A career spent supporting and highlighting the interests of the north is how The Guardian’s Northern editor described his work to aspiring journalists.
Martin Wainwright, who joined The Guardian in 1975, was talking to Leeds Trinity University College students at the community news hub and gave a wide-ranging overview of the industry and the many changes which he’s seen.
Taking pains to point out that he wasn’t making an “anti-London” statement, he said the problem was a metropolitan focus by the national media.
“My life purpose has been to explain the north of England through the national media. There is tremendous ignorance about life here.”
He gave examples including the coverage of the Shannon Matthews case, where the Dewsbury estate the family lived had even been compared to Beirut by some tabloid papers – a far different picture from the town Martin knows well.
The talk, in which Martin’s passion for the region (and refreshing lack of powerpoint presentation) swept the audience along, concluded with a warm welcome for the BBC’s move to Salford – a “spring of hope” in changing the media landscape for the north.
* The next speaker at the community news hub will be The Guardian’s data editor Simon Rogers. Updates and details about all the activities at the hub can be followed here.
______________________________________
Regular readers of The Guardian will be familiar with Martin’s regular updates at The Northerner – an online and email subscription round-up of news snippets from across the north of England. I was very pleased to be able to produce the digest this week for the first time (you can read that here). Martin is introducing other authors to contribute as well as inviting reader input on how it should develop in future.
If you have any opinions or comments to make on the subject, please feel free to add them in the comments below and I’ll pass them on.
Dim Sum Digital 
I’m sure Martin has the best of intentions but the Guardian’s Northerner can be incredibly patronising. Papers did away with women’s pages largely because they suggested that a) the rest of the paper was just for men and b) women only cared about lipstick and baking.
So it is with the Northerner it allows the Guardian to pretend it gives a crap about what happens outside of London (it doesn’t and frequently derides large section of the UK) and secondly it can patronise us with stories of whippets, pigeon racing, pies and stottie cakes.
It’s not as if there is a “Southerner” that only covers pearly kings and queens, singing songs around the ol’ Joanna and recipes for pie and mash.
Instead of the Northerner why doesn’t the Guardian just put a few more reporters out there to help Martin and boost the outside of London coverage in general?
“Explaining the North” suggests we’re a bunch of freaks which all too often is how the Northerner portrays us. Don’t explain – after all no one feels the need to explain the south to us – just report us in greater depth.
Newspapers are short of readers. I’d imagine that a Northern reader is as good as a southern one when the numbers are being crunched.
LikeLike
Hi both – thanks v much for the post Sarah – I very much enjoyed the event; I always do at TASS, and the work of yourself and John Baron at the Community Hub, and in beatblogging more widely (including our colleagues in Edinburgh and Cardiff) is another, major reason for my continuing optimism.
Steve, I completely take your points about the Northerner. My only defence is the weak one that it is better than nothing, or than the paucity of Northern coverage which remains such a grievous problem for a paper which has been the Manchester Guardian for by far the greater part of its life.
The encouraging thing is, that this is recognised at King’s Place and efforts are being made, within the fearsome budget constraints, to do something about it. The beatblogging operation is part of that, and I think that BBC Salford will prompt more. With today’s technology, there is no reason why more people shouldn’t be stationed outside London, or spend a lot more time there. The latter is happening. It is extremely welcome when the likes of Mike White and Nick Watt come up to the Old & Sad by-election, or Paul Lewis comes to Leeds to galvanise Cutswatch. I think we will see more of that.
I also take the point about the hee-hee factor in the Northerner. We talk a lot about the need to balance the ingredients and there is a major meeting the week after next into which viuews such as your own will very definitely be fed. Last time I looked at Sarah’s excellent Northerner, it didn’t seem to have a thread facility. I may be wrong – age… But this sort of glitch is also part of the problem, and another indicator of the mismatch between London HQ and those of us left out here, which all concerned want to sort out.
All warm wishes and to you and John, Sarah
Martin
LikeLike
Steve’s absolutely spot on – except that said patronising tone extends to everywhere outwith the M25. And once you get past the territory covered by the ‘Northerner’ and into Scotland, the coverage is an even bigger joke.
