Not your Standard editor, Mr Osborne

George Osborne’s appointment as editor of the Evening Standard, odd, daft even, as it may seem, is in one way, little more than the natural progression of modern journalism.

And it speaks volumes for where those with the power to hire and fire seem to see the role these days.

There's clear conflict with his job as cheerleader for investment fund but he won’t be the first senior hack to have held high office in politics. After all, most of us have done our fair share of moonlighting, even though we didn’t get paid £650 for a day a week.

But if the hon member for Tatton thinks editing an evening paper is something he can knock off before lunch and nipping across town to help run the country, he’s in for a rude awakening.

The days of the gentleman editor, poking his head into the newsroom once in a while to put a hand on the tiller between entertaining the great and the good and pontificating from platforms went out with the rest of the staff they had to make redundant.

Editing a paper at a time of wide-ranging constitutional chaos, when your plummeting circulation won’t even sustain a paying readership and when there’s a new app every week threatening to deliver the same message in a more relevant and appealing way, needs to be more overtime than full time.

I don’t blame him for not knowing that. He probably knows as little about newspapers as I do about running the Treasury. But his staff will, his boss should and the readers, such as they are, may well too.

Conflicts abound even if here is merit in having the capital’s premier publication toughing up as a battering ram against Theresa May’s runaway Brexit rollercoaster. But it’s not a part-time job and should be far more than just something to fit in between Commons, constituency, and consultancy.

David Miliband responded to the news by Tweeting that he was about to be named the next editor of Heat magazine. Tim Farron joked he should apply to edit Viz.

Joking aside, at least they would be more do-able, given their lead times and publication cycles.

Osborne inherits a seriously strong editorial team. He will have to learn fast if he is to impress them. And to do that he'll have to put in the hours and treat it with the respect it deserves and not as a high-profile and comparatively low-paid indulgence.

Either way, the issue is less about where it leaves the Evening Standard, more a case of what it says about the way we see newspapers these days.

You don’t need long knives to put down a Fox

When a fellow Leicester fan remarked as we lined the streets to watch our heroes pass with the Premiership trophy: “can you imagine anything better than this?” there was a universal shaking of heads.

But I had one further scenario in mind. If I could perhaps, don the mascot suit and run out with the team for the first home game of the following season, that would probably, I had to admit, put the topping on the pizza.

As a fan since schooldays, a former club member/shareholder and proud over of an actual brick from the rubble of the actual now-demolished City Stadium, a chance to be Filbert Fox for 90 minutes would have cemented a lifelong relationship with the club like little else.

But after last Thursday’s disgusting dismissal of our now-legendary manager Claudio Ranieri the only image I had in mind was this fittingly poignant one created by Telegraph cartoonist Matt Pritchet. The one where a club official brought a vet to the stadium and told him: “We’d like to have the team’s mascot put down.” And they might as well have done, as most of Fleet Street seemed to recognise with equally-fitting attacks on the club’s Thai owners for managing to turn football’s greatest fairytale into a sordid and sorry soap opera of back-stabbing and deceit.

Like most of Matt’s cartoons, it said in a picture what many columnists would take an inside-back dps to do: you might as well kill the mascot, they’ve already killed the spirit of the club.

How reassuring then to see fellow Italian Jose Mourino wear the initials CR on his chest at a press conference the following day.

He may have been echoing what the Milan-based daily Gazzetta dello Sport described with their splash: Inglesi Ingrati (ungrateful English).

Or he may just have been giving us a subtle lesson in the sort of humility, good grace and sense of fair play few involved in this sorry affair, if not the current game, would understand.

What do I mean? Semplice: A season earlier, the same thing had happened to him when he was sacked by Chelsea only a few months after having won them Premiership title. And he isisted that, while it was “a giant negative” in his career – “I realise it was peanuts to what happened with Claudio”.

And which was the game that cold December day that sealed his fate? Only an embarassing 2-1 defeat at the hands of Ranieri’s Leicester City.

Time to play the Trump card

Why was it only Associated Press and TIME Magazine that had the presence of mind to act appropriately when White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer hand-picked a select group of journalists for a private “gaggle” in his office.

The off-camera gathering with news outlets seen as less hostile to the Trump regime (and I chose that word deliberately) was a way of blocking the likes of CNN, BBC, The New York Times, LA Times, New York Daily News, BuzzFeed, The Hill, and the Daily Mail from attending a regular press briefing.

