Snapper dies - but the image remains vivid

Sadenned once again to learn of the death of yet another former colleague. This time it was Tony Gregory, former chief photographer of the Herts Advertiser in St Albans. And as if to bring the news even closer to home, he died after suffering a heart attack in what was, until recently, my local.


It also brought back a few memories of the days when newsrooms were crammed to the rafters with staff, lunches were long, workloads manageable at a canter and expenses went through on the nod.

But for all that, the papers were editorially strong, no-one appeared in court in relative secrecy and local councils were held properly to account. And no one could place a quirky small ad in a shop window and not expect a call from the newsdesk.

Greg, as he was known, was one of those larger-than-life characters who boomed their way around newsrooms, barrel-chesting their way through the day and "getting it sorted" in that robust, no-nonsense but highly ethical way that defined his generation.

He was there on my first day. One of the few still in the office at midday. I'd had a long drive from the westcounntry and didn't show until 1.00, just as the newsroom had emptied for a two-hour liquid lunch.

The editor knew I'd be late. He'd offered to store some of my stuff at his rambling old mill house in return for an early start date. But Greg didn't know that.

"New boy?" he asked, looking at his watch from the doorway of the darkroom as I sat there alone. I was a bit cocky back then and just replied: "doesn't do to be too keen."

"You'll go far," he replied. The ambiguity remains to this day.

He had a team of four or five, as i recall The reporters' desk was about 12-strong, from the old lags who knew everyone and everything to the training scheme modshipmites who called people sir on the phone. There was a newsdesk of two, about eight subs (maybe more) two district desks (four or five) a social desk of two and five more on the sports desk.

We were paid in cash in little brown envelopes the editor's secretary brought around on a Friday, before popping back again a few hours later with the exes. I claimed a tenner's worth at the end of my first week but that was laundered into £25 by the FoC who "hadn't fought all those battles" just so some boy scout could let the side down.

We did two stories a day, by and large, but the diary was as comprehensive as the schools in those days. The youngsters got stuck into pump features like Down Your Way, the seniors did death knocks and the pre-Leveson ones who stayed up to watch Lou Grant in the days before betamax video, even fronted up villains, preferably with Greg standing behind them with a Nikon dangling like a pendant from his neck and chipping in with "it's a fair question, pal."

The editor wore a colourful waistcoat, read the Village Voice and talked of "getting the vibe", the news editor was from up north and smoked a pipe at his desk, the snappers wore jeans, there was a hamster of a librarian who would let his car idle for a full ten pollutant minutes before engaging gear because he'd read something about optimum engine heat, a 5ft 4in bulldog of a chief reporter who'd ask geezers in the pub who they were looking at; the most senior hack on the desk had a handlebar moustache and the most junior a punk haircut. The babes in the ad room next door were all out of our league and the smoothies in suits they sat next to were derided by those of us who would have secretly claimed legit expenses for a month for plant cutting of their cool.

You couldn't have got more character in a room if you'd had oak beams and open brickwork.

When Robert Runcie left the city to become Archbishop of Canterbury, he told me in his exit interview the thing he'd missed most was "the dear old Herts Ad" he could never live without.

About a year ago, I went back there as part of a fact-find on behalf of my students and found a newsroom of five doing everything: writing and subbing all sections, cobbling together ad features and updating the website.

The current editor told me tales of jumping fences to jog across fields to the scene of a major fire, so the spirit is still there, even if the resources aren't.

Greg remained in the area after retirement and, like me, would have got the now-free edition through his letterbox every week. He had his fair share of illness but was a legendary non-complainer and if you read Medeliene Burton's piece here you'll see why (note the bit about helping Spitfires take off and you'll learn more of what built that generation).

The industry today may not be the one he remembers, but he goes to his grave with the comfort that he was there at the best of times.

What's the point of telling the truth?

Long ago, when Chris Huhne was just a young reporter on the Liverpool Echo, I was doorstepping a magistrates clerk 500 miles away for a comment about why someone who had paid a £100 fine and forgot to add 20p was being threatened with jail.


The clerk, a surly retired barrister, had written to the lady to tell her this, which is why it was a story.

Except that the clerk insisted he had not, an insistence delivered with a sneer and a curt: “if there’s nothing else, good day to you.”

When I showed him a letter, he told me “the system” must have dispatched it in error. It was signed by his assistant as a pp. He thanked me for my time and, again, insisted that was the end of it.

