There are about 100,000 people working in the media. At any one time many thousands more are ready to be churned out of media stiudies courses at universities throughout the UK. This is at a time when the newspaper and broadcasting industry is facing a funding crisis through falls in circulation and lack of advertising. As an industry we are still failing to find a way to make money out of putting news and information on the internet. So, more people fewer jobs and less money. A recipe for disaster you would think.
Well, no. I remember starting my first job in the north west on a small weekly newspaper 40 years ago and being told that I had missed the best of it, the industry was was going to pot. Well it didn't and it won't. The beauty of our industry is that it is constantly changing and the challenge for us to is not to keep up but to lead that change.
The Journalists' Charity is recognising the need for change. We have rebuilt our care home at Dorking . We are constantly looking at ways to help and improve how we can help the people who come to us with what they think are unsurmountable problems. We are trying to raise the profile of the Charity through events and our website and through links with our players in the industry. We have a larger part now in the Press Awards and this year, for the first time, there will be a separate Journalists' Charity special award. We have strong links with the Society of Editors, the Newspaper Publishers' Association, NUJ and Women in Journalism.
Now the hard bit. I want the members of the Journalists' Charity to change too. I. like many of you, paid £50 many years ago for lifetime membership. I have changed by making a regular monthly direct debit. We are not asking for the world. A tenner a month would be great, more even better.
We also have to increase our membership base because of all those 100,000 in the industry we have just 5,000 members and a fair few of those will be retired or near retiring age. We are exploring ways to increase our membership base but we need you to help. Put the word out. Tell people of the good work that we do. Get more young people to join.
At the recent Journalists' Charity carol concert at St Brides in Fleet Street I was honoured, as chairman, to make the address to a sell out audience and some very distinguished figures in our industry. I repeated a quote from Auberon Waugh. It stands the test of time.
"Generally speaking, the best people nowadays go into journalism, the second best into business, the rubbish into politics and the sxxxx into law.''
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