I’m in Riga at the moment, as part of the official Amnesty International delegation to join the Riga Pride march. Part of my work, as well as helping to steward the march and do some filming, is to write for the offical Amnesty International Pride blog. You can read my first post there now Homophobia isn’t just a gay issue.
NUJ New Media ADM report
Just a short post to flag that I’ve finally finished my report on new media issues at this year’s NUJ ADM. It’s available on the NUJ New Media blog.
Why I’m supporting Michelle Stanistreet
My union, the National Union of Journalists, will soon be electing a new deputy General Secretary following the retirement of John Fray. Two candidates have so far declared themselves, the union’s Freelance organiser John Toner and Michelle Stanistreet, the union’s 2007/08 president.
I’m proud to say that I support Michelle and am actively engaged in working for her election. There are those who are arguing that Michelle, having not previously worked as a union Organiser, doesn’t have the experience for such a senior job in the union. More controversially, there are those who say that Michelle is only being supported because she’s a woman and a lefty and that the election is a popularity contest rather than a serious election.
This is hogwash and deeply insulting to Michelle and her supporters. Michelle is the rank and file candidate in this election, the chapel rep who’s fought tirelessly against one of the most notoriously obnoxious bosses in the media. A boss like Richard Desmond can make things go one of two ways for a union. They’ll either beat people into submission or will energise the resistance. Michelle has been at the forefront of ensuring the latter was the case at the Express and Star newspapers.
Elected chapel rep pretty much immediately after Desmond took over, the successful battle for recognition at the newspapers was only the start. Tales of the battles at the Express and Star have inspired many – this is the NUJ Chapel that reported their own newspaper to the Press Complaints Commission not once, but twice.
Unwilling to sit quietly by as their names were associated with some of the nastiest anti-immigration and anti-gypsy campaigns in the media, the Chapel stood up and Michelle was in the frontline. In fact, it was at a fringe meeting about immigration and asylum issues that I first saw Michelle speak, at ADM 2004 in Liverpool. Her tale of the Chapel’s stand impressed me so much, I included it in a feature I wrote for Amnesty International’s website on Press Freedom Day.
A couple of years later, it was the staff revolt at the Daily Star that was the talk of ADM. In October 2006, the staff said enough is enough and forced the paper to pull their “Daily Fatwa” “satire” page. And, to top it all off, the chapel’s latest dispute with management – officially about pay, but coming just after the McCann apology highlighting the quality issues at the newspaper Michelle and her colleagues have been talking about for years – led to the first strike action at a national newspaper in the UK in 18 years.
It’s her workplace experience that makes her the best candidate, particularly because she’s remained a full-time working journalist while acting as Vice President and President of the union over the past two years. These have been years of massive change in the media – staff numbers cut to the bone, newspapers stumbling into the web and journalists having to come to terms with massive technical change in their jobs without proper training or remuneration. Michelle understands this; she’s worked through it and in it.
The next few years are going to be vitally important for the future of the union. It’s not just the finances that are a worry; the review of the union’s structures is halfway through its work and will be bringing its final recommendations to ADM next year. The union has to change, the sectoral structure that’s served the union well for more than two decades is looking more and more out-of-date as the months progress and the dividing lines between print, broadcasting and new media become meaningless.
No offence to John Toner, but we need new blood in the higher echelons of NUJ officialdom. We need someone not rooted in the politics of the sectors and not wedded to the structures of the past. We need someone with fresh ideas, someone fresh from the workplace frontline to help the union through this difficult transition period.
I’ve worked with Michelle; I’ve been to meetings she’s chaired since I was first elected to the NEC three years ago (Policy Committee first, then NEC) and I’m confident Michelle is the woman for the job.
The campaign website is coming soon, but, in the meantime, those of you on Facebook can join the support group.
Anarchy in the NUJ
This year’s ADM had lots of highlights, but one of the main ones for me was the success of the fringe event I organised with the Irish anarchist organisations Organise! and my old Dublin comrades the Workers Solidarity Movement (WSM). Proving that anarchists are capable of organising, there was a pretty good turn-out at the event planned to mark the 50th anniversary of Rudolf Rocker’s death.
Entitled “Politics without parties – The future of trade unionism?”, the event covered Rocker’s impact on trade unionism in the UK, anarchism and trade unionism in the workplace and the media’s coverage of anarchism. I was joined at the main table by Jason Brannigan from Organise! and Chekov Fenney of the WSM.
There were some very interesting discussions with the people who came along, including a number of NUJ members and some local activists.
There was lots of common ground between the groups, particularly when Chekov, who has had a rather turbulent history with parts of the Irish media, held up a copy of Nick Davies “Flat Earth News” and started talking about the problems journalists face. This convergence of ideas was added to by the fact that among the NUJ members in attendance was photographer Guy Smallman, well known for his radical photographs and a long-time Indymedia contributor.
The history of anarchists and the media is a long and difficult one. Too often, anarchists are portrayed exclusively as violent troublemakers, while many anarchist groups shun the media completely and refuse to challenge this coverage, preferring to rely on their own relatively small-scale alternatives.
However, the meeting discussed the benefits of going beyond this oppositional standpoint and Chekov, in particular, spoke of the benefits that can come from engaging with the media and strongly countering ridiculous claims of the kind that the anarchist movement in Ireland has seen over the years. The WSM has managed to “infiltrate” the mainstream media on a number of occasions over the years, Aileen O’Carroll’s appearance on the Late Late in 2004 being probably the highlight.
As someone with one foot in both camps, I’ve long felt that journalists and activists can learn a lot from each other and the NUJ can be the organisation that brings them together. This event confirmed that to me.
Belfast WSM kindly reported on the event and uploaded some audio to Indymedia Ireland.
I’m seriously thinking of organising a similar event in London over the coming months. If anyone wants to help, please get in touch.
New blog
I’ve decided to set up a new blog site that I’m actually going to use for blogging, instead of my rarely used blogspot site. I hope to actually use this site regularly as something of a brain dump of my ideas and thoughts, so expect random bits and pieces about politics, the NUJ and other such exciting topics.
I have written on and off for the NUJ New Media site and have recently started doing news posts for the NUJ London Central Branch site, so I thought it was time I did it properly myself.
