 I want to welcome you all to tonight's event, Breaking the News at the Launch Debate. Breaking the News is an upcoming British Library exhibition opening on 22 April in London and is supported by Newsworks. The exhibition explores what makes an event news, press freedom and issues of trust through a selection of news stories spanning 500 years of news production in Britain. This evening, we're in Leeds Central Library to celebrate the opening of the exhibition in public libraries across the UK through the Living Knowledge Network. The Living Knowledge Network explores new ways for libraries across the UK to work together to share ideas, spark connections and create memorable experiences for library users. Public libraries are drawing on their individual collections and regional connections to augment the exhibition to celebrate the value of regional news in communities across the UK. Each has been specially designed exhibition displays generously supported by the Helen Hamlin Trust. There will also be a programme of in-person and online events curated by local libraries which can be viewed at livingknowledgenetwork.co.uk. We're streaming online as well as into our public library partner buildings tonight. So a particular welcome to audiences in Cambridge, Jersey, Surrey and Ipswich. Those watching from afar can join in the conversation tonight by asking questions. If you'd like to tweet about the event, please use the hashtag Breaking The News. We're delighted to be coming to you from the Tiles Hall in Leeds which was originally the main library reading room and indeed when I worked at what is now Leeds Beckett University in the early 1990s and came to meet professional librarian colleagues here, this was the commercial and technical library. The choice to work with Leeds tonight reflects the British library's strong presence in West Yorkshire. Our Boston Spa site has been in operation since the 1960s, our growing culture and learning programme in the region and our current exploration to establish a permanent venue in central Leeds. This event's particularly appropriate as our newspaper collection is the only part of our collection wholly housed at Boston Spa in Weatherby. We're thrilled to be joined by artist and activist Rachel Horn, editor James Mitchinson and writer Roger Lytollis for tonight's panel event. There'll be a conversation celebrating regional news and its significance at the heart of communities. The event's hosted by Fatima Manji. Fatima's an award-winning broadcaster and journalist who anchors UK's Channel 4 News. She reports on major national and international stories and is best known for breaking stories with global impact. She's also the author of Hidden Heritage, Rediscovering Britain's Lost Love of the Orient, which was published last year. Fatima, thank you very much. Thank you so much for that kind introduction. Can you all hear me? Good. It's great to see so many of you here tonight, a full house. Live in-person events have been much missed and so it's really really nice to see so many of you here in Leeds tonight and to be in this fantastic venue. Without further ado, I'm going to introduce you to our panel and hopefully we'll have a lively and an interesting discussion tonight. We're here to celebrate local journalism, but because we're journalists, we'll probably do so in a critical way. So we'll have a little bit of a chat and then we'll bring in some questions and some thoughts from the audience too. So first of all, we have here Roger Lightollis. Roger is the author of a brand new book called Panic as Man burns crumpets, The Vanishing World of the Local Journalist, and his book is available to buy at the very end, so please do seek that out. The book has been described as laugh out loud funny, and his honesty has been praised, and he's promised me he's going to be very honest and very funny here tonight, so I'm really looking forward to that. And it's obviously based on his many many years working in local journalism in Carlisle. Then we have Rachel Horn, and you might have seen Rachel's work upstairs. She led the Don Capolitan magazine, a citizen led journalist movement advocating and celebrating Doncaster. She's also done lots of work for the Guardian looking at issues in Doncaster and so we're going to talk about some of that tonight. And then we have a gentleman, some of you may know, the Yorkshire Post editor, James Mitchinson. He says he's passionate about God's own county and he fiercely fights for the north, so we're going to hear some of that fierceness tonight, I hope. So welcome all of you. I'd like to open with asking you, you all work in local journalism in different ways. What do you think is the best thing about being a local journalist? I mean, I started my career in local radio, and for me the best thing was the closeness to the audience. When you did something right, you'd hear about it, and when you did something wrong, you would definitely hear about it. So what's the best thing for you about being in local journalism, Roger? The best thing is the people. The worst thing can be the people as well. But the variety of people that you meet, the stories that you hear, the trust that people place in you to tell their story, they can come to you in times of... Basically, when times are really good or times are really bad, you tend to meet people that's one extreme or the other, which is one of the things that makes a job so interesting. I love to tell stories, so hearing stories, telling stories, seeing the variety of life, that's really the best thing about it for me. Brennan, Rachel? Yeah, I think for us, obviously we're not journalists, we were artists that started Don Capolitan, but I guess for us it was the relationships that were built with the community and the trust, and the fact that we were doing something positive when a lot of national news had negative stories on our town. So it was a pleasure really to be of service to the town in that way, even though it was incredibly difficult creating a print magazine in such a decline of print. But