Archive for January, 2009

Secrets

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

Tis the season of careers talks. For some reason, we’ve always have a wedge of Life as a Journalist talks coming up at this time of year, from sixth forms to Cambridge University. It is my painful duty to tell the bright young things (and the less than bright) that watching Match of the Day or wandering round New Look every week may not prove an infallible entree to a job on FourFourTwo or Glamour.
Of course, it’s not impossible. Your dad might be editor of NME, or your mum editorial director of Conde Nast. Nepotism is the best route of all. Sidestep all that nonsense about shorthand or an ability to write. Who needs a passing understanding of sentence structure and what’s going on outside Hollywood Towers when your parents call the shots?
Alas, most people have to take a more mundane path. But young people expressing an interest in journalism get really duff advice from many teachers, who rate working in the media somewhere below lap-dancing or puppy-drowning.
My English teacher went red in the face when I told him I was going to be a journalist. He shouted for all to hear: “Nobody has ever left this school and made anything of themselves in journalism!”
Went back about five years later.
“Ah, Elliott. What are you doing now?”
“Working as a sub-editor on The Times, sir.”
“Always knew you’d do well.”
I was lucky. It’s 20 times harder now. More people wanting to get in, fewer jobs to go to. But then, I wouldn’t study English to S-level either, given the choice.
Trust me on this: failing to understand the links between the Manciple and the Merchant in Chaucer will never hamper your journalism career.
Do me a favour: study agriculture or zoology, but not English. It takes ages to teach English graduates to write properly.

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Golden

Monday, January 12th, 2009

Three months on, I still haven’t really adjusted to the fact that I don’t have to sit in front of my Mac every Thursday evening.
Discipline and journalism aren’t words that sleep well together. But deadlines and journalism are very different bedmates.
When you survive as a freelance (unless you’re hugely talented or confident), you always feel you’re only as good as your last article. Most editors would rather have OK copy that hits deadline than dazzling stuff that invariably arrives late (or not
at all).
So you always file on time and to length, make a check call to see if there are any queries and NEVER do a Martin Amis because subs have inserted a comma.
My view (admittedly, tainted by several years as a sub) is that if someone has changed or rewritten your golden words, you probably didn’t write it clearly in the first place.
I filed weekly for 22 years on the Independent (for much of that time, twice a week) and never missed a deadline, even getting copy in from Outer Mongolia, the jungles of Ecuador and a tiny island off Malaysia.
Alas, all good things come to an end. You don’t have to be Miss Marple to know that things on the Indy are parlous. When the axemen swiped their way through the building last autumn, my head rolled.
But here’s the funny thing. I am an inveterate tearer-out of interesting scraps. These often turned into stories when nothing much seemed to be happening. I’ve still got two fat folders stuffed with sports stories like mud-wrestling and underwater football, and twice as many with fishy cuttings that could be twisted into an angling column.
And I can’t stop doing it. I no longer have a national newspaper outlet (and see little chance of one appearing any time soon, given what the dailies are going through), but I can’t stop tearing scraps from scientific journals to Materials Recycling Week.
Is there any cure, doctor?

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