Politicians always moan about the press. In particular, they complain they don’t get enough coverage, or their opponents get too much, or the arguments are biased in one direction or another, or any other myriad version of a whinge that we in the political world can find to complain about.
IN the run up to the general election in 2005 I found myself getting grumpy that the Labour candidate was getting more press in the Shuttle than I. So I dropped an email to editor Clive Joyce, moaning about it. I didn’t hear anything for a few days so I rather assumed he had ignored my complaints. Far from it. A week later I received a long email in response. Clive had gone back through months of the Shuttle to look at the amount of coverage the Labour candidate and I were getting. As it turned out, Labour had received around a half column inch more than I had in six months, but I had a couple more photographs.
This was all rather childish on my part, but as a result I started to look much more closely at the press, and at the Shuttle. The fact is that Clive has always been utterly meticulous about the newspaper he has edited for 21 years. In the decade or so that I have known him, he has always been balanced and fair with his reportage of the local political scene. Getting this right isn’t luck. It takes years of experience and skill to be able to judge what is and isn’t news – but it takes a principled individual to be able to steer a tricky and unbiased course.
But as a local newspaper editor, Clive has been a champion of this community. It was down to him that the Wyre Forest general election result in 2001 provided the shock of the night with the election of Dr Richard Taylor as the surprise outsider. But this wasn’t political favouritism – it was support for the community. There have been dozens of other local causes the Shuttle has taken up because of Clive.
This week is Clive’s last week as editor of the Shuttle. He has steered it well through difficult times as online presence has become essential in publishing. But he has always done it as both a champion, but more importantly as a friend, of the community. He is a true example of an editor with integrity.