LikeLike
Martin Wainwright’s slot on Radio 1 with Noel Edmonds on a Sunday was my radio highlight of the week back in the 80s. Delighted that he is still banging the Northern drum.
LikeLike
Really interesting subject area. I should declare my hand here: I am a southerner living in the North; and, my son is a journalism student at Leeds Trinity.
Before we moved to Yorkshire in 2003 we had a sketchy understanding of what lay north of the M4. Before we moved we placed little credence in the complaints of anti-North bias in the media. It took about three months of not hearing or seeing what we knew to be important national stories about events in the North in the National news to cure us of that scepticism.
I don’t think the blind spot is confined to news organisations they just mirror the sort of ignorance we used to have and which we’ve been cured of.
I really hope that having the Salford media development will change the balance of power a bit. Or at least have non-London or SE examples to illustrate the impact of national stories. And stories about the North that don’t feature flat caps, whippets or dark satanic mills.
We’ll see but keep up the good work folks.
LikeLike
I always enjoy reading The Northerner as I’ve lived in the north on and off since 1982 and lived up north for far longer in total than I ever spent in my native Sussex. The main attraction of The Northerner for me is the opportunity to read about what’s going on in other cities up. I’d never see many of the local papers the column quotes from.
I do agree with Steve, however, that there is an attitude problem to the north from the largely London-based media. I so rarely see interesting stories about the north in the national press. Today has possibly been an exception as both the Telegraph and Mail picked up on the New York Times placing Manchester 20th on its list of must-see tourist destinations for 2011. But what a shame that the tone of both articles was mild surprise that anyone would want to visit Manchester. If the Telegraph and Mail bothered to send senior reporters up here they’d quickly find out that the Rainy City has as much to offer, even more in some respects, as the filthy, overcrowded and over-praised capital.
Incidentally, Martin, we do live in the digital age now and it would be good to see you hat-tipping some of the many excellent online-only news operations up here. Sarah got the ball rolling this week with her mention of Saddleworth News – let’s see you make this a regular component of your otherwise very readable column.
LikeLike
Steve: “Instead of the Northerner why doesn’t the Guardian just put a few more reporters out there to help Martin and boost the outside of London coverage in general?”
… like http://www.guardian.co.uk/leeds?
or http://www.guardian.co.uk/edinburgh even?
It might not be quite at the level of coverage that London gets but it’s certainly an approach that many other London-based nationals haven’t taken yet.
cheers
Matt
LikeLike
Thanks all for the comments so far – and especially to Matt for his recognition of my Local project 🙂 Everything posted here will be fed into the feedback that Martin is compiling atm.
LikeLike
Agreed with Steve on the need for more reporters from the nationals in the regions – the Sports pages on the Guardian and the Times seem to be well represented in the north east. It would be good to have some more though and like others, I hope that Salford will have an effect on this.
There is an interesting comparison on a 1970s copy of the Times and a 2002 copy in Andrew Marr’s book My Trade. He found substantially more coverage of the English regions outside London and international stories in the 1970s copy. He found the 2002 copy much more London-centric and celebrity focused.
LikeLike
Cooeee from the South West… hello, remember us m’dears? Yup, we’re the northern towns that both the “north” and the “south” forgot…
Meanwhile, I’ll get my popcorn to watch the two belligereant behemoths fight it out yet again…
LikeLike
Hi again – just to say that all excellent comments taken on board. The South West is indeed interesting Carl. I’ve cousins near St Austell and that town’s terrace houses and slagheaps conform with amazing precision to metro cliches about the North. The clotted cream and surfing just outweigh them better than all our wondrous greenery and other assets do up here. The point about using new digital methods is very well taken. It’s not my strength (age…) but the G is very good at it, so watch this (or rather the Northerner’s) space
btw Sarah’s Northerner now has thread attached, so please use it to sound all these bugle calls even more loudly.
LikeLike
The beatblogging pilots are good but are they changing the patronising attitude the guardian overall has to anything outside London? That said, those who complain about negative attitudes to the north don’t help the situation by calling Manchester the rainy city….
LikeLike