The crucial difference between working for a wire service and a newspaper is that with a newspaper there's a bit of leeway with the deadline. Working for a wire is working in real time: news has to be on the wire fresh and hot - there's an added urgency to it.
People don't always realise how fast the whole thing is. When you give them a call they say, "I'll put that in the post and you'll have it in a few days." You don't have a few days - you don't even have a few minutes to get stories out. Sometimes it's pretty intense. Stories come in and you have to have two paragraphs explaining them on the wire in five minutes, and another larger story in 10 minutes. There are also days when stories come in fits and starts. We would use all the same sources as any other news service - tip-offs, Government departments, the Garda, that sort of stuff, and we've stringers all around the country. We also listen to the RTE news on the hour.
And other Reuters bureaux feed in to us. Sometimes one of the other offices will let us know X will be on your patch, so be sure to ask him or her these particular questions. We also read the newspapers. Sometimes we pick up on a story and use it as a springboard, get into it and enlarge it. And there are usually two to three press conferences a day we try to get to. Over the past year there has been a slight shift with the news we cover, and how. Increasingly we've been concentrating on the Irish economy. It's a story of huge interest in Europe and America. In fact, Ireland has crept right up the news agenda, so we'll now be broadening it out, doing cultural and political stories and more general news stories.
The technical side of things is also changing how Reuters operates - we're big on the web!
There is a strict Reuters style and approach to stories. They are very fact-based, being sure to have sources as solid as possible, including little or no speculative stuff. We cover everything that moves. The fax never stops here with stories coming in.
Newspapers in Ireland that subscribe to the Reuters service generally do so for the foreign and British stories. Sometimes, however, our Irish stories are picked up by the Irish papers. We do lots of stock reports, for example. Sometimes we scoop the papers because we can have a story on the wire before they come out in the morning or evening. There are three journalists in the newsroom here. Mostly we all do stories as they come in; but if you have a particular interest, you'd probably cover the relevant stories. I'd always pick up on arts and culture stories, and I always get stuck with agriculture stories. We don't pick up every piece of news - we decide ourselves if a story is of international interest. Some are guaranteed: political scandal, sports, an equity story on one of the top-10 Irish companies. We'd also do little bite stories: "oldest woman in Ireland, glass of whiskey in hand, says the drink has kept me alive" - that sort of thing. But the editorial process is dictated by the Reuters style.
The office is open here from seven in the morning to seven in the evening. We stagger our hours, each doing an eight-hour shift. I'd probably write an average of half-a-dozen stories a day. It can be exhausting. You'll be on the phone all day, at press conferences, scrambling for stories, then, just when you think you're nearly done, a story breaks at 6 p.m. and you can be there for another few hours. It's long and intense, but tremendous fun and very exciting. Anything over 40 lines and you get a byline. I used to work for a newspaper, and obviously had my byline in the paper all the time. It's a bit of an ego setback when you first start seeing your stories published with no byline! Journalism is such an ephemeral business, but it's nice to know your byline does sometimes appear out there in the wider world, covering news from Dublin.
In conversation with Jackie Bourke