The chosen few included the rightist Breitbart News, One America News Network, and The Washington Times, all of whom attended.

White House Correspondents’ Association president Jeff Mason immediately called on those allowed in to share the material with press corps colleagues locked out. Whether they will or not remains to be seen. But it’s surely the least they can do, given they didn’t have the mettle to take the AP/Time route – and boycott it.

Brexit and the edge of reason

I often tell – and, I admit, delight in the comic irony – of the time I subbed a piece one Saturday afternoon for the Sunday Telegraph praising the way John Major effectively saw off a back-bench revolt, only to skip across town to do the late-stop on the S. Mirror and get stuck into the same story - telling how party “rebels” had a now red-faced PM bang to rights.

But that’s politics. I cared only that the copy sang. To what tune was not an issue when it came to time and a half for the anti-social nature of the shift.

So, I wasn’t surprised to learn that Boris Johnson, entirely coincidentally, a Telegraph staffer at around that time, was just as, shall we say, flexible with his political “angle” when it came to penning his thoughts on the EU.

In his new book on the Brexit campaign, All Out War, Sunday Times political editor Tim Shipman describes how Johnson, in an article written but never published for The Daily Telegraph, wrote of Britain as “a global force for good”, adding: “It is surely a boon for the world and for Europe that she should be ¬intimately engaged in the EU."

Boris, apparently, warned that Brexit could lead to an economic shock, Scottish independence and even Russian aggression, the latter showing impressive foresight, given Moscow’s plans to send an aircraft carrier through the English Channel as a sign of open defiance over Syria.

According to Shipman, the article was written two days before Bozza’s surprise announcement that he would campaign to leave the EU.

So the story goes; he had already written one Telegraph column arguing a case for leaving, then wrote the Remain piece as a way of clarifying his thoughts, before doing a final pro-Brexit one for publication.

Sky News’ Jon Craig goes behind the scenes on the intrigue in what appears more reminiscent of Brian Rix than the likes of Jim Hacker or Malcolm Tucker. But for the rest of us, it does make it ever more difficult to appear positive when faced with the usual down-the-pub attacks about how you can’t believe half of what you read in the papers.

Problem is, if much of the cringe-worthy rhetoric spouted either side of the mistimed-misjudged and miscalculated Brexit vote is examined closely enough, you probably can’t.Certainly, one campaign not afraid of advancing that notion, and gaining traction in the process, has been Reasons2Remain which goes as far as listing no less than 300 of them so far. That's one of their graphics above.

In tandem with others, it’s the work of the former BBC investigative reporter Jon Danzig, not one I've ever known to pull his punches – and, from first reading, appears to do a far better job of challenging the sort of outrageous spin, half-truths and downright untruths behind the Leave campaign than David Cameron, George Osborne and Jeremy Corbyn could muster between them.

Otherwise, they wouldn’t be either out of a job, or struggling to keep them - and the country wouldn’t be in the desperate state it is now.

It’s gloomy reading in places but worth bookmarking as there's, sadly, lots more to come.

'Even hardened newsmen' . . . and other myths

I remember as a teenage copy boy back in the day making a point of reading the text beneath the red pen lines of the subbed copy I had to dash off to the composing room. I did it because a likely lass who'd been in the job a few months longer warned me not to.

Too gruesome, she said. The bits they take out. But I was young. So these were the juicy bits the guys in green eye shades had all the fun of censoring.

It was an early insight into the complexities of news judgment and prompted me to ask a foreign corr, on the rare occasion one would speak spoke to an oik like me, why such detail would make even the first draft.

He gave me two replies. The first, in the formality of the office, was simply that "I just report. I leave all that to the subs." The second, after a few pints down the pub, was more revealing. He loved to convey whatever sense of drama or danger he could because it gave the job more of an edge.

The fact is, I was left for a long time with the impression that I was less likely to end up in therapy working on a subs desk than if I was in a war zone. Reading about atrocities second-hand and cropping the gore out of AP photos couldn't be as traumatic as seeing it first hand.

Odd then that, as I was to later discover, the few times I got close to anything uncomfortable as a reporter, the effect was minimalised, neutralised even, by the involvement of third parties such as police, rescuers, forensic teams and the like.

