risk in what we’re doing, there’s no doubt about that – if you invest an awful lot of money in journalism and you hope that people are going to ultimately subscribe to it online there is a huge risk in that. But… we have managed to get this very significant number of people that is growing, and we’re finding new ways to engage with them.”
According to McBride the Belfast Telegraph has almost 13,000 digital subscribers, with a full-price subscription costing £69.99 per year, while Mediahuis Ireland overall (including the Irish Independent) has about 90,000.
[Read more: How newspaper giant Mediahuis aims to reach 70% digital revenue by 2030]
In Belfast this is despite a “congested” media landscape with competition from the BBC, UTV, multiple daily and weekly newspapers, and Irish titles that come up from Dublin and UK nationals from London, he added.
McBride said the key metric in the newsroom is no longer page views but what subscribers are reading and how long they spend with the content – with positive results from his columns, he added, proving wrong the old received wisdom that “nobody reads more than something like 1,200 words in a newspaper”.
He also described his in-depth pieces as “quite counter-cultural” in a world where brevity is often valued across platforms like Tiktok. “Actually there’s at least a section of the population that are very open to reading that and engaging with that and actually paying money for that.”
Building trust in the journalism by demystifying it and explaining the work that has gone into stories is also helping, he added, including through an email newsletter he writes.
McBride described doing this as something that never crossed his or his colleagues’ minds when he started as a journalist in January 2006 but that now it receives “amazing feedback” and gives people a sense of trust and ownership over the work.
He suggested that some of the big regional publishing groups are “really in a race to the bottom in terms of scary weather stories that are ludicrous, in terms of real hyperbole about something that was on television that really is inconsequential.
“I’m not saying that there is no place for weather stories in newspapers, of course there is, of course there’s room for stories about what’s on TV or whatever. But when that is dominating your stats online, when that’s the stuff that journalists are being incentivised to churn out more and more of, is it any surprise that people don’t really think that this is an industry worth saving sometimes?
“The basics of good journalism are about holding power to account, about explaining the world around us, about telling people the good and the bad about their local area, that has to be what it’s about.”
Being ‘a journalistic pain in the arse for those in power’
McBride was described by the British Journalism Awards judges as “a proper journalistic pain in the arse for those in power” but had mixed feelings in response.
“On the one hand, of course I want to be a complete pain in the arse to people who deserve that. But I don’t necessarily assume that everybody who’s powerful deserves to be treated with contempt…
“There are lots of good people in politics. I think, actually, part of our job as journalists is to get away from some of the lazy claims about politics: in particular the idea that politics is an inherently disreputable way to earn a living, and that they’re all at it, that they’re all the same, that they’re all corrupt, or they’re all ripping off their expenses, or whatever.
“As journalists we know that’s not true. There are loads of good people in politics. There are lots of people who might completely disagree about how society should be structured, about economics, about social issues, whatever, but they’re absolutely genuine and sincere in trying to make the world a better place and they think that their vision of the of the world would make the world a better place.”
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