When I showed him a more forceful follow-up letter, this time signed by him, he asked me why such a small matter was of interest.

I told him he'd answered his own question and asked why he had sent such a second letter if the first was merely an admin error.

He insisted he hadn't. It wasn't his signature. I showed him a copy of the covering letter he signs every time the court listings go out to newspapers like mine. The signatures matched. He said he must have signed it "without looking properly – I deal with a lot of correspondence”.

So, how could he explain the third, distinctly more aggressive, letter?

He didn’t look at this one, and merely told me told me I was a pipsqueak and that he knew my chairman.

It made a better quote than "we apologise" or "we have launched an investigation".

But the 10-minute exchange in the doorway of his office told me more about the importance of pertinent questioning, empirical evidence and the easy way someone of advancing years and in a position of authority can so easily disregard the truth as an unnecessary annoyance when faced with something so irrelevant as a legitimate question.

Like Mr Huhne, who ironically was my age and also cutting his teeth on local newspapers at the time, he clearly missed the point(s).

Boycott your paper, Nadine? Get outa here!

Nadine Dorries, the MP the Tories deselected for bunking off to appear in I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! insists she will never speak to her local paper again. Well, one of them, at least.

The paper in question is the Bedfordshire on Sunday, a somewhat feisty organ that covers her mid Bedfordshire constituency.

Given the headlines she's been getting lately I'm not surprised she's finding the publicity machine she kick-started a difficult one to stop. She's already been reported as saying she'll call the police if another red top turns up on her doorstep.

If that's true and not one of the "salacious andinaccurate" stories she complains so bitterly about, she needs to know it's a problematic tactic at best and one that would only produce more of the sort of headlines she doesn't want.

Once an issue dies, and luckily her Nadine, we’re on borrowed time with hers, it’s the tears and tantrums they leave in their wake that tends to revive them.

And, to be honest, there’s not much to write about in her neck of the woods. The council magazine that popped through her letterbox last week was all about restoration of the war memorial, dog poo in the high street and access to wheelie bins.

But this isn't about the balance between what constitutes privacy or trespass (which may be the better tool in this instance) and the legitimate right to inquire of a public figure. It's about empathy, albeit a tacit one.

Let me explain. I was editor of the Bedfordshire Journal, a weekly newspaper which covered her mid Bedfordshire constituency long before the 2005 election at which she won what was an extremely safe seat.

I’m talking 1984-1985 (note: it was later bought by the Herald Post group and subsumed into Thomson Free Newspapers) when Sir Nicholas Lyall was in office, long before he became Attorney General under John Major and ages before the Churchill Matrix affair threw his name into the headlines. To be honest, I rarely spoke to him, aside from acknowledging his press releases and taking the odd call from his agent.

I had more to do with Sir Trevor Skeet, his North Beds counterpart and a gangling New Zealander with enough of the Bon viveur about him to help flesh out the gang of bigwigs who'd attend anything that involved shaking hands with a glass in one of them. And, yes, that did include me.

I never had a discussion with him that involved eating Ostrich testicles in the Australian jungle, more a case of the effects the dumping nuclear waste would have on local villagers and his pet topic of how he'd sort out striking miners.

It was the sort of relationship that exists between many local paper editors and their MPs in many constituencies: an uneasy truce, in some cases, a pact, based on the implicit understanding that one needs the other. But often - and I've been reminded of this countless times by MPs, be it at Commons functions, charity bashes or Downing Street receptions - the only papers they trust are their local ones.

That may be because those papers are less interested in digging the dirt, don't have the resources to do so, or simply know the difference between a genuine issue and something that smacks of someone in an office in London taking a flyer.

But it's also because they're on the spot and see what happens day-to-day, rather than descending on a postcode they've never heard of, running up a few expenses and turning on their heels for the motorway.

So it's always a shame when I hear that an MP has cut off dialogue with a paper that probably shares many of her concerns and ideas on the issues that affect what is essentially a joint constituency, be they readers or voters.

If the idea of pretending that a news outlet that speaks directly to thousands of your constituents doesn't exist was one formulated on the advice of a press adviser, I'd make them lie in a coffin for ten minutes with only maggots and a TV camera for company.

I never fell out with my MPs, then again they didn't thrust themselves into the limelight in a bid to talk to millions on a reality show.

