The final week of my Independent fishing column. For a moment, I was tempted to bury a hidden message in it (but a little more subtle than the first letter of successive sentences) but in the end, I decided that would be a little petty.
Nothing to do with the quality (or so the sports editor claims), it’s just that the bean-counters have been rootling in the undergrowth and found they can save a few more quids by bumping me off. I guess that when you’re a bean-counter, you count small beans as well.
Because I’ve written for the paper since it started (22 years) and must be the longest-serving columnist, you would have thought that the gods would at least have invited me for a drink. No luck. Not even a gold watch in the shape of a fish. Rather makes me wish I hadn’t turned down the Mail.
I’m rather hoping the paper will be swamped with Angry of Hampstead letter (“I’m never buying the paper again…”) but fishermen are notoriously apathetic. Both Angling Times and Angler’s Mail ran stories about the Indy killing the column. I got a few calls, but their letters pages weren’t exactly swamped with threats of violence against Independent News & Media.
One plus is that I’ve never signed over full rights, so I’ve got hundreds (say, 50 x 22 years) of columns that I’ll turn into one book. Maybe two or three. It’s my idea of a book. Just write an intro, put them in a vague sort of order, and there’s a book.
Curtis has also suggested that I continue the column online. Seems a good idea, running it through the Classic Angling website. We’ll suck it and see.
Then again, maybe the Economist or the Wall Street Journal will come a-courting and offer me shedloads of money.
And maybe fish will fly.
It’s hot. Damn hot. Or it would be if I stepped outside. I don’t think the temperature here in Singapore ever falls below 80 degrees.
Went to the Night Safari last night and it must have been at least 90 degrees at midnight. Wonder how warm it was in Britain as today became tomorrow?
We’re here for the Asian Publishers’ Conference. I did a talk on things to watch on design; Riva spoke about some obscure thing on research, using lots of words like paradigms, monetization and metrics.
Then I had to ”moderate” (strange word that, seeing as all I had to do was introduce the speakers) on a session about innovating to succeed. Great thing is, when there’s a really tricky question, I’d just pass it sideways.
“Ah, I think Stephen’s the person to answer that one.” You could see by the colour draining from his face that he wasn’t.
Huh! Innovation didn’t do you much good there, buster.
I think we’re on the verge of setting up a base here. Everyone I meet seems to say: “We need that sort of training.” What they’ve had is American journalism majors lecturing them, not sitting down to address their specific problems.
I made the mistake of saying after my session: “…and if anyone want to bring along their magazine, I’ll sit down with you and talk it through.” Two hours later, I still had a queue of eager people.
So the demand is here. Just wish Asia wasn’t thousands of miles away, I was 20 years younger, and it was just a little cooler.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Er, yes, I’ve been a bit remiss on this. For 22 years, I’ve written a weekly column for The Independent and never missed a deadline. It’s been tight sometimes when trying to file from remote places like Canada’s North-West Territories or the Arctic Circle north of Sweden. But the copy’s always reached the sports desk in time.
But can I produce a weekly blog for my own company? Clearly not.
Having just done appraisals for all the staff, I did a personal one (KE sitting across the table to KE) and realised that one of the things I wasn’t fulfilling was writing a few hundred words for my own company website.
For a bloke who writes an average 7000 words a week on various journo projects, commissions and columns, it was a pretty poor show. I gave myself a verbal warning.
Too much has happened since my last missive. So we’ll pretend that we’ve been chatting weekly, and start afresh.
A whistle-stop trip to Frankfurt to inspire the staff of Deutsche Bank’s internal magazine started the week. Its editor-in-chief is Neil Fitzgerald, a hugely bright guy I worked with a million years ago on Accountancy Age.
He’s taken on a whacking challenge here, with all the classic problems of an internal magazine: tortuous approvals procedure, managers wanting to rewrite stuff that’s perfectly OK into corporate speak, versions in German and English, people who have worked there a long time and are fearful of raising their heads above the parapet.
