Birmingham Post – Jo Ind

I hate public relations (PR)

Jo Ind — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:34:28 +0000

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate the public relations industry and I certainly don’t hate people who work in it. Some of my best friends…..(Jayne Howarth, Ros Dodd etc). Unlike some journalists I actually feel grateful to good PR firms. Let’s be honest, in recent years working on a newspaper would have been far harder without them.

What I hate is doing PR. That’s all.

I feel the need to say this because since I’ve been a self-employed writer, at least once a week I get a call from somone I’ve featured in the Birmingham Post in the past, who wants me to write about them again. They suppose that now I’m freelance I’m only to happy to tout my work round a range of publications and, they imagine, earn a multiple fee from them.

To which I can only say that I would sooner pickle my head. In fact I DID say exactly that to one hopeful – he still didn’t understand I didn’t want the job.

For those that don’t understand the difference let me explain. It’s about the difference between telling and selling. I love the telling. I’m a writer. I like to communicate, to connect, to build up relationships. I loathe the selling – picking up a phone and saying: ‘I’ve got a great story here. Do you want to publish it?’

That’s why I’m not in PR. It’s why I’m not in double-glazing.

Granted, there is middleground between telling and selling, a place where sales-patter and headline-writing sit. I’m comfortable on one side of that middleground, I’m not on the other.

Next time I’m approached by someone who wants me to both tell and sell their story, I shall put analogies about pickling heads to one side. I shall simply say: ‘The service you require is public relations. £1,500 would be the going commerical rate.’ Let’s see if that works.

Farewell Birmingham Post

Jo Ind — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 12:04:16 +0000

My last day at the Birmingham Post was Tuesday 22 December 2009. I slid out on a farewell blog like Santa on his sleigh. Here is my heart-felt post, with added pictures, which was published in the Birmingham Post that day.

Bye bye Birmingham Post

Bye bye Birmingham Post. I have been with you for more than 21 years. In those years you have been through eight editors, gone from being a broadsheet, to a tabloid, to a broadsheet and back to a tabloid again, only we don’t call you that. You were black and white then, you’re colour now. You were a six day a week publication when I joined. Now you are a multi-media operation of which the newspaper is only a part.

In those 21 years, I have changed too. My mother has died, I’ve been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, I’ve lived in community, I’ve lived on my own and I’ve lived with my family. I’ve married, I’ve had a son, I’ve had two books published and I’ve learnt to sing jazz. I’ve gone from being an angry idealist determined to change the world to someone who is content to change her little bit of it and is happier than I knew was possible – same hairstyle though.

Farewell everyone I have ever interviewed

Farewell everyone I have ever interviewed. I became a journalist because of you. It’s been an honour to hear your stories and to tell them as faithfully as I could, whatever the pressure of my deadlines or the barking of the newsdesk. There are some of you who have touched me so deeply, I will never forget you. Thank you for your trust and for making my work such a privilege.

Adieu colleagues. What can I say to you? Do you know what I respect about you? That whatever we go through – and we have been through one Hell of a lot – still the stories get written, still the deadlines get met, still the newspapers come out. Sometimes I wonder how we do it. We do it because nobody cares about journalism as much as we do. What binds us is our professionalism and our dedication to our trade. By God, I shall miss that camaraderie. Stay in touch.

Farewell to the grubby sensuality of printing

There are other things which ceased to be part of my working life some time ago, but to which I feel the need to say goodbye. Bye bye inky fingers. Ta ra to the increasing clattering of keyboards as the deadlines draw nearer. Adieu to getting on my knees in the library to pull out files of black and white photographs and rub the red crayon marks from them with the sleeve of my jumper. Farewell to the deafening clamour of newspapers rattling along overhead conveyor belts into lorries blocking Printing House Street, so we could not get out of the building. Farewell to the grubby sensuality of printing.

Bye bye, Fort Dunlop. Ta ra M6, or rather the sight of you snaking your way through the estates of Castle Vale. Farewell standing in the bitter-cold opposite Moor Street Station wondering if the Urban Splash shuttle bus will ever turn up. Goodbye ladies loos, the secrets you have heard and the lipstick applications you have witnessed. You never did get those bog brushes did you?

Au revoir journalism

Au revoir journalism. This is the one which brings a tear to my eye as I type. I leave in the hope it is “ta ra a bit” rather than goodbye for good. We will always tell stories. We will always need story-tellers. Bye bye to the traditional ways of doing it – you were great, you really were. Hello wonderfully connected new world.

A cyber-room of one’s own

Jo Ind — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:07:43 +0000

When Virginia Woolf famously said a room of one’s own was necessary for a woman to write, she could not have envisaged a room that looked like the one below.

But for me, having my own space on the web in which to doodle my thoughts and write my life feels every bit as important as the hut at the bottom of the garden, for which so many women yearn.

Ever since I started blogging for the Birmingham Post, around 18 months ago, I have longed for my own little patch on the internet – a space that I have designed, that I manage and in which I can say what the Hell I like.

Waiting for my cyber-space

But I have had to wait, for all the reasons dear Virignia so well understands. My little boy, Arch, is now three-and-a-half and stays all day at nursery but for the first two years of his life, we had no childcare at all. My husband and I would swap work for the baby, literally picking one up and putting the other down. I didn’t have time to turn a computer on, never mind do anything creative once I had.

