Delighted to see one of our former postgraduates, Tom Vaughan, clean up at the Periodicals Training Council’s New Journalist of the Year awards. He won best business feature journalist and the overall award, and was so confident of winning that he didn’t bother to attend.
“I thought getting shortlisted was about as well as I’d do,” he said when I called to congratulate him. “Although I had a short holiday booked, I’d certainly have turned up if I felt that I had a chance.”
He had a point. I’ve judged a lot of these awards, and business journalists generally get a raw deal.
Tom works for Caterer and Hotelkeeper, which at least covers issues that most of us can understand. But how many judges treat work from Cranes Today, Pipeline World or Refrigeration and Air Conditioning with the same objectivity?
Judging is normally heavily weighted by those who have only worked on consumer mags, and sponsors. They don’t understand the subject, so are far less likely to appreciate its virtues.
Being able to judge the qualities of a feature on paint polymers, derivatives or motherboards is not easy. But I feel that if you take on judging responsibilities, you’ve got to assess them all on equal terms.
I judged some Emap awards a few years ago, and one of my fellow judges, head hitter on a women’s consumer title that shall remain nameless, pushed a pile of fishing and motorbike titles to one side, saying: “Well, they can’t win because I don’t understand them.”
I pushed all the women’s magazines to one side in retaliation, saying: “Well, they can’t win because I don’t understand them.”
She said indignantly: “That’s not fair!”
So I retorted: “Nor’s what you did. Shall we start again?”
Interestingly, she still doesn’t speak to me.
That one of the great thing about journalists: they don’t hold a grudge.
At the risk of sounding like Victor Meldrew, I despair of what’s happening to university students with aspirations of becoming journalists.
Trudged up to Durham this week to give a talk about getting a job in journalism. Eight hours in the car on the A1 for an hour’s talking – and just two of those who attended seemed curious enough to ask any questions.
In fact, Durham is one of the better universities for these talks. (Last year, more than 100 turned up for my talk.)
Allegedly, 60 per cent of all students want jobs in the media, but I’ve had as few as 12 turn up on these sessions.
Might be I’m a boring ol’ fart to listen to, but surely they should at least wander through the door when a talk is called something like: The Inside Line: Find Out The Truth About Getting a Media Job.
If all these students really want jobs in the media, and I’ve already told them that a key skill for a journalist is curiosity, wouldn’t you expect them to have a question or two at the end?
Increasingly, we are taking fewer and fewer people straight out of university for our postgrad magazine course. Those who have been in work for a couple of years, or who have spent some time writing to ads in The Guardian and never even getting a reply, are much better material.
They have started to realise that it’s a cruel world. Heat and Q, it turns out, aren’t actually so devastated by a 2:2 in media studies, they immediately create a vacancy for someone whose main qualification is that they like going to the cinema.
Goodness, there’s that Meldrew tendency creeping up on me again. Eight hours on the A1 listening to Tom Waits does strange things to a man. But where’s the passion to do the best job in the world? Not in enough students, I’ll tell you that.
Suddenly, my little fishing magazine has become flavour of the month. Subscriptions have surged by almost 10 per cent in a month. What’s going on?
Classic Angling’s circulation has always seemed unaffected by floods, recession, salmon farms, invading Iraq, the Large Hadron Collider and the death of Elvis.
Very few people fail to resubscribe. The magazine has a resub rate of more than 95 per cent, the sort of thing most publications can only dream about. I usually phone up those who have not renewed. Turns out they’ve usually died.
A couple of years ago, I introduced a two-year sub because people said it was a hassle to keep renewing. Most sign up for this, but I’m now getting readers asking: “Why don’t you do a three-year sub?” In publishing terms, this is dreamland stuff.
But CA’s success has always been limited by my lack of marketing. I’m so knackered after finishing each issue, because I have to fit it round all my other commitments, that I keep vowing to do something about it – and don’t.