I did at some stage with most people in public life, though, in my undisguised bid to make my paper worth buying and give me a leg up into Fleet Street. My spats, with everyone from senior police officers to council chiefs and even a local gangster, were put to rest in, among other places, the lounge bar at Flitwick Manor, a posh hotel in the next village to Nadine's.

Not all of those encounters resulted in either of us seeing eye-to-eye, but it did keep communications open.

But back to the Beds on Sunday. if it was going to be any paper to hack her off, it was always going to be that one, not the Times and Citizen, one with a more sober approach and one with which she still apparently gets on. So, here's the empathy.

The BoS was a rival in my day; a tabloid that chased the same sort of eye-catching off-diary stuff we did. We gave each other a run for our money, poking our noses behind the scenes of the days’ big issues and tended towards headlines with the word scandal in them. We left the paper of record stuff to The Times, as it was then known.

Its editor in those days was the meteoric Frank Branston, a man who went on to become the mayor Bedford and later have a bypass named after him. He and I would share a pint, steal each other's staff once in a while but maintain a tacit gentlemen's agreement to play by the rules.

But he had one extra, and difficult, task that I didn't. He had to of fill a gossip column each week in a town where not a lot happens. And, as one of those putting themselves about, I was as fair game as anyone.

I was chided for "empire building" when I described myself pompously as group editor (well, we did have separate editions for the likes of Biggleswade and Ampthill), attacked mercilessly when a coach broke down during channel hop for readers and given a pasting for (allegedly) having my own staff rewrite a profile piece on my departure because it wasn't glowing enough.

All, er, total b******s of course. But I would say that wouldn't I?

Anyway, it was all too long ago to be searchable today, unlike the attacks on Nadine, if that is indeed what they are. So when a former red top hack tipped me the wink at what the trade press were saying the weekend, I had a look at their website in search of the “salacious and inaccurate” stories that had so wound her up.

Not sure I found them. There was loads of post-jungle stuff, including those threats to call police, some rather OTT Twitter rants and a daft nomination for a pinhead of the year award. Hardly enough to make you choke on a witchety grub.

Mind you, it didn’t help that the predictive text rendered her name as Marine Forties.

Still, I'm sure she’d agree, it's an improvement on Mad Nad.

 

 

The uncomfortable truth about Croydon

A council chief bans reporters from a public meeting because he is "uncomfortable" with their presence. Two local papers and a blogger from Croydon were asked to leave so he could address a local forum about regeneration plans.

 

Croydon Council CEO John Rouse told the gathering in West Croydon: "It's not my job to place myself in a position where I have to defend council policy and have my words scrutinised." A vote was taken to exclude reporters from two local papers and a popular blog.

 

Inexplicably, the Forum members followed his lead and the meeting was held in secret. One objector walked out in protest.

 

A couple of points worth noting: One, yes it is, Mr Rouse. Two, the objector should have stayed and taken notes.

 

It’s nice to see local papers actually attending such meetings these days, giving the low staffing levels. But the end of this particular wedge is looking very thin indeed.

Copytakers - is the typecasting deserved?

A Guardian blog about copytakers injected a little nostalgia. Roy Greenslade Recalls all-too-familiar anecdotes of an age before laptops and smart phones in which touch typists, most them in Fleet Street, men, would take dictation using headphones from reporters on the road.

They were a breed unto themselves; impatient know-alls often, intimidating to the young reporter filing off the cuff, sometimes abrasive and downright rude if they thought what you were filing was not up to scratch. But, it has to be said, extremely helpful on occasions.

Like the time I described a "war veteran" in his forties (this was in 1974) and was told: "he'd have been still at school. Get yer maffs right."

Or the time one on the Evening Standard completed my sentence: "...let me guess, he was jailed for eight years."

How did he know? Because he'd typed it already when he'd taken it from a faster, more diligent rival. He assured me I could continue but the other one had already been through the rather unforgiving Joe Dray and it's probably not good to flag up the fact that you've missed thre first edition.

They were also the unofficial arbiters of good sense and style. Filing an intro which began "Singing superstar Cilla Black" to get a muttered, "I think we know who she is", should have told me something about the overuse of adjectives.

