Jon Slattery has a guest blogger on his site lifting the lid on what it is like for a former regional press journalist to work on a council-run newspaper.
The anonymous blogger writes: “I come from a journalistic background but I never fooled myself into thinking that what I am now doing is journalism. It uses some of the same tools, but it is emphatically not journalism.”
He adds: “Sitting across from me are the table of press officers, a very nice bunch, all late 20s, early 30s, you would like them. They all went to university and then straight onto local newspapers because they wanted to be journalists. They worked hard, making it to senior reporter or news editor or editor of their local edition.
“Then they wanted to get married or buy flats and they looked around at an industry shedding jobs at every level. And they all applied for council press officer jobs that have seen their salaries jump by, on average, around 50 per cent.”
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