5 th August 06 - Tony Thomas
So what is news by Tony Thomas
This talk covered about fifty years of Tony’s (left) life as a News reporter and later as Editor to several county papers and also editor for the Reed International Publishing Cooperation (Magazines), this was an excellent presentation covering many aspects of the print industry from a personal angle that many of the Club members have not been party too but we all understood the implications that Tony lead us through.
Below are some of the basic facts of his talk but of course do not show the full picture.
For Tony in a droll but humorous manner illustrated many incidents and stages of his fifty years in print that we all remember well and if you get a chance to hear Tony on full spate grab the opportunity, you will not be disappointed.
So read some of Tony’s brief as follows:-
So what is news, Lord Rothermere called it the raw material of publishing profit.
News, the first rough draft of history 19th century British journalist: “The desire for news and information comes a close third behind mankind’s desire for
Warmth, comfort and shelter
The need for physical relationships.
The chairman of Portsmouth & Sunderland Newspapers told an editor’s conference:
“We’re in the retail business; the retailing, perhaps call it the re-telling, of news.”
While Mark Twain said:
“Real news is something that someone, somewhere would prefer not to see published”.
News is gathered, disseminated, re-written, angled, sometimes distorted, often sensationalised by journalists who in my days came straight from grammar or secondary moderns and who now are invariably graduates who have studied journalism and the media or who have taken a post graduate course in journalism.
I started in publishing by literally pedalling news, about Maesteg Rugby Football Club as there was no phone at the club so verbally I cycled to the nearest phone and passed onwards the report of the match.
News from valleys this was a period working as a junior reporter and to cut the effort required I worked (without our respective editors being aware) with Alan Protheroe of another competitive local paper swapping info and snippets he became much later the BBC Deputy Director General.
.Journalists have been described in various ways by those who are exposed by them and by their own kind:
TIME OUT suggested that Fleet Street is one of the nastiest places on Earth being an abyss peopled by puny-witted bullies, whey-faced ghouls, dim-witted toadies, snarling gargoyles all puking venom.
Julie Burchill writing in the Mail on Sunday said: “Journalists fiddle their expenses shamelessly and sulk when found out. They tell their spouses they are having affairs when all the time they are really working late! He said they are perhaps responsible for a fifth of the alcohol drunk in Britain.
News in the form of the written word needs to be retailed this was shown by Rothermere, Beaverbrook and Northcliffe in days gone by, Robert Maxwell came and went, Rupert Murdock came and stayed. When building his empire, he launched Today there was speculation that he wanted to buy The Guardian, and call it, with his Australian background G’day. A writer on UK Press Gazette, the media trade newspaper, felt he could buy up the salacious and somewhat pornographic Daily Sport and merge the Guardian, Today and the Daily Sport into a newspaper call G’Day Sport
Raw news is distributed by national, international news agencies and stringers. In my younger days as a journalist, we had the Press Association, and Exchange Telegraph, and Reuters, news agencies that sold news to local, regional, provincial and national newspapers. The national news agencies obtained their news from stringers who worked for local newspapers, freelances and local and regional news agencies
News can also be bought by Cheque book journalism such as Kiss and Tell of John Prescott and Tracey Temple selling her story or Set up – Arab Sheikh and Sven, England football manager, entrapment.
News can be manipulated; press officers have been around for 40 years or so. Spin doctors are a recent phenomenon, a creation of politicians. Politicians want newspapers to report news that they think is important whilst editors chose to print news for their readers that they think is interesting.
The British politician Richard Crossman, giving the Granada Lecture in 1968 summed up the politicians’ view quite nicely when he said: “I do sometimes wonder whether the people interested in politics and current affairs cannot establish a right to be given equal treatment on television with all-in wrestling – sixty minutes of straight outside broadcasting would seem a lot to us.”
News has to have style all tend to follow an in-house format for example, Sunday Times Surrey Ad. Tokio, Tokyo, council is or are, Chelsea FC is or are, M&S is or are, the readers tend to understand this speech talk!
News can be deceptive, sometimes deliberate such as the Red No 10 door on Sat April 1 this year when the Daily Mail. End quoted design consultant called April Fewell, there have been plenty of other examples which if obvious as all fools day but there can be deliberate misleading cases.
