We arrived at Canary Wharf at 10am sharp. The weather was glum, but after a visit to Starbucks we were set to go. We worked our way up to the 21st floor of 1 Canada Square, home to The Mirror Newspaper, one of the country's favourite dailies.
Upon arrival we were greeted by our guest lecturer, Conor Nolan and Eugene Duffy, the Managing Editor of the newspaper. Our first stop was Eugene's office where he explained his his role within the paper: it seemed a pretty tough job. As well as managing much of the paper's finance and worrying about circulation, he reads the Mirror (and some of its competitors) from cover to cover every day, even on holiday. His journalists obviously have to read the Mirror daily to keep in touch with their work and one of Eugene’s pet hates is his staff not doing so.
Eugene gave us an insight into what the future holds for the newspaper with a very successful online paper, having thousands of hits per day despite being run by a minimal staff team. Despite many new ways of catching daily news, the fall in readers may be close to 'bottoming out'. The Mirror, like other tabloids, has certainly felt the pinch, but Eugene seems confident that it can survive. One of the ways it attracts readers is with the sort of partnerships arranged by Conor, such as the recent Led Zeppelin album giveaway where Mirror readers were offered exclusive access to tracks from Led Zeppelin's new album prior to its general release.
Eugene went onto explain a little bit about himself and how he got to where he is now. Working his way up the ladder from small regional newspapers to bigger national newspapers, to where he is today.
By 11am the office empties and Eugene explains this is when they have a daily meeting to choose stories for the following day's paper: the news conference. This gave us an opportunity to have a tour of the office and the different desks. My favourite was the fashion and entertainment section. The fashion desk was noticeably messy, with the freebies and clothes for features.
We move round to the production area, where we get an insight into the different jobs such as sorting out the layout of every page to make the paper perfect and easy on the eye.
Overall I gained an interest into the paper and learnt about the difficulties of producing a daily title. However, it looked like a fun environment to work in with great production.
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