So new readers (and advertisers) find the magazine despite rather than because of me. A few flyers that I scatter at the big tackle auctions are about the extent of my promotional work. Otherwise, new subs come from word-of-mouth.
But something has happened. Every day, over the past few weeks, I’ve been finding shoals of new readers wanting to sign up. Has there been a glowing review somewhere? Did someone on Strictly Come Dancing say that they can’t live without it? (It can’t be the website.)
I’m not complaining, especially as I’m off to Boston in a few weeks to talk about getting it printed in the US, and thereby giving a huge boost to North American subs.
If it keeps on like this, I’ll have to give up the day job.
Life in the training world has been a little quiet of late, so it’s enabled me to catch up with friends whom I haven’t seen for a while.
The basic journo concept of keeping in touch with contacts never goes away. But when people like Tony Loynes (editor-in-chief of Press Gazette), Steve Buckley (Emap’s head of TV ventures) and Mel Nicholls (Autocar’s editorial director) tell you things, you can’t think: “Great story! I’ll write that!”
It’s an interesting ethical point that journalists often raise on courses: what do you do when a good contact tells you a great story, but you know it will get him/her in trouble if it appears in print?
Publish and be damned is all very well as a principle. But in practice, it loses you friends very quickly. An MP friend often runs things past me, asking what the implications are. Many are terrific stories, but the whole thing’s done on trust.
Occasionally, I ask him to give me an entrée to people or places. All that would go if I sought the route of quick glory. The long-term benefits of the relationship are far greater.
To be fair, these are easy decisions. The tougher ones for journalists are, typically, those stories acquired when alcohol loosens tongues. We’ve all been there: you’re at a dinner or conference, it’s 12.30am and the person next to you, who’s become your new best friend, blurts out something that he or she would never have told you when sober.
You check it out. It stands up. To write, or not to write?
I had a news editor once who deliberately and calculatingly went out with the chief press officer of the main organisation in the industry just to get stories. For him, it would have been an easy decision. But for those of us who don’t ascribe to the Sun reptile style of reporting, there’s no black-and-white answer.
Party time at PMA, with more than 160 turning up to celebrate 20 years of our postgraduate course. We were supposed to be out of the place at 9pm, and we managed to get the last person out of the door promptly on the crack of midnight.
Nice to see we’ve imbued them with the great journalistic traditions. (Never leave while there’s booze around, never leave if there could be another party to go to, closing time never really means that, etc)
You can view the party pix on facebook (PMA Media Training), but God bless Chris Lewis, once a PMA tutor, who is now making millions as boss of PR company Lewis. (A lesson for us all.) He let us use his company’s wonderful media centre on Millbank. He’s got a close link with Private Eye, and the venue is enhanced by all those classic front pages, framed writs from Maxwell, cartoons and I hear, it may soon be used for some Eye fun evenings. You heard it here first.
They travelled from far and wide. In the end, Amanda Chater decided that flying from New York was a little over the top just for a three-hour party (told her it would last longer), but Stephanie Norbury travelled from the south of France, leaving husband Mark (who was on the same course as her) literally holding the baby.
It was great to see so many people from as long ago as 1989. But it was equally satisfying, edging towards my dotage, to remember almost everyone’s name. “You won’t remember me,” is how they all started. “Yes I do. You’re …”
Got some of the years wrong, but nailed almost everyone. Not surprising, I suppose, considering the long hours and the weekends and the tears, of which I was sometimes the cause. God bless ‘em: they all said nice things about those days. Time’s a great healer…
It was a great journalistic exercise to find everyone. Most emails were out of date (when you go to work for Euromoney, you don’t keep the email sexyone@ or rocknutter@) and few lived at the same address.
Many women had married to complicate things further, so they had new surnames. Facebook, Friends Reunited and Linkedin proved the best sources, but I even found a couple through Debretts. Wish I could replicate the exercise on courses to encourage more journalists to pick up the phone.