And the very few times I've gone home with a feeling that sleep may be hard to come by has been as a result of things I'd read, sometimes repeatedly over the course of a shift, updating and expanding as details emerged and having to absorb and understand in enough graphic detail to be able to effectively sanitise.

It feels almost gratuitous to elaborate so I won't, save to say that it was the mere realisation that what I was dealing with were actual events involving real people - sometimes as young as my own children were at the time, if that gives a clue, rather than scenes from something screened after the 9pm watershed.

It was no surprise then to learn that the likes of Storyful and Reported.ly and other eyewitness organisations are having to adopt policies to protect their, I imagine quite youngish, staff from the worst effects of days spent trawling social feeds and coming across what Storyful’s news projects chief Derek Bowlder describes as “unmediated and graphic evidence of brutality”.

One of the reasons the organisation has teamed up with a Dublin-based counselling service to introduce an Employee Assistance Program which lets them seek help in confidence if they feel unduly affected.

And all power to them. It's not that long ago an expression of disgust at an unsavoury scenario or other would have been met with an empathetic nod but a request for "a few minutes' fresh air" would have prompted raised eyebrows and a dismissed with a simple: “wuss”.

Ipso, MPs and some early day notions

Ipso, Another day, another regulator. The names change, the stories come in anew. But the one thing guaranteed to stay the same: MPs will reach for the cliché drawer and brand the watchdog “toothless”.

It happened again a few hours ago when Sir Alan Moses appeared before the Commons culture, media and sport select committee.

MPs wanted to know why Ipso, set up two years ago after the Leveson inquiry, had not fined any newspaper it found to be in breach of its rules.

They also couldn’t understand why it had not insisted on equal prominence for corrections of dodgy headlines and why no-one had bothered to call the whistleblower’s hotline it set up for disgruntled staff with issues about what is expected of them.

Now, it may just be me but, reading through the ever-growing archive of complaints adjudications, I’d be hard pushed to find one worthy of a financial sanction, equally hard-pushed to find a breach so bad it warranted a splash apology and can’t realistically envisage many circumstances thus far when anyone would phone the hotline.

On the last point, I’m not suggesting there has never been any justification for such a call in the past two years, although I hope not. It’s just that, in the main, I think it’s something most journalists would have a problem with.

What I wouldn’t want to see is any regulator feeling pushed into a position where it felt it needed a scalp or two to feel properly blooded. It’s early days, the changes to the culture of certain newsrooms is palpable at the ground level and I sense a strong feeling among those at the top that they don’t want Ipso on their case lest it can be avoided.

That can have as much to do with the Leveson legacy as anything else but, for the moment, it exists. And while it does, there’ll be little to seriously test a fledgling watchdog. Early days. Methinks the MPs were questioning in haste.

On this day: the other side of the Telegraph's 9/11

Peter Foster’s piece in the Telegraph today recalls the day America came under attack on September 11, 15 years ago.

He nicely mixes fact with anecdote to bring quite a vivid inside view of what it was like to be in a daily newspaper office as the story of the decade was evolving.

But he tells only one part of the story, and an important one, given the the way we look at news today. By the time the newspaper went to press with its first, and highly memorable, edition, readers had been following every spit and cough of the story for the previous eight hours, thanks to a (then) fledgling news team online just two floors above their Canary Wharf offices.

Foster’s story begins by setting a typical newsroom scene – the senior team on the foreign desk were out at lunch. Five calls to mobiles went straight to voicemail and it took a waiter on a landline to deliver the message that they might want to get back to the office.

Upstairs, where the news team in total comprised only three, include myself as the then deputy editor, we were having lunch where we always did – at our desks.

Foster’s initial reaction – “I assumed it was a traffic spotter plane or a police chopper” – were mine exactly. Within five minutes we were leading the Home Page with a non-committal plane believed to have struck the World Trade Centre, partly because the only TV images available were taken from a nearby roof on the other side of the tower.

Unusually, and a sobering sign that this may be something bigger, editorial director Kim Fletcher appeared at my side and watched the next few moments on the TV that hung over my desk. “Probably a training flight?” I said. He was unconvinced. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that. This looks bad.”

Then, two things happened.

Firstly, as I began fussing over when we were going to get an image to fit the tiny slot at the top of the page, it happened. Live on Sky TV, the second plane came into view and flew, as if in slow motion, into the second tower.

