Scoop! Journalists in Fiction

The art of sub-editing

"There’s nothing to it, really,” said Bob modestly. “It’s just a matter of checking the facts and the spelling, crossing out the first sentence and removing any attempts at jokes.”

• Towards the End of the Morning, Michael Frayn

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."

What a carve up...?

One of the problems with writing for newspapers is that other people interfere with your deathless prose, either unintentionally (copytakers) or intentionally (sub-editors). In Jonathan Coe's What A Carve Up! narrator Michael gleefully takes the opportunity to knife a colleague in a book review. Spread over 20 pages he relishes the thought of his fellow writer opening the paper and reading the carefully honed piece he has phoned to over to a copytaker.

Michael had worked particularly hard on the final sentence:

"Whatever his other qualifications for the task, I suspect, finally, that he lacks the necessary -

The word was there, and I was only inches away from it. He lacked the necessary brilliance, the necessary bravado, the necessary...

...brio.

Yes, that was it. Brio. Precisely.

... I also knew, as if by some telepathic process, that it decribed the single quality which he, in his most secret heart of hearts, would yearn to be credited with.

The following week, the piece appears and Michael's friend Graham describes it as enigmatic; Michael is puzzled.

"Look there's obviously some clever metaphor or figure of speech that I have missed out on," said Gordon. "I'm sure your metropolitan friends will understand."

"I really don't know what you're talking about."

... "I mean, what are you trying to say, exactly?" said Graham. "That this bloke is never going to write a really good novel because he doesn't own a pen?"

"Look, it's simple..." I was about to read aloud for conformation when suddenly I saw what was printed... Then I screwed up the newspaper and threw it across the room in an involuntary fury. "The bastards!"

..... Joan joins them and Graham shows her the article, pointing her to the last word.

"I don't get it," she said at last, after reading the sentence one more time. "What is so funny about a biro?"