Day fur in the Big Brootha House, er, sorry ADM, and top of the viewers’ voting were two former Brighton branch stalwarts. Step forward Helene Mulholland and Jemima Kiss.
They were elected by delegates to the new union body – the Commission on Multi Media Working (Motion 90 – you can read it in full at the main NUJ website). It aims to conduct an intensive study into all union-related aspects of multimedia working – and will look at issues like training, health and safety, use of freelances, wages etc.
And they’re definitely the right people for the job though of course with all the candidates in front of us, we were spoilt for choice. Anyone who knows Jemima is aware of her evangelistic zeal for new media in her former role at Brighton-based journalism.co.uk. And Helene - known to many of us as ‘Len’ when she was secretary in the late 90s and a key figure in the branch’s resurrection – works on the Guardian website. Both were speakers at a fringe meeting on ‘Convergence’ the evening before. Jemima is the recent former chair, now a resident of west London, is also on the union’s new media council. She also works on the Guardian website.
Of particular interest today was the motion on Newsquest, which is the owner of the Brighton Argus. In Glasgow, as publisher of the Herald, Sunday Herald and Evening Times, it has fallen foul of journos. Managers even had the audacity to ask the staff how to save £3m – this, following a £19m profit last year. “Oi, help us make you redundant!” Anyone who has worked for Newsquest would recognise this attitude.
Bradford rep Bob Smith condemned the ‘rapacious greed’ of the Newsquest. He said: “We are looking to attend the Gannett group annual meeting in the US next year (Gannett own Newsquest) to tell them about what is happening on their papers in the UK. We have got to attack them.” The ADM instructed the National Executive Council to support the joint chapels’ campaign to remove the threat of further cuts.
Motions 150 to 175 were on the agenda. Some decisions arising from them:
* There will be 10 issues of the Journalist not nine, published next year. One was to have been dropped but that has been opposed.
* A motion urging the Journalist editor Tom Gopsill to seek to ensure a balanced and fair coverage of Middle East issues was passed.
* Ways to enable an NUJ-hosted email list to allow for ‘sharing of best practice and defence of members’ rights’ will be looked at.
* A union pensioners’ organisation is to be set up.
* The National Executive is to step up its anti-racist campaigning specifically against Islamophobia and support membes prepared to take industrial action to oppose racism.
More contentiously the union will soon have a new code of conduct which is ‘tighter’. See Motion 172 on the main site. The paragraph which mentioned not mentioning a person’s age, gender, race, colour, creed, legal status etc etc has been ditched and sparked a healthy debate with several speakers on both sides.
The one who stood out though was Yorkshire Post reporter Pete Lazenby (star of last week’s Press Gazette NUJ pullout). Basically I’m telescoping his quotes here – He said: “If, after making the morning calls on the newspaper I wrote a story about someone dying in a road crash and left out all the information supplied by the various emergency services (and all of it relevant to what the reader would want to know), I wouldn’t be able to write a story if I take on board what the code of conduct says I should leave out. So instead of a news story revealing all about what had happened and that someone had died in a car crash and who that someone was etc. I’d be left with the story “It is dead.”
And now, thankfully, after the vote so is that part of the code of conduct.
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