Secondly, an online newsroom schooled in uploading print copy, embellishing with links, images and meta-tags and providing snappy, running updates for office workers who didn’t want to wait for the 6pm news, suddenly became into a broadcast hub providing minute-by-minute coverage that continued throughout the day and night.

Had it happened a year earlier, I may well have been sitting downstairs on the end of the back bench with everyone else, looking forward to an afternoon of cramming the rest of the news into two pages, before planning and re-planning and trying to imagine what the first edition may look like.

As it was we planned and re-planned on the spin. We had no real video capability, limited access to pictures, no flexible CMS that allowed us to resize an reshape our Home Page, let alone a Twitter feed or even SMS alerts to alert the world of what we were doing.

In fact, in my head, I actually went backwards in time. To the days of filing from phone boxes at the scene, dictating adds and offering wraps and write-thrus as a story unfolded. To make the point, I added the words more soon (in those italics to express urgency) at the end each time we refreshed a refiled.

And, when all those old-fashioned agency things like attribution didn’t seem to cut it, we simply told the reader (users, some of my young team called them) straight: a statement is due any moment, keep refreshing, it’ll be here . . .

An IT lady called Theresa came over and gave an update on traffic. Someone said we were dealing with more than 100 request per second (huge in those days). Someone mentioned the strain on the system in being able to accommodate.

Someone else said CNN and the BBC had temporarily gone down through sheer volume and we were getting their cast-offs. Our pages were taking ages to load. Could we close some of our channels to keep news live?

I heard Editor Derek Bishton say something behind me about closing "all non-essentials" and things seemed to speed up.

On my right I had a rookie reporter called Ann Wasson, an American with family in New York, bashing out updates. I revised them by getting her to read outloud, send and go back in whioe I read over her shoulder. At one stage her voice faltered and a tear appeared as the closeness of it became clear and I told her to close the page for me to go in. She refused.

Fletcher told me “This isn’t enough. We need a new front page”. He took a designer and our best XML coder into a corner and reinvented the front end of the site. The next time we refreshed we had a headline Attack on America - one word away from the one the paper led with - the now-iconic image of the burning tower “and loads of slots for all the comment and analysis" we were amassing.

My wife rang and asked why I was in the office when TV pictures showed all the bankers in all the tower blocks pouring out on to the lawn outside. It reminded me to send the intern home and Fletcher assured me we could relocate to our City office if the building was evacuated.

IT Theresa came over with a mobile and a laptop and said, if we shared a taxi, she could keep me “live” until we got there.

In the event, we stayed. Six hours passed, the most appalling scenes were played out in front of us, the towers were reduced to rubble and she told me: “Well, so far, you’ve published 148 times.”

By the time the drama was over, we were reduced to minor updates and the odd “tweak”. But downstairs the newspaper was just getting into its stride. The batten had been passed. What we had been telling people all afternoon was now being recorded in massively more detail and backed by the sort of heavyweight analysis the Telegraph was known for.

Our night team came in and prepared to out all that online sometime after midnight. As calm returned to the room, I wandered downstairs and watched them in the full flow of organised chaos. I realised there was no baton, really. The paper would be a collector’s item and we’d merely “held the fort”.

I looked at a few proofs, went back upstairs and tinkered all night, keeping the Home Page as fresh as possible as night turned to day in foreign parts and readers, even those in tiny, unheard-of countries where we had five uniques, woke up and logged on.

Then, too late and too tired to drive home to Hertfordshire, I had a nap on the nurse’s couch in the medical room on the 11th floor. At about 4am, a cleaner’s vacuum bashed against the door and I awoke with a start. I was, after all, in a tower block in the heart of a financial centre.

It was only when I closed my eyes it fully dawned on me.

Inde to the end

It's appropriate that the passing of any newspaper should be mourned. But, in the case of the now online-only Independent, the eulogy should be a positive one.

Launched in the frenzied days of what was then called the newspaper revolution ( a rather hopeful euphemism for journalists being able to publish without asking print unions permission), it stood aloft for both standing by its founding principle and staying the course for three decades.

Oh how the other revolutionaries would have coveted such an achievement: Today (nine years), the Sunday Correspondent (14 months), the London Daily News (six months), the News on Sunday (eight months), the European (eight years) would surely loved to have seen the dawning of another day.

