The editor of Computer Weekly, winner of the 2024 British Journalism Award for Campaign of the Year, has told Press Gazette specialist titles publish “a wealth of great journalism” to which the national media should pay more attention.
The technology title won the prize last month for its 15-year coverage of the wrongful convictions of hundreds of Post Office subpostmasters, who were accused of theft and fraud over issues in fact caused by faulty accounting software.
Bryan Glick, who has edited Computer Weekly since 2009 — the same year Computer Weekly published its first investigation into the scandal — told Press Gazette he thanked the national media “for everything you’ve done on the Post Office scandal.
“But keep a look at what specialist publications like us are doing, because there’s a wealth of great journalism and great stories there that we’d love for you to be covering.”
Between 2009 and the start of 2024 Computer Weekly published around 350 stories about the Post Office’s faulty Horizon software, most of them written by chief reporter Karl Flinders and freelance Nick Wallis.
Although the story was followed up by titles including Private Eye and BBC Panorama, it was only in early 2024 with the release of ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office that the miscarriage of justice became top of the news agenda. In May Parliament passed a law brought by the Conservative government to quash the convictions of affected subpostmasters.
This week former Computer Weekly journalist Rebecca Thomson, who wrote the magazine’s first, year-long investigation into the scandal in 2009, was awarded an OBE for services to justice in recognition of her work.
[Read more: Attention to Post Office Horizon IT scandal follows 14 years of dogged journalism]
Glick said he didn’t think Computer Weekly was currently covering any scandals “quite on the scale” of the Post Office affair, but said there were stories it is reporting today around cybersecurity and data privacy “that are hugely relevant to everybody in the country at the moment…
“I think it’s true for a lot of specialist magazines, and B2B magazines as well, that because of our unique understanding of certain audiences and the unique trust and engagement that we’ve got with our audiences, we’re writing stories that, with the greatest respect, don’t get picked up by the national media — but could and should be national media stories.”
Computer Weekly editor Bryan Glick: Post Office scandal a ‘case study about journalism in the UK’
Glick said “we’re hugely pleased and humbled” to receive the Campaign of the Year Award. “When I look at some of the other people who’ve won from national broadcasters, national media, at some of the incredible work that has been done.
“Caroline Wheeler, Laura Kuenssberg, Rosamund Urwin — so many fantastic journalists. For us as Computer Weekly, as a comparatively small specialist publication, to be up on stage with people like that is amazing. Very, very chuffed.”
Asked whether the long-delayed success of Computer Weekly’s campaign made him feel optimistic or pessimistic about the ability of journalism to achieve change, Glick said the Post Office scandal “is such an interesting case study, in many ways, about journalism in the UK…
“It was a specialist story that was broken by a specialist publication because we understood… that the arguments the Post Office was making to justify what happened made no sense.
“And with no disrespect to anybody in national media, it wasn’t a story that really resonated with them and their audiences for a long time. And so it’s been a story that has, bit by bit, doggedly, story by story, been built up over a period of time.”
But Glick said ultimately 2024 had “really shown the benefit of long-term campaigning journalism and the power of British media”, because once the media at large picked the story up, “literally within weeks there was the prime minister standing up in the House of Commons and saying: ‘We’re going to pass an unprecedented law to exonerate all these people’.
“That would not happen without British journalism.”
Asked how he felt about the lack of progress on the scandal until ITV’s dramatisation, Glick said “I’m delighted that the drama happened, because it has helped to make progress for the victims.
“If it weren’t for that drama, a lot of the victims wouldn’t have been exonerated, they wouldn’t be getting the conversation they are now, we wouldn’t be getting ever closer to justice for what’s happened to them.
“So the fact that drama was the final catalyst to really get this in the public imagination is brilliant.
“But I know the producers, and they would say the drama would not happen without the journalism that came before it. So I think the way to look at it is the two were symbiotic — each one couldn’t happen without the other.”
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