mediations

Scoop! Journalists in Fiction

Following on from earlier posts, I have created a new blog, Scoop! Journalists in Fiction, partly to keep a clearer focus for Mediations, and partly to see how useful a blog can be in developing ideas. I am hoping it will be a useful online notebook for this project and also a way of getting ongoing feedback and new lines of inquiry. I wonder how many visitors it will attract...?

The first post, Only doing their job, is a rather glum handful of quotes from McEwan, AN Wilson, Marklund and Coe, all lamenting the awfulness of being a journalist... Sadly, a rather more common theme than anything positive about the joys of writing for newspapers.

Hacked off by hack lit

There must be a word for it (other than jealousy!) - it being that sinking feeling all writers get when they pick up a newspaper or magazine and discover somebody has just published what they thought was their own brilliant idea. In one of my first posts to Mediations, back in May 2004 I wrote:

"I have been thinking about how journalists appear in fiction. Evelyn Waugh's Scoop is a classic, and Michael Frayn's Towards the End of the Morning perfectly captures a long gone Fleet Street, but what about life on a regional? To set the ball rolling, how about Constance Amory in Martyn Bedford's Exit Orange and Red - I feel certain I worked with her on the Wakefield Express...

A recent musing looked at Lisa Marklund, and this the reason for the Mediafictions list (right). So it was wonderful to pick up today's Guardian and see the front page of the Review supplement, with its drawing a pressman's trilby and the headline Hack Lit, trailing a feature by Christoper Hitchens, Fleet Street's Finest. 

There is a moral in this somewhere..

Liza Marklund

I am doing some research into representations of journalists in fiction so I was delighted, on holiday in Sweden, to come across Lisa Marklund (pictured), who writes thrillers based on the exploits of Annika Bengtzon. Amongst other things, Marklund is a columnist on the Stockholm paper Aftonbladet and the Bengtzon books are very firmly rooted in what I presume to be a pretty realistic account of working life on a Swedish tabloid, fictionalised as Kvallpressen. The books I have read so far - The Bomber, Studio 69 and Paradise - are perhaps not great literature but they are warmly recommended as good reads and, for me, hugely useful for throwing up a host of useful research topics and will certainly crop up during my Media Ethics classes.

* I was interested in Annika's justification for wanting to move from a small provincial to a national daily: "I have already written everything there is to write about at Katrinesholms-Kuriren: forestry supplements, auctions, municipal meetings, composting reports... I want to move on."

Familiar sentiments indeed - but do Swedish papers really carry composting reports? I'd love to know more...

      

Brought to book

I have been thinking about how journalists appear in fiction. Evelyn Waugh's Scoop is a classic, and Michael Frayn's Towards the End of the Morning perfectly captures a long gone Fleet Street, but what about life on a regional? To set the ball rolling, how about Constance Amory in Martyn Bedford's Exit Orange and Red - I feel certain I worked with her on the Wakefield Express...