An Interview with a Reporter: Tips and Advice!

Hello, Darklings! I recently conducted my first interview with Paul Fisher, a reporter for the Ardrossan and Saltcoats Herald. The interview was highly successful in regards to being able to find out generalised and useful information on how to break into a very competitive sector especially in this day and age. The outcome of the interview has made me eager to step out of my comfort zone a lot more often since it was problem free and ran smoothly. I gained a lot of valuable knowledge and figured that the answers I received might be of interest to anyone whom is intrigued to know additional and insightful information from a valuable source and essentially, a professionals point of view. 

"Can you tell me your name and the name of the publication?"

Paul: My name is Paul Fisher, I work for Ayrshire Weekly Press - that’s the whole company and inside that I work for the Ardrossan and Saltcoats Herald.

"What made you decide to become a reporter?"

Paul: At school, I wasn’t the best of students. English was always the easiest subject for me and then once I got to third and fourth year, I always played sports so I kind of followed that line. I kept in with English and once we were going to the boards to look at careers you wanted to do and stuff like that, it just seemed like a natural fit because I was good at sport - I was never brilliant, I was always kind of on the upper average. I was never going to make it as a sports person so writing about sport and news was kind of the next best option. That was the main drive for it - to get in to go and watch big sporting events and stuff like that. I'm not quite there yet but I'm working towards it! 

"Does your degree pertain to your career?"

Paul: It does and it doesn’t. My degree was Sports Journalism. I do a fair bit of sport but my main job 9 to 5 is news. I have a couple of other jobs - I do freelance stuff. I don’t just work on the Herald, I work at Celtic Park on a mobile phone app as well which obviously helps with the sporting side of things. In terms of stuff that you do in your degree, shorthand obviously is a big factor for me especially doing court reporting and then you have obviously your IT skills, digital skills and social media. It all helps when you’re working at a newspaper where - in terms of newspapers just now - a lot of them are in decline so the companies are moving towards the digital side of social media. So, being trained in that area when a lot of my colleagues are maybe ten/fifteen years more experienced but haven’t been trained in that side of things helps out a fair bit. Interviewing skills help since a lot of the stuff we do is on the phone. When you’re going to interview somebody, you were taught that in my degree it was really good in that side of things so that all helped in IT skills - not just social media with sub-editing and stuff. t’s In Design and the software we used help as well because say someone’s off sick and you need to try and cover the editing side of the paper, you have the basics to do a wee bit in that as well so a lot of it actually really helped to get the job in the first place. 

"What skills are required to become a reporter?"

Paul: People skills are one of the main things, I think - being able to talk to somebody off the cuff about a lot of different subjects that we cover, obviously the last couple of weeks has been about political stuff. My background is sport but then you have to know the area you’re covering really well if you’re working at a national newspaper which is a wee bit more broad but when you’re working at a local newspaper, we cover about six or seven towns so you have to know the ins and outs of the towns, where the people are from when they’re phoning you directly and if they’re not from your area - if they’re from another paper in the company, knowing where to transfer. Skills, as I said, social media in this day and age is really the key. Obviously inviting skills have to be kind of tip top, shorthand is also key – not so much for everything but especially for court because of the the court cases that you’re covering. If you haven't got time to go there every day then you’re only getting a few hours of information. To get the good stories, you need to be on the ball and get the good quotes that sell the papers, the front page splashes, etc. But, they’re the main skills you need - I would say.

"Is it necessary to have additional work experience?"

Paul: Yes and no. I think, having work experience is a good thing because you get into the environment of working on a newspaper or working on a magazine or whatever it is you want to do. It’s difficult because if you’re going in for a week, I don’t think it gives you a real sense of what actually happens day in, day out because you’re having to learn a system as well as learning an area - say you do work experience at a national newspaper, it’s going to be difficult for you to find stories that other reporters who have been there for ten, twenty, thirty years aren’t going to get so it’s good in a sense where you get into the actual arena of working in the industry but it’s difficult because you get flung in - you’ll see. Once you get into the industry, work experience and actually working are two completely different things. Work experience is good fun but working is really hard work.

"What does the job entail?"

