In Flat Earth News Nick Davies describes how too much pressure is put on reporters at newspapers and news agencies to produce as many stories in as little time as possible, which thwarts the reporting of the truth.  In the book Davies chronicles the week of a young graduate reporter working at a regional tabloid.  In their week of work the reporter has written on average 10 stories a day, has spoken to 26 people, 4 of which he has spoken to face-to-face and has spent only 3 out of 45.5 hours out of the office.

Though I have been working at a tabloid, my experience at The People suggests otherwise.  I was given a whole working day to work on two stories, one of which was an investigation.

Within five minutes of entering the office, I had introduced myself to the News team and I had already been assigned my first project – haggling down the prices of package holidays from popular holiday companies. This was a straightforward idea following on from the announcement from travel firm TUI Travel that it had thousands of unsold package holidays for this summer.

The article required a few phone calls and a few quick investigations for background information through Google.  Within 4 hours I had phoned and tried to haggle down the prices from 8 package holiday companies, scanned the internet for any similar stories (there weren’t any!), researched TUI Travel, contacted consumer groups and written up an almost entirely original story.

See the article here.