When Journalists Come Knocking.

News stories never think about the wider implications of their actions. Like a hurricane, they create chaos for everyone and everything they touch. Anything in their path is dragged in, kicking and screaming. Those left behind wake to find themselves turned into the subject of other people’s curiosity — their pain dissected on social media, their grief consumed like the next episode of a true-crime boxset.

Increasingly we watch our televisions, listen to the radio and read news websites as if it’s entertainment for the masses but the people at the centre of the storm have never been coached or prepared for it.

This is real life for them.

News knocks the wind out of you and most people will be caught in a maelstrom, at its mercy, until it abates - which is usually when something else happens to someone else and the focus of attention switches elsewhere.

In 2001, the phone rang early one morning. A producer at the BBC where I was working told me about two backpackers from Huddersfield who’d been travelling in Australia. The young man, Peter Falconio, had disappeared without trace and his girlfriend, Joanne Lees had managed to escape and raise the alarm. Peter’s father worked in the next village to where I was living. He was in charge of the post office. My local post office. I’d been in there the other day buying stamps.

I knocked on the front door of their house in a quiet cul-de-sac and Peter Falconio’s mum answered, in tears. I explained who I was. Peter’s dad came to the door. They’d been called by the police - they knew something awful had happened - but the thing they weren’t expecting was the interest in them as a family. Like every family I’ve ever had to “door knock” in the last 40 years, they simply didn’t know what to do. I talked to them for a while. Understandably they didn’t want to do any interviews - who would - but as I was about to walk away I asked them what they were planning to do. They didn’t understand what I was saying so I explained that more reporters were going to arrive and by lunchtime the road would be full of journalists, photographers and TV trucks. They seemed genuinely surprised. Wasn’t it events in Australia that the news would be following?

A few hours later, the cul-de-sac was rammed with cars parked on pavements. Satellite truck drivers struggled to park as close as possible to the Falconio’s home so the engineers didn’t have to run out long lengths of cable. It was a scrum the like of which you hardly ever see these days - TV lives for the news can now be done from a small DSLR camera and a backpack to look after the live signal and regional TV reporters will often turn up with just their phone and a tripod to broadcast on. The numbers of reporters who leave the office to go to the scene of an event is diminishing by the year as press-release-churnalism and the regurgitating of social media posts take over from on-the-spot news gathering.

For those who do turn out on news stories it’s the start of their own little inter-journalist battles. Each one tries to get ahead of the other. As in politics these days, news isn’t often interested in taking the higher ground. The race to the bottom is one that most organisations are involved in. What has changed is that nowadays fewer pretend otherwise.

At the epicentre of a story, like all animals, reporters feed off scraps. It’s not a nice sight. A door-to-door sales team of locusts swarm up a street, knocking on neighbours’ doors (“What’s Peter like?”), phoning his old school (“Was he in any sports teams?”), calling in at the local pub (“Was he in here often?”) - even the local barber will get a visit (“How often did he come in to get his hair cut?”). The pack is desperate for a line, a quote. It doesn’t matter how tangential.

Want to see what really happens when reporters arrive at a family’s door? How tragedies unfold behind the headlines — and what it really means to call yourself a journalist? Trust me, it’s not what you might think. Subscribe to read the full story. 

Peter Falconio’s disappearance happened at the turn of the century. Today there may be fewer reporters in the pack but they carry more technology. These days it’ll only be a few minutes until you hear the high-pitched mosquito-buzz of a drone taking off. Photographers and camera crews know they have a limited time until a no-fly zone is imposed and the race is on to get the shots and footage from above. If something has happened in the vicinity of a house, a trawl will start for doorbell videos or CCTV footage. It is a sight to behold - reporters and police officers running from house to house, trying to keep ahead of one another, as they search for a crucial bit of video that might tell the story of an event. On Christmas Eve in 2022 a young woman was shot dead outside a pub in New Brighton in Wirral - it was an appalling crime. Truly shocking. Every shop and house in the area was visited by reporters in the hours after the incident as they tried to find video of the night before. I should know. I was one of them.

Reporters are used to being called every name under the sun, usually by the very people who then go out and buy the papers and read the stories and trawl FaceBook for the latest bit of gossip. It’s part of the territory and thick skins are a prerequisite. If the tabloids and news sites and TV stations don’t cover a story enough they’re accused of not caring, if they cover it too much, they’re ghouls. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t but I’ll let you into a secret: as a reporter a little bit of you dies with every knock on a door, every enquiry about camera footage, every “Did you see what happened?” Over the last few years, in particular, I’ve talked to real hard-core pen-behind-the-ear old-school hacks who feel disenchanted at the pressures they’re under to get “a scoop” (a phrase, I should say, that’s not been used in real life for decades).

I’ve had to cover so many similar stories to Peter Falconio’s over the years. Every single one has been a tragedy for the family involved. Even if, eventually, it ends happily, there are always those hours when a family finds themselves in the thick of it through no fault of their own. In the near future I’ll take you through some more of the thought processes of both the people knocking on doors and the reactions of some of those people when they open the door to find a reporter standing there. Sometimes - only occasionally - the reaction isn’t what you’d expect.

