1989 Read Online Free PDF Page A

other colleagues of mine – both of whom came through the Reuters training process – have publicly identified the main characteristics of a successful journalist as, and I quote, ‘ratlike cunning’ and ‘intelligent guile’. One has been a successful Reuters bureau chief on most continents and the other is the editor of an esteemed British national newspaper . There is also one other element, which had been on my side that day back on the périphérique in Paris, one which editors prize in their journalists as much as Napoleon prized in his generals: luck.
    Knowing the answer to the $64,000 question was not, of course, the only thing that got me the job, even if it was probably the clincher. All ten of us who got hired – with another to be taken on twelvemonths later after a sponsored year at the new Cardiff journalism school – had been tested on our basic mastery of the English language , our ability to marshal facts and our command of one other language fluently and a second at a basic level of competence. I had had no difficulty proving the first in French – after a year living with students in the Parisian suburbs I had acquired a facility with the current argot that mystified some of my Oxford tutors but would have let me pass for any mec on the métro . My Russian, despite my degree, was at an altogether different level: I could read (if not exactly race through) Gogol and Dostoevsky but with the Soviet Union still a difficult destination, my experience of the vernacular on the ground had been limited to a two-week holiday course. But it was good enough to be my ‘banker’. The signal absence, you will have noticed, was the language that would eventually become more important to me than any other: German.
    In the meantime we all had a more basic linguistic function to master: typing. None of us could. Not properly anyhow. I had spent an hour or two a week during the summer before starting the job in September, bashing away on an ancient Remington typewriter of my mother’s, but it weighed a tonne and had been ill-maintained. It would all be different when I got to the real world of journalism and super modern equipment, I told myself.
    It wasn’t. The trainees were dumped not even in the hallowed 85 Fleet Street headquarters but in a draughty building belonging to British Telecom around the corner in Seacoal Lane. And our equipment was – yes – heavy, old, ill-maintained typewriters. Not necessarily Remingtons: anything that came to hand, it seemed. I would later discover to my surprised dismay that it was little different in the newsroom itself. We weren’t taught to type properly. I discovered later very few journalists could ‘touch-type’, even though some were lightning fast with two fingers alone and in at least one instance, with just one. We were given news stories to analyse and rewrite; we played through scenarios of being fed reports from police, firemen, army, and told to ‘type it up’ and make ‘a story’ out of it. Typed. We got sore fingers.
    Our training was undertaken by a variety of senior journalists from ‘across the road’ but supervised by a genial, grinning,expansive-waisted West Country man called George Short * , who saw to it straight away that we understood the most important duty of a trainee journalist: buying his betters a beer. Fleet Street was tribal in those days. And each tribe had its watering hole. Printers and journalists on the newspapers hardly spoke to one another – there were literally demarcation lines on the floor in the print works which no journalist dared cross for fear of triggering a walkout. But the journalists too all drank in different places. It wasn’t that they didn’t mix with one another, just that if you weren’t in the office it was a good idea to be in the office pub: that way in a crisis all hands could get, however unsteadily, to the deck.
    The Daily Telegraph , for example, drank in the King and Keys, right next door, while