The more I thought about it, the less I thought the intended answers should be so unambiguous. Has my weekly newspaper actually improved in the two-and-a-half years I have been on it? Have I actually become a better journalist? Is there a higher standard of journalism among my fellow reporters? And if the answer to all of the above is no, then what am I doing here, in the rain, giving out these leaflets?

Journalism and journalistic practices have rarely been under as much scrutiny as they have since the Hutton Inquiry. Andrew Gilligan’s failure to provide a single handwritten note of his interview with David Kelly caused no end of mirth in newsrooms up and down the country. This was, after all, a senior broadcast journalist on BBC radio’s flagship news programme, not some hapless junior reporter relying on half sentences and snatch-quotes tapped into a personal organiser to “flesh out” his story.

But there is a deeper malaise here. However galling it was to hear Alastair Campbell gloat, after the Hutton report was published, that “if the public knew the truth about the way certain sections of the media operate, they would be absolutely horrified”, sadly he is absolutely right. Whether any reporter’s work would have survived the Hutton inquiry’s forensic analysis is debatable, but the lesson is clear. If the public do not believe journalists are treating facts as sacred and instead are peddling vague assertions and halftruths, then we might as well close our notebooks and give up.

In the light of Hutton, it is alarming that a completely unscientific poll of friends on other local newspapers – where the requirements to be a good journalist should be no less demanding than on the Today programme – suggested I was not alone in my fears. Most admitted what they put out week after week was simply not as good as it should be. And the reason? The endemic weaknesses in the way their newsrooms and companies were run. All pointed to the age-old problems of low pay, poor working conditions, the complete absence of training, long hours, understaffed newsrooms, and a managerial emphasis on quantity rather than quality.

Experienced reporters and editors – the sort of journalists who knew their patch inside out and could file word-perfect copy after five pints of Dogbolter ale – are no longer around. Instead, young and, in many cases, sorely inexperienced journalists are being thrown in the deep end, promoted beyond their ability.

“There is a lack of appreciation by management – an irritated indifference to the very real problems staff face in getting the papers out,” one told me. Another said: “Editorial quality is often severely compromised by bottom-line considerations. The fundamental value of news to newspapers often seems to be forgotten by many in positions of power.” Yet another said: “We get outrageously poor pay. Why should we have to put up with this crap for the ‘love of the job’?” Many said they were so disillusioned they wanted to leave the profession.

No single factor has resulted in the mess some newspapers have created and it would be grossly unfair to condemn every local newspaper. But it is clear falling standards of journalism do not affect only the occasional newsroom and there is a very real danger these weaknesses are feeding through to nationals. These are industry-wide concerns that simply cannot be brushed under the carpet by blaming falling standards of English, or by journalists not grasping the essentials of the profession. They stem from newspaper management simply not understanding what happens day-to-day in newsrooms.

On the face of it, the regional press is vibrant. More than 42 million local newspapers are sold every year; 85 per cent of adults in the UK regularly read one of the 1,300 local newspapers published every week and 30 per cent read one instead of bothering with a national. Around half all locals last year increased their circulation, with annual advertising spending going up by 3.2 per cent to almost £3billion – a rate well above advertising spending across the country. Trinity Mirror, with its portfolio of nationals, daily regionals and 230 local newspapers made £173million profit last year, while Johnston Press made £128million.

But a world away from the boardrooms, where newspaper executives are patting themselves so vigorously on the back, a very different picture emerges. No young journalist goes into the industry without eyes wide open and fully expecting to be paid a pittance. But when newspapers are competing for the same potential employees as the public relations, marketing and advertising industries, they have to raise their standards. Gone are the days when one could march straight into a newsroom and ask for a job. Most weekly newspapers now expect trainees to be graduates, who have paid for their own post-graduate media or journalism course and have a large portfolio of cuttings – little of which can be achieved without running up debts.

Shameful wages

NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear stunned the TUC conference last year when he spoke of a profitable newspaper where journalists earn £8,750 a year and have to supplement their income by cleaning their own offices. Low pay stops potential journalists from joining the press and has led to the better-off young people, rather than the most talented, coming into the profession. This industry-wide instinct to ignore talent and keep salaries down or impose recruitment freezes, simply because there are people queuing up around the corner to become reporters, smacks of unacceptably short-term thinking.

