At the peak of his business Teesside-based court reporter Peter Holbert could make more than £5,000 per week (in 1970s money!).
At the end of January 2025, at the age of 84, he will be covering his last case. He says in recent years demand for his services has almost completely dried up from both local and national media.
He says that both Northern Echo publisher Newsquest and Teesside Gazette owner Reach no longer have budgets for freelance contributors. His last regular client, ITV regional franchise Tyne Tees, stopped using his services at the end of 2024.
He said: “There isn’t a living for another Teesside Crown Court freelance to succeed me.
“I could only afford to operate because I have two pensions, no mortgage, school fees or take big holidays.
“But I loved my work and made some great friends in the job and in the law
”I certainly had the best of times, and I’m working on some memoirs to record them.”
Holbert began covering Teesside Crown Court in 1968 and previously worked with partner Clive Armitage, who retired in 2006 and died in 2021.
He began his journalist career at the Prestwich and Whitefield Guide aged 16 going on to work at the Joe Horrocks Agency in Bury, the Northern Echo and Evening Despatch in Darlington, the Hereford Evening News as deputy news editor, North East Press Agency in Middlesbrough and the Sunday Sun.
Since the coronavirus pandemic Holbert, like many other court reporters, covers cases from home via videolink. This means he can monitor two cases at once, on separate devices, but he says it has also drained some joy from the job.
He said: “It’s not the same because you can’t ask questions. In court you can speak to barristers and solicitors and get more details. They will also tell you if they have got a good case coming up.
“All the fun has gone out of it and all the money too. “
He formerly counted nearby dailies the Teesside Gazette and Northern Echo among his regular clients as well as the Hartlepool Mail (National World) and local BBC and ITV news operations and all the national newspaper titles.
Up until the mid 2000s many national newspapers had northern offices with their own pages to fill and Holbert recalls being called up asking for stories. Now, he says, The Times has not used a story from him in years. He said: “I send them stuff, I don’t know if anyone reads it.”
Incredibly, Holbert says rates paid for stories have not improved since the 1960s.
The now defunct News of the World was once one of Holbert’s biggest clients.
He recalls that they used to carry double-page features on US murders in the 1970s and he pitched the idea of them carrying reports from some of the cases he had covered.
These 1,800-word features included trial reports and interviews with the families of both victims and murderer. Holbert recalls once selling three of these pieces in a week to the News of the World at £1 per word (a rate many national press freelances would be happy to achieve today).
As well as dwindling demand for court copy, Holbert cites competition from police press offices as another unwelcome development.
Local police will often nowadays write their own reports of cases where criminals have been convicted and post them online with some publishers using these reports verbatim.
Holbert says: “They don’t report any words that have been spoken in court, they are just having their own background in – quite often missing important things which I would regard as a form of censorship.
“But their stuff is free and in many cases newspapers would rather have their free stuff than pay for a report.”
Holbert said local publishers Newsquest and Reach do still cover Teesside Crown Court and often syndicate their reports to other publishers.
Asked why he has kept at court reporting for so long, he said: “I like it and I’m good at it.”
Does the grimness of so much of the subject matter he covers ever get him down?
He said: “In court you’re too busy writing stuff down and writing your reports to have time for anything else.”
Although he does say one case from more than four decades ago moves him to this day.
He was the only journalist allowed to attend the funeral service for Jacqueline Hill, 20, a Leeds University student murdered by the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe on 17 November 1980.
It was in a tiny church near her home in Ormesby, Middlesbrough, and he knew the family solicitor Ainley Hart who prosecuted for the RSPCA in Teesside Magistrates’ Court.
“I had an aisle-side seat and on the floor was Jacqueline’s Dansette record player which at one point played her personal LP of Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge over Troubled Water.
“The church filled with sobs, and all these years later it still brings a tear to my eye.”
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