Scoop! Journalists in Fiction

Watching the detectives

Crime usually makes news and seldom more so than when the crime is murder. Police investigating serious - or unusual - crimes know their activities will attract press interest. Sometimes they encourage that interest, often they don't.

Henning Mankell's Inspector Kurt Wallander is both a skilled detective and an honest and decent man. He appreciates and upholds the freedoms and openeness of Swedish society - but strongly objects to the intrusions of reporters into the vital business of investigating crime. At best they get in the way, at worst they risk jeopardising his efforts to bring villains to justice.

In The Dogs of Riga, Ystad police chief Bjork takes a call from the Express. Wallander says: "It's not worth getting upset about. They'll write what they want."

Wallander particularly dislikes the ritual of the press conference. Before facing reporters in Firewall,

(He) could feel the symptoms of his flu getting worse. At least maybe I'll infect a journalist, he thought, and dug in his pockets for a tissue.

Journalists do have their uses, though. In The Man Who Smiled Walander tells colleagues it is time to call a press conference.

"It will be the first time in my life I've ever taken that initiative but I think it would be a good thing if we could give the autumn a helping hand to spread a bit more mist and fog."          

The greasy pole

Whereas Exit's Constance Amory seems to content with life on the Hallam Evening Crucible, with taking over as industrial correspondent as the height of her ambition, many see weeklies and regionals as a stepping stone to national glory - perhaps well beyond the world of newspapers.

The career of Dawn (once Doris) Stone bookends John Lanchester's Fragrant Harbour (2002). After Durham University and a journalism course at Cardiff, she joins the Argus, a local paper in Blackpool (chosen because political party conferences are held there).

Nowadays ... the plan would be to bypass all that grubby cloth-capped crap about reporting and head as quickly as possible for the clean, well-lit uplands of commentary, opinion and a column with your second most flattering photo at the top... This however was the old days. So I sent eighteen months ... doing all the usual stuff from local fairs to sports to news (Granny drives Reliant Robin over cliff, survives) to gradually more interetesting court cases, to features and eventually - yes - a column.

.... I daresay if I'd gone to Oxbridge I would have had at least half a dozen chums who fell out of bed into useful, networkable positions on the kind of paper I wanted to work for.

The Inky Path 2

A reporter starting out on a provincial weekly might expect to earn £10 a week. If he is disgruntled about this he ought to look elsewhere for a living, for the true journalist measures his remuneration not in pounds, shillings and pence but in column inches.

Mr Write . . .

Journalists may get a bad press in general fiction, but it's a different matter in women's romances. For author and ex-journalist Jilly Cooper, reporters make the perfect romantic hero. In Imogen, a newspaper reporter called Matt is the only noble character in a group including a vicar, a tennis champion and a film producer. In Prudence and short story The Ugly Swan, journalists Ace and Danny again stand out for their integrity, and both get the girl in the end. 

Cooper presents various journalistic qualities as appealing - sharp wits and intelligence, strong social conscience, energy and passion - but the one she constantly highlights is the journalist's ability to empathise with and listen to people.

This is the admiring heroine in The Ugly Swan speaking...

"Danny seemed to have time for everyone. At a party, he would talk to the plainest woman in the room and within 10 minutes she'd be glowing and happy, with a crowd gathering around her."

And in Imogen:

As always, Matt drew confidences out of her, as the sun brings out the flowers . . . He's a journalist, she kept telling herself, he's trained to ask questions and be a good listener. He'd do the same to anyone.

What woman wouldn't like this - a man whose very job it is to listen and show an interest? It could almost be described as a traditionally feminine role or quality (in Janice Radway's study Reading the Romance, she concludes that readers want feminine characteristics in their fictional heroes because what they're really seeking is some nurturing of the type they traditionally dole out.)

Perhaps this is why a romantic fiction writer might see journalism as an appealing profession for a man, while male writers tend to see it as slightly shameful or play up its macho elements. In Jilly Cooper, there is no stitching people up, bribery or corruption - in fact, her reporters will grant copy approval at the drop of a hat.

