The Daily Novel

Holly Watt, a young journalist on the Sunday Times, is to be this year’s Laurence Stern Fellow. She impressed the interview panel with the quality of her investigative reporting. She has been shortlisted, along with her colleague, Robert Winnit, for the Press Awards scoop of the year category. The broke the story last year about MP Derek Conway putting his son on his expense account even though he was a full-time student at the time. Follow this link for her latest story on Conway.

She will be flying out on the fourth of July to spend three months working on the Washington Post on the national desk in this election year. The fellowship was set up to honour the memory of Larry Stern, who died young while serving as national editor. He was a formidable investigative journalist himself, as well as a first rate editor and a friend who gave unstintingly of his time to help British journalists struggling to understand US politics.

When it comes to the naughtiness of politicians the difference between US and British politicians is not that great. But what is radically different is the size of the figures. Conway pocketed £160,000 from the sale of his constuency home. The Clintons, who have just released their tax returns, trousered $109 million over the last few years.

Thus far no-one has proved that any of the money earned by the Clintons was earned illegally. And journalists tried for years to prove they had erred in the Whitewater matter, long before the current election campaign started.

And no-one has proved that Derek Conway has broken the law over his expense claims. But the public interest justification for journalists invading the privacy of politicians’ financial affairs does not rest on solely on law-breaking.

Both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair earn vast sums for making speeches. These sums are paid by super rich individuals and big companies. The public should know which people and which companies are doling out the lolly.

Politicians also need to be reminded that there own evaluation of the degree of respect their offices should carry is not always shared by the electorate. The speaker of the House of Commons has been fighting a campaign to try and prevent the Freedom of Information Act being used to publish the detail of MPs’ expenses. He failed as you can see from today’s papers.

The speaker was upset because journalists had exposed him for claiming on his expenses a couple of thousand pounds spent by his wife who uses taxis to do her shopping. The notion that the dignity of the speaker’s office is demeaned by either him, or his wife, using the tube or the buses just shows how out of touch he is with contemporary politics.

A Labour speaker above all should know that Michael Foot continued to travel to the House of Commons on the 24 bus while he was leader of the Labour Party. And he did it without borrowing a Police bullet proof vest of the kind that another Labour cabinet minister wore last week when visiting constituents in Peckham.

Snow fell for the first time this morning on my bungalow in Charmouth. And a neighbbour stopped by and told us she had abandoned a walk up Stoneborough Hill because of a blizzard. The gardener reported that his side of the town was white when he left. It almost restored my faith in the newspapers who have been full of the news that Britain is suffering its second spell of Arctic weather this spring.

Almost.

By the time I sad down to write this blog my study was baking hot. I went to turn the central heating only to find that it had not been turned on this morning. The heat was coming from a blazing summer sun. The back garden is awash with colour. The lawn is covererd with white daisies and yellow daffodils. Around the apple tree, showing its first buds, there is a girdle of bright yellow primroses, bluebells and daffodils.

The snow flurry lasted ten minutes. None of it settled. As I write now another flurry has begun. But the sun is still shining and melting the flakes before they reach the ground.

So I decided not to voyage the web looking for evidence that this weather is being caused by climate change. Instead I shall have a look at what is actually happening in Zimbabwe. Is Robert Mugabe really going to cling on to power by using bullets to overturn the the verdict of the ballot boxes?

In my last blog I took issue with the Rottweiler, Jeremy Paxman, for telling a City University student, that they were wasting their time doing a course. All you needed to know in journalism could be learnt in three weeks. Since then Geoffrey Cox has died. He was even older than Robert Magabe, aged 97. But he has not been trying to go on running the News at Ten, whose continued existence owes more to him than most of the founding fathers.

The battles he had to fight were to get the News at Ten extended from 15 minuties, which was what the advortisers wanted, to half an hour. After Cox departed from the scene, the advertisers shifted their attack, by moving the News at Ten, to another time. To suit the needs of their advertisers. After many battles the News at Ten has been re-instated at 10, by Michael Grade.

And the avuncular Trevor Macdonald, who is even blacker than Barack Obama, is back there with lots of credibility. And a pleasing alternative to the Beeb, most of whose non-whites, are rather fetching females, and young enough to be Trevor’s grandchildren. But the battle is far from won.

