MEDIA STUDIES
My message to the young: it's easier to become a Silk or an ambassador than an editor or columnist
STEPHEN GLOVER
Iwas going to write about Max Hastings, the newly appointed editor of the Evening Standard, but I don't think I can. My researches are not yet complete. There remain one or two enquiries to be made, a couple of loose ends to tie up. It will have to wait.
But Mr Hastings will nonetheless play a small part in this column. Something he did last week has set me thinking about jour- nalism, and the increasingly uncertain career prospects which it offers young men and women. This column is directed not so much at fellow journalists, who have already climbed aboard and can't easily get off unless they are pushed, as at parents who may be thinking about what their beautiful and clever children should do when they leave university, and at those young people themselves.
It is very likely that they will want to be journalists. In my experience, almost all young people do. It was not so 20 years ago, when as a newly minted graduate I petitioned the editor of The Spectator, Alexander Chancellor, to let me write for this magazine. In those days most of the cleverest young men and women still regarded the Foreign Office or the Bar or the City as both more respectable and more sensible. Newspaper journalism was consid- ered by some a little below the salt, though television journalism was believed to be glamorous.
All reservations have been blown away, and newspaper journalism is the acme of respectability. I can't wholly account for it. One explanation may be that papers have defied every prediction of impending doom. Twenty or 30 years ago it was widely assumed that television would eventually make them redundant. In the event they have proved astonishingly resilient. News- papers, at any rate broadsheet ones, offer intelligent or opinionated young people more scope than television, which is increasingly devoted to soundbites. When- ever they advertise bursaries they are besieged by thousands of applicants. Uni- versities have set up undergraduate courses in media studies, usually run by failed jour- nalists but no less popular for that. One such person, a professor of journalism at what was an obscure polytechnic but is now dignified with the title of university, recent- ly told me that his department receives some 2,000 applicants every year for 60 places on a media studies course. Many of those turned away have three A grades at `A' level.
Which brings me to Max Hastings. Last week he got rid of five journalists. Now that is nothing new for Mr Hastings. When he was editor of the Daily Telegraph he sacked a great number of hacks. He has been edi- tor of the Evening Standard for three weeks and his sackings are already into double fig- ures. He has dismissed the City editor, the sports editor, the travel editor, the motor- ing correspondent and the fashion editor, whom he tried unsuccessfully to rehire. He sacked me because he didn't like what I had written about him in my press column — but that's another story. Last week he turned his attentions to the engine-room the uncelebrated people upon whom every newspaper depends. Four sub-editors were despatched, along with James Hughes- Onslow.
Mr Hughes-Onslow is the genius who gave life to Terry Major-Ball, the Prime Minister's brother, for which act the nation, let alone the Evening Standard, owes him an incalculable debt. He coaxed a book out of Mr Major-Ball that is one of the great comic masterpieces of our time. It is true that at the Evening Standard Mr Hughes- Onslow occupied no very fixed position, but the latitude he enjoyed was proof of the imaginative and humane character of the editor, Stewart Steven, as well as of his pre- decessor, Paul Dacre. Successful newspa- pers always need a few characters like Mr Hughes-Onslow floating around the place, dispensing wisdom and gentle wit and good humour.
Last week Mr Hastings got rid of this unusual person, who had worked for the Evening Standard for 13 years. I gather the conversation went something like this. Mr Hastings: 'James, I don't think I've got space for you in the features department.' Mr Hughes-Onslow: 'Oh, that's all right. I don't mind working somewhere else in the paper. I'd quite like to work on the political side.' Mr Hastings: 'No, I mean I don't think we've got space for you on the paper.' Mr Hughes-Onslow: `Oh.' And that was that.
But at least Mr Hughes-Onslow enjoyed the benefit of an audience with Mr Hast- ings. The four sub-editors (I can vouch for the competence of the two whom I know) were not brought before the great man.
Some people deserve to be sacked. When I was an editor I dismissed a few journal- ists, but I like to think that they were not surprised — in other words, they had been given a chance to do better — and I told them personally. Undoubtedly there are editors who rather enjoy throwing people overboard, and I have known one or two who derived a positive thrill. It goes without saying that Mr Hastings does not fall into this category.
My point is not directed primarily against Mr Hastings, who is merely an exemplar of a new tendency in Fleet Street for incoming editors to dismiss without explanation jour- nalists who have served their newspapers loyally and on the whole competently for many years. The Evening Standard, by the way, is profitable and pretty successful, and hardly in need of radical measures. Some of the journalists whom Mr Hastings has sacked may be glad of the generous redun- dancy packages which the paper offers, but they will find it difficult to get equally good jobs. Seemingly large sums of money disap- pear terrifyingly quickly when there is no income.
Admittedly, employment everywhere is less secure, but journalism, never a struc- tured profession, has become spectacularly precarious. Here is the paradox: as newspa- pers have become more profitable, so man- agements have become more cavalier with their employees, many of whom are no longer unionised. Editors and 'top colum- nists' are much more highly paid than their predecessors were ten or 20 years ago Mr Hastings, for example, receives £300,000 a year — but the pay of engine- room journalists has improved far less dra- matically, and they do not enjoy the securi- ty they used to.
So if little Johnny or Samantha want to be journalists, tell them this — that hacks are members not of a profession but of a craft in which bewilderingly conflicting val- uations will be made of their skills. If they enter the law they are more likely to become Silks, more likely in the Foreign Office to inhabit some distant ambassador's residence, more likely in the City to enjoy well-paid directorships, than they are to be highly paid editors or famous columnists. Journalism is like showbiz, with this differ- ence — that not only are the stars some- times dashed to the earth but the ordinary, unoffending foot-soldiers can be plucked out and thrown aside at the whim of a new editor or management. Tell them all this and then say that journalism is fun.
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