As I said at the beginning, there is no training for this, no manual you can download to explain how things will work. Each time it happens, another family finds itself poleaxed by events.

There was no happy ending for Peter Falconio’s family and friends. A young man, enjoying the prime of his life brutally murdered thousands of miles from home and those left behind found their lives torn apart. Not for the first time, the utter rubbish written by some newspapers didn’t help and, again not for the first time, I wondered how some of the people responsible slept at night.

A few years after Peter Falconio’s disappearance, I was called to another story in South Yorkshire. A missing boy. Ten years old. Not seen overnight. His parents frantic. Using tried and tested procedure, the police launched an urgent appeal on as many radio stations as they could to try and throw a ring around the Barnsley area. The crucial few hours can make all the difference. Again, before you condemn reporters, remember they’re the ones who are called by the police to help raise awareness of such cases and there’ve been countless times where rapid and blanket news coverage has helped the authorities trace missing people and bring them safely home. It’s often a symbiotic relationship - very unlike the portrayal in police-procedural television drama shows.

I drove down to Barnsley and parked up near the family’s home and joined the gang of reporters on their way to the house. Sky, ITN, local radio, commercial radio, regional BBC, national BBC. We were all there at the time South Yorkshire Police had requested. The officer made his way to the front. Photocopies of a young boy smiling at the camera were handed round. Standard practice - someone tapes the photo to a wall, the photographers and camera crews film the photo to include it in their pieces. It’s still the same now with the work of court artists who run outside the crown court and stick their pictures to the nearest flat surface for the crew to film. A panned shot or a slow zoom into the accused’s face highlighting the focus of the reporter’s words.

The police officer started the news conference while the bun fight continued in front of him, reporters shoving to the front. I saw two men square up to each other, snarling.

“Scribbler!” one spat at the guy standing next to him.

“Snapper!” said the other.

As the officer went on, explaining the order of events and how the boy had seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth a colleague of mine from regional TV was staring down the street. I looked in the direction he was looking. I stretched my neck to see the picture stuck to the wall of the little boy and we both turned and looked back down the road, our heads moving in unison.

“‘’Scuse me,” said the reporter. “Isn’t that him?”

As one, the gaggle of reporters, camera crews and producers all strained to look where we were looking.

Sure enough, it was. It turned out he’d been at a step-grandparent’s house overnight.

You could hear the clunk of a dozen car boots as cameras were chucked in the back and reporters and photographers set off back to the office. For the family, it was hugs all round and a few words to be had with gran and grandad about keeping in touch a bit more.

I raised it a few paragraphs ago but it’s worth asking again. What’s more important? No news coverage about somebody needing help or too much? There have always been judgements in journalism. Which story is worth covering, which story isn’t. After all these years I’ve no idea what criteria is used to make these decisions but I’ve seen it happening at first hand and there’s a stomach-turning moment when you realise someone along the line has got it wrong.

Kayleigh Ward’s life had been hard - her family had been evicted from their house in Chester. They were struggling to find somewhere to settle. One day Kayleigh vanished.

As the search intensified, Cheshire Police held a news conference on the top floor of their headquarters overlooking the city. The police were taking it very seriously - search teams doing everything they could to find her. The media were on board too - it was the lead item on the radio station I was working at and TV news bulletins were covering it as well. As the press conference went on, however, an officer in the middle of a sentence described Kayleigh as “streetwise”. An innocuous word on its own but loaded with possible meanings in relation to a search for a missing person. Especially this missing person.

You see, Kayleigh was just nine years old. How can you be “streetwise” at that age? What does it even mean? And if the police officer was right, what was the subtext and was it merited?

The effect of the term was staggering. Sections of the media drifted off and interest in the search for Kayleigh faded away.

It wasn’t just me that was uneasy with this. In 2011, Paul Vallely wrote about the case in The Independent, “What it seems we are being told, in code, is that somehow we don’t need to worry about this lost nine-year-old. It’s not that she isn’t in danger. Just that, in some disturbing way, she isn’t worth worrying about.”

Kayleigh was already dead before the police search was even up and running, murdered by John O’Shaughnessy, a 31 year old man who’d befriended her when the Ward family was living in a hostel. Her body was found in the River Dee.

“Streetwise.”

I spoke to the media team at Cheshire Police a few months after O’Shaughnessy was convicted of the little girl’s murder. Yes, I was told, “streetwise” was a mistake. It was the wrong word. Did that word have any effect on the end of Kayleigh’s life? No - but did it drive sympathy away from the family? Did it mean that revulsion at her murder was somehow less than it would have been?

Nine years old.