He's a reporter, she's a writer

Authors of fiction tend to divide those journalists who produce copy (as opposed to editors, executives and publishers) into two types, the reporter or the writer. The distinction is often driven by plot. If it's about action, the reporter - the hack - is a useful way of getting to the heart of the action, notepad in hand, sometimes as the central character; if the requirement is more character-driven, they may well be a writer - an artiste (usually failed and miserable).

Constance Amory and Annika Bengtzon fall firmly - and honourably - into the hack category but many others are either would-be novelists or dilettantes who can't get a real job so fall into journalism as a way staying afloat - and wouldn't spot a real news story if it punched them in the mouth. As in real life, there is also a fairly sizeable subset of 'writer', the celebrity socialite or sports star who, despite being unable to scrawl a compelling note to the milkman, manages to knock out a regular column for a tidy fee.

Lionel Watson, in AN Wilson's My Name is Legion, is a typical artiste, 'a fallen archangel' who left Oxford to become a travel writer and poet, whose book on the Amazon is a minor classic, but who has no money...

It seemed foolish not to accept any journalistic work offered as a way of paying the mortagage on a small flat in Clapham....

After a year or two, however it seemed that journalism was much more lucrative and much less hard work than 'proper writing'....

It had certainly killed something inside him when he joined the Legion.

   

Jurassic Park

Although it's a job many of them end up doing, not many starry-eyed recruits join a newspaper with a burning ambition to be a sub-editor (or any other form of desk-bound executive).

Here's Annika Bengtzon when her reporting career looks doomed in Studio 69...

Maybe that's where you end up in this job, she thought. Maybe it's just as well I'm out before I've become like those guys, a bunch of addled old hypocrites with brains that can only think in 72point Bodoni.

And here's former boyfriend and news photographer Howard talking to Exit, Orange and Red's Constance Amory...

"What's funny?" Howard asked.

"Nothing, I was thinking."

"Fuck me, that's your chances of becoming a sub blown."

The Inky Path 1

Journalism is a profession best suited to those of an inquisitive disposition. This is not to say that being nosy is, in itself, tantamount to having the proverbial 'nose for a story', but it is a distinct advantage. For it is basic to the art of good reporting that the journalist should seek to answer the questions: who? what? where? when? and why? In this respect, the reporter's task is not dissimilar to that of a police detective or, for that matter, the neighbourhood gossip. Nor, in the slippery business of separating fact from fiction, is it by any means certain which of these three will establish the most reliable version of events.

The first rule of journalism

Over lunch wise old sage William Boyce observes:

"First rule of journalism, Constance: never presume."

As they leave the pub, Boyce observes:

"First rule of journalism. Never miss a deadline."

Constance asks:

"Exactly how many first rules of journalism are there?"

"Only one: the one you're being told to obey at any given moment."

Boyce is right on every count - but where do the rules come from? Bedford employs the clever device of inserting regular quotes from The Inky Path, a book written in 1959 as a guide to cub reporters, which Boyce reveres as the bible of the profession.

Basics, he said.

But however influential The Inky Path might be, books are not really where the rules come from.

Although reporters do have formal training in that they need to pass National Council for the Training of Journalists, and increasingly begin their careers with a university degree(such as that offered at Sunderland) the real culture of news is learnt on the job, from people like Boyce and Connie's archetypal news editor, Gary. Operators like Gary ('operator' is a great compliment in journalism) absorb a set of principles and frameworks, almost by osmosis. Trainee reporters gradually gain an understanding of what news is, not in any formal manner, but by constantly hearing others describe its essential qualities (often, scathingly, in terms of what it is not).

The result is that definitions of news become a closed circle - news is news because it is news. This is magnified by the intense pressures of the newsroom, the high level of competition and the constant ambition of colleagues. Similar factors shape every newsroom, but the perspectives will be subtly different. That said, most people who have worked on regional newspapers will recognise the characters in Exit, Orange and Red, and will have heard many of the first rules passed down by Boyce without ever having read The Inky Path or any similar text.