I have been given permission to publish this response from Jenny Lennox, assistant organiser at the NUJ. The e-mail was broadly agreeing with another member's post which stated that the member hadn't come across any journalist who don't believe that good journalism can happen online, and that publishers aren't investing enough. Her response was as follows:
This first appeared as an e-mail on the new media mailing list.
Comment: I think it's a shame that this is the only public response we've had from an NUJ official, because it clearly misses the point. This dispute has never been about the NUJ not understanding the web or even new media, it's about them not understanding (or engaging with) social media.
I spend my days talking to journalists throughout the regional press, and they don't have a gripe with the web, just with their employers and their crappy approach to it. I haven't met a single "anti-web".
We have got the debate all wrong, because we are allowing people to tell us what the union and journalists think who quite clearly haven't got a clue. The debate is about properly resourced quality journalism vs money-grabbing bastards who think they can produce it in any format on the cheap.
This first appeared as an e-mail on the new media mailing list.
Comment: I think it's a shame that this is the only public response we've had from an NUJ official, because it clearly misses the point. This dispute has never been about the NUJ not understanding the web or even new media, it's about them not understanding (or engaging with) social media.
I've finished reading the entries on your blog, but I have much more information resulting from them to read. In any case, I want to thank you for sharing this. It's been fascinating!
The irony here in my mind is so many of the union journalists seem to have a minor to major issue with reading comprehension. Just simple, straight-forward, "read what it says here" reading comprehension. And, beyond that, actually presenting their subsequent ideas comprehensibly.
Maybe I've been spoiled by bloggers, who generally crunch through everything they read with a fine toothed comb and whose resulting comprehension failures tend to be at the level of interpretation rather than content (and which is reasonable; issues of interpretation are real issues).
Giving Ms Lennox the benefit of the doubt, maybe *to her,* the better, overall, more important debate is "properly resourced quality journalism" versus "money-grabbing bastards who think they can produce it in any format on the cheap." That debate would be relatively easy, since there are a *host* of bloggers doing real journalism for *nothing.* The only question is how much they've grubbed their money.
But that debate has nothing to do with the debate that's been going on in these pages.
As I said on the New Media list, I think you show an element of misunderstanding of the union.
The NUJ is a democratic membership organisation and is therefore lay-led. This means that it is "volunteers" who are members of the National Executive Committee who are the leadership between Annual Delegate Meetings. Below the NEC are the Industrial Councils, which provide leadership in the various sectors of the union.
The job of full-time officials and organisers is to work to carry out the decisions of the lay leadership and to support members.
In terms of new media, I am the elected NEC rep - I am the person responsible for representing the unions membership registered in new media.
My role and Chris Wheal's role are different - Chris is Chair of the Professional Training Committee, that is not a representative body, it's a coordinating body responsible for overseeing and developing professional training provided by the NUJ.
The fact that "only" I (and Chris Frost, another NEC member) responded on your blog, rather than Lawrence Shaw (who's off sick at the moment, by the way) or Jeremy Dear, shouldn't be seen as a lack of response. It is, instead, a response from the people responsible for communicating with members.