yeah, it was always like a privilege, and yeah, when things did go wrong, people would tell you about it as well. So it was interesting navigating that. James? It depends slightly on where you are, I think, in the newsroom and what your job is in terms of what the best bit is. So setting out as a trainee journalist, some of the jobs you're asked to go on are terrifying. You know, your editors will tell you that if somebody's been killed in a car crash, you need to go knock on that door, talk to that family and tell their story. And the privilege in that moment is when you look the person in the eye and they're well immune to the house and they'll sit you down in the cup of tea and they'll tell you their story. The reason they do that is because they recognise the Yorkshire Post, they trust the Yorkshire Post, and as you say, some media outlets aren't necessarily there to give them a positive experience. But as I've progressed in my career and become the editor of the Yorkshire Post, at risk of sounding cliched, making a difference to that community really is opposed to. So anybody who reads the Yorkshire Post will remember a quick story of an elderly couple had been conned out to their life savings. It was only £15,000. You know, it wasn't a King's ransom, but it was to them. And I remember putting an appeal in the Yorkshire Post and within 24 hours we'd raised all of their life savings back and given it back to them. And that's quite special. Yeah, it's amazing actually. I mean, you all talked about trust in your own way. How difficult is it to keep that trust? Because sometimes things go wrong, don't they, Roger? I think it's getting harder now to keep trust in general with the rise of online journalism and the rise of clickbait. I think newspapers that have had good reputations for a long time, if they're not being driven by the need to get as many people to click on their stories as possible, which leads to misleading headlines and celebrity news and basically discredits the whole brand as it were, I think that's quite a danger when it comes to trust. So individual journalists are generally still very... They still recognise the importance of their work in doing it well, but if the policy from above is right, let's put a headline on this story that isn't really true to get as many people to click on it as possible, then that has a very damaging effect, I think, on trust. And that's one of the things that's causing journalists in general, journalists need to have quite a bad reputation. Rachel, you found that people were distrustful because of stories that had come out about Doncaster and the national media. Just tell us a bit about that. I think my experience personally has been quite negative because of Doncaster and its history with the miners' strike and then the post-industrial era was quite a stereotype and journalists would come in and take sound bites sometimes and then you'd feel kind of misrepresented. I think for us we always felt that there is that narrative there, but there are other things happening and we wanted to be able to create a publication that platformed that and platformed the change. For us in terms of building trust within the community, that was really difficult and one of the main things was that we might stop publishing or we might stop existing because things are like a flash in the pan and things come and go and stories come and go. For us it was about maintaining a relationship even though the magazine evolved into being online or we did other projects. It was like being a brand within the community that continues and hopefully will continue. James Rachel is quite explicit about the fact that she's a sort of advocate, a campaigner for Doncaster. Do you see yourself the same way for Yorkshire? I think so. I probably didn't set out to be, but through various different sort of conversations I found myself sort of increasingly passionate about the Yorkshire Post, increasingly passionate about Yorkshire. I've been at it for six years. I've been in local journals in 20 years in October. I'm from one of those mining towns. I'm from one of those left behind communities. The friends I went to school with, excuse me, don't necessarily have good jobs like I have. I think we didn't all have amazing opportunities and I'd probably carry with me just a sort of wish that everybody had the same opportunities in life and that it wasn't a postcode lottery in terms of whether you could succeed in life or it shouldn't matter where you're born or where you're from. We should all have the same opportunities in life and I sort of tried to steer the Yorkshire Post with that ethos. How do you get that balance right though if you're sort of campaigning for a place where at the same time a lot of news is negative and you're having to report difficult things about the community you're in? How do you get that balance right? It's a great question. The first thing you have to do, and my old grandmother used to say, there's two ears and one mouth and that's the order that you should use them in so listen more than you speak, read more than you write and that's really important that you take the temperature of the readers and the place to understand what you're just looking like a demented Chippey Northerner or whether you are actually tapping into what people want and that's difficult in itself. Sometimes campaigns about railway lines, they're boring. That's the difficulty, isn't it? It is and it's really difficult to bring to life that huge infrastructure projects like that that can have detrimental impacts on the environment on the landscape trying to humanise and bring to life the opportunities and the prosperity and the jobs for them to a better word that those things can bring is tricky but it is the secret but the trick is to listen and tune into what people are wanting. Roger, what do you think about that? I come at it from a slightly different perspective. I'm a feature writer rather than an editor or a news reporter so my priority was always just to tell good stories that was what I was driven