From little acorns...

By Mike Jempson

Mike Jempson

Back in 1979, after a 7 week National strike of local newspaper journalists, victimisation of NUJ members and closure of The East Ender title in East London, journalists from the East London Branch of the NUJ got together to initiate a ground-breaking project. The idea was to launch a paid-for weekly paper to address the concerns of working class communities in Docklands area of East London, where local papers seemed to be more interested in championing the aims of the Development Corporation than the efforts of local people to have a say in their own lives.

The East End News was set up as a workers and readers co-operative, with individuals and local groups buying shares and contributing to editorial policy. It won the backing of the TUC and local churches as well as community groups and journalists from all over the country. Nonetheless it took over a year to raise the £26,000 launch capital.

One of the major weaknesses of local papers in the area, which has a high proportion of people of colour (especially from Bangladesh, the Caribbean and Somalia) was that few local titles employed Black journalists. The Hackney Gazette had Juliet Alexander who went on the work in TV, and the Stratford Express/East Ender had Baz Bamigboye (now with the Daily Mail) and Shyama Pereira (who also went on to become a celebrated TV presenter). The East London Advertiser had no Black staff at all.

Opportunity
As a result it was difficult at first to attract Black journalists into the East End News, where we had a tiny core staff and a burgeoning team of voluntary correspondents who received in-house training based on the EEN's style guide. However our efforts bore fruit with the arrival, among others, of Beulah Ainley (then a nurse - now an active NUJ member and academic), Arjum Wajid (then a housewife, who went on to become an active NUJ member working in the BBC World Service), George Alagiah (now the BBC's award-winning Foreign Correspondent), and Chi Chan (then a student photographer, now working on the Daily Telegraph picture desk).

The project also attracted a young Black photographer, David McCalla. We only realised that he was bunking off school to work with us when his father, Val McCalla turned up looking for him. Like David, Val became actively involved in the paper, at first on the management side. Eventually he became the editor of the Black Voices page, set aside each week to provide an extra space for local ethnic minority organisations to address their own issues. Stories about and affecting people of colour were also to be found in the main run-of-paper. Val had been nervous of this initiative, since he feared it might lead to a separatist agenda, but he got into the spirit of it and when East End News reached its (inevitable) funding crisis in 1982, Val left with some of the staff to set up The Voice... The rest, as they say, is history.

Fleet Street help
Among those who devoted time and effort over several years to make the project work were Aidan White (now Gen Sec of the International Federation of Journalists), Kate Holman (now working on a Brussels newspaper), John Jennings (the SOGAT journal editor, founder of the Campaign for Press & Broadcasting Freedom, and anti-racist activist, now, sadly, deceased), Dan Jones (then a local community worker, now campaigns organiser for Amnesty International) and myself (I was Company Secretary and the paper's first editor).

We were greatly assisted by sub-editors from Fleet Street who came in when they had finished their shifts on national newspapers to make the East End News a breezy tabloid that won plaudits for its design. It was a hard struggle, but we all like to think that we made a significant contribution towards breaking the bias against people of colour which at that time was pervasive throughout the media.

(Mike Jempson is now Executive Director of the media ethics body PressWise)