Northern Echo Case Study
The first northern echo paper was published on January 1st 1870. The paper was started by a man called John Hyslop bell. It’s most famous editor was W.T. Stead. A company called Newsquest own the paper; however it is run by Peter Barron (editor in chief). The paper is a regional daily paper and has an independent political alignment. This means they print the newspapers daily and always have to be on the ball for fresh new stories. A resent survey showed that the Northern Echo sold on average 42.000 copies a day. The paper has four editions and covers the areas; Darlington, County Durham, South Durham, Tees Valley and North Yorkshire.
Within a newspaper there are a number of different job roles; Editor in chief, Deputy editor, business/features editor and chief photographer. All these people are heads of department and they oversee and make sure that their department is working to a top standard. The Northern Echo’s editor in chief is Peter Barron. He is responsible for seeing the paper off. He has to make sure it’s suitable and readable, presentable and legal. He makes sure that the content of the paper is suitable for its target audience and that there are no mistakes in the paper. He owns £80,000 a year and is in charge of the whole of the company. The assistant editor in chief is Nigel Burton; he manages reporters in the newsroom and decides who cover what. Without this member of the newspaper team, the paper would be in chaos as certain jobs might not get done. Other editors include Scott Wilson, the sport editor and Own McAteer, the business editor. They both earn around £27,000 a year. The editors rely on contacts they have made and information from social network sites. A good relationship between companies means that the news paper cannot just save a bit of money but also gain trust. The chief photographer Richard Doughty may get up to 5 picture jobs a day, meaning that he must be on the ball when it comes to his work.
Another division of a newspaper is the production staff, including Sub Editor, Journalist, Photographer and the trainee journalists. Sadly the members of the production staff are more likely to be made redundant as cut backs have had to be made. The sub editors are the people that put the paper together. Their job roles include making headlines, arranging things on the pages, checking stories, detecting mistakes and cropping and managing photographs. Next is the journalists, they will expected to take on the sub editors role. This means that there is a massive amount of pressure on them to get the job right first time. On average each journalist is expected to gather 6 items a day as they need to jam pack the newspaper with interesting stories. Journalists will attend council meetings, contacts local campaigns and even call the public services for stories. To be a good journalist you need to be feisty, hard working and dedicated to the job. Journalists that work for the northern echo are slightly different to other journalists that work for national newspapers. They have to act as part of the community and have far more accountability. They have to have respect for their readers as with it being a smaller newspaper they have a stronger relationship with them. However before you become a journalist you need to train. Trainee journalists start on a wage of £16,000 a year and after a year that increases to £17,000. They train for 2-3 years. To begin with they cover stories from around the local area, they then progress on covering stories from further afield.
