Speaker: Bill Goodwin

Bill Goodwin was prepared to. So was Ed Moloney. And by March, 13 other journalists will have to decide whether to take the same stand.

The 13 have been ordered by the Bloody Sunday inquiry to hand over notes of interviews with people who were in various ways involved when troops killed 14 unarmed demonstrators in Derry in 1972. The journalists are not themselves witnesses, but if they continue to refuse, the Saville inquiry will seek court orders to imprison them.

Ed Moloney, the northern Ireland correspondent of the Sunday Tribune, faced the threat of between six months and five years in jail for refusing to hand over notes from interviews with a former Loyalist paramilitary, William Stobie, who has alleged collusion by the RUC in the murder of solicitor Pat Finucane.

In October Ed successfully appealed against his court order, helped by the international profile of his case. The appeal court judge ruled that the police had to prove the that the notes were likely to materially assist their enquiries because information in them was unlikely to be secured elsewhere.

'The police can no longer just ask for an order and expect to get it,' Ed told the Report after his victory. 'The police now have to show why they want a particular document and the defence can query their claims.'

Before the judgement Ed explained why he had to protect his source: 'On a personal level I would be unable to work again as a journalist in Ireland. No source could ever trust me again and who could blame them? Equally this action could put my life in danger. I would be telling the world that journalists are not to be trusted.'

Bill Goodwin made the same stand, as a 23-year-old trainee on the Engineer magazine in 1989.

Tetra Business Systems secured a court order requiring him to identify a whistleblower in the company. Although the House of Lords found Bill in contempt of court and fined him £5,000, the European Commission on Human Rights overturned the Lords decision in 1996 because it breached Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which guarantees freedom of expression.

Come along to this month's branch meeting and debate the issues - and to share the traditional mince pies and wine.

Encourage workmates to attend by sticking up the back page of the Report on noticeboards.

There is also space on the agenda to discuss workplace problems.

Branch pay survey

IPC comes bottom of
the pay league

The most shocking revelation from our pay survey is just how big a pay cut many freelances in the magazine sector have taken.

A number of major employers have successfully kept day rates where they were 10 years ago - with inflation that translates into a one-third pay cut over the period.

Many freelance respondents added comments to their survey forms about the treatment they had received from certain editors when they asked for a rise. Some editors have boasted that they can always find someone willing to work at the set rates.

Our last survey in 1997 found that several employers paid different rates among their magazines. This appears to have got worse over the past two years.

Far and away the worst offender is IPC, although dishonourable mentions also go to Emap, Haymarket and Time Out.

A subbing shift in IPC's Kings Reach Tower can earn you anything from £90 to £105: seven different rates were reported - none of them negotiated and all, apparently, fixed for all time. The average that subs receive is £95 a day - well below what other magazine publishers pay.

Hall of shame

IPC generally paid the lowest salaries for fulltimers as well. Since this was an anonymous survey we cannot name and shame particular magazines. This has also saved the blushes of a certain employers' organisation for paying crap wages on its journal; then again, it might have taken pride in rivalling IPC.

A word of caution about the figures. This was not a scientific survey. First, the responses - while surprisingly good - were self selecting and not necessarily representative of the universe of jobs concerned. Second, the job titles were arbitrary and inevitably cover a wide range of situations - the editor, chief sub or news editor on a weekly generally have more onerous responsibilities than on a monthly.

One weakness in the survey was the relatively poor response from what we categorised as junior reporters. Maybe nobody likes being called a junior?

We see plenty of 'entry level' jobs being advertised in the Guardian and elsewhere that pay considerably less than £16,000, but none showed up in the survey.

Possibly, young journalists take such jobs to get a bit of experience and leave as soon as possible, so by the time someone has joined the union and is on the Report mailing list they have moved job.

Moving on

Job mobility may also explain why wages for some fulltime posts have risen considerably since our 1997 survey. We have had anecdotal evidence for some time that experienced writers and production people have taken advantage of a buoyant labour market to raise their pay by moving companies. Even so, the survey's figures for subs' and senior reporters' pay rises are certainly exaggerated.

Although one response to the very wide spread of salaries has been to move employers this is not one that we can take much satisfaction from. When employers derecognised the NUJ in many companies they claimed that market forces would ensure that no one paid unreasonably low rates. The appallingly low level that some companies get away with paying shows how fallacious that argument is.

The long-term solution to low pay is not to up sticks and seek greener pastures, it is to stay and fight. Easier said than done, of course, but the re-recognition ballots that the NUJ will be organising next year are the first step to regaining our right to collective pay bargaining.

Although freelance pay has suffered the most from derecognition we should not just sit and wait until new house agreements are negotiated with employers before trying to move the rates up. Some members have been able to push subbing rates up at certain companies by simply refusing to work for less than £125 a day.

Notes on the survey

We were unable to publish pay levels for several of the job categories on the survey form, as we did not receive enough responses from designers, art editors and photographers.

However, we received enough information about freelance rates for picture researchers to say that the average daily rate is is £107.50. We also received enough information from researchers to include this as a job title, although it was not on the form.

We decided to amalgamate the categories of news editor and section editor to make it easier to work out the pay rise since the last survey. The average London salary of £27,500 provided by the National Office of Statistics is boosted by City incomes: the figure for the South-east excluding London is only £24,102.

We would be very interested to hear from members about how we could improve the next pay survey and whether we should do it annually - and of successes in using the results for wage bargaining.