by if along the way something that I did helped somebody if it helped to raise awareness of someone's plight or to raise awareness of an issue in a community that was great but I just wanted to tell stories. My colleagues were more driven by that kind of thing than I was. They would work for long hours they would go the extra mile to dig out stories and it's something that I admired rather than I wanted to be that kind of journalist in a way but I was more tell a story and if it helped people along the way that was just a happy kind of by-product really. Rachel, you feel quite strongly about who gets to tell a story I know when you worked with The Guardian that was something that you talked a lot about. Yeah, because at first it felt very much like I was going to be the subject of John DeMoco's film and that he actually documented me expressing those feelings so then through that process he said would you like to co-produce this film so I had a lot of autonomy on what we talked about who we talked about and I tried to steer the film in a way that kind of portrayed a different side of Doncaster. And just explain to those who haven't seen it what was the film about and what did it involve? The film was called Made in Doncaster and the idea of the film was to look at towns outside of sort of in the north that are misrepresented and to kind of dig into the issues of what it's like in a town that's been post-industrial heavily by austerity and when John first met me he actually came to an arts festival that I was organising and I felt like he was going to like come and make a film about the event but actually it became this completely different narrative and then we had the pandemic so he couldn't even be in Doncaster and I ended up shooting a lot of the film on my phone with no experience of video journalism and then involving a lot of other creatives which produced the film basically. I feel like we've got quite serious already. I'm going to ask you to share a weird or fun story that's happened along the way when you've been in your course of local journalism it can be recent, it can be from years ago you take your pick, James. They happen every day. Give us a flavour. If I can go right back to it isn't necessarily a funny story but you said previously what's the best thing about journalism and one of the best things about journalism it really does keep you grounded in the sense of you sort of believing your own hype sort of thing but I remember a story that I discovered it was an elderly lady and I have to be careful with my words here. She'd been mugged of a bingo winnings she'd been to the bingo, she'd been mugged of a bingo winnings and I went to tell the story and I think I'd only been doing the job six months I said to her quite naively as a 20 year old journalist if you met the guys, is there anything you'd like to say to him? Oh God, she said I'd like, she had no teeth and she said I'd tell you what I'd like to do put my knitting needle on the gas and I'd shove it up his watsie and I'd say anything you could give me that I could put in the paper put down your paper and she'd chase me off and that's one of the great things you deal with real people in real circumstances and even in a difficult moment like that to find some humour and I think that's one of the things that keeps you hooked because you don't get paid very much in local journalism and that connection with people it is addictive. I want to come on to questions about pay and money in a minute but Roger you've got lots of fun stories in your book just share one of them with us. Naked swimming British naturism begun a new swimming session at a local pool so I thought there's a potential for a good feature there so I contacted them and said would it be okay if I come along and report on this naked swimming session and they said absolutely fine as long as you take part in it so I thought well I knew there'd be a good feature in it so that kind of tipped the balance I said yeah okay I'll do it, no problem it was in about a month's time so I thought maybe the world has ended in a month's time I won't have to do it but unfortunately I woke up and we were still here so I had to go and do some naked swimming but it was okay because I realised the most embarrassing thing was being the old one out because I walked into the pool area with this huge towel around me it was basically wrapped around me like a blanket completely stark as so I felt really awkward so I just dropped the towel and felt less awkward strangely so that's not the kind of thing you expect to do when you go to do your day's work but it can happen if you're a journalist another one I was interviewing some male strippers there's a theme here isn't there and in a dressing room with male strippers I better not describe what happened right now again things you don't really expect when you go up in the morning as James says any long-serving journalist will have hundreds of stories as I mentioned earlier dealing with people like their best, their worst and their weirdest at times sometimes you see people out that are doing weird things because you know it's going to be interesting so again one of the great things about the job Rachel yeah I just instantly thought about a story we did on a man called Frank Lawson who collected bricks and he was a pensioner and his son told us that he'd like raid building sites for like broken bits of brick because obviously we've seen bricks sometimes have like names on them but there's like really rare bricks that have like little motifs on them and Frank had this huge huge collection and he just really wanted to write a story about him and his antics he actually had like an Instagram and all the bricks were on there as well what's the handle I'm quite tempted to follow I don't know about us you look it up for me so let's talk money then because that's been coming up and it is the difficulty here because we can celebrate local journalism but in the end someone's got to fund local journalism what is the biggest challenge at the moment and how are you finding