Big names were built on those papers as the hitherto hard-to-breach wall that was Fleet Street opened up a wealth of opportunity to provincial wannabes ( me included) who arrived and moved from on as one paper closed, knowing another would be opening sometime soon and, besides, you were eminently employable anyway because the established ones were still waking up to new technology (such as it was) and in need of your so-called skills.

The Inde stood apart because it deserved to. As a sub, I'd be among those who ridiculed the wordiness, the pomposity and the indulgence of those early editions but it excelled in the bigger picture by doing what great newspapers do - marking their territory.

This eulogy has many contributors but I was struck by one this afternoon. Eddie Shah, the man who started it all with the launch of Today, described it as the paper he would love to have launched.

Many of us who joined him in that adventure thought it was. The so-called independent voice we had been sold at our interviews was sold within xxx to Tiny Rowland's Lonhro - and quickly became the voice of the Lib-Dems, a fact most of us only discovered when we went went upstairs for an early view of the latest ad campaign !

My, how the tables have turned

There used to be a Fleet Street branch of the Leicester City supporters club. All unofficial, of course, and it's meetings were fairly ad-hoc and usually reserved for when there was a London game on and enough local knowledge to be assured 'the first pub you see when you turn left out of the tube' was all that was needed.

I won't name them all for fear of getting one wrong and confusing affiliations which just isn't done. It's players who go through transfer windows, fans stay put.

There weren't that many of us and in the latter years it was left to Express man Bill Wheeler to muster a crew together (usually his son from the Sun and a pal) to join us in being able to say 'I was there' when we lost to some old first division side whose players I'd never heard of.

Tickets were easy to come by if your annual membership or share certificate wasn't enough to get you into a big game because most sports editors we knew would find a couple going spare. And your rarity meant you were easily identified among the fans of 'real' clubs.

One Saturday afternoon in the Mirror building in Holborn a sports sub on deadline was sent my way when struggling to get a Midlands slip away. 'You from Leicester?' he asked as if expecting an apology.

He dropped a picture down. A player in blue, face partly obscured, number on his shirt hidden. 'Any idea who that is? Need it for the caption.' Indeed I did. It was a player whose opposite number at Arsenal, Man U, Chelsea, you name it, would have been household and wouldn't need a relative to identify the body.

I can't recall the full caption but it ended with words to the effect of: '. . . scores his second, despite a hapless lunge from Richard Smith'.

The club produced an season review on video called 'So near, yet so far', and the commentary began with the cheering words: 'No silverware but pleeeeenty of action...'

We were at Wembley half a dozen times in the nineties - nothing the stuff of legends; two league cups and four play-off finals, one even producing the best live game I've ever seen - and I was so proud ok my share dividend that I didn't even cash it. And not just because it was for 3p.

How times have changed. The City fan who wept his way through a radio interview shed tears for a forgotten generation of fans who are no longer asked 'do you know who this is?' But, 'do you think you'll hang on to him next season?'

I sat alongside Robbie Savage at the Watford Hilton a few Fridays ago. He was on his mobile the whole time so I eventually left without asking him whether I could replay his radio phone-in slot in which he repeatedly insisted a club like Leicester, with the funds and squad size they have, will never (his emphasis) win the premiership.

If, sorry, when, they do, I've every confidence my childhood local, the Leicester Mercury, will win the sort of plaudits given to the Oxford Mail for their recent performance in celebrating their club's achievement.

And they can run the pictures without captions. Anyone who cares will know who they are.

For crying out loud, let's make it the Ex-Factor

Didn't X Factor plunge to new depths at the weekend?

In a bid to harden up a somewhat tired format, producers introduced yet another level of degradation.

With the laughing stock acts behind us, and to be honest, they’re what make the show, not the half-decent sound-alike kids who blur into one by week five, we now have new ways of jangling the nerves of the young wannabes.

And how do we do that? By knowing they're not good enough but letting them think they are for a moment before jumping out with a “surprise”, you’re going home after all!

And worse, we make them sit on the stage in front of everyone while they watch the other acts do them out of a spot right in front of their teary eyes.

And this after the judges with their “will-we, won’t we” clichés have kept them dangling with lines such as “I’m really not sure about you,” followed by (even worse) “I’m sorry, but I'm afraid (pause, solemn shake of the head) “you're (beaming smile) . . . in my top six!”