Geoffrey Cox, did not have any journalism training at all.

He was, like Robert Magabe, a colonial. A New Zealander who did a hiistory degree in one of our far off colonies inhabited by sheep farmers. But, because he got a first, he went on to do a rather posh degree at Oxford, the BA in Philiosphy, Politics, and Economics. But he set his own agenda.

This from The Independent obituary.

A convivial and highly intelligent man, Cox was also a brave and resourceful correspondent. In 1932 he had entered Oriel College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar from New Zealand, where he had gained a first class degree in History from Otago University. At Oxford he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics and travelled widely in Europe during the vacations. Challenged by a German Rhodes scholar in 1934 to see the true face of Nazism, Cox served for three weeks in the Arbeitsdienst, the Nazi youth service, draining marshes and drilling with spades instead of guns. An article he wrote on the German labour camps led the Sunday supplement of The New York Times and was also printed in The Spectator. This in turn helped him to secure a reporting job on the News Chronicle.

So although Cox did not go a journalism course, that is how he learnt his journalism.

It got him a job on the News Chronicle, so that he learnt his journalism, not in covering weddings and funerals, but in covering wars, at which lives were at risk.

 Including his own.

Which is the present reality for all journalists out there. Including John Simpson, who is reporting from Zimbabwe, although he is not supposed to be there. Including the New York Times reporter, who has been arrested and is now in jail, and an unamed British reporter, who is presumably being helped by the British embassy. But they have not told us yet, even who he (or she) is.

These reporters are risking their lives to tell the world what is happening in this former colony. Like Geoffrey Cox, when he went off to cover the Spanish Civil War, they did not go there in a gung ho frame of mind.

They believed in the myth of journalism. That journalism is worth doing because journalists try and convey to the folks back home, what it is like on the front line.

That is what Geoffrey Cox stood for.

We should honour his memory.

And we should work to nurture those young would-be journalists. Whether they be on journalilsm courses, or like Cox, learning journalism in their own way, to follow in the footsteps of those who have tried to interest the public in matters which are rather rather crucial to the nation and the planet.

Cox, if he were reporting today, would be trying to put Mugabe in historical context. A tyrant, yes, but one produced by the coup d’etat by Ian Smith, the white leader who went for unilateral independence for what was then called Southern Rhodesia in 1965.

Xcity, the annual magazine produced by the magazine students at City University, London, takes on Newsnight presenter, Jeremy Paxman, in the latest issue that has just come off the presses. Paxman asserted that the nation, and the students, were wasting their money by studying journalism at a university. According to an interview he gave it takes only three weeks to train a journalist. Whereas the poor students at City University and elsewhere, have to sign up for three years for the undergraduate option or twelve months for the intensive post-graduate courses.

Paxman is renowned for challenging the conventional wisdom, and doing so with the ferocity of a Rottweiler and the tenacity of terrier. In this case he is espousing the conventional wisdom. Had he come to last night’s annual party for the Laurence Stern Fellowship, he would have found that the three national editors present, (from The Guardian, The Times and the Financial Times) would have agreed with most of what he had to say on the subject.And I think it probable that the executive editor of the Washington Post, Len Downie, the presenter of the Today Programme, Jim Naughtie, and the anchor man of BBC News24, Gavin Esler, who were also at the party, would have found themselves agreeing with Paxman.

I can assert this with a degree of certainty because I have known for several years all the people I have mentioned so far, with the exception of the present editor of The Times, James Harding.

Harding was also exceptional in that he was the only editor mentioned who actually went on a journalism course before he embarked on a career in journalism. As it happens, he was at my own University, but because by the time he came we were the biggest in the UK we never met. I was running either the International course or the magazine course. Harding was on the newspaper course, but I know what he was taught.

So I am 90 per cent sure, that when challenged by Paxman, in my fantasy meeting which did not take place, he would have said that the course he did at City helped him get his first job, but it did not give him the skills/qualities which enabled him to leapfrog the competition and jump into the editor’s chair at The Times.

