Journalists who lost their jobs seldom prospered at anything else, writes John Preston, in Ink (2000)
Careers spent recording the foibles of the world hardly prepared themselves for living in it. Mostly they drank themselves to death, or went into public relations, or bought themselves little teashops on the south coast.
Lars Magnusson, in Henning Mankell's Sidetracked, follows the first route.
Long ago Magnusson had been a journalist. After a number of years at the Express he had tired of city life and returned to his roots in Ystad... (he) was an alcoholic.
By chance Wallander had been at the station late one night when Magnusson was dragged in, so drunk that he couldn't stand up. He had been driving in that state, and had lost control and gone through the plate-glass window of a bank. He had ended up spending six months in jail.
Magnusson gives up journalism and makes a living setting chess problems for newspapers; he avoids drinking hmself to death by forcing himself to hold off on that first drink until had devised at least one chess problem.
Warren Bartholomew, the £29,000 a year and a car press officer at Urbopark in Bedford's Exit, Orange and Red admits to 'serving my time on local newspapers, you know'. naturally, this experience makes him
...consumately adept at managing information to Mall Admin's best advantage without alerting reporters to the fact that he'd steered them away from a more fruitful line of inquiry.
Any examples of fictional reporters buying teashops gratefully received.
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