News sometimes isn’t news and can fail to catch the imaginations of news desks on national newspapers. Typically when the Met Commissioner Sir Ian Blair stated that the murders of some people are less reported than others. The trial of Ian Huntley for the Soham murders of two little girls over lapped the trial of a gang of youths in Loughborough who tortured, mutilated and strangled a lad of 14, cut his body into pieces and deposited them in rubbish bins across Loughborough. You probably never heard of Adam Morrell because newspapers and the rest of the media, including BBC East Midlands, focussed all their time on the Huntley trial. Perhaps the fact that the lad who died a terrible death was of mixed race and that he was a local tearaway had something to do with it?
News can be created, such as opinion polls, surveys, when the Surrey Comet carried out a survey of sandwiches in Kingston upon Thames town centre where sixteen places serving lunchtime sandwiches were surveyed and the head chef of the Griffin Inn Alfred Brooks, acted as a blind judge, top came Littlewoods with eight out of ten, Bentalls came 12th out of 16. “It’s like eating nothing”, said the head chef of The Griffin.
Rowan Bentall the chief executive of Bentalls (shown below) contacted me and said” I am most grieved and sadly disappointed: Mr Thomas to say I am dismayed is an understatement. My secretary said I was livid, BUT I was shocked when I read the Surrey Comet this morning. Take it from me; I am not going to let this matter rest
(We at the Comet were in the middle of negotiating Bentalls advertising spend with the whole Group). AND THEN I tried one of our sandwiches and I could not agree more but I can promise you, we will improve.”
Publish and be damned? The tabloid press and a growing trend among the quality nationals have long blurred the distinction between what is in the public interest and what interests the public. The right to publish and what is right to publish.
Good news, bad news, no one wants to read about the good news. Everyone wants to read about the bad news. A Newspaper launched in Oregon USA reporting only the good news the bad news is that it lasted only four months. Not enough people wanted to buy it for the good news alone.
News can be lifted from say Church magazines, residents’ magazines, local weekly newspapers, local evening newspaper, national newspapers so if there were no local newspapers, and there would be no national newspapers, no international news in print or on our TV screens.
News can be biased or angled, It’s how you see things, We all here can go to see a theatre play or a football match and all come a way with different impressions, different highlights. We all see things from a different angle, a different perspective.
I learned this in my very early days as a junior reporter. I was covering for my local newspaper the opening of a new power station just outside Bridgend in South Wales. I had been instructed to report what the good and the great said at the opening, before tucking into taxpayers’ funded smoked salmon, ham, beef, and fine wines. Whilst a reporter from the Daily Worker/Morning Star, wrote about the men who built the power station, the workers, huddled beside a hedge as the rain poured down, eating jam sandwiches and drinking from bottles of tap water.
News is Perishable such as the St Albans curate who opened his Church door to homeless but this good news was not reported as all the press space was taken up by the tragic assassination of President Kennedy.
Reporting is biased with respect to how the reporter sees it, what angle the night news editor, the night news desk or the chief reporter on the weekly newspaper asks for.
My memorable moments are lesson in deflating an over-inflated ego such as the new editor of a local paper just after WW11 wished to be called Captain Roy Howells-Jones and when this posted announcement was made by the sub editor signed and put in brackets after his own name (Wing Commander)
Taking Norman Lamont MP to the Houses of Parliament in my car at very high speeds with a Police escort to vote in a three line whip and beating the Division Bell having enjoyed more than my fair share of alcohol!
On a visit to Moscow, January 1972 this was in the days of the “Cold War” when each side were suspicious, on phoning my wife received the message “We have found the red dress”, this was an innocent remark in relationship to my daughter and her birthday party, but the call which was obviously being listen to by security resulted in being observed very closely by the authorities and any further calls to the UK were barred.
After covering 50 years in breathtaking speed, he answered a range of questions, such as “did the introduction of new technology result in much redundancy and has computer technology been a great asset?” the first he indicated yes the trade unions had been intransigent resulting in a loss of 14 men in every 15, many could have been retrained but the trade unions hindered and eventually lost the case. Computer technology has been a dramatic and helpful advance but the printed word is still a powerful commodity still required by the populace in spite of onscreen text.
Brian Cousins on behalf of the Club thanked Tony for his spirited talk and as an ex press officer for the government concurred with the thoughts of Tony and he asked the Club to thank our speaker and we did so in our traditional way.
