Scoop! Journalists in Fiction: What's Scoop all about?

The Inky Path

Journalists appear in fiction in many guises and play many roles. Sometimes they provide central characters, often they intrude on the action, their attentions as unwelcome as they often are in real life. Scoop! gathers together these appearances under a variety of themes, some amusing, some trivial, some giving an insight into how the Press works and how it is seen to impact on our society. If you have favourite representations of journalists in European fiction or insights into ways they are portrayed, please email Scoop!

For a little while now I have been collecting references to journalists in fiction.

There are many novels which feature journalists as central characters, from Scoop! and Towards the End of the Morning to Martyn Bedford's Exit Orange and Red and Ian McEwan's Amsterdam, but this blog is just as interested in fiction where journalists appear as incidentals - to move forward the plot by unearthing key details, as part of a commentary on our (invariably troubled) times, or, one suspects, to reflect the personal grudges and bitter experience of the author.

Perhaps other people read different books than I do but the picture of the profession that emerges is not particularly edifying, not least when seen through the eyes of authors who are or have been journalists themselves.

No doubt they are out there, but I have found it hard to find many heroic, happy and fulfilled fictional journalists. They are almost always drunk, miserable, misanthropic or desperate for a career change. The best of them are misguided; most are ethical derelicts whose only concern is the next headline.

And when they find the headlines it is almost always inept. Very few novelists seem to grasp the essentials of a newspaper headline, not least that it needs to be short, sharp and informative. There is an essay to be written about fictional headlines that would have to be set in 12pt to fit a tabloid or convoluted intros that would never make even the dullest local weekly.

Other categories might range from journalists in crime fiction (they almost always get in the way) to representations of women (juggling a job and family is tough) to lists of fictional newspaper titles and portraits of proprietors (an even lowlier species than journalists).

Suggestions, comments and contributions welcome...