A story that could be told about many magazines

Richard is a first-class journalist and, crucially, a committed trade unionist – the essential mix to be the next editor of our union’s magazine at what is certain to be a challenging time for journalists and journalism.

Richard Simcox

The role of the Journalist is to inform, inspire and unite us across the nations and the sectors – wherever we work and whoever we work for. It is how NUJ members share ideas, experiences and tactics.

Richard has been an NUJ rep at a Newsquest newspaper and currently edits a magazine for activists in the Public and Commercial Services union – one of the UK’s biggest and most vibrant trade unions.

He has brought together a broad range of supporters who trust him to develop a Journalist we would be proud to send into workplaces to help raise our union’s profile and recruit new members.

His manifesto, published on his website, states: “Our union journal is much more than just another magazine. It is a powerful tool that unites us – from books to broadcasting, and from Cork to Cardiff, Caithness to Colchester.

“While remembering that the printed edition of the magazine is still the main source of NUJ information for most of our members, we must create a vibrant digital Journalist making full use of the latest technology and social media.”

Richard pledges to:

• Provide a lively and accessible forum for debate and ideas on our campaigns and key issues such as press freedom and media ownership – to sharpen our game.
• Produce a magazine that meets the exacting standards expected by journalists – a journal we can send into workplaces to promote our union and recruit new members.
• Ensure that the Journalist online is a vital and stimulating resource for people who want to be a part of our union every day – not every two months.
• Support NUJ members in the good times and the bad, celebrating successes, learning from defeats, and building confidence for the battles ahead – in every sector, every region and every nation.
• Cover our union’s extensive internal democracy – bread and butter journalism that is currently ignored by the magazine and the NUJ website.

Richard said: “I am grateful for the support of NUJ Left – a group of members who recognise the need for a strong, united, fighting union, especially at a time when media owners have abandoned journalists and journalism.

“There is a strong field of candidates in this election, but I am the only one who is actually doing the job now that the NUJ needs for the Journalist.

“Democracy is vital to our union so I urge all NUJ members to use their vote.”

The meeting starts at 12 noon in Lecture Room 1 in Queen Mary & Westfield College, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS [map].

Speakers include Tim Gopsill, who’s leaving the post of editor of the NUJ’s magazine, The Journalist, after 21 years, will talk about radicalism in the history of the union and how changes in the ownership of the media have impacted on journalism.

Human rights journalist, Donnacha DeLong, will talk about how activists can improve their presence in the media. Simon Saunders, who’s worked for the Evening Star and more recently the Morning Star, will compare working for such fundamentally different types of newspapers. Other speakers may be added before Saturday.

Unfortunately, Pete Lazenby, who has been advertised as speaking at the event, had to pull out due to an important union meeting closer to home.

NUJ members might also be interested in the big debate from 4-6 on “Capitalisms present crisis – how will it end?” featuring Paul Mason, BBC Newsnight and author of Meltdown; John Holloway, author of change the world without taking power; and William Dixon, Mute magazine contributor.

The London Anarchist Bookfair is an annual event that is a combination of stalls, talks and workshops organised by anarchist and other radical groups.

Joint father of the newly-merged Guardian and Observer chapel, Brian Williams, told tonight’s hugely-successful Stand Up for the Observer public meeting that NUJ members would fight to save jobs at the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper.

More than 200 people packed a room at Friends Meeting House in Kings Cross, London, for the event jointly organised by NUJ members and Press Gazette.

Journalists including Henry Porter, John Humphrys and Francis Wheen were among the audience at the meeting, chaired by comedian David Mitchell and addressed by NUJ deputy general secretary Michelle Stanistreet and Press Gazette editor Dominic Ponsford.

Observer contributors past and present Katharine Whitehorn, Philip French, Barry Norman and Victoria Coren also spoke passionately and humourously about their involvement with the paper and the need to preserve its identity and editorial independence.

Katharine Whitehorn said the paper was one of the first to give women “a real voice” to write as themselves and it must not be allowed to change beyond recognition.

The Guardian Media Group announced last week the title would not close, despite speculation, but uncertainty still hangs over the viability of the paper and staff are seriously concerned about their jobs.