new ways to sort of continue doing the work that you're doing James? I'm in danger of getting a bit profound here because people have to ask themselves the question what kind of local and regional journalism they want and if I could ask for a show of hands how many people in here subscribe to a local or regional paper one That's quite a bit of a question but it's a bit of a question one That's quite telling though isn't it and those local and regional papers are there for the community they do the fundraising efforts they tell funny stories I've become quite fond of being a nuisance in terms of speaking truth to power we discovered a story about Covid vaccines being diverted from the region to the south of England and there was a night when several Tory MPs just dozens of them called me out for the story the next morning on radio 4 a lead clinician confirmed the story was true but she was forced to change change tack during the course of the days you talked about trust people in power don't want you to trust us they don't want us to ask difficult questions and the more people subscribe the easier it is for us to resist what Roger was talking about the disingenuous journalism the clicky stuff there's an infinite amount of money in the sky that publishers can pull down by generating clicks an indiscriminate paymaster who doesn't give a fig about your community and they'll never raise funds for somebody who's lost their life savings and if we can win the war on convincing people to subscribe we can resist longer the temptations of clicks for queds as I call it and how are you doing that how are you trying to convince people to subscribe well some of it's enforced so we've put paywalls upon the website but the best way to do it is to maintain your standards and to keep coming to community events like this where you talk to people about the work you're doing, the journalists you have there are news outlets in Yorkshire that I'm responsible for I'm not just responsible for the Yorkshire Post it goes far as Scarborough, Bridlington Whitby, Halifax, Wakefield some of those have one journalist filling a full newspaper and a website and that's really difficult but yeah I'm in danger of getting quite profound because society needs to question whether or not local journalism journalism that's about the place they live and it's for the betterment of that place and they value that and I hope people do value that and I hope we do prevail Subscribe, you heard it here Roger what's already been lost because we have moved from an era where people bought their local paper every day they expected detailed reports about what was going on in courts in coroners courts in magistrates courts we don't get that in every area now it's just not expected in the same way I think ideally a newspaper is kind of a watchdog for an area people know that they can that it will represent them people could come to it and say if you have a problem with the gas board if you go to the local paper and they contact the gas board on your behalf and things are probably going to happen a bit quicker than they otherwise would on a bigger scale the paper itself can be proactive and tackle MPs organisations and push things if you've got one journalist in a town and that's not as likely to happen I think financially the problem began with publishers giving away content online I think if people have had 20 years of free journalism it's a lot harder to persuade them to start paying for it now I don't think this is hindsight because many of us were saying this 20 years ago why we charged for our newspapers why would we give the same content away on the internet and we're kind of paying paying the price for that now I'm encouraged that there seems to be a recruitment drive now from some of the big groups and they seem to be cutting back on clickbait and going more for subscription models I think I spoke to a former colleague who told me that his paper I've been not quite the exact figure on subscriber brings in the same money as many thousands of page views so it makes sense economically to make the papers better make the websites better so even a few subscribers will bring in a lot more revenue than countless people clicking on the new menu from McDonald's or some celebrity gossip that's got nothing to do with the area that you're covering Rachel you're trying to revive that spirit aren't you what you're doing and you went door to door handing out the magazine, 5,000 doors I think you were telling me earlier so how did you do it we had a model where it was print and we basically went to local independent businesses and asked them to advertise with us but nobody really got paid we just did it for the love of it and the buzz to be honest what we talked about was community to supplement it so it was a bit of a crazy business model and I wouldn't advise anyone to do it that way but we made it work and there was something in that when we would go out into communities and hand out a print magazine and people would be like oh thanks really looking forward to seeing this we just totally buzzed off being of service to our community and I do think it's a democratic right to have good colour in use and we're not journalists it's stumbled in to kind of creating this solution and I do think maybe the subscription model is the way that we can kind of keep that I mean you are all making it work despite the budget constraints what are you hoping to focus on to really keep the audience going and to make sure your readership knows that you're there for them but what's the kind of focus what's the sale people in Yorkshire don't like anything being sold to them so I think the key is the relationship and we're recruiting in fact there's a job I'd go in and out next week probably for the Yorkshire Post an engagement editor which is somebody who will ring people, talk to them how's the Yorkshire Post, is there anything that we can do the key is that relationship and I think if you think about as I said previously discriminant digital paymaster and how that flows revenue into