Not sure how much difference I made. But maybe telling them that such problems were common to large organisations (the bank has nearly 80,000 staff) and could be largely overcome means they can win a few battles, even if they don’t win the war.
Today it’s final judging for Press Gazette’s regional press awards. I judged feature writer in weeklies and dailies, and was a bit disappointed with the standard. Not enough sparkle in much of the writing, too many obvious features (Madeleine McCann, injured soldiers back in Blighty, youth crime).
Is it the demands of the feature desk? (We need two features a week.) Is it the increasing difficulty of getting out of the office that journos face? Is it smaller teams, a tendency to take the easy route, or simply a lack of sideways thinking?
Most depressingly, these are people who think their words are good enough to win recognition as the best feature writer in the country. All too often, it’s not writing; it’s typing. I always remember one feature editor saying to me: “You have to make it sing and dance, not drag its feet.” A good lesson.
Sometimes you just feel the fates have decided that you’re in for a very bad day. I’m writing this from South Carolina, where I’m covering the “World Cup” of fishing. Thank goodness I wasn’t competing. It all started at Heathrow, where BA’s baggage transporter had broken down. The place was chaos, a heaving mass of angry people. When eventually I reached the head of a queue, I discovered why. The choices were stark: drop your case in left luggage; send it cargo (no guarantee when it would arrive) or repack to get it all into hand-baggage. What would I do with my case, then? The woman shrugged.
The queues for left luggage and cargo were unimaginable. If I joined the end of either, I would miss the plane that I thought I was nice and early for.
I had another thought. Fly business! Great idea, though the queues here too were daunting. And yes, I could indeed fly business class and they would take my case. Phew!
The bad news? It would cost an extra £2103. Was that return? No, one-way to Chicago.
Pointing out that I wasn’t trying to buy the airline, I scrapped that masterplan. Two grand just to turn left on the plane — and one that didn’t even take me all the way to my destination? For a fishing contest? Fortunately, the harassed clerk did offer an alternative: fly United to Washington on a flight five hours later. It meant I landed in Greenville at 11pm
and got to the hotel after midnight (5am our time) but it was better than the other choices.
Support your national airline? It’s not easy, when it does things like that and doesn’t seem to care a fig. I thought the hassle meant I had suffered my punishment for sins unidentified. But God hadn’t done with me yet…
So much for my hopes of sneaking out for a day’s fishing during my visit to Singapore. Cyril Pereira and Ashok Nath from the Society of Publishers in Asia, arranged a schedule that didn’t even allow time for a stroll down Orchard Road. Breakfast power talks, working lunches, even the evenings meant more meetings with big hitters, not drinking lots of Tiger and troughing on Singapore’s excellent cuisine, as I’d hoped.
Still, he said grudgingly, the results were pretty good. One of my best meetings there was with Werner von Busch, a former editor-in-chief of Die Welt, who’s now heading the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Singapore.
We got on like Ashley Cole and an unnamed blonde (well, maybe not quite that well), bemoaning the quality of grammar these days, the downgrading of subs, the rise and rise of kids who can read a balance sheet being considered more important than experienced reporters: all the stuff you’d expect from two old hacks.
Don’t think that because much of Asia is “third world”, it’s still in the publishing dark ages. Things are flying here, especially in India. Design on many titles is equal to some of the best British and US titles.
Where it all goes wrong is in the editing. There’s still a tendency to drop in, fairly untouched, copy that needs a good sub to hack into it and ask tough questions, like: “What the hell does that mean?”
Most training, though, has been either “on the job” (we change your copy and don’t tell you why) or US-style lectures, which are as much use as a snow plough in Singapore.
An interview with the tabloid daily Today sums it all up. Praising the Straits Times for its “Pulitzer-prizewinning journalism”, the interview especially praises the broadsheet daily’s ability to rewrite government press releases “as if it was their own story”.
There’s work to be done here.