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 Saturday, December 31, 2005 Foreign editing farewell to 2005  Am seeing out 2005 editing the foreign pages of The Sunday Telegraph. I have always done my best to avoid working on news desks but I have found the experience surprisingly rewarding. Having raged, as a reporter in the field, at my impotence in terms of controlling what appears under my byline, it is useful to see things from the other side. The sense of control, of taking decisions about which stories to run, where to send reporters and shaping how the pages look definitely has its plus side. It also provides a useful perspective on my reputation for complaining and being difficult with news desks. When you are juggling a dozen stories, processing copy and having to satisfy an editor, a night editor and any number of other executives putting their oar in, the last thing you want is a reporter giving you grief about something that has been rephrased or a slight cut to their copy. It is certainly annoying when people who file 1700 words when they have been asked for 800, omit basic facts or cannot write coherent English. On the other hand, I hope I will never be dismissive of anyone for caring about what is printed or who strives to get things right. It's all about striking a balance but give me an awkward reporter who has a streak of impatience and perfectionism over a journeyman hack any day. A lot can be achieved simply by sending edited copy back to a reporter and checking they are happy with it - something that is pretty rare for news pieces in British papers. The job of those on the desk is to soak up the silly stuff in the office and make things easier for the journalists out in difficult and dangerous places - not vice versa. Transmitting the woes of the production process ("We have just gone down to four pages, there's a huge ad on page 24 and my tube journey was delayed again. Don't you understand how many problems I have?") to reporters is one of the most demoralising things a desk can do apart from wrecking your copy. I'm pretty pleased with our four foreign pages this week. The main story is a lovely piece from Philip Sherwell about cowboys in Wyoming and their feelings about the new film Brokeback Mountain. I had a choice to keep Phil in Washington grubbing around for a line on the Supreme Court nominee or send him out West to have some fun. The result, I reckon, goes to show that confidence in a good reporter is almost invariably rewarded - and usually there's no need to micromanage. Phil headed to Sheridan, went to the bar on which Annie Proulx based her original short story and filed a great article that sailed into the paper with minimal editing. And Adam Nadel (of New Orleans pit bull fame) took a sublime picture (above, of the Mint Bar in Sheridan) to go with it. Made my job this week easy by providing a great read for the opening, colour page. We're also running a good story from Massoud Ansari about radical clerics from madrassas in Pakistan defying orders to expel foreign students and two nice off-beat pieces about manners lessons in Shanghai and Ethiopia's version of Pop Idol. And my colleague Colin Freeman and I took the opportunity to get two of our own stories from Iraq into the paper; I guess that's the ultimate journalistic control trip - writing and editing your own story and then approving the pictures, subbing and headline on the proof. Got overruled on which main picture to use with the Brokeback story but I suppose you can't win them all. Happy 2006. #posted by Toby @ 12:53 PM Saturday, December 10, 2005 Sea monster's nose  My dog Finn hasn't yet learnt how to behave the British way on tubes and trains. Instead of minding his own business and avoiding eye contact, he fixes his gaze on each new person who enters the carriage (he figures, I suppose, they have got on especially to see him) and tries to make friends. Almost invariably, he succeeds. This morning at Putney station, a student was very taken with his "expressive" nose and took a photograph of it. She said she was doing a project that involved making a sea monster and his nose would be perfect. For the purposes of comparison, here's his nose alongside mine and President George W.Bush's. #posted by Toby @ 10:00 AM Token women Why is it that it is considered acceptable to be obsessed with what categories people fall into rather than their talents? To me, it is pure prejudice. I'm with Jemima Lewis on this one: Today's Independent, page 23 (profile of Theresa Villiers MP) Given the male-dominated composition of Cameron's inner circle, her new appointment as shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury is a shrewd one; she is talented, industrious, and, most importantly, a woman. Today's Independent, page 41 (Jemima Lewis column) I was chatting to an opposition minister at a party when he suddenly clasped my hands in delight. "You must become a Tory MP!" he cried, with the urgency of Archimedes springing from his bath. "You're just the kind of person we need! You're young! You're a libertarian! YOU'RE A WOMAN!" Flattering though it was to be asked to serve my country as a token female, I declined the offer. #posted by Toby @ 9:50 AM Wednesday, December 07, 2005 Screwing up your evening My United Airlines plane from Heathrow to Washington Dulles was about 90 minutes late because of an engine problem before take-off. When we landed, the senior crew member apologised over the tannoy "for the delay to this flight, which will have screwed up your evening". For me, that frankness was preferable to the usual lame, insincere, "we are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused". Others might not have appreciated the language. Best of all, I suppose, would be a bunch of air miles or some cash off a future flight on a scale depending on how long the delay was. But I don't suppose that will happen. #posted by Toby @ 9:10 PM |
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