Paul: My week runs from a Thursday to a Tuesday and our paper comes out on a Wednesday. So, on Thursdays and Fridays, I cover court at Kilmarnock Sheriff Court. It’s not the most serious of crimes that we cover but it’s usually anywhere between somebody getting done for drink driving or shouting and swearing at the police to serious assault, sexual assault and attempted murder, etc. It varies from week to week - usually it’s Thursday’s and Friday’s that I spend in the mornings up at the court and then I come back on the Thursday and Friday afternoon, do the Housekeeping stuff that’s in the paper and then on Friday, I write up the court stories and make sure that they’re all ship shape. After that, we send them off to the lawyers to make sure that they’re all legally entitled to go in because you need to watch - obviously with law, there’s a lot of different things you need to watch. Over the weekend, we obviously don’t work but we look for what’s happening in the local area so staying local helps me. My colleague Douglas works here but he stays in Glasgow so if something’s happening in The Three Towns or in the surrounding area, you’ll hear about it on the Saturday and then you come in on the Monday morning and for the first three/four hours, you investigate things that have happened over the weekend, build up your stories and then Tuesday is pretty much the deadline day – you get everything written, sent in, get pictures organised, if you need a picture you get them into the system and then you get the pages built and then on Wednesday morning, we check if anything has happened - something happens on a Tuesday night that’s really serious, the front page changes overnight and we have to completely start again – we pick which story gets removed, pick where the story goes and if it’s going on the front page, how high up it will be in the paper and stuff like that so there’s always something happening every day. Wednesday afternoons are a wee bit more relaxed, you do stuff where you go back to fifty years ago and you type up old files - it’s not the most exciting job but sometimes you get a good story out of it because if you go back fifty years and you say oh this happened, you can make a couple of page spreads out of it so there’s always something that has happened and that is always quite exciting.

"Would you still choose this career knowing what you know now?"

Paul: Yes, a hundred percent. Every person I went to university with enjoys their job. There were only twelve people in my course because it was sport only. Every single guy’s got a job in the industry and as far as I know, they’re all happy. Six of my friends went to university and five of them dropped out - one qualified and has a job that he doesn’t like and the rest of them decided they wanted to follow different career paths. They always ask me “How did you do it?” and I was like, by doing something you enjoy - reading, writing, watching news, sport, politics - no two days are the same so there’s always something happening. You go into a job and it’s monotonous, something happens and then the same thing happens again the next day, where you’re just typing the same stuff – that gets boring so yeah, definitely not. It’s obviously something that I enjoy and I hope to keep going/go further in the next few years.

"What is the work environment like?"

Paul: The environment here is very mixed. There are a mixture of ages, a mixture of males and females and a big mixture of experience as well. There’s a guy who has been here for forty years and then we’ve got a new guy starting on Monday who’s never worked, he done a degree and he’s coming into his first job so it’s really laid back in a sense of everyone getting on but when it comes to having to get work done, everybody knows when everybody’s deadlines are so they don’t end up annoying people and stuff like that. Obviously there are advertisement people as well and they tend to know when we’re doing stuff and when they need us/when we need them so everybody works together in a team and it tends to work. My experience has never been negative so it’s been quite good. 

"Do you have time to relax?"

Paul: You do sometimes - it completely depends on the stories you’re working on.  Sometimes you’ll come into a working week completely dry, you’ve got no stories at all and it’s like you’re digging, you’re looking for council meetings and through the last couple of weeks to see if you can do a follow up on something so when it’s a week like that, you’ve got no time, you just need to find stories because if there’s no stories, there’s nothing - you need to fill the paper so you have to have stories. There are some weeks where you finish the paper on the Wednesday and then by the Thursday you’ve got four or five leads to follow up on but if you’ve got that done then you can relax more because you know what you have to do, you know who you have to speak to, you know where you have to get quotes - say it’s the police, the fire brigade or the council or something like that - and you know what their deadlines are - how quick they are getting back to you so, you send an email or even give them a phone call and then you wait for their quote to come in. I tend to not write the story in one go - I try to frame it up so if I’ve got a story, say it was a fire for instance, I’ll frame it up, write the bulk of the story and I’ll leave space for a quote and my introduction for when the full story comes through. I’ll try to speak to somebody who was involved or was a witness or something like that and I’ll include that in the introduction and then quotes at the end so there is time to relax if you plan it out well in advance but it’s just the way it happens sometimes. You have to work on a story, work on something else and then go back to that at some point during that day when you’re struggling for time so not overly, it’s quite a high stressed job.

