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Wednesday, June 4th, 2008Er, yes, I’ve been a bit remiss on this. For 22 years, I’ve written a weekly column for The Independent and never missed a deadline. It’s been tight sometimes when trying to file from remote places like Canada’s North-West Territories or the Arctic Circle north of Sweden. But the copy’s always reached the sports desk in time.
But can I produce a weekly blog for my own company? Clearly not.
Having just done appraisals for all the staff, I did a personal one (KE sitting across the table to KE) and realised that one of the things I wasn’t fulfilling was writing a few hundred words for my own company website.
For a bloke who writes an average 7000 words a week on various journo projects, commissions and columns, it was a pretty poor show. I gave myself a verbal warning.
Too much has happened since my last missive. So we’ll pretend that we’ve been chatting weekly, and start afresh.
A whistle-stop trip to Frankfurt to inspire the staff of Deutsche Bank’s internal magazine started the week. Its editor-in-chief is Neil Fitzgerald, a hugely bright guy I worked with a million years ago on Accountancy Age.
He’s taken on a whacking challenge here, with all the classic problems of an internal magazine: tortuous approvals procedure, managers wanting to rewrite stuff that’s perfectly OK into corporate speak, versions in German and English, people who have worked there a long time and are fearful of raising their heads above the parapet.
Not sure how much difference I made. But maybe telling them that such problems were common to large organisations (the bank has nearly 80,000 staff) and could be largely overcome means they can win a few battles, even if they don’t win the war.
Today it’s final judging for Press Gazette’s regional press awards. I judged feature writer in weeklies and dailies, and was a bit disappointed with the standard. Not enough sparkle in much of the writing, too many obvious features (Madeleine McCann, injured soldiers back in Blighty, youth crime).
Is it the demands of the feature desk? (We need two features a week.) Is it the increasing difficulty of getting out of the office that journos face? Is it smaller teams, a tendency to take the easy route, or simply a lack of sideways thinking?
Most depressingly, these are people who think their words are good enough to win recognition as the best feature writer in the country. All too often, it’s not writing; it’s typing. I always remember one feature editor saying to me: “You have to make it sing and dance, not drag its feet.” A good lesson.