newsrooms it doesn't care what content you produce as long as people click it whereas if you engage with people and they see that actually you live near them and you use the same hospital they do and your children go to the same schools that theirs go to by sort of having that relationship I think there is a chance that high quality local journalism that people trust can prevail you mentioned democratic right there the Reuters Institute published some research recently that showed that there is a democratic deficit people disengaged from the process in communities where there isn't a local newspaper and where there is a good quality local newspaper people are more interested in the parish council the town council, the city council and they feel more compelled to be a stakeholder in those communities when there isn't a high quality local newspaper people lose interest and they stop caring and that's when corruption can occur when as you say when the watchdog is not there anymore that's when basically bad people can do bad things I do want to give people in the audience a chance for questions so we'll move to that soon but just before we do that what advice would you all give to any young person or anyone who wants to work in local journalism what's the best advice you would give to them Portia? I would advise them to look closely at the industry it's probably not what you might expect it to be it's probably not as much going out and talking to people and probably more cutting and pasting of past releases unfortunately that's depressing in some cases it's true there is still great journalism being done the more funding people can give it the more great journalism will be done but I would say go in with their eyes open don't expect it to be chasing around getting great stories on day one or possibly even year one you might have to work your way up because depending on which publisher you work for some journalists rarely leave the office which is very sad but people should know that before they go into the industry but it is it can be an amazing job both for the journalist and the community that they work in so I say have your eyes open but try not to be cynical even though there are things to be cynical about but try to keep pathing it because it is still an amazing job it is very honest of you thank you Rachel I think it is possible to create small grassroots projects like Don Capola that are really inspired and they want to do that I think it is probably never going to be a full time job but other organisations do exist like Don Capola across the country that are doing meaningful work that is valued by the community so I guess it is not like for me anyway it is not anything like what these guys do it is a different beast but I think it still has an important impact in communities and to anyone who wants to try and set up something in their own area in the way that you have what kind of advice would you give them build relationships with the community and find your audience in the community and work and co-create with them and have someone in your team that has got a business sense because we didn't we were just artists and we didn't really know what we were doing at all so James I am always reluctant to give advice because the people that interview the best are the people that are themselves and they back themselves and they believe in themselves and they follow the path that they want so don't let anybody tell you the kind of journalist you have to be to be a success write about the things you are passionate about and the things you care about of course there are some formalities that you should try to get right try to make sure any courses you pay for are properly accredited seek some advice and have conversations with industry professionals write to the editor of the local paper respond yes I can't write back to everything because my inbox is basically a switchboard operator some days with the inbox where people write to me for advice and I can see that it's even person I tried to help but don't be straight jacketed with the advice I would give any journalists coming through and be passionate about the things you're passionate about write about those things and don't be afraid to tell editors, publishers that you're more than just somebody who can read and write there's so much more to journalism now that if you can code and crunch data if you're a graphic artist if you can shoot and edit video quickly on a mobile device with great copy great headlines you know how to amplify things through social platforms journalists are so much more talented than I was when I went into journalism now so be yourself that's some good advice there thank you so we've got lots of time for audience questions I think there's a microphone that's going to come round if you could just raise your hand and get a microphone to you and I think there's someone at the back there already just behind you and if you could just introduce yourself as well that'd be great thank you hello my name is Sarah Priestly so I I don't really read many news articles personally because I feel frustrated with the amount of subconscious bias that's often in articles that I have read or do read what training do you offer or do you think that journalists should experience to try to make them more aware of those different biases that they may be getting across in a very passive-aggressive way can I just ask could you give us an example of something that you've seen that particularly has made you angry about? I think I can't give an example but I think it's literally embedded in virtually everything that I read so there's obviously somebody that's very anti black lives matters for example or feels that certain political views are not in alignment with their own personal views and there's often very little direct statements around that but a lot of passive-aggressive comments embedded through the full articles and I just find that really frustrating because I just see it so often and I feel it's a form of brainwashing people that are reading and subscribing