"What are the positive and negative aspects about your job?"

Paul: The positive aspects are that it’s rewarding when someone phones you up about a story you’ve done and says “Oh, that was really good” or “That’s something that I’ve been meaning to speak to you about” or “I really enjoyed your follow-ups”, etc - that’s the best thing about it. If somebody’s complimenting you on your work - for any profession, it’s the same. Also, getting to go to different places, seeing different people and meeting different people as well as the experience of getting to know people in the local area and them getting to know you. There’s always going to be negative aspects where people are complaining about the stuff that you do. It mainly comes from court but you try not to take it on the chin. My year here so far has consisted people phoning up to complain about stories but never in the sense that they were wrong, it’s always been the sense of “Oh, why did you write that about me, I never gave you permission” and stuff like that. You do get people moaning about it. These last few months have been a bit of a nightmare with the referendum stuff and people saying that you’re biased towards one side or the other but I had one really bad phone call. We had a plan to do one page on “Yes” with readers photographs and stuff like that and then the next week it was to be “No” and the guy phoned up after we did the “Yes” page and complaining that there wasn’t any coverage for “No” and once I explained to him what we were going to do the following week he was fine so the complaints and stuff like that tend to be the most negative aspect about it but the working hours are fine and the office is great so it’s not really that bad - it’s quite good.

"What subjects or topics do you like to write about?"

Paul: I like to write a variety of stuff, I hope every week when the paper comes out that I get to write about different things. Sometimes you have to write about cats getting stuck up trees and stuff like that but in local news that’s the way it works sometimes. I like to write about sport, football, bowls. I play bowls so I do most of the stuff for the paper on that. I like to write the political side of things, it’s always really good and really interesting and the court stories - I like doing that because it’s always something different and there’s always the feeling of needing to get it absolutely spot on. If you get something wrong or you quote something wrong, there’s ramifications and you don’t bare thinking about them, there’s always the pressure of that so I like that kind of side of things and I like human interest stuff as well like people coming in with a cheesy story, it’s always good to have a wee break when doing something like that.

"Have you ever covered a story you felt strongly against?"

Paul: Kind of. There is in being local to this area when I’m covering court, I tend to know a lot of people, it just so happens that the court stretches from Largs to Muirkirk and East Ayrshire. It covers East and North Ayrshire, it’s a massive area but it tends to be that people I know recognise me from school or I recognise them from somewhere else and there was one a couple of weeks ago where we had covered a woman who had been charged with sexual assault, we covered it last year and it went on the front page after my court story where she plead not guilty and it went to trial and my editor decided this was going to be the front page splash but it didn’t have much of a story behind it. The story was that she had been charged with sexual assault so that was fine so I felt slightly guilty because I knew who she was but I didn’t know her too personally that if I knew her really well, I’d take myself out it and get someone else to cover the story. So, it came to trial a couple of weeks ago and she was found not guilty so it kind of came back on itself that I got to write the story about that and how that she had been found not proven, her side of the story went in the paper after the legal side of things were approved and I got to speak to her so that was probably the only one. I wasn’t against writing the story but the fact it went on the front page was maybe a wee bit excessive but these things happen and your boss has the final word so you can’t do anything about it.

"Are ethical issues a big concern when covering a story?"

Paul: Yes, they tend to be. It’s a difficult one, we tend to try and keep everything by the book. There’s guidelines you need to follow and local news is a bit more simpler to do because if it’s a story, the circulation area is not as big as say a national news story. I know it doesn’t excuse if you make a massive mistake but we always try and keep everything by the book and if I’m unsure being a still trainee, I just ask one of the other reporters or ask my boss and if there’s an issue, it can be cleared up and changed so for me it’s not a big concern because there’s always somebody else that’ll go in first before it goes to me so I try to make it just as straightforward as possible and not make it any more difficult than it has to be when doing a story.

"Are inspiring independent bloggers a threat for traditional newspapers?"

