My name is David Farbrother, and I’m an award-nominated journalist living near Cambridge with my wife and our cats, and next  door to my daughter and grandson. I decided some time ago 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!

When I started this, I was the news editor on the news desk of a couple of Sussex-based newspapers. I have since specialised in healthcare / business / finance and for seven years had oversight of and wrote a series of market intelligence reports.

I loved being a local journalist. There was too much of it, of course – the only way to make local newspapers work is for the scant teams putting them together to work extraordinary hours. But I loved 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 journalism 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 15 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 And the IT man has been replaced by a bank of pleasant, but distant people overseas.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 few years 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. Their first guess was ten. The answer, at the time, in a good week, was two-and-a-half. Now, I’d say it’s just the half.

The work the remaining 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 blog posts here, I’m trying to shed some light into why, and the trials and tribulations of a jobbing journo.

For the record, the thoughts here are, quite naturally, all my own. What would be the point of anything else?

David

Edit: As of April 2016, make that 1.5 news reporters. Blimey.

Edit: January 2018, to reflect my unfortunate, but (financially) necessary jump into financial journalism and away from local news.

Edit: December 2024. I have moved house, changed jobs, and this website has not been updated for a while.