to certain newspapers so personally if there was a newspaper that was willing to fully take that on board I would fully subscribe to that because I would feel I'm actually getting news rather than people's personal opinions embedded sort of through something Okay, thanks very much for your question James why don't you kick us off with that I mean what do you do to try and keep the news side of things impartial because obviously you've got news and you've got comment Pragmatically and simply newspapers and their websites have to flag and identify opinion and commentary and editorial and state that it is that rather than news but the lady's talking about something quite different and subconscious biases subconscious we all have it and how do you train people to I guess become aware of it is what you're asking the industry through the NCTJ has long trained people with a certain copy style anybody who's been through journalism training as I have will remember that a place called Oxdown as I'm sure you do but there was a sort of a staid stale clinical way of writing copy and that training was deliberately done to try to minimize subconscious bias coming through into news copy but subconscious bias that creeps into an author's work subconsciously is quite different to news organizations or newspapers or publishers who bake in structural bias to their work and that's something quite different James you've recently had quite a controversial topic to report on in the azim Rafiq investigational scandal or whatever you want to call it what were the sort of conversations you were having with your journalists about how to report that the language that should be used the conversations were about stepping back from the bad actors because there were a lot and there remain a number of bad actors in that story who are feeding us lines that they want to see published so they want to control the narrative they want to steer the story and the conversations were about listening and trying to be aware of the fact that there are people who want to play you for their agenda so try to talk to as many people as possible we had just on Saturday we had the story relating to azim's lawyer he spoke to one of our journalists about Islamophobia generally Islamophobia in government the lack of willingness to tackle Islamophobia or even acknowledge that it exists that was our splash on Saturday and it is imperative that we tell a 360 story but it's very very difficult to tell who the bad actors are sometimes because they're very good actors Have you got any thoughts on that the idea, I know with features it's slightly different but with biases I think in terms of bias it maybe applies more generally on national papers I think we probably know which papers tend to be left wing which tend to be right wing maybe applies less locally because I don't think local papers can afford to be politically biased they can't afford to alienate half of their potential readership I mean I know historically a lot of local papers were left or right but nowadays no local paper can say right we're a Tory paper, we're a Labour paper and therefore tens of thousands of our potential readers aren't going to buy us because they don't like us so I think bias is generally national and hopefully flagged up at least by the political banner that the paper goes under Rachael, anything to add? I think what question dialed up for me was around like who's in the newsroom and the editorial rooms how diverse are they what's the gender balance and how that might shift the biases because your different perspectives are bouncing off each other when they're shaping the news we always tried to have a gender balance in Doncapolitan where we kind of split so we had a split team we always tried to work with different voices but we co-created our work so it's very different so traditional journalism Brilliant, thank you Any other questions or comments? Welcome to you next Hi there, my name is Ella and I'm training to be a journalist at the moment in Leeds My question is where do you go to look for your stories and I'm more interested in the unconventional methods and the unconventional stories Great question, thank you Roger, you kick us off on that I think it kind of gets easier the longer you've been doing the job because you build up contacts and either they contact you or if it's a slow day you can just go for your contacts book and think I haven't spoken to so-and-so for a while give them a ring, see if there's anything going on that can throw up some great stories If you work in a newsroom stories sometimes just arrive when you least expect them often people turning up in reception for better or worse that's kind of a a bane of locked journalists life when people just turn up and you know you can hear this cry of someone in reception and everyone scambles to be the person who doesn't go down to reception and meet this person because it's not always the best story in the world but sometimes great stories do turn up that way so contacts people walking in off the streets but it does still happen they're probably the main ones for me Pretty similar, people would come to us with ideas for stories and then we'd use that as a starting point but other times I'd use Facebook and sometimes things would come up on Facebook and if we wanted to do something quick we might even just sort of like interview someone over Facebook and use that as a way to quickly make stories not like legit but this is just kind of like how we'd kind of capture things so yeah that's sometimes what we'd do Facebook's a great place to start but if you can get past the admins who are like rock violas with people who come into these Facebook groups they're like town halls people are having conversations and one of our best stories this year was about an invasion of king crabs for example which was basically a fisherman who'd been trawling off the coast, the Yorkshire coast he was worried about this specimen of crab that he was dragging in he thought it was a killer crab from America or something once it was