1989 Read Online Free PDF Page B

ample girth through ninety degrees so that all of a sudden he was with his back to the bar, leaning against it to become effectively a fulcrum for his admiring acolytes. ‘See, now another bloke can lean on that side and you can build up a second group that’s still part of the big group. And ,’ he stressed with a twinkle in his eye, ‘you maximise your control of the barspace (since George I have never been able to think of that as other than a single word, like airspace) so that you can always get another round in without queuing. It’s your go, lad.’
    Within weeks we were on the fourth-floor newsroom, shifted and shunted from here to there, amidst the endless chatter of teleprinters and typewriters. From the busy sports desk to the slow-paced features desk to London Bureau – where we actually got to go out and cover (minor) stories as part of the team that reported the UK for the rest of the world – and then, inevitably to the, for most of us dreadfully dreary but increasingly important, Econ, newly rechristend RES: Reuters Economic Services. And then, bliss oh bliss, the place we all wanted to be: the holy of holies, the grandly named World Desk, then still the hub of Reuters’ global operations. It would be some years still before the telecommunications revolution would mean the ‘world desk’ could be moved seamlessly with the clock from London to New York to Hong Kong and back again. For the moment London was still supreme, the reins held by four senior editors known collectively as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
    These were the men who monitored incoming copy, decided how urgent it was and which journalist should look it over and prepare it for publication. There was a ‘top table’ of the best and fastest workers. We trainees were decidedly ‘downtable’. Often we were rewriting copy, turning the bare facts sent in by ‘stringers’ – part-time local correspondents – in places as diverse as Srinagar or Caracas into the ‘inverted pyramid’ form expected by mainstream English-language newspapers: most important facts at the top, second most important next, subsidiary information to follow, background and colour merged in after that. The idea was – still is – that the story couldbe slotted into any ‘hole’ on a newspaper page and literally ‘cut to length’: you could remove any number of sentences from the bottom and what remained above would ideally still make perfect sense. It was the mainstay of news-agency journalism.
    Reuters in those final days before the whirlwind advent of electronic information and financial services that would transform it, was still a trust owned by a conglomerate of British and former imperial media interests. The business founded by Paul Julius Reuter, a German Jew, using carrier pigeons to link fledgling French and German telegraph lines had moved to London in 1851 after the laying of the Dover-Calais submarine cable, and subsequently spread a network of correspondents across the world. Reuters got a famous scoop in 1865 when a correspondent arriving on a ship from New York passed a message to a waiting boat off the coast of Ireland enabling the news of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination to be telegraphed to London and the continent nearly a full day before the mail ship docked in Southampton.
    The agency had always aimed at the widest possible international coverage and a reputation for impartiality, but during the Second World War its London base and British and Imperial ownership meant it effectively became an arm of the Allied propaganda machine. By the 1970s it was once again moving towards status as an independent international operation (it would eventually be publicly floated in 1984), but there was still a fair amount of the old mindset amongst senior figures on the editorial floor.
    For example when a delegation of German business people were being escorted round the office, with a view to signing them up for the still embryonic