I haven’t always wanted to be a writer. Until I was about 16, I was going to be a train driver if I failed to make it as a professional footballer and, not or, a pop star. I spent many happy days watching the express trains thunder past various often illegal and dangerous viewpoints and concluded that this was the life for me. Then, my lack of footballing skills and my inability to play the electric guitar (and amplifier) I had purchased, assuming I would automatically be able to play it, saw my main dreams, like West Ham, fade and die. At a careers night at Briz (Brislington School in Bristol), I met a famous female journalist, whose name now escapes me, so maybe not that famous, who gave us a talk about the world of newspapers and more importantly how she did her job. It all sounded so exciting, although I began to fret as to how I would learn shorthand. Soon I would be an ace reporter or daily opinion piece writer. Except that I then joined the civil service in order to help put bread on the table. My journalistic career was over before it had started.
Real life then got in the way. Football, girls, beer, holidays and a dead end but reasonably secure job and writing was what I did for fun rather than for money. The office magazine, a fanzine for the local football team, a regular column for the matchday programme at Bristol Rovers, a book and now this blog was all he wrote. The hot shot reporter, the daily column read by millions stayed as a dream.
Things were rather different in the early and mid 1970s. People got their news from newspapers and the BBC and that was pretty well it. In Bristol, we had the Bristol Evening Post, “the paper all Bristol asked for and helped to create.” I could see me writing about stories in the courts, car accidents, interviewing the local politicians like Tony Benn. “Did you read Johansen’s column in the Post yesterday?” no one asked, because of course there wasn’t one.
Now, almost no one reads printed newspapers, and certainly very few people under the age of 60. Even old codgers like me get their news online. I pay for some of my news, but most of it comes for free. Even the Daily Mail, the best-selling newspaper in the land, barely sells 700,000 copies a day. The newspaper I took daily, The Guardian, has a circulation of just over 100,000. The print editions of newspapers are dying. I suspect when one big gun goes, the rest will tumble like dominoes. It’s not if, it’s when.
Quality newspapers – and I would say that it’s only The Guardian and Times you could seriously called ‘quality’ these days, but even that is debatable – still employ great journalists and commentators, but the more downmarket papers, and I would these days includes The Telegraph in that number, are little more than tawdry right-wing hate journals, apart from the Mirror. Just populist tat. As for local newspapers, the end is nigh.
In London, the Evening Standard is no more. It’s now a weekly free sheet, so hardly news at all. In Bristol, the Bristol Post (the Evening bit has long gone), enjoys a circulation of around 5000, compared to 160,000 in the early 1960s. Given that nearly half a million people live in Bristol, you can see where this is going. The print edition still resembles a newspaper, with actual stories, features, opinion pieces and so on. The online edition is pure clickbait. These are some of today’s leading stories:
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91-year-old Joan Collins says her secret to ‘looking young without Botox’ is a £35 Charlotte Tilbury creation. (Joan is not from Bristol.)
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Dramatic moment Tesco delivery driver is pounded by waves on stormy seafront. (This is in Port Mellon, Cornwall.)
- ITV’s GMB Alex Beresford make big announcement as colleagues show support. (Telly weather man who was born in Bristol is going to be a father.)
- LIVE: South West braced for severe 60 MPH gales and rain. (But not in Bristol.)
- Antiques Roadshow stops show and tells guests, “Please go home”. (This happened in North London.)
It’s tosh, it’s nonsense, it’s clickbait. Quite simply, the paper’s owner Reach needs clicks to attract advertising and it will print any old bollocks if they find a story, any story, even if it has no connection to Bristol. This is not the kind of writer I wanted to be.
I feel sorry for the journalists of today, whether it’s those paid to lie on behalf of overseas billionaire owners or local reporters whose sole job is clickbait. What I write here might be bollocks, but it’s my bollocks and no one tells me what to write.
A more serious point is that I fear for the future of journalism full stop. With the demise of local newspapers, there will be a smaller gateway to the remaining national titles and you have to wonder if all the places remaining will be allocated to client journalists, friends of the editor and proprietor and a cosy clique at the top, posh public schoolboys one and all. Maybe it’s largely like that already. The arts is a desert for working class performers. Journalism could be going that way too.
I’d have liked to have been among the hot metal men of the day, as the presses whirred and rattled their way down below, arranged by skilled typesetters, but it was not to be.
The internet has changed everything and, on the bright side for me, it’s given us the opportunity to blog. It’s definitely too late to expect a call-up to the England squad from Lee Carsley or to be the lead guitar player in the Doobie Brothers and it is rather late to be considering a career on the railways. But writing is there until I lose my few remaining marbles and the physical ability to write. It’s something for which I am, but maybe you aren’t, profoundly grateful.