identified it turned out to be native and all was well but that comes from just listening to social media there are tools you can use as well like crowd tangle so I don't know if you're familiar with that that will tell you in this place at this time these people are talking about something so why not just have a look so you don't necessarily you can digitise your radar if you like these days with the tools that are available to you who suites another one but you can use the technology to listen for the quirky for you now you don't have to spend all of your time although nothing beats ringing your contacts and having a great network of contacts right around the county but that's as well as using the tools that are available to you now it's not an instead-off it's as well as but again one thing my first editor told me just open your eyes and look around you that's the best thing you can do and you used to say to me no journalist should ever walk past a planning application that's taped to a lamppost cos that planning application will be a great story for the people who live near that lamppost good advice there was a question here and then I'll come to you in just a second sorry, if you've got the mic why don't you just go in I've just got questions coming through from online so we have a question from Karis who asks with pay being low in regional journalism what can you do to overcome lack of diversity in the newsroom okay James do you want to start with that it's a challenge I mean I'm going to sound like an old fart here but my first salary 20 years ago as I say in October was £8,000 a year was my first salary I think for seeing you now the average in a local newspaper would be between 20 and 25 you're not going to end up driving for our if you're writing local journalism I don't necessarily believe that the diversity of the newsroom is linked to pay directly I think editors, publishers have to be more proactive about building newsrooms that reflect the communities they serve but I'll give you an example and it's much publicised because I moaned about it and deliberately put a mischievous tweet out about having I don't have a single female sportswriter on the Yorkshire Post team but nor do I have a budget to just go and get five female sportswriters you have to it's almost dead man's shoes in sport you have to wait for somebody to die before you can give their job away and I've got I'm lucky to have a brilliant sports team with people who get paid essentially for their hobby they love football, they love rugby league, they love ice hockey why would they leave that job so turning the crank in the wheel of the newsroom and changing the people isn't always easy you don't want to throw good people out of the newsroom you've got to you've got to make way for for the right diversity and as I say newsroom that reflects the community it serves but there are I'm bored people but there are mechanics and tools now in the recruitment process that make it much better for easier to identify people based on their talent rather than allowing those subconscious biases to influence who you recruit Rachel I know you work as a volunteer so this is a slightly tricky one for you but what are your thoughts on sort of how to get a diverse group of people together in the work that you're doing it's always been a core belief of ours really to work with different voices and I think what I was thinking about the film that we made with John DeMoco and now Black Lives Matter in Doncaster featured in that heavily which was started by Olivia Jones who's it was the first time organising anything and from the back of it she's come an activist and we use some of our Patreon to pay Liv to be a writer in residence for us because Liv's perspective was so important and I couldn't I couldn't Liv needed to write her experience so we'd use some of the Patreon money which wasn't very much but to just pay a small amount but for some of the other writers that we've worked with that small amount then led on to other things and I'm standing down from Don Capolet and Liv's going to run Don Capolet so it's been kind of a really nice trajectory even though it's been a small kind of thing just getting paid to write a piece for a year but it's it's something so that's what we've done as a small that's good to hear thank you let's go to the gentleman there who's been waiting quite patiently for a long time this leads on from much of what you've been saying but we've been hearing about the dangers of clickbait and things like that and I just wanted to hear more about the opportunities that new media offered for journalism today okay Roger I'm a bit of kind of old fashioned I'm afraid when it comes to journalism but a bit of a dinosaur I mean I'm kind of old fashioned and interviewed people write it the things that James was mentioning the new videos and things I mean obviously it's great for websites one thing I do worry about is will that kind of close off chances for people who might not be that kind of outgoing and exuberant you know the worry that if you can't do a piece to camera then you still have a future in journalism if you're not that kind of person I think hope will always be a place for people who are kind of just quiet and good listeners, good interviewers, good writers on a tech front I'm not particularly hot on that myself so sorry Old school, we like that Rachel I think it's really important that we look at how people are using different platforms to tell stories and we want to expand and move into using TikTok and video more, we have experimented over the years but it's definitely we need to do that and a lot of people are telling their own stories on those platforms so it's like understanding how we can expand our team and bring more people in to use that as a platform so okay, thanks Can I just say, embrace new media every opportunity that technology gives you to tell a story learn how to use it and use it to tell your stories it's great telling is as old as humankind isn't it, and the way we tell stories changes every day, you know, I'll