I have been through an experience that has rocked and shocked me – giving birth. I have been blissed-out beyond my imagining – lying with a sleeping new born on my chest. I have wanted to grab these experiences with both hands and squeeze every last drop I can from them. For me, that means writing about them. But I simply haven’t had the space or time.

A room of my own at last

Today all that has changed. With the help of my friends Chris Duggan and Emma Jones, I have created a website. The name has been chosen, the pages furnished, the images polished, the typos swept. My blog is a playroom, a study, a chapel, and a dance floor all at the same time. Welcome to my cyber-room – a room of my own.

I’m quitting the Birmingham Post

Jo Ind — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:25:57 +0000

I have just volunteered to leave a newspaper I love and a job about which I am passionate.

Last week Trinity Mirror, the company that owns the Birmingham Post, announced 41 journalists in the Midlands are to lose their jobs by the end of the year. I am offering to leave as part of the cull.

Why?

I want to learn digital media

I want to leave so I can become a writer who is as competent in the digital arena as I currently am in print.

I am in a more fortunate position than many of my colleagues in that I have worked for BPM Media, as it is now known, for 21 years and so my pay-off is relatively comfortable. I can buy myself the time to learn.

My plan is to spend the first few months of next year getting to know how websites are made. I want to learn HTML code. I want to understand FTP, SEO and WBMP format. I want to get canny with the back end of the internet so I can be more effective in the way I use it up front.

I love digital

I love the internet for its scope, its flexibility, its speed, its diversity and its potential to create community. I’m excited by the way, in theory at least, it makes it possible for anyone to tell his or her story. I came into journalism because I believe in story-telling. The world wide web has made this possible in ways that were unimaginable just 20 years ago. This is a good thing.

Sadly, it is also bringing about the crisis in the media industries which I and my colleagues are finding so painful at the moment. I have no idea what form the media of the future will take. I don’t know if Murdoch will prove that readers are happy to pay for newspapers online and thereby rescue not only the Times but the whole newspaper industry.

I want to combine story-telling and digital skills

I can’t tell if the Guardian’s response of inviting readers to subscribe to a newspaper-based club will turn out to be the business model that rescues all print from terminal decline. I have a sneaky feeling that Clay Shirky might be right when he says saving newspapers is not the answer and the whole edifice needs to come tumbling down before the new journalism – whatever it is – can emerge.

But I have a hunch that whatever form the media of the future is going to take, whether it will be niche and hyperlocal or multi-tasking in multi-media conglomerates, the people who are going to be really useful are those who combine traditional story-telling skills with both a social and technical understanding of the web.

I want to be one of those people. I’m fortunate in having the opportunity to become one. With moist eyes and tender feelings for the team to which I have belonged for almost all my adult life, I have handed in my form….

*I wrote this post originally for The Birmingham Post.

Elizabeth Fry is my nan

Jo Ind — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:50:48 +0000

See this woman. I’ve just found out that she is my great great great great grandmother.

Earlier this week, as part of a feature I was writing for The Birmingham Post, I went with family historian Paul Wilkins to Birmingham Central Library to trace my family tree and discovered, amongst other great worthiness, that I am a direct descendant of Elizabeth Fry, the woman who reformed prisons in the nineteenth century and is commemorated on the back of a fiver.

Now I’m trying to work out how it makes me feel.

To be honest, it wasn’t a total revelation. I was told this as a child but I had completely forgotten it as it hadn’t been mentioned since. This is the first time I have seriously tried to take it in.

The news broke on same day that Trinity Mirror announced it was looking to axe between 60 and 80 posts in the Midlands, which means that my job, along with those of my fellow journalists, is seriously under threat.

But did I care? No, not that day because my great great great great grandmother was Elizabeth Fry and if she could reform the prison service, then I was damn sure I could work out how to support my family even if I didn’t have a job in the depth of a recession. You can’t touch me Trinity Mirror, I’m made of noble, worthy, heroic, pioneering, life-transforming stuff!

And then the next day I felt stumped because it was raining and I couldn’t work out how to dry the washing…

At a practical level, knowing I have descended from a long line of do-gooders (we will be revealing more in the Post over the next few weeks) makes no difference at all. The difference is at the level of imagination and identity.

But even there, my relationship to the news is complex.

On the one hand, I am glowing – radiating the light from the halos of my ancestors. On the other, I know that I am who I am, regardless of who has gone before me. When I meet people, I want to know them for who they are, not for who their families might or might not be – and that includes myself.

I am very glad to be getting to know my ancestors but I am also very glad I lived for 45 years before I did. I’m glad I was established as a professional feminist before I knew my great great great great grandmother founded the first national women’s organisation. I’m glad I had inquired about working as a writer in residence in prisons before I was aware I am a direct descendant of a prison reformer.

My first reaction to the news is to tell people – have a good old brag. But once it is integrated into my understanding of myself, I think it is something I will want to keep quiet. I will get photographs of the amazing women who have gone before me. I will keep them at home and when life is challenging, I will sit in their presence and silently draw from their strength.

*I wrote this article originally for the Birmingham Post.