Many of the contributors, including David Mitchell in his opening address, said the plans run contrary to GMG’s sole shareholder the Scott Trust’s founding principles of liberalism and public service.

Brian said: “Most of us who work on the paper consider ourselves liberal. But we are not liberal when it comes to compulsory redundancies, and any notice of these will trigger an automatic ballot for industrial action.”

Michelle praised chapel members for the high profile campaign they have run so far and confirmed they have the full support of the union.

“It’s vital that the newspaper remains viable,” she said. “If it is to survive for another 218 years it needs proper resources, and needs to maintain its talented pool of journalists and keep its distinctive voice.”

Dominic pointed out that the Observer is still a “fantastically successful newspaper” that has put on sales in the last nine years while its competitors’ circulations have dropped.

He welcomed the news that GMG management had committed to continue to produce the Observer, but added: “The message needs to go out from this meeting that it must be robust and independent.”

Mike Pike, FoC of the Guardian News and Media Unite chapel that represents non-journalists, read out a message of support from his chapel and said the first battle had been won, “but not the war”.

This is right. The chapel has run an excellent campaign, attracting high level backing, and tonight’s meeting was a visible expression of that.

But clearly the battle for the Observer is not over and we will need to build on this and continue to support NUJ and Unite members to protect jobs and journalism.

Surviving NUJ members at the Express titles are currently going through yet another redundancy exercise.

Richard Desmond’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for journalistic blood demands the sacrifice of a further 96 London jobs from a total of 600 across the Daily Express, Daily Star, Sunday Express, Daily Star Sunday and their associated magazines.

The Glasgow office is to lose a quarter of its staff – that is 10 from just 40 serving four national titles.

Initial proposals, full of words like “eliminate” and “review”, indicate that no one is safe. Merging desks between titles and copy-sharing are strong possibilities.

A nine-day fortnight is to be brought in to replace the current four-day week. These are of course four-night weeks as these 10-hour shifts go on until the early hours of the following day.

District reporters look set to be consigned to the history books, replaced by agency copy. Management here have recently been successful in engaging outside suppliers of words and pictures in talks about renewed contracts – where they have agreed to cut their prices by as much as 16%.

The 1 January pay review for this year was postponed until 1 June. Then it was postponed completely. On the day we were due to commence pay negotiations for 2010, the company announced its latest cull.

Daily Express Editor Peter Hill told me in an email: “No one wants to see job cuts but survival is the issue now. Revenues from circulation and advertising are drastically down and there is no prospect of any improvement. The bills have to be paid. The company has to be viable.”

No mention there about the journalistic reputation and credibility of the titles having to survive. No thought of restoring the Daily Express to its former glories.

What has happened to Desmond’s plan to overtake the journalistic juggernaut that is the Daily Mail? He is not going to overtake anyone while he reduces the Daily Express to a title whose staff could easily fit inside a Smart car.

The NUJ chapel has warned management before that it views these constant cuts with anger. We believe they herald the demise of the Daily Express and Sunday Express as national titles. But still the redundancy exercises come – and they are getting closer together.

Redundancy exercises have become as regular as Daily Express splashes on the McCanns, or Jordan and Peter Andre front pages in the Daily Star.

When Desmond bought the Express titles in 2001 I think he thought he was buying Express Dairies as he has been milking us ever since. He has paid himself millions in both salary and pension and then says the company is fighting for survival. I wonder why.

You are demanding a new direction tonight. NUJ members at the Express and Daily Star are desperate for management to take a new direction too – away from badly-managed decline and towards meaningful investment in quality journalism and quality titles.

See you in Brighton.

Unite Against Fascism was quick to condemn the move and has launched a campaign, which it is hoping will gain traction among the unions, calling on BBC management to reverse their decision.

And coming just days after the NUJ launched a resolute defence of the licence fee – a campaign it will be seeking to build among trade unionists, particularly at the TUC annual conference next week – the timing is potentially disastrous.

The editorial independence of the BBC is crucial. But in citing impartiality rules that only apply during election times, BBC bosses are seeking to absolve themselves of their ability and responsibility to make robust editorial judgements.

Of course the BBC could, quite legally, refuse to include the BNP on Question Time and not have to answer for it, regardless of the party’s recent electoral success in Europe.

