The Balkans tell me that,
sometimes, things fall
apart for no reason at all
John Cameron
EU nightmare
The CafeThe last two editorials in SR led me to punch the air shouting, ‘Yes!’ Here’s a thought. Did Rebekah and her coterie wear their hacking jackets when they went riding with Dave?
Edgar Lloyd
I have a new verb. New tech and associated new wickedness requires a new vocab surely? So here it comes. To phone-hack will now become to ‘phack’. Thus the ‘phone hacking scandal’ gives us the ‘phacking scandal’. And quite right too!
Thom Cross
SR Extra
I would go so far as to argue that if the Scots are to continue and thrive as a nation the means of their survival have to be cultural rather than economic. If you are to work as if you were living in the early days of a better nation, you need more than a cheese piece to keep you going.
Teacher Willie Hershaw contributes an impassioned defence of Scotland and the Scots language
Click here
The viewer was invited to watch West Yorkshire police rehearse and record John Humble, reading the words of the transcripts of the hoax tapes. The police officers didn’t actually say ‘Once more with feeling’, but they would have been as well to do so.
Television journalist Norman Fenton on a shocking precursor to the use of the Sheridan tapes
Click here
Unlike many publications SR doesn’t have an online comment facility – we prefer a more considered approach. The Cafe is our readers’ forum. If you would like to contribute to it, please email islay@scottishreview.net
Today’s Banner
Iona
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
SR accepts no advertising or corporate backing. We depend entirely on the generosity of our individual supporters. Help SR to flourish by becoming a Friend. [click here]
The special edition of
SR on 1 July, containing the results of the Who’s Who in Scotland poll of great Scots, attracted 18,631 visitors
An Iona wedding
Photograph by Islay McLeod
Click here for full feature
Private Lives, Public Morality
With ratlike cunning
and a plausible manner,
I intruded into private grief
Kenneth Roy
Nicholas Tomalin (1931-73), a foreign correspondent who died in Israel covering the Yom Kippur war, is remembered not so much for his work as for a single saying. ‘The only qualities essential for real success in journalism,’ he wrote in the pre-Murdoch Sunday Times in 1969, ‘are ratlike cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability’.
As the horrors of the month unfolded, it was amusing to recall Tomalin’s low view of his own vocation – ‘trade’ as it is more commonly described by journalists themselves – and to apply his cynical perception to each new revelation.
There is, however, a flaw in the saying: it is not quite right. I take issue with Tomalin’s opinion that one of the essential qualities for journalistic success is a little literary ability. Many successful journalists have no literary abililty whatsoever. Some I have known could barely write. But this is no impediment to progress through our ‘schools’ of journalism which themselves need to be investigated and whose main purpose is to inculcate the corrupt values of the tabloid press. Whatever else is taught in these seedy institutions, the love and practical use of language is not high on the curriculum.
There are pedants called ‘subs’ – sub-editors – whose grim daily task is to take the rawest of material and somehow knock it into serviceable shape. At the roughest end of journalism, the extremity finally laid bare in July 2011, the subs are the people with a little literary ability. Most of the reporters have a separate function. It is the collection of information, mainly through the massaging of contacts. By their tip-offs do they live or die – or, as we shall presently see, merely go to prison. The knack of stringing a few words together – an average of around 25 in a typical tabloid front page – is not essential for advancement.
It is almost embarrassing to have to admit that, when I entered newspaper journalism at the age of 16, I imagined it would be a way of satisfying my urge to write. I was in heaven at the thought of it. Fortunately, it took no time at all to be disabused of this quaint notion.
I was working for a local paper in Falkirk. The paper paid very little, but its reporters could make some useful extra cash by moonlighting as ‘stringers’ – casual correspondents – for the national tabloids, the Daily Record in our case. The Record tended to use stringers for such basic work as the collection of photographs from families of the victims of crime or accidents. ‘The collect pic’ this practice was called. There was no escape from it: an elementary skill in the dark art of the collect pic was considered part of any young journalist’s induction. My own took place within months.
But identifying the picture was the least of it. There was now the problem
of how to wrest it from its place on the mantelpiece, how to persuade
the tear-stained parents to remove it from its frame and hand it to a complete stranger.
Kenneth Roy is editor of the Scottish Review