The owners of my newspaper made a £70million profit in this country in 2003. Yet year after year the union chapel has painstakingly to negotiate a pay rise simply to match inflation, dealing with management so mean that the office has no PA wire, reporters are blocked from phoning overseas or even using the directory inquiry services, copies of our own newspapers are rationed in the office, and a current sort of Stalinist stationery embargo means journalists are expected to buy their own notebooks and fax paper.

Investment in staff is the only way to hold on to committed employees, thereby controlling long-term costs, raising morale and retaining editorial quality. Higher pay is an assertion of professionalism and recognition of the resourcefulness, intelligence and skill it takes to be an effective journalist. When low pay forces people in their late 20s and early 30s to put their lives on hold and live like students, is it any wonder the profession haemorrhages senior reporters who choose to move to other, better-paid jobs in the wider media industry? When the standard of reporting is being questioned, losing quality employees is not something the press can afford to do. It simply reinforces the importance of training on local newspapers, where the majority of future national reporters will learn their craft.

Being a trainee, however, never involves actually being trained. I remember, with three other trainees, being invited to a “journalism masterclass” from my new editor on my first day on the newspaper. “This is what journalism is,” he said, holding up a small, carved wooden ball. We all looked back at him blankly. “You’ve got to play hardball,” he explained unhelpfully. That remains just about my entire on-the-job training apart from the odd demand from the same editor to be “24-hour news-hunting machines” and “robo-reporters”; instructions to ask “not x but y y y” and, most bizarre of all, to be “vampires sucking on the corpse of news”.

Trainees are thrown into overworked, understaffed newsrooms. Mistakes are corrected by subs and editors and never mentioned again simply because newsdesks do not have the time to go through copy or tell trainees to rewrite it. Bylines, once the gold standard of a decent story, are showered on reporters because the newspaper’s design dictates it. As for something as far fetched as classes to review the latest changes in media law, or perhaps learning how to sub or lay out newspaper pages on the web, forget it. It means bad journalistic practice and bad writing become ingrained because, as far as many reporters are concerned, someone else will always pick up the pieces of a damaged piece of work. Then, after 18 months of a singular lack of interest in their professional development, trainees are herded on to refresher courses weeks before they sit senior reporter exams in an attempt to cover up the flaws in the newsroom and to justify newspapers employing “training managers”. It is hardly surprising, then, that half of all trainees fail the twice-yearly National Council for the Training of Journalists examinations, an acutely embarrassing statistic that says as much about newspapers’ commitment to their staff as it does about reporters’ own abilities.

I am not sure the rose-tinted Fridays of yore, where apprentice hacks on local newspapers were summoned to copy clinics and publicly humiliated over their mistakes, ever really existed. But the undoubted will to mould and school young reporters, which was around only a few years ago, is now the exception rather than the rule.

Perhaps one of the most worrying and frustrating aspects of life on local newspapers is being so office-bound. Of all the impressions I had of the profession before getting my first job, relying on telephone interviews and the internet for so much written work was not one of them. Journalism must allow relationships developing with contacts, whether or not there is a story at stake, and getting to know your patch inside out. Put simply, only lazy reporters spend their days behind desks. Yet such on-the-streets reporting was described to me early on as “a luxury”. The newspaper did not have enough journalists to allow staff to go daily to court, let alone out and about. The paper had to be filled and could not wait for as-yet unwritten stories and features to arrive. While the editor preached the virtue of “interactivity” with the community, the management’s own reluctance to employ more staff or give its journalists enough free rein hampered basic reporting. Quality, it seems, is not an issue. Yet across local newspapers, regurgitating press releases and sticking a couple of opposing quotes on the end has become the norm and many reporters now prefer to use the telephone rather than interview people face to face. It is far easier to write that someone “refused to comment” when they slammed the phone down, rather than confront him or her in the flesh.

The key to preserving editorial standards is not straightforward. But treating journalists like professionals would be a good start. Investing in them by paying them a reasonable salary, training them effectively and equipping them properly to do the job are very basic considerations that have sadly been ignored for too long. Yet these standards are nothing more than reporters themselves, the future of the profession and the public deserve.