This decision has more to do with an obsession in some sections of the media to treat Nick Griffin as a freak celebrity whose presence inflames opinion and therefore attracts viewers, listeners or readers.

But this merely serves to provide a legitimacy to a party that operates a racist membership policy and has a history of, and close involvement with, violent neo-nazi politics.

No media organisation should be putting vulnerable communities at risk and cynically manipulating its audience in this way, and it is certainly not what the BBC is for.

The NUJ’s reporting guidelines are clear: the hateful, divisive and discriminatory policies of the BNP must be tackled and opposed. And no journalist should allow the fascists to spout their lies without exposing them as liars.

But the problem with Question Time – as Sunny Hundal points out in a well-argued rebuttal of some of the myths surrounding allowing the BNP airtime - is that it doesn’t offer this opportunity.

Aired just hours after recording, there is no real time to rigorously check the veracity of claims and counter-claims and inaccurate statements can go unedited and unchallenged.

With a format that fosters the trading of soundbites – exactly the kind of platform the BNP craves and has built its relative success on – it can not provide the analysis and debate that is required to defeat the BNP’s arguments.

We need the BBC to be truthful, rigourous and challenging in its dealings with the BNP. We need to see the party’s machinery and supporters lacerated by quality, in depth investigative journalism based on solid public service principles.

We will always defend the independence of the BBC and the licence fee, but as trade unionists and journalists we can not defend this decision.

NUJ member Arifa Farooq, who used her sister’s name to apply for jobs, helped to uncover malpractice by companies caring for elderly people at home.

The necessity of this kind of work is shown by the fact the Scottish parliament’s local government committee has been investigating the issues around elder care raised by the Panorama progamme that Arifa worked on.

While there should never have been any threat of prosecution, Arifa and her BBC and NUJ colleagues deserve our praise for their resolute defence of quality journalism.

Reporters know that in working for the Mail you hand over a little piece of your soul when you file your copy.

The deal acknowledges that any vaguely sentient newsgatherer knows it is odd, at best, to ignore the otherwise newsworthy ambitions and achievements of whole sections of society.

As Nick Davies discusses in Flat Earth News, the editorial line has a corrosive effect on the kind of journalism its journalists practise. But you take your poison, or you move on.

The same can not be said for the Guardian. Like the BBC, the desire to work there for many is cultural and political, as well as journalistic.

In recent years, however, GMG management has been chipping away at the group’s founding public service ethos that is not just important to journalists on the left, but also a vital part of a diverse and free press.

Journalists and readers in Manchester, for example, rightly wonder how “a sense of duty to the reader and the community” is best served by closing local offices and cutting jobs, while handing out massive executive bonuses.

It is also difficult to see how anyone could seriously contemplate closing down the country’s oldest Sunday newspaper or turning it into an irrelevant mid-week magazine.

The possibility that this is a softening-up exercise to push through further cuts in London is as disgraceful as it is worrying for the future of the Guardian and the Observer.

Amid all this controversy, management is busy attacking the creative rights of photographers by saying it will no longer pay to re-use images.

As photojournalist and NUJ Left member Jonathan Warren says on his blog – in a post linking the issue to the Guardian’s appeal for free Flickr images of the London Climate Camp – “photographers rely on reuse fees to earn a living”.

The timing of ‘Flickr-gate’ could not be better. Or worse. Photographers will be protesting against the rights grab outside the Guardian offices in York Way, London, at 9.30am on Tuesday 1 September.

Some freelance photographers have already said they will boycott the Guardian until it negotiates a new deal.

And if the bosses don’t get back to their roots with some “honesty, integrity and fairness” soon, other journalists and readers could well follow suit.

It is highly unlikely the Mail will benefit from this. But the Guardian, as a newspaper and a group, will certainly suffer.

That’s why NUJ Left is asking for your vote. All our candidates pledge to campaign for strategies based on the most effective and strident action – official or unofficial – to defend jobs, pay, conditions and quality journalism.

This means solidarity action to back our members in dispute and harnessing the resources of the whole union to stop the employers’ assault.

We do not believe the recession should be used as an excuse for preconceived attacks on jobs and standards.

We believe cuts are unnecessary, counterproductive and entirely avoidable. We will not pay for their crisis, while shareholders maintain their returns.

