Roy Greenslade’s blog October 25, 2007
Posted by rosieniven in convergence, integration, multimedia.trackback
I don’t normally do posts about people leaving the NUJ but I thought it was worth starting a debate on this post from the blog of Roy Greenslade. In this post he reveals that he has decided to leave the union because of its policies on new media and job preservation.
The article is worth a look – as are the comments including one from his colleague Helene Mulholland, an online journalist who has been involved in the union’s Multimedia Commission.
Personally, I have never found the union’s policies to be anti new media (though I have not yet seen the Commission’s report), but I can understand that there may be a tension between’s policies on job preservation and its tentative moves of embracing new media.
At the NUJ conference early this year, participants highlighted how integrated workplaces put more demands on staff and how they should should be adequately resourced. That’s something I have found to be the case from my own working life.
Even with the publication of this report, I think there is much more to debate on new media and how we as a union respond to it. New media will continue to evolve and workplaces will evolve with it.
I must say, I didn’t expect anyone leaving the union over its new media policy!
I WAS saddened to read Bro Greenslade’s comments because the record shows that the NUJ is more progressive than most employers. Not only were we the first to gain equal pay for our sisters, but we were the first to get fax machines installed, we tried to get word processing members desks 30 years ago, the NUJ was probably the first union to appoint a technology officer, we were cetainly the first union to hold meetings for journalists using new technology in 1978, we supported broadband and other high speed links years before the bosses even learned how to spell those words, automation in local radio newsrooms, etc, etc, etc