Tears of joy on stage, usually the kind that precede severe palpitations and the need for oxygen, are matched by scenes of sheer despair from the chairs as the realisation dawns that the fat boy who’s just shown himself to be much, much better than you may just be taking your place.

One that was told to her face was the hapless young thing who was urged at the audition to drop her pals and go solo, only to have then shun her before the judges finally didnjust that. She staggered off the stage telling host Dermot O'Leary: "I've lost everything."

It’s been compared to the Suzanne Collins novel The Hunger Games in which children are forced to battle each other to the death. I’m not sure that’s entirely fair, it’s more the Crying Game, or a snuffle movie, perhaps.

We’ve built a society that holds celebrity far higher than anything else to which most of these very ordinary shelf-stackers and rubbish sweepers can aspire.

Either way, reality TV will never wise up to reality. How long before we read tabloid stories of breakdown and serious self harm? There are column inches a plenty to come in this. Just not sure they're the ones we want.

Enough. It’s become a turn off. I suggest we do just that.

Go on, name that judge

Brighton Argus reporter Tim Ridgeway had to leave the press bench and turn detective recently just to find out the full name of a county court judge.

Ushers, usually the ones who know everything, couldn’t help and the clerk’s office simply declined to give Judge (Barbara) Wright’s name as they were not authorised to give personal details, according to Hold The Front Page. A hapless phone call later was followed by an email, and only when the Royal Courts of Justice PRs got involved did he get the answer he wanted.

Anyone who has spent any time in the courts, or dealing with officialdom generally, will sympathise. When I was based at St Albans Crown Court as part of an agency crew in the 70s, we collaborated on an A-Z of every judge, magistrate, solicitor and barrister that came our way, so we never came unstuck.

On those frantic days of five guilty pleas before lunch (five trips to the payphone and five hasty off—the-cuff reports) there wasn’t time to blink between recesses, let alone pass notes along the benches (would m’learned friend be good enough to provide his Christian name?) or nudge coppers and clipboard-holders in the waiting room.

Once, in a magistrates’ court in the Westcountry, I made a similar inquiry of a member of the bench I hadn’t seen before. I needed to profile the three JPs who would be deliberating on a matter that had got the little market town of Launceston all abuzz.

It was not forthcoming. The country reporters alongside me had never thought to ask and the somewhat deferential solicitors simply thought it bad form. After all, she was the wife of a local clergyman.

This was a place, you have to understand, where titles and forms of address were a matter of social heriarchy. My elderly neighbour, on discovering I worked for the local paper, handed me a notelet (her word) on how she should be referred to in print: Alderman Ms K. Wotnot (retd).

Anyway, the three of us on the press bench made a pact that, whoever found out first would ring the others. It wasn’t me, but I was, nevertheless, grateful that the call came quickly.

The reason for her reluctance was never known. But it could have had something to do with the subject of the bench’s deliberations. Police had swooped on a local newsagent and taken away half a dozen top-shelf mags.

Before they could rule on whether or not they were pornographic, they had to read every one of them.

Must’ve choked on her cucumber sandwiches. Poor Edith.

There's rapping . . . and taking the rap

Let’s be clear. Coronation street star Chris Fountain never raped anyone.

He merely sang a nasty song about it.

But at first glance, on a newsstand, garage forecourt or even a doormat, you may not think so.

It was such a comment, one along the lines of, “another one of dem Corrie lot’s bin done” which confirmed it. Mum and daughter in a queue in Sainsbury’s discussing how the “well fit” lad who plays gormless Tommy Duckworth in the soap has apparently joined the growing list of TV stars arrested of sex offences.

The problem was the use of the word “rap”, particularly in its alliterative form as “rape-rap”. True, he did sing a rap song that had rape in it.

But the ambiguity is self-made: rap being a longstanding tabloid short-form for a criminal conviction. The Sunday Mirror went with a p13 piece: Rape rap Corrie star is told: Grovel on TV. Yesterday, the Daily Mirror compounded it with a splash as the story moved on: Corrie star is axed for rape rap. The Sunday version, to add to the confusion, led with Top TV actor in teen sex quiz.

A P4-5 spread revealed that he remains for the moment anonymous. Other tabloids used the latest revelation to make reference to the pending cases against fellow Street stars Michael Le Vell and Bill Roache.