The final week of my Independent fishing column. For a moment, I was tempted to bury a hidden message in it (but a little more subtle than the first letter of successive sentences) but in the end, I decided that would be a little petty.
Nothing to do with the quality (or so the sports editor claims), it’s just that the bean-counters have been rootling in the undergrowth and found they can save a few more quids by bumping me off. I guess that when you’re a bean-counter, you count small beans as well.
Because I’ve written for the paper since it started (22 years) and must be the longest-serving columnist, you would have thought that the gods would at least have invited me for a drink. No luck. Not even a gold watch in the shape of a fish. Rather makes me wish I hadn’t turned down the Mail.
I’m rather hoping the paper will be swamped with Angry of Hampstead letter (“I’m never buying the paper again…”) but fishermen are notoriously apathetic. Both Angling Times and Angler’s Mail ran stories about the Indy killing the column. I got a few calls, but their letters pages weren’t exactly swamped with threats of violence against Independent News & Media.
One plus is that I’ve never signed over full rights, so I’ve got hundreds (say, 50 x 22 years) of columns that I’ll turn into one book. Maybe two or three. It’s my idea of a book. Just write an intro, put them in a vague sort of order, and there’s a book.
Curtis has also suggested that I continue the column online. Seems a good idea, running it through the Classic Angling website. We’ll suck it and see.
Then again, maybe the Economist or the Wall Street Journal will come a-courting and offer me shedloads of money.
And maybe fish will fly.
It’s hot. Damn hot. Or it would be if I stepped outside. I don’t think the temperature here in Singapore ever falls below 80 degrees.
Went to the Night Safari last night and it must have been at least 90 degrees at midnight. Wonder how warm it was in Britain as today became tomorrow?
We’re here for the Asian Publishers’ Conference. I did a talk on things to watch on design; Riva spoke about some obscure thing on research, using lots of words like paradigms, monetization and metrics.
Then I had to ”moderate” (strange word that, seeing as all I had to do was introduce the speakers) on a session about innovating to succeed. Great thing is, when there’s a really tricky question, I’d just pass it sideways.
“Ah, I think Stephen’s the person to answer that one.” You could see by the colour draining from his face that he wasn’t.
Huh! Innovation didn’t do you much good there, buster.
I think we’re on the verge of setting up a base here. Everyone I meet seems to say: “We need that sort of training.” What they’ve had is American journalism majors lecturing them, not sitting down to address their specific problems.
I made the mistake of saying after my session: “…and if anyone want to bring along their magazine, I’ll sit down with you and talk it through.” Two hours later, I still had a queue of eager people.
So the demand is here. Just wish Asia wasn’t thousands of miles away, I was 20 years younger, and it was just a little cooler.
If you’re a typical journalist and you’re thinking of buying a motorhome, let me give you a word of advice from one who knows. Don’t.
Admittedly, my experience is that of the typical hack reviewer: four days living on one. Come on! I know one car reviewer who wrote 1500 words based on a five-minute drive round a car park.
By way of mitigation, I should say that Riva loved it and wants to buy one. But I fear that I could only manage if it’s the size of a bendy bus.
My ride was no converted VW van, either. The Motorhome Information Service (A-listers when it comes to being helpful) found me a spiffy Peugeot Compass Avant Garde 130, which allegedly sleeps five, though you’d have to be very good friends.
After the tent fiasco at the last Game Fair I attended (don’t ask), I decided that I rather liked wearing something other than rumpled, damp clothes, showering in warm water rather than cold, and dining on food that didn’t featured fried grass.
It was also a delight to be able to eat from clean plates, rather than the same grease-encrusted dish from the previous three days. Those things were great.
But I am not by nature a tidy man. In a motorhome, you have to close drawers, put clothes away and not buy enough food to feed the Stretford End.
Fail on any one of these, and you’ll struggle, Fail on all three (plus several others I haven’t mentioned) and your life becomes a misery of lost shoes, hidden keys and spilt coffee.
