Anyone familiar with that arch-cretin Piers Morgan, pal to everyone whose name he thinks might impress the great unwashed, especially the gullible ones? Well, he gets a side-mention here, but mainly it is about hack ingenuity and how fucking marvellous it can be. Scummy, yes, unscrupulous, yes, borderline dishonest yes, but often fucking marvellous (and I am not talking about politicians and related scumbags, i.e. lobbyists)

Here’s a great example of how Brit newspapers operate, especially, though not exclusively, the tabloids. It this account comesw from a story carried by our very good and very entertaining gossip site Popbitch, this year’s May 21, edition.

Like it or loathe it – and, er, I like it – you must admit there’s a certain true genius in creating a story out of less than fuck-all. Here is a screenshot of the story with the text below it:

The Cannes Film Festival concludes this weekend. A lack of Hollywood stars on the red carpet has kept coverage muted, though, unlike much of the last 20-30 years, when every brand seemed to be throwing parties there.

Back in the 90s and 00s Soho House used to hire a yacht for the festival. It was always a magnet for the cream of Brit liggers, like hacks from Loaded Magazine and the red tops. One day an agitated Matthew Wright, then Daily Mirror showbiz chief, made an appearance. He explained that his editor, Piers Morgan, had demanded a front-page splash.

Someone had an idea. The Swedish porn company, Private, was sailing over to Cannes on a disused car ferry and hosting a party on it, why not go? Quick as a flash, Wright rang up their press office to get him and the other journos on the guest list. He then added Noel and Liam Gallagher’s names.

The next day, on the front page of the Mirror, there was a masterclass in how to invent a cover story out of absolutely nothing.

I used acquainted with Matthew Wright when he was still a reporter / writer for the Sun’s Bizarre column, then headed by one Piers Morgan (Piers Pughe-Morgan in real life).

I didn’t come in to contact with him as I was a lowly down-table casual sub, but self-promoting dick that he was then and still is, he was very much in evidence and a regular visitor to the feature subs’ back bench to sort out his daily column.

I could not get over the fact that he invariably wore a lights brown Tweed sports jacket. Sycophantic cunt, always keeping his finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing to make sure he blows with it. And if you missed it the first time around, sycophantic cunt.

I was working casual subbing shifts on the Sun features desk – Dear Deidre letters, vague ‘fashion’ pieces and recipes – so nothing you might care to boast about (oh and then the Sun was still using the fucking useless Atex computer system which returned the story you were working on to the very top of the page every time you justified the copy! Irritating or what!) – and we often chatted on meal breaks in the Wapping canteen.

It was on one such meal break in about 1992/93 that Wright told me he was fed up with working on Bizarre (or being a hack, or the Sun or whatever he was fed up with) and was thinking of knocking it all on the head and re-training as a primary school teacher. Passed that one on to Popbitch, screenshot below. Honour among thieves? Yeah, right.

Morgan moved on to edit the News of the Screws in 1994, but was then moved to edit the Daily Mirror (occasionally just The Mirror, though an hour or two ago in the Bodmin Morrisons I’ve spotted it was back to the ‘Daily Mirror’ with the ‘Daily’ rather small and at a 90º angle to ‘Mirror’, though why I have not clue.

NB Here’s a neat little story with which you can wow our friends and bring cocktail parties to climax though you might also lose a friend and get kicked out of the party – your call.

When all other papers use an ‘ellipsis’ – as in . . . – in a headline, they print the standard three dots. The Mirror doesn’t, it only prints two. The story is that back in the ‘hot metal days’, an editor or production editor or chief sub or whoever was alerted by the comp at a headline was busting and the ellipsis would fit in.

His solution was simple: he got the comp to take a chisel and mallet and chisel off the third do. Since then all Mirror ellipses have been just the to dots.

All together now: Aaahh!

Logos – and sorry, I couldn’t find any splash heads with the two dot Mirror ellipsis. I suspect your are heart-broken.

   Old-style . . .                                 then . . .                   and now

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PS I have no idea at all what has brought on this flurry of activity on my blog. Not that I care, but oddly I have had many ideas of what to write about, some not all that awful. You are warned!