My name is David Farbrother, and I’m an award-nominated journalist living near the south coast of England with my wife, teenage daughter and four cats. I’m still able to say I am in my early forties (just!) and I’ve decided to chip out a tiny corner of the internet to share my thoughts in the belief that someone – friends, fellow journalists, curious would-be-journos and quite probably prospective employers – may want to read them. This is me, uncensored and unfiltered!

As I write this, I’m the news editor on the news desk of a couple of Sussex-based newspapers.

I love my job. There’s too much of it – the only way to make local newspapers work is for the scant teams putting them together to work extraordinary hours. But I love it. A wise man once said, “Choose a job you like, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life”. He was half right, but I suspect had never experienced a deadline day.

The times, are however, a changin’. I’m in a profession which is – at a local level at least, either going through its death throws or – hopefully – shedding its skin (and by skin, I mean jobs) to emerge more lithe, healthier and profitable, and almost certainly digital.

Just 10 years ago, there were more reporters, and banks of sub-editors sat just rows away from them making the jigsaw from the pieces the former had carefully crafted for the latter. And there was a man, in a suit, who sat in the corner and who handled IT problems.

Those Halcyon days have gone, and I wish I had seen more of them.

These days there are less reporters. The last of the old-school cohort of journalists who remember when the most interactive way of finding out about news was turning a page rather than hitting a red button are retiring. The sub editors have been relocated to somewhere so far from the papers they design it would require a train trip or two for the journalists who work with them to meet them and even then, while they would know their voices they wouldn’t recognise their faces. And the IT man has been replaced by a bank of pleasant, but distant people overseas.

But the papers survive, thanks to the remarkable talents and hard graft of a new breed of switched-on, and (at times begrudgingly) digital first journalists. I gave a talk, a couple of months ago, about how to put together a paper to a group of Rotarians. I asked them how many news journalists they thought it took to put their local paper together. Their first guess was ten. The answer, currently, in a good week, is two-and-a-half. Most weeks, it’s less.

The work those talented 2.5 reporters do is remarkable. You simply couldn’t do the job without a passion, a dedication, and a joy in what you do. If you are looking for the finer things in life which money can buy I can’t – now more than ever – recommend becoming a journalist. And yet it’s hard for me to imagine doing anything else myself. Over the course of the coming blog posts, I’ll try to shed some light into why, and the trials and tribulations of a jobbing journo.

For the record, this blog has nothing whatsoever to do with whatever post I hold when you read it and the thoughts are, quite naturally, all my own. What would be the point of anything else?

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