From the tragedy of Peter Falconio half way through my career as a journalist to the desperately sad death of Jay Slater towards the end of it, I’ve found myself, time and again, covering a family’s despair. I’ve never pushed myself repeatedly at people who’ve been at their lowest ebb but yes, I’ve knocked on a fair few front doors such as the home of Nicola Bulley who went missing in Lancashire. I was shocked when her partner, Paul, answered the door. Far more politely than I would have been if the tables were turned, he told me to contact Lancashire Police. I had wrongly presumed the police would have sent a family liaison officer to the house to help and I’d only been calling to hand a letter to them but I was later told that because the police didn’t suspect any crime had taken place, her disappearance was being treated as a ‘misper’ - a missing person inquiry. As such, they didn’t have the resources to place someone full-time at the family’s home.

I spent days and days reporting on Nicola’s disappearance. TV, radio, social media, the news website. All the while, the internet was going - I can’t think of another word for it - crazy. You’ll remember the lies, the deception, the cruel and viscous things that were written on social media sites. All of it totally baseless and uncaring. This was a tragedy for a young family and it was treated as some sort of feeding frenzy by people who knew nothing about the case, had no involvement in it and saw it as an opportunity to muck-rake in something that was none of their business. She hadn’t been abducted, nothing suspicious had happened, it was a tragedy. A terrible, terrible tragedy but the more the internet went mad, the more pressure was put on reporters to visit and revisit the story, even when they were telling their news desks there’d been no developments, there was no ‘news’.

The dog chased its tail round and round.

Nicola was finally found. An inquest found she’d accidentally drowned after falling in the river.

Did her death mark a turning point in people’s behaviour? What do you think?

In June 2024, a young man from Lancashire went on holiday abroad for the first time with his mates to Tenerife. A couple of days later he was reported missing. Jay Slater had gone to a music festival and then onto a house in a remote part of the island with two people he’d met. When he woke up he left the house and, instead of turning right and catching a bus back to where he was staying, he turned left and walked up a hill and got lost. He fell from a ridge he was walking on and was instantly killed.

They’re the facts.

When he went missing I was sent to Tenerife. I made my way to where he was last seen. The route was hair-raising. I got to the top of a windy pass at dawn and looked along the path of a hairpin road that stretched downwards as far as I could see. Every fifty metres the road turned back on itself. There were no pavements. It was a barren and unforgiving landscape and, in hindsight, I can understand why Jay, who didn’t have any water with him and was kitted out in the same trainers he’d been dancing in, hadn’t wanted to walk back up this road and chose to turn left to see where it would take him. I reported on his disappearance for ten days or so. Again, fuelled by lies and rumours on social media, the story of Jay’s disappearance took on a life of its own.

“No,” I told news producers again and again, there was no sign he’d been abducted, no sign of foul-play, nothing to suggest anything had been ‘going on’. To most of us who were there, it was obvious that something tragic but accidental had probably happened to him but it wasn’t enough for some people back in Britain. All sorts of half-baked rubbish and lies on social media were being spouted. Surely there must be some truth in it?

There wasn’t.

I never approached Jay’s family who flew out to help in the search. They had enough to deal with - not only the awful realisation that something terrible had most likely happened to Jay but the constant nastiness of a baying crowd, desperate for their fix of true-crime. But there was no crime, no secrets, no skullduggery. People were treating a tragedy as entertainment - like waiting for the next episode of a box set to drop on Netflix. I felt incredibly sorry for his family. A well-meaning post on Facebook by a friend who wanted to raise awareness had included Jay’s mother’s phone number. She was inundated with horrific messages from idiots intent on causing her even more pain but she didn’t dare turn the phone off in case her son was trying to get in touch with her. I’ve no idea how she coped with it all but I knew I was never going to approach her for an interview. She had more than enough to cope with beside me pestering her.

Jay’s body was found a month after he was last seen at the foot of a valley. His body was brought home to Lancashire. An inquest found he’d died accidentally as the result of a fall from height.

Once again, social media had been wrong.

You don’t need a qualification to call yourself a journalist. You just write it on your profile and that’s it: you are one. All of a sudden you’re allowed into news conferences and your voice gets carried further and further by social media shares. The authorities that hold news conferences are struggling to keep up with what’s happening. Should they ban people from attending if they don’t work for one of the ‘legacy’ media organisations? What if someone turns up saying they’re a reporter ‘for Facebook’? I’ve heard it. It’s happening.

Do we need to strengthen the criteria by which someone can call themselves ‘a journalist’? That’s what’s been suggested by some but they can carry on dreaming. How would that even be possible?

The truth is the old system is broken - everyone now has a voice. Just as FaceTime and WhatsApp audio calls mean every caller to a radio station sounds as good as the presenter, so it is with online “reporting”. Every ‘reporter’ is the same as the next and those who shout loudest are the ones who are heard. Perhaps an end to anonymous posting might help although people willingly put their name and photograph to all sorts of mindless drivel. They couldn’t care less if their name is attached to a post - that’s the point as far as they’re concerned. Say something controversial, something hate-filled and fame, or at least notoriety, will follow. Maybe the answer is in our own sense of responsibility? Maybe if we stepped back and thought about those whose lives continue to be affected by online gossip and careless reporting we’d realise these people we read about are us - you and me. A road trip, a dog walk, turning left instead of turning right. We could all be there but for the grace of God.