go into the office and somebody will ask me if I know about such and such and what the hell are you talking about and I think new media presents great opportunities I welcome people coming to the newsroom to who have those skills and the awareness of new media not least because if we go back to the last question about diversity if we're going to make our newsrooms appealing for people from all walks of life that we've got to tell their stories with people who they recognise, who they can relate to in places that they want to consume the media if we just try to force them to read a newspaper that's only got pale white males who are 50 plus telling their stories we're on a glide path to oblivion we have to diversify the types of story we tell and diversify the places where we tell them and I think that will help to diversify the newsrooms because people will see that it's a place that can represent them that they can work for that they would believe in it I do think news brands you're talking about I think I'm being called off here but a last sort of anecdote when my MDs no longer with us offered me the Yorkshire Post editorship I turned it down I don't want to work for a right-wing newspaper Yorkshire Post was once owned by a conservative newspaper's PRC and I said I don't want to write right versus left I don't want to be my journalism to be steered by politics and he said to me what do you want it to be steered by I said well not right versus left I want right versus wrong that's what journalism is all about and he said well go and do it then I needed that I could change the Yorkshire Post I was able to bring my influence to bear on the kind of stories it told and I'm grateful that it did because I think we need to do that We haven't got very long left but I think we've got some online questions I think this will be our last question it's from Kat and it follows on from that theme which is how has your job had to change in terms of sharing news on social media and the fact that something can rapidly get taken out of context when you have such few characters in order to write a new story Rachel I'm not sure how I can answer that really that hasn't happened to you no no lucky you James I bet that's happened to you oh god every day and it is because people want to bring their agenda to bear hopefully you're all familiar with the boy on the hospital floor story it was a story by Dan Sheridan who works for the Yorkshire evening post it was his story the Yorkshire Post we picked it up published it and shared it and you know it went viral people were saying it was fake it didn't happen despite the fact that the chief executive at the hospital, the lead clinician at the hospital confirmed it was true there was a little boy there wasn't a bed for him he slept on the floor on a pile of coats that was our NHS at that time doing its best but overworked and I got a letter from a lady called Margaret she said she was cancelling a subscription to the Yorkshire Post the Yorkshire Post had been on the coffee tables of her family for 75 years three generations and she was fed up of reading fake news published by journalists like me who just wanted to tell lies and that's how quickly truth can be destabilised by social media and what was it like in your newsroom at that point did you have conversations saying how do we deal with this sort of backlash or did you have a sudden moment thinking oh god have we definitely checked it out but did you think oh have we definitely checked it out the wave of so there was thousands of bots came at my twitter account thousands of them saying that I'd got it wrong that it was fake news Donald Trump is responsible for that fake news sort of bark that makes everybody go oh I don't really trust these guys and you get a knot in your stomach and I remember emailing Dan the journalist who got the stories a great journalist and he showed me he's working out and he's still using the notepad this is in my notepad this is who I rang this is who I spoke to and the quality of a shorthand note can't be underestimated when you're trying to defend something in a legal position or something that's as serious as that but you get a knot in your stomach and it goes away when the training and the professionalism of the journalist is presented to you the challenge then is to debunk the fake the fakery very very difficult and there was one that went viral on Facebook Twitter is slightly different that felt like rushing bots automated to target my account on Facebook there was a lady who said the Yorkshire Post story is definitely not true I've got a friend who works at Leeds Hospital she tells me that it's absolutely nonsense this is just a non-starter and that went viral on Facebook and more people read that than read our story so that old mantra about a lie gets halfway around the world before truth gets its boots on is very much true when it comes to social media right I'm afraid we're going to have to end it there although that's not a positive note to end on somehow the positive note is the exhibition so if you haven't yet checked it out please do because there's some fantastic celebration of journalism in there but thank you so much to all of you James, Rachel and Roger you're fantastic really great insight into all the work you do and the difficulties of doing the work that you do and it's been really great to hear from you and thank you to all of you for coming tonight thank you everyone just a final note of thanks from me I'm Maxime and I work on the Living Knowledge Network this event has been a real collaborative effort between the British Library Leeds Libraries and the Living Knowledge Network and we are really proud of this exhibition Breaking the News which is now open in 31 public libraries around the UK so if you head to our website you can find out information about that we have for people in the room books at the back of the hall so you can buy Fatima's and Roger's books so please do head back there and take a look but another round of applause for our amazing speakers because thank you