What all these editors would have agreed about, was not that it takes three weeks to train a journalist, but the thinking behind the sound bite that Paxman delivered to the City University student who interviewed him. The best way of learning journalism is by doing it. What you can learn off site, whether it is in a university or on a training programme run by the BBC or by a newspaper group, is far less important than what you have to learn by attempting to do it, thinking on your feet in a busy newsroom and getting what help you can from experienced colleagues, in the limited time available for you to write the story to get in tomorrow’s paper.

This was always true. But it is even more true today, when journalists, and students on placement with news organisations, have to meet the demands of twenty-four hour a day broadcast programmes and newspaper websites, which have adopted the same deadlines. As recently as two years ago, there was a fierce debate as to whether newspapers should save their scoops for the paid for printed newspaper. Those who wanted to hold stories have lost out to the realities of the web age in which we live. There are a few exceptions, where for instance, a newspaper has been conducting a long investigation on the Watergate scale, and has accumulated information which no rival can possibly equal in a few hours.

But even in those cases, the need to publish quickly often over-rides other considerations. While the newspaper is consulting its lawyers, other newspaper rivals will not attempt to publish. But web sites, like the Drudge Report, will publish the essence of the story in the making.

This poses a problem for universities preparing students for entry into journalism. The journalistic need is to design courses which will encourage the Rottweiler and terrier like qualities exemplified by Paxman. But at the same time, there is the even more important imperative, to discourage wouldbe journalists from trying to model themselves on the Jeremy Paxman brand, and to hold any Rottweiler tendencies they have firmly in check for a few years. After all Paxman only established his brand after many years studying serious subjects in higher education and after many years of learning on the job. It is not easy for universities to satisfy these kinds of needs. The dominant concern is with what is taught rather than how it is taught. The curriculum rules. And when I was in City University yesterday the talk was all about the changes in the curriculum being made and being proposed to make sure that students were prepared for the web age.

Fleet Street has been having its annual fun day stretching its readers minds to spot the April Fool story. These days the task is tougher because real life seems to produce a story which sounds like an April fool every day of the year. Remember the canoeist who did a Reginald Perrin?

Thanks to the Daily Mail web site I have not had to tax my brain. In a story headlined

 Sarkozy is having ‘height’ surgery and penguins are flying: The best April Fool’s jokes from Fleet Street’s finest

their slueths have combed the nationals to serve you the best jokes in one story, including pics of the French Prime Minister suddenly seeming as tall as his rather more beautiful wife and a BBC pic of flying penguins.

Most of the spoofs are not to difficult to spot. The Guardian story that Prime Minister Gordon Brown has appointed Carla to spearhead a new Government initiative to inject more style and glamour into British national life, is by-lined, Avril de Poisson.

The Sun, who scooped the rest of the street with the news that Sarkozy was going to get taller, made in authentic by a quote from the surgean who was going to stretch him. His name is Professor Ura Schmuck. So even in a joke The Sun managed to reflect the Euroscpetism of boss Rupert Murdoch.

But it mostly very funny indeed. And it serves as a reminder to broadsheet journalists like myself who frequently criticise the tabloids, that the British pops still lead the world when it comes to tickling the ribs of the nation.

When I got back to London today I happened upon the blog of my head of department at City University, Adrian Monck. It was a blatant piece of self-publicity for the book he is writing with an Australian, to be called, ‘Can you trust the media?”

This is a disgrace for City University. And a disgrace for British journalism, because Monck professes to be a ‘journalist’.

Allthough he obviously does not have any of the characteristics of the people who I have learnt from.

City University is now, by a long way, the leading university training journalists. It numbers amongst its alumnae the present editor of The Daily Telegraph and the present editor of The Times.

And also a rather well known television bloke, Dermot Murnaghan.

If you go into Monck’s blog, you will see that as part of his self-publicity, he includes a quote from Dermot  Murnaghan, suggesting that he, Monck,  is a totally trustworthy chap.

I actually know Dermot rather better than Monck, because I taught him when he came to City University, when he was struggling to complete a Ph D thesis.

So I do not think it likely that he would want to aid the self advertising by Monck.

But I may be wrong.

But judge for yourself.

Just read what Monck writes.