In isolation, mum and daughter apart, no-one who looked closely would be in any doubt that he was guilty of a discretion, not a crime. But online searches, particularly from the US, where the word has an entirely different meaning, will leave the poor lad forever labelled the rape-rap soap star.

Like this, this, this and this...

Being written out of the series is one thing . . .

Bloodletting all round

If you want to see what a provincial newspaper office full of reporters looked like a few years ago, watch tonight’s conclusion to Denise Mina’s TV adaptation, The Field of Blood. More importantly, you will actually get to see some out of the office, doing what they’re paid to do.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s a crime drama set in Glasgow during the miner’s strike of the eighties; one of those where a plucky young reporter called paddy manages to defy family poverty, sexism so institutionalised it may as well be in the company handbook, and solve crimes the police can’t.

It’s also interesting as it pitches itself at a turning point for an industry and a decade; one in which publishes got fed up with the sort of strikes it’s reporting on, clunky technology and chunky expenses.

It mixes all sorts of stereotypes; new female boss who barged wide-shouldered through the glass ceiling to direct her smart-ass patter at cost-cutting, saddo-yet-principled editor who never goes home, whisky flasks in drawers, older hacks being shunted aside, younger ones catching the eye.

But the staff dress as charity-shop they did, act as they did, mention NUJ every time someone challenges the status quo and gather in smoky bars after work to whinge.

A good test is whether real-life journalists rate it, and the reviews so far have been good. But there’s daftness too. The reporters travel in pairs like cops (do they make their notes separately too, like judges always ask them?) plucky Paddy, the one who solves all the crimes, happily takes a £50 bung in front of McVie, her grizzled old mentor, then gets all persuasive on a picket line to grab a background chat with an activist about a dead lawyer and hardly musters a pertinent question before letting her drift off like an old college pal she see later.

And what was that about coppers and hacks never mixing? A Detective in the press club? Don’t recall that being a rule not to break. Some of the best story investments I ever made were cash in the police social tombolas.

At least it doesn’t over-rely on the biggest cliché in period scene setting; background music. And it does put the eighties in perspective. These were problem days. The miner’s strike followed the Falklands War and Afghanistan, President Reagan’s Soviet sabra-rattling had anyone who could afford it musing over planning permission for nuclear bunkers. Wall Street, privatisation, and the loadsamoney economy were yet to be enjoyed.

Last night’s episode ended with McVie’s car being bombed. That’s where fiction kicks in hard, although this was a time of IRA threats and controlled explosions. And if you follow Reporters Without Borders, you’ll realise such threats do become fact sometimes.

Not sure if McVie survives to complete the crossword he was doing while Paddy emptied someone’s dustbin. If he doesn’t you can bet there’d be some good to come of it.

The villain behind it all would be, to be all eighties about it, bang to rights. And they’d save a wallop on the redundancy.

Murdoch: now he says sorry to staff

So, Rupert Murdoch has finally apologised to staff about his extraordinary over-reaction in the wake of the phone-tapping scandal.

He admitted to Sun staff that he had panicked as the allegations piled up and made them "victims" of the inevitable fallout. He over-rteacted when it became personal, in other words.

It’s hard to find a kind word in Wapping even a year later about the knee-jerk closure of the News of the World. And as for the internal management standards committee, it’s just best not to breathe its name.

The climbdown, a whole year later, may have gone down well in some quarters but, if he’s honest with himself, he knows this is something he should have done a long time ago, rather than bowing under the weight of personal pressure.

An internal inquiry is one thing, cleaning up your act and co-operating with police another. But to go from years of turning blind-eyes to unsavoury but acceptable practices to one of sheer disbelief and outrage when the lid was lifted was a step way beyond a bung to a dodgy copper or a fiddle with a pin number. He may well not know about any of what was going on, but he knows his market and his industry.

And now the ultimate in back-tracking: he may keep on anyone convicted of a criminal offence? In a way, I’m even warmed a little by that. If I’d shopped or sacked everyone I’d ever worked, with for or alongside, for being a little dodgy now and again, it’d be like editing the paper on your own in those days when strikes used to clear newsrooms.

Even so, I’m not sure what message this sends out to an already cynical readership, such as they are. Making independent corporate judgments is one thing, as is deciding enough is enough when it comes to throwing more staff on the bonfire, but a wholesale U-turn because a year has passed and the Leveson message is, as it was always going to be, in disarray? Dunno.