Paul: In one or two areas possibly but on the whole I don’t think so. Traditional newspapers have the backbone of a big company behind them. Traditional newspapers have degree standard reporters in pretty much every newspaper and although circulation might go down for newspapers they have the online presence as well – it is the same writers but it’s online and some you might get for free so they make money through advertising. I know when I was at university, I did a bit of blogging but it’s difficult when you’re studying or it’s very rarely that you’ll find bloggers who do it for a living and do it full time - you don’t have the time to keep up-to-date. There’s an online newspaper for our area which gets updated on a Saturday, one guy does it. He does not have a qualification and it’s fine but it’s never going to get anywhere near the circulation we do just because of the name, the heritage and the history. The majority of local newspapers have been about for more than one hundred years so in the near future I don’t see any real threat for traditional news and the names that people trust when it comes to local national and international news so it’s always going to be the same and I don’t see that changing in the next fifty years.

"What’s the competition like against other reporters for a story?"

Paul: For us it’s quite good because we don’t have a direct competitor in Ardrossan because it’s just the way the newspapers fall. Irvine Herald cover Kilwinning and Stevenston to an extent. Kilwinning is kind of our very let outreach, it’s the last bit that we cover and there’s another Irvine paper in our office who also cover Kilwinning so we don’t bother too much when we miss a Kilwinning story or they get a scoop on us which very rarely happens because there’s two newspapers against one. As I said, there’s an online independent blogger who does competition, there’s only one story that I have seen on his website that we have not covered and it was an investigation thing that he did which is difficult to do with a newspaper when you need a lot of backbone to it and you’re just doing it as a blog - you can publish what you think without any ramifications of being sued or anything like that. Our other main competitor is West FM, the local news side of things tends to be a wee bit more weak than their national news or their entertainment news and stuff like that so we very rarely see it as a threat because they ask questions about court and stuff like that. They do court and they get it from a freelance reporter which is fair enough because he can cover the court everyday of the week and we cover the court two days a week so that’s the only real thing that they can scoop us on but the chances are if there’s something big happening out the court, we’ll know about it and we’ll cover it ourselves so it’s very rarely that they do so I don’t think it’s much of a problem for us but other papers have big competitors and it’s hard but for us it’s an ideal situation since we are the only one that covers the area.

"So to finish, what advice do you have for a student aspiring to get into the field?"

Paul: I think it’s changed. If you asked me this question maybe three/four years ago, I would have said get your name out there as much as possible. I would say probably the first thing to do would be to be very careful on social media because there’s a lot of people who want to get into the industry and it’s grown massively in the last five/six years and you see a lot of people on social media who maybe don’t take enough precaution and they could make a mistake and say something to the wrong person and it could go higher than that and turns out you have said something to somebody who they want to get a job from five years down the line and not remember it. That’s the key thing. Another thing is, write as much as you can, write about everything, anything and if you have got a goal or you have got a story that you think is big, sell it or try and sell it or take it somewhere. If you have got a story that you think would make waves don’t just put it online, put it somewhere where people are going to see it and you’re going to make money from it. At the end of the day, everyone’s wanting a job and everyone else is going to go for the same job as you regardless of whether they have had two years experience or ten years experience so you just try and get your name out there and make sure that you keep up-to-date with everything that’s happening but also write as much as you can.

"Is there any additional advice you would like to add?"

Paul: The only thing in terms of the industry is that it’s obviously very difficult but there is newer and different jobs coming up for Journalists, I think keeping yourself broad rather than focusing on one specific area like obviously I work for print but we do online work as well and then I do stuff for Celtic which is digital so if you’re doing digital stuff, you don’t want to just focus on that - make it a broad spectrum of video, of radio, of print, of online content because the styles are all different and make sure you know at least a bit about each of them because chances are when you come into a job, even if you come in to a job like print you’re going to be asked to do different things so make sure you know how to do different things and keep your eye on the ball in terms of things that are changing - make sure you’re one step ahead of everybody else because there’s a lot of things that come out in two or three weeks or even months down the line somebody will say “Have you seen this?” or “I knew about that a while ago.” Always try and keep ahead of the game, that’s the main thing, it’s difficult sometimes when you’re working a full time job but you have to try and do it.

       

**I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and I'll be posting more frequently within the next few days or so. In the words of NCP: "Choose happiness and happiness will choose you."**