Journalism under lockdown

Buy a paper. If you take nothing else from the ramblings you're about to read, buy a paper. Hopefully the nonsense that will follow will go some way to explaining why.

Got that? Good. Now, if you're sitting comfortably, I'll begin.

I'm about to go on holiday for a fortnight and furlough could potentially extend that to a month. In a different universe, I'd be heading off to some lovely, hot, scenic part of Europe with my fiancée. Thankfully, we hadn't agreed where to go before someone shouted “Double bat and chips, garcon!”, so it's Costa del Solway instead.

There's worse places to be...

Four weeks off from The Galloway News will be the longest break I've had since I finished uni nearly 15 years ago – and I need it. The last two months have been the toughest I've experienced during my journalism career and I'd imagine many of my fellow reporters feel the same. It has been interesting, frustrating, fulfilling, challenging and many other things. Different doesn't quite cover it. Neither does tiring as this week has confirmed I'm physically and mentally exhausted.

I'd guess I was like most folk when coronavirus began to spread. I didn't think it would affect us, it was the usual exaggeration in the media (yes, I'm aware of the irony there) and it'll never make it to the UK. I laughed at people taking seemingly ridiculous precautions – the hand sanitiser, the elbow rubbing, the face masks. Then, quicker than Donald Trump downing a shot of Domestos, it all become too real.

When it hit Scotland, the start was quite exciting from a journalistic point of view. The story was developing at a frightening rate with changes being measured in minutes, rather than days or hours. Working from home was followed by the schools being closed and then the full-on lockdown. It was incredible and fascinating to follow and report on. There'd been nothing like it before – and hopefully won't be again any time soon.

Yeah, even I draw the line at eating that

That was the fun part. The problem that was about to rear its ugly head was how you fill a paper. You have few, if any, council meetings and no court. All events are cancelled. Sport's gone. Schools news was up the spout as kids were being taught at home. The majority of your community pages are lying empty because women's rurals, rotary clubs and all the other organisations have had to cancel their meetings. Don't laugh – these are an important part of a local, community newspaper like the one I work for, as proven by the e-mails and phonecalls you get when they're not in.

Everything was fine to start with. Stories on lockdown rules, articles about the events that were falling by the wayside on an hourly basis. You had the stories about the fantastic community efforts to make sure the vulnerable and isolated weren't too badly impacted – people willing to pick up shopping, collect prescriptions or even walk dogs. You also had stories about how people were trying to lift the mood in their community – wearing dinosaur costumes for their daily walks being a particular highlight.

How can you not like this?!

But at some stage you reach saturation point and you run out of such stories – and your readers get bored of reading the same thing, just with different towns or names, every week. And I'm not looking for sympathy, but it also gets pretty tiring writing articles like that for weeks on end. I got a real thrill when I was able to write a rare story not about Covid-19 and if I don't have to type the phrase “coronavirus pandemic” until 2056, it'll still be too soon.

Every week, almost as soon as one paper was finished, I began to worry about how on earth we were going to fill the next paper. In fact, it's probably the most forward planning I've done in my 13 years at the paper. I'd often have my stuff filed a full day ahead of deadline, meaning I could move on to looking for stuff for the following week. I was constantly panicking about how we were going to fill another paper in seven days time – even though we still hadn't got that week's edition done and dusted.

Despite that worry – or perhaps because of thinking ahead - I would argue that the papers we have produced under lockdown in the past two months are some of the best in my near decade and a half at the Galloway News. We have had some fantastic stories about how our community is coping with lockdown, incredible fundraising efforts, how businesses have adapted to ensure they can continue trading and, latterly, how ready everyone is for the restrictions easing. Our weekly updates from care homes have provided a great way for friends and relatives to see how their loved ones are doing when they can't physically see them themselves, every time we've appealed to our wonderful readers for photos they have responded in their droves and we've still managed schools news – with a difference.

A 101-year-old woman doing a zipslide is one of the fantastic fundraisers we've covered

And as much as our readers have helped us through this difficult time, we have been able to help them. Aside from our care home updates, we have also provided details of how people can contact local groups willing to help out those who are shielding or self-isolating at home. You might assume everyone is on the internet these days but they aren't– especially in our circulation area. Having these details in the paper allows people to see them who may otherwise have been unaware help is at hand.

We've somehow managed to produce these fantastic papers while everyone (barring our photographer) is working at home. I have no idea how we've managed it – maybe it's because our computer system seems to work better on home broadband rather than the office network. On a personal level, at times I've struggled at home and with the silence of being on my own, at others I've probably powered on for longer than is healthy without a break (stop laughing at the back). Plus I miss the biscuits other folk bring in.

I seem to be treated as some sort of god for bringing these into the office just before lockdown

Of course our sales have fallen as not everyone can get to the shops. That's a shame because it means people are missing out on the tremendous papers, although unsurprisingly our web traffic has gone up - and if you would like to boost it further by visiting www.gallowaynews.co.uk that would be grand. However, a good chunk of people are still buying it and hopefully that will continue. I'm not exactly going out on a limb to suggest we're nearer the end of the print media story than the beginning, and the Covid-19 pandemic will probably have brought the final chapter close, however we're still here, we do still have a role to play.

And while some papers and journalists are biased, not all of us are. Running a negative story about your preferred political party does not automatically out to get them and favour the other lot. And another paper in the same publishing group favouring one political party does not mean all journalists and titles in that group have the same stance. After all, you don't accuse your binman of being a rabid Nationalist just because the council has an SNP administration.

And for that reason, buy a paper – particularly your local paper. We're important. We're a trusted source of news. We help people in the community – whether it's by fighting your corner, telling you what's going on or something as simple as contact details for local groups. We've seen during this pandemic how important papers are at holding people in power to account – Mr Cummings will testify to that. Don't let anyone tell you that papers are irrelevant these days because the evidence clearly suggests otherwise.

Dominic Cummings - big fan of the print media

So support these efforts, support important journalism and buy a paper. As we finally begin to exit lockdown and look forward to the “new normal”, please remember that newspapers kept going through it all and will be around for a good while longer. The reporters were there for you, are there for you now and will continue to be there for you.

Although I won't be – well, not for the next month anyway.