And to make matters worse, the whole thing came to light because someone secretly recorded it. You couldn’t make it up.

Front pages and first instincts

It was odd to see the Newcastle journal promoting the best front page it never had by referencing the art desk’s alternative to the one it ran criticising former soccer boss Joe Kinnear's return to their local club as director of football.


After producing quite an eye-catching splash headline “A Joke”, which pretty much summed up fans' views, it then began showing the one it didn't print and explaining why.

Headlined, “We scoured the Toon to find someone backing Joe Kinnear and this is what we found”, it produced a blank space.

Not sure why they felt the need to tell readers they have more than one good idea. If every art desk gathered up all the pages it had stuck in front of the editor before being told “nearly but not quite”, or “nice try, just not for us,” it could produce a spread every month.

One of the perks of spending so many years on the late shifts of nationals used to be flipping through the earlier versions of pages littering the back bench, those often produced hours before you clocked on, before the cleaners binned them. Looking back, think I missed a trick.

The pages you never saw. Just have to sort the copyright.

Talking of dramatic front pages, especially those in which the emotionally charged subject of sport moves up from the back, I was highly impressed by the way the Watford Observer handled their team’s Wembley play-off defeat recently.

No cliches just a stunning long lens shot of the moment the dream ended after their former star player scored from a penalty in the dying seconds. Against a backdrop of their own fans, the players were shadowed out as mourners at their own funeral.

I saw it belatedly as I have connections in the town (worked for the paper briefly as a cub in the 70s) and was immediately struck by the effectiveness of its simplicity.

There was another agenda and more irony though. A few days earlier, I was at the game at Vicarage Road that they won to reach the final. They were playing my team, Leicester City (born there, childhood fan, shareholder).

I couldn't get a ticket. Even old investors have to apply early. So I bought one from someone local, which put me in the wrong part of the ground, surrounded by yellow shirts worn by people talking about players I'd never heard of and how crap my lot’s defence was. But, it was one of those games that ensures people live and breathe football. This is why:

It’s all square and already minutes into injury time. Our best player decides to take a dive and wins a penalty. Everyone within 100 yards of me in every direction is in shock. I can't believe we got away with it, await the goal that will send us to Wembley for the umpteenth time and sneak away with my head buried lest someone notices I'm not one of them.

Their goalie (who used to live up the road from me) somehow keeps it out – twice; legs, chest, you name it - and their nippy frontmen who'd run us ragged all afternoon, pop down the other end and score.

The pitch gets invaded. People with whom I've the opposite in common, give me hugs, kisses and handshakes as I sneak away with my head buried; past a bakers where I once worked as a student, through a park where I'd taken my kids cycling, to my car parked in a road where I used to walk my first girlfriend’s dog.

One of my sons who'd watched the game live on his laptop rang to console as I listened to their fans still singing in the stadium a mile away and I consoled myself that, at least, there may well be premiership games nearby next season.

When I got home I trawled YouTube for fan videos of the travesty I'd just witnessed and found one taken a few feet to my right (if you're really observant, I'm the one whose face looks like the bloke in Gladiator when he arrived home) and dreamed about all the other Wembley playoffs, taking my son to the City guest box or my dad to the terraces when I couldn't get an invite and Colin Randall on the Telegraph news desk found me a last-minute tout.

Then the next day, I saw the Leicester Mercury with the headline “We thought it was all over - it is now”. Now that was cliched. It was as if, still in shock, no-one could be bothered.

I know which paper I'd rather have been editing that week.

Not quite the full Monty

No matter how often I read it, I still can't help wincing at David Montgomery's assertion that in future journalism will be conducted "without the human interface".

He used it to explain how papers in his Local World group will be affected by the switch from print to digital.

In a statement to the culture and media select committee he described how the role of journalists will change as they "harvest content", adding that "Journalists collecting stories one by one is hugely unproductive. They will have to have new skills, greater responsibility for self publishing on different platforms".

It did cause a little controversy, although in reality he's doing nothing more than trotting out the obvious, and to a large extent, if you accept he’s talking philosophically, saying nothing more than anyone else looking to the future.

But is this the Monty I knew, who would jump all over his middle bench for committing such faux pas as describing a buyer as a purchaser or a car as a vehicle?

I just hope his multi-platform self-publisher's interface keeps faith with the Monty of old when harvesting their content for real.

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.