by Leo Wiles
05 June 2015
Recently I wrote a blog post about 8 skills you never knew you needed as a journo working today. Mulling over my copy, it made me incredibly nostalgic. As a result I came up with this peek at what journalism was like back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a young cadet.
In 1991, pre paywalls and the internet, newspapers were a bustling, thriving, important cornerstone of disseminating knowledge and I was lucky enough to be at the heart of it.
I smoked at my desk, cradling my landline phone on my shoulder as I tapped words onto my black screen with its green lettering, (no wonder I ended up with Coke bottle lens glasses!) and ashed into the ashtray moulded into my desk.
Suits with dangerously high heels were de rigueur, as was my mobile phone that resembled a brick and my trusty Dictaphone for when my shorthand couldn’t keep up (or I wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t be done for libel). Especially as most interviews were conducted face to face (shock horror), and over lunch, which nearly always meant wine.
In fact, you had to be fond of wine, beer and hard spirits – and expected to consume the above during work hours, if you wanted to fit in. It was a habit often hidden in the bottom draw of the iron file cabinet that I am sure led to many a divorce, along with the long hours and inter office dalliances.
Substance abuse also led me, aged 22, to do things like scrape the deputy show business editor off the floor of the loo and book her into rehab. Later that year I had to call the ambulance for my hard drinking, chain-smoking features editor after he had a heart attack at his desk.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom, however. The Nineties were the heady days of gangbangs (as we called round table interviews at press (not media) conferences). After the photo call, TV and radio interviews were allocated slots, as they had the longest turnaround. Finally, print journos would be called upon to do their thing – write – with no expectation for you to cover the story in any other way than with words.
Every journo had their role and we all knew our part: photographers took photos, producers, cameramen and soundmen filmed footage, radio put broadcasts together. There was no multi skilling required and for writers, no need for little more than a pad and pen.
We also had specialist writers and large departments that allowed us to spend time on a piece with the added luxury – in my case being on the show business desk – to go on far flung film sets in Europe and America, rather than relying on newswires or citizen journos.
Research was done by visiting the library and coming back with an armful of manila folders bristling with cuttings glued onto A4 sheets. Or, if you were lucky, you’d send for one of the 13-year-old copy boys and girls to fetch it from the team of long-faced librarians.
Along with your pre-Google search, these ferrets of knowledge would also give you the lowdown on the latest goods to fall off a truck, ‘available right now in the printers service dock downstairs’ (well, it was the East End in Wapping). They’d even rush your copy over to the subs desk where if it wasn’t up to par, it could be impaled on a metal post and be spiked!
Subs weren’t located offshore, but actually sat in the same open plan office. Our subs desk was headed up by the lovely lush Scott, who’d spend three hours in The Stab (as we called our local), downing two bottles of red before putting our issue to bed at 4pm. Back then, 4pm was the conclusion of the news cycle. Apart from the late edition of the Evening Standard, and of course broadcast news on TV and radio, there were no real updates until the morning edition.
There was no need for 24-hour media watching or flicking through various platforms or data mining. Our communication with each other was done in person and there was no interaction with our readers apart from the odd AVO against those who wielded green pen. In fact, in one offie we had a wall adorned with crazy letters nearly always written in green, hanging as a grim joke and warning from those who did not like what we wrote. At no point did we have to face them, be held accountable or interact as Twitter, Facebook and personal websites with comment sections simply did not exist.
I could never have imagined in those glory days of my youth just how the role of journalism and its foot soldiers would change. For good or bad, those days are over along with the death of a cadetship.
If my memories resonate, I’d love to hear yours in the comments!
Ah yes, I remember those days well. I worked as a correspondent based in Lusaka, Zambia from 1990 to 1994. When I first arrived, I filed stories by Telex for the news agency I worked for. Remember those machines? We had one in the corner of our living room that would suddenly start rattling away. An old Africa hand had a party trick which was to sit at the Telex and file his story as fast as the machine could send it – no typos, no backspace. Newbies like me had to cut a tape first, then get the connection and then file the tape through the machine in takes. A visiting photographer for Reuters would set up his darkroom in our bathroom for days when there was a big story happening – tape up the doors and windows with cloth and black tape and hours later emerge with a print. This would be placed on a machine with a rotating drum, connected to the phone, and an hour (or three) later – depending on the line quality – the image would be “uploaded” to London. The phone bills were crazy. But on more routine stories – or when a photographer couldn’t fly in quickly enough – we’d drive to the airport with rolls of film, find a likely target in the British Airways check-in queue plead with them to hand carry them to Fleet Street by cab. They almost always agreed. And then we discovered the Tandy 200 – an early laptop – that you could connect to the phone wall socket with crocodile clips and file stories at the amazing speed of about 300 words per minute. It was nicknamed the “AK47 of journalism”. But telephones weren’t reliable carriers of data in those days and it could be incredibly frustrating to get the technology to work – so there was always the copy-takers you could call – a bank of men and women who did nothing else all day except take dictation from correspondents. Nothing like standing at the back of a grocery shop in a small town in Zambia with the only phone that seems to work shouting down the receiver to London: “RIOT POLICE FIRED TEARGAS COMMA AS THE CROWD TURNED VIOLENT STOP. CAP P PRESIDENT CAP K KAUNDA THAT’S K-A-U-N-D-A DECLARED A STATE OF EMERGENCY STOP.