I’d also suggest that you don’t share the space with a slightly flatulent springer spaniel.
Well, all things considered, it was a pretty good Game Fair. Got a few new subscriptions for Classic Angling, sold some books and even set up a couple of PMA courses.
Next year? I fear the memsahib has fallen in love, and it’s motorhomes for evermore. Me? I’ll be banished to the tent again.
I don’t need Max Mosley-style entertainment. I’ve just enjoyed my regular sadistic session fix with our eager postgrads to satisfy my dark side.
Part of the nine-week course involves bringing them up to speed on grammar. Depressingly, very few have done grammar at school, or only ran into it when they learnt a foreign language. For a few, it’s just that: a foreign language.
Because we cherry-pick those chosen for the course and give them a grammar test as part of the interviewing process, we can recruit those who have at least a passing knowledge. Still, that’s not saying a lot. Those who aren’t quite sure of the difference between a comma and a full stop (how do you explain that in one pithy sentence?) are told to read Wynford Hicks’ English for Journalists. But there’s a difference between reading and understanding. Hence my thumbscrews and racks day.
Most are pretty cocky about their grammar and spelling talents. So I ask for marks out of 10 on the latter. Most say 6 or 7, a few 8 or 9. Ho ho.
This is the fun bit. I split them into pairs, give them a “simple” test and say: “OK. A bottle of decent wine for each pair that makes five or fewer mistakes, but if you get more than seven, you buy me a bottle.”
This year, they did slightly better than average. The worst was 67 mistakes, the best 24.
“How would you feel, as an editor, if you were sent someone who made 67 mistakes in a spelling test?” I ask them. Silence.
When we go on to grammar, they are slightly less cocky.
“Bottle of wine on this too?” I ask.
Guess what? No takers.
Boot-camp stuff, but it hammers home the importance of knowing the difference between practice and practise, colons and quotation marks. It may not get them a job, but it can certainly lose one.
I’m often asked if you can you really teach grammar in a day. The answer’s yes, as long as you avoid all the stuff about subjunctives and ablatives and other stuff beloved by grammarians.
My daughter told her teacher that he had misspelt something. “No I haven’t,” he said. “Yes you have,” she replied.
“We’ll see about that!” he retorted, and grabbed a dictionary. Sure enough, he found that bulrushes only has one L.
“How did you know that, Fleur?” he asked.
“My dad told me: ‘Moses had one L of a time in the bulrushes.’”
Simple rules, as I said.
Off to meet Philip Braund, one of our most entertaining tutors, at his flash Millbank base, almost opposite the House of Commons. Philip was news editor on the Mirror and senior producer on The Cook Report. As you can imagine, this experience provided him with a wealth of stories, like the one about Paul Daniels…
He’s now managing editor at ITN, and told me a delightful homonym from a young reporter filing a story about families driven into poverty. Seems that the family were so desperate, they had been selling their treasured belongings at the local porn shop… The mind boggles.
So we caught up on old friends, old enemies, and he then said that ITN was looking to do a programme on extreme fishing. Who better to ask?
I gave him several ideas, one of which was going to the Congo river in search of a 100lb fish with teeth like a vampire called goliath tigerfish. Then I realised that he might have thought I was up for going there. No fear!
The Foreign Office says: “We advise against all travel to eastern and north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This includes entering DRC from Uganda and Rwanda. The only exception is within the towns of Goma and Bukavu, including entering them from Rwanda, where we advise against all but essential travel.”
A friend who went there was attacked by river pirates, caught malaria and was shot at several times. I like fishing, but that’s on a very different scale.
I’ve been trying to find a safe way there for ages, but I fear it will never happen. The best I found was a fishing trip that South African ex-mercenaries were trying to put together. They said: “We’ve found a way of getting there and fishing which might not be too dangerous.” Hmm.
And I don’t think I would be able to drum up much training business there, either.