Archive for July, 2008

Fair

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

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.

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Grammar

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

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.

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Can

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

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.

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Scratching

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Off to the Emirates Stadium for the Good Communications Awards. In my days of covering football I knew most of the grounds. But I got bored with losing my Saturdays for a 0-0 draw in Middlesbrough.
It’s not 90 minutes either: you leave before dawn because you need to be at the ground at least an hour beforehand, then there are interviews afterwards, rewrites and finding you’ve just missed the fast train.
I gave up taking the car. You had to park in the next county, then got approached by some lowlife who said: “Look after your car, mister?” (The assumption being if you said no, ornate keywork would decorate the paintwork when you got back and maybe you’d have four flat tyres too.)
Anyway, this was my first visit to the Arsenal home, and it was pretty impressive. The staff were helpful and polite (wonder if they’re like that on match days?) and the meal was excellent.
My involvement was judging two of the awards, and we sponsored Council Publication of the Year. I shared a table with the winners, Stoke-on-Trent, and evilly told them that I’d be happy to talk through why they hadn’t won. A dirty trick, but it was worth it to see their faces.
The following day, it was the Press Gazette Student Journalism Awards. Only one PMA person, Lucy Handley, bothered to enter. (Don’t they realise there’s £500 for winning an award?) She was shortlisted but didn’t win.
Talked to a lot of the eager young things. Depressingly, they all want  to work in television. Why aren’t their tutors telling them how few jobs are around, and that they’ll be expected to work as unpaid dogsbodies for months?
Because then we wouldn’t fill the courses is the simple answer. I wonder what proportion of those who do TV journalism courses actually get jobs in TV? My guess? Under 1 per cent. But I may be optimistic there.

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Passing

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

It’s clearly the awards season. No sooner have I got the Regional Press Awards off my desk than another batch arrives from the Good Communications Awards, followed hotly by those for the Asian Publishing Convention.
The latter present quite a challenge. It’s not so much the scale of them (one class has 60 entries) but the fact that many of them are in Chinese. How can I judge writing quality when I’ve got no idea what it’s all about?
The supporting information helps, but ultimately it means looking at the pictures, which is scarcely a fair way to judge.
Fortunately, I’m head of the judges. So I hit upon a great scheme. I pointed out to my three fellow judges that it was a daunting task ploughing through 60 entries. How about we all take 15, shortlist three from that, and then together judge the final 12?
Great idea, they all said. So I allocated “randomly” the first 15 to one judge, I took the next 15, while the others took batch three and four. And guess what? All my 15, by sheer coincidence, are in English.
The Good Communications Awards, for local government, present another problem. Some titles are produced quarterly, some monthly. But what weighting do you put on an entry that does it 12 times a year against one with only a quarter of that output?
Team size, too, must count. Where half a dozen work on a title, you’d expect it to be better than a one-man band. This would be less of a difficulty if there was a clear winner. But I’ve got four that are all around the same standard when judged on writing, editing and design. That’s when these other factors count.
Our reward for these labours is not what outsiders think. The PPA gives a bottle of decent wine; on others, you get a free lunch. CiB (haven’t done them for a couple of years) used to pay. I once collected £500 for my efforts. But as I had to write a 250-word critique on every one of 40-odd entries, it was scarcely money for nothing.
Some don’t give anything at all. One, which shall remain nameless, gave me a small bar of chocolate. Obviously valued my efforts highly.

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