We will fight to defend journalistic and ethical standards. We oppose the latest sordid attempts to whip up support for the UK’s unwinnable wars and will continue to campaign for greater coverage of the anti-war movement.

Where we face editors who insist we must be “balanced” in our reporting of the nazi BNP we will press the case for a truthful and challenging media, and support with all our resolve journalists who refuse to work alongside far right elected members.

We have grown into a fighting union that puts the defence of jobs, journalism and human decency first. Let’s keep it that way.

Vote NUJ Left

• Kyran Connolly – books
• David Beake – broadcasting
• Tom Davies, Alan Gibson, Pierre Vicary and Barry White – London
• Barbara Goulden/Lucy Lynch – midlands
• Julia Armstrong/Phil Turner – newspapers and agencies
• Anita Halpin – PR and information
• Dave Toomer – north west England

Print and distribute our leaflet (pdf).

But a report published recently by the right of centre think tank provides a forensic analysis of the online activities of BNP members and supporters that not only pulls back the BNP’s mask of ‘respectability’, it shatters it into millions of pieces.

Its examination of the BNP on blogs, internet forums and YouTube – carried out over three weeks in June – reveals an accepted culture of extreme racism, Holocaust denial, anti-semitism, homophobia, sexism, incitement to race hatred and violence, and an undimmed admiration for the Third Reich.

In the introduction, researcher Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens says one of their major findings is that “many members of the online BNP network share, to some extent, a neo-nazi ideology, based on the notion that European nations should be ‘purged’ of their non-white populations”.

Those highlighted in the report, ‘The BNP and the online fascist network’ (pdf), are at best tolerated by the BNP leadership. In some cases they are promoted through official BNP channels and, in the case of blogger Lee Barnes, a part of the party hierarchy itself. This is the true face of far right politics in the UK.

This research is important. Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons were elected to the European parliament in May on the back of a conscious campaign by the BNP to shield from public view its links to violence and neo-nazism, and to promote itself as a more or less benign party of ‘civic nationalism’ based on ‘identity’, ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’.

The authors analyse in detail the close links between the official BNP YouTube channel, and official YouTube accounts of the Thurrock and Burnley BNP branches, and “ideologically driven racial supremacist” activists and organisations.

They also highlight Covert Tactics, a group of British neo-nazis who operate a YouTube channel, a blog, an internet TV programme, and an online discussion forum, and whose allegiance to the BNP is unquestionable.

Its members discuss their attendance at the BNP’s annual Red, White and Blue festival, and any BNP members who oppose Griffin’s leadership soon become the targets of sustained hate campaigns from the Covert team.

One member, Tommy Williams, appears on the recently leaked BNP membership list and another, Peter “Sid” Williamson, was effectively forced out of the openly nazi British People’s Party last year for what the BPP described as a “long term slavish devotion to the sacrosanct policy of never criticising Nick Griffin and his notorious gang”.

The argument that the BNP has no control over who supports it holds no water when the party makes no attempt to distance itself from such violent extremists.

A chapter in the report about Lee Barnes is particularly telling. Barnes is head of the BNP’s legal team, a party spokesman, a speaker at BNP meetings, a writer for the BNP website, and a researcher for the party.

His blog, 21st Century British Nationalism, is enough to dispel any myth about the BNP as mainstream and respectable. His writings exude racial hatred, sexism and homophobia, and he analyses the BNP’s relationship with the National Front.

It is important to remember that Barnes is a senior figure in a party that has successfully persuaded sections of the white working class that it has their interests at heart. Yet he displays a misanthropy that borders on the sociopathic.

He accuses those who protest against the BNP of being child molesters, and he claims that lesbians who oppose him “are in fear of their own repressed sexual feelings” for his “rampant virility”.

Providing irrefutable confirmation that, far from reforming, the BNP continues to promote a racist and white nationalist ideology akin to its formation under founder John Tyndall, the report deserves to be read by everyone who identifies with our core values of solidarity, equality and anti-racism.

It also provides further proof that our reporting of the BNP must be more vigorous than it is with other political parties.

The BNP is not like other political parties; its representatives must not be given a free platform from which to speak without confrontation and challenge.