I was never one of those hacks – my preferred word for ‘journalists’, but I certainly do not mean it pejoratively, in fact the opposite – who lived and breathed print journalism and who had from the age of nine never wanted any other job.
Frankly, I found myself a job as a reporter because I for several years I had imagined myself to be becoming ‘a writer’ and, perhaps more pertinently, I could think of every little else to do. The standard suggestions from the ‘careers’ officer’ at Dundee University where I was in my fourth year of an honours degree course was to ‘go into teaching’ or ‘become a social worker’. Well, bollocks to that.
I was due to graduate with an English & Philosophy Honours degree, but didn’t: only got an Ordinary degree because the English department objected to me getting any degree of any kind in view of my ‘academic performance’ and the abysmal quality of work I turned in.
However, before taking my finals an Honours still looked on the cards (oh, how we can kid ourselves) so with little idea what do, I had contacted the British Army to inquire about joining up.
I reckoned that they might well be crying out for a chap like me, middle-class and nicely spoken with a background in philosophy, perhaps even in the Intelligence Corps like my old dad.
They responded quite soon, thanking me for my interest in taking the Queen’s shilling and telling me that there was always a need for men like me in the Army Catering Corps.
This rather bruised my ego. The Catering Corps! I know now that for any army in the field, catering and making sure troops were well-fed is one of the more important considerations, but I didn’t know that for many years.
So in 1974, the would-be writer in me wrote to several newspapers asking to be taken on as a reporter. I can’t remember how many replied, but I got an interview with Tony Robinson who had a beard and a stutter, and whose family owned the Lincolnshire Standard Group, including the Lincolnshire Chronicle where I started work in June 1974.
As I say, I wasn’t one of those who would settle for nothing less than a job serving in Her Majesty’s Press, but little by little the job grew on me, although I didn’t necessarily enjoy until I left provincial newspapers (after being sacked by my most recent, the South Wales Echo) and I moved to London in June 1990. There I began working subbing shifts on the national papers. And it was there I learnt most of what I know about newspapers and where the penny dropped about ‘what it was all about’.
But this is not about my ‘career’ – the quote marks are necessary so that no one gets the wrong idea – but a review of Jeremy Black’s book The English Press.
I had long been looking out for such a book detailing the history and evolution of the Press and thought I had finally found it when I came across Black’s book – and Jesus Christ what a disappointment!
Yes, it does trace the genesis of the Press in England and the stages of its evolution into the Press we know today (which is dying a slow death, however). But it is exceptionally badly written, so badly written that it became a struggle with every sentence I was obliged to read.
Black is a history professor at the University of Exeter, and although I have long known that many academics can’t write for toffee, masking their inability by insisting that ‘academic writing’ has its own imperatives and style, that cannot account for Black’s jaw-droppingly bad writing. It is quite awful.
As far as I am concerned – a necessary caveat as I dislike folk who pontificate on writing – it is not just getting the words down on paper, but, depending on what is being written, marshalling and organising thoughts, deciding on relevant themes, considering what strategy to use to put forward those themes and so on. In one sense, writing starts long before a single word is written.
Black, however, does none of that (or if so, it was for about eight minutes): there is no evidence at all that he marshalled and organised any thoughts.
Even worse, he seems not for a minute to have considered how best to present the ‘facts’ he hoped to put forward, and there is no evidence that he had some kind of idea of what the different themes of his book should be.
The huge irony resounding throughout Black’s book on what was then the Press but it is now best to describe as the media is that ‘clarity’ is the sine qua non of journalistic communication: if you are trying to communicate leaving your readers in the dark is not best advised to prove successful in getting across what you want to say.
That should also be true of other writing, though not necessarily all – fiction and verse might be the exception where what you are trying to do might be a little more subtle. Black, though, has cast off ‘clarity’ as pointless and useless and possibly just for wimps.
Perhaps I should give an example. There are a huge number not choose from, but here is one: in his chapter entitled To the present, 1975-2019, Black offers the following:
‘In part, the fortune and fate of the Press was a matter of the aggregate results of individual titles, but this was far less than the complete picture. The sense of overall success and prosperity was also highly significant as it could encourage, as well as discourage, investment and more generally turn outcomes into trends and trends into the future. There was also the impact of information about the position of abroad.’
What is Black trying to say? We might stab a guess, but trying to guess what a writer is hoping to convey is really not ideal, to put it mildly. As I say, this is just one of hundreds of instances where – this reader at least – is left scratching his head about it all.
Clarity? Black seems never to have heard of the word. And if he did, why did he end up with this mess? He seems never even to have considered it to be necessary.
Black’s is a manic scattergun approach, hopping from topic to topic, almost in random order in the same paragraph, introducing what are, in context, wholly irrelevant matters and serving up an indigestible mish-mash.
In the truest sense of the word, it is incredible that Bloomsbury, the publisher, did not send him off with a flea in his ear telling him politely when he presented his manuscript to the house ‘why don't you take yourself off, Prof Black and give it all another go?’
Yes, I have learnt a little more about the history and evolution of the Press but, in a sense, that is despite Black’s efforts. This book is dire and not at all recommended except if you are one of those strange souls who is addicted to puzzles and doesn’t mind spending several minutes about ten times on every page trying to work out what the bloody hell Black is trying to say. I’m not.
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