We had our own copytaker at the Herts Headline agency I worked for in St Albans in 1974. She would take non-urgent copy that needed to go via the newsdesk. She once passed a piece through to news editor Steve Payne who came on and said: "What do you mean his alibi was that he was insane?" In Spain, I insisted. in Spain. And the Land Rover they used as a getaway car? In the cuttings it's a Range Rover. I know. I'd said Range Rover. The hapless (and not long for the door) copytaker explained: "I thought it was a mistake. My dad's mate has got a Land Rover."

Better still was the one on one of the broadsheets (too long ago to remember which, but there are those who will recall the telling) who interrupted when I described a celeb driving an Aston Martin DB3 "as featured in the James Bond film Goldfinger". He cut in: "you mean the book. The film had a DB4. Or, to be precise, a DB Mark four."

"Are you sure?"

"Dead sure."

"OK, let's say book then."

"Very well. But our style is novel."

Congratulations, we're having a cliche

Today’s Mail royal baby special includes an inevitable comparison piece on the pregnant Kate and Princess Diana. Under a page 9 headline (yep, it’s the first 14 pages)  Oh what a contrast, it looks at how time have changed so dramatically for a expectant mother of a future heir.

It’s a pity their tabloid rivals didn’t follow their lead, with cliché after cliché cribbed from 30 years ago, according to the faded cuttings from the days when Yours Truly was doorstepping the Princess of Wales.

Ma’am’s the word, said the Mirror (it was a secret from the Queen we’re told, unlike the last time when Mum was just keeping tight-lipped).  Prince and Princess of Wails was another corker to vie with the Sun’s Nappy and glorious, tucked a few pages back from the inevitable Kate expectations.

If I get a moment, I’ll dig out William’s birth ones so we can see what to expect in nine months’ time.

One idea that was new was a quirky PS piece at the foot of the Sun’s Page 3: Headlined, What the baby will look like, their “graphics experts” came up with a boy and a girl after studying pictures of the couple.

Just hope it’s not a boy. So will you if you follow this link and scroll down a bit.

The report, then the retort. No surprises then

Just as I predicted, David Cameron moved like lightning to block the merest suggestion by Lord Leveson that newspapers could be tarred by the brush of legislation.  He’s right. For many reasons. Too many to mention here. And he’s as right as the judge was in many of his assertions on the best and the worst if a free press. More of that later.

But, as today’s Mirror pointed out, to legislate now, in whatever limited form, would be akin to following Caesar across the Rubicon to a situation from which there is no retreat.

There are laws, loads of them, and I see them close and personal every day, that deal with damage to reputations, invasions of privacy, bribery, trespass, harassment, contempt and all manner of issues that can be thrown at the media. There is a body in place to arbitrate at a lower level, albeit not a terribly well supported one, and we’ve seen a frenzy of police inquiries, internal investigations, arrests, jailings and sword-falling the like of which I cannot remember in 40-odd years in the business.

For the past year, any suggestion that the media is able to do what it likes and get away with it, must surely have been dispelled time and again. What’s required is a way of ensuring compliance with the laws we have already. Not new ones.

A few weeks ago, I attended a forum by the media lawyers Association at which there appeared to be a universal condemnation of any new laws to control what they already see as a fairly tightly controlled press.

From a legal perspective that may be so, from an ethical one, far from it. I heard a lot of evidence from the less glamorous end of the witness statements and recognised a lot of what was being said as a mere scratching of the surface. Hands up to that on behalf of many, and those who have listened to my after-dinner talks on “the good (sic) old days” will know what I mean.

There’s no doubt that regulation will change and firm up. And for a time after that there will be a difference to be seen. The rogue reporter (those who were caught cast out by euphemism as bad examples) will be reigned in and proprietors will once again ask editors for reassurance that “we don’t do that sort of thing, do we?”  

Only when the dust settles from that and, backed (hopefully) by a few exclusives that have changed our world for the better, will we be able to judge the new ground.

Lord Leveson made a point of the fact that this was the seventh inquiry in 70 years and almost spat out the assertion that there must not be an eighth. There will be.  I know thaty and so does he. Although it will not be directed entirely at the printed press.

But for now, we have to steer away from a reporting line to Ofcom or whatever other back-door route leads to a government minister (especially not a government minister) and face the music in the most accountable spirit in which we call others to account.

But forget a new press law. And forget the likes of the rather at-odds-with-itself Hacked Off campaign.

The only game in town today is Backed Off.