Latest update on the word count. I’m still about 4,000 and a few short of where I should be by the end of today. I’m not sure how that happened. I only missed two days , though I also missed two days before that, but I did my best to get caught up with those, or at least not to get further behind. I need the calculator again. Four days at 1667 words a day is 6,668. So how am I still 4,000 words short if I’ve written more than 3,000 already today.
Another quick count... IN fact I’ve written 3,398 today so far. So if you subtract that from 6,668 you get 3,270. Oh well ,it’s still the equivalent of two days writing so I’d best get on with it. While I’m on the stupid calculating front I might do a really silly calculation. If I’m managing about 30 to 35 words a minute, let’s go for the lower target of 30, that means it’s going to take 1,667 minutes to finish. (Now that’s creepy!) Or almost 28 hours.
So theoretically if I can manage to type for an hour a day I should have it sussed before the end of the month. But I’m not managing an hour a day am I? Today’s gone well. In fact I think I’ve been typing for about three hours today. I could just let it go, I suppose and do more tomorrow. But I want to do things for my life tomorrow. I have a life, believe it or not, and I want to spend a bit f it on me tomorrow. So let’s not waste any more of today. I’m counting these progress discussions, even though they’d never form prt of the finished work, even f there ever is one. But it’s not getting my story told.
Back to my days at Sheffield learning to do this mythical subject of ‘journalism’. They also took us to other places to experience life. We attended a Derbyshire County Council meeting; planning if I remember rightly. I had very little idea of what was going on, considering I studied public administration as part of the pre-entry course. It showed us what we were letting ourselves in for, because I suspect all of us at some point in our careers sat at a very boring council meeting and tried to work out what was going on.
They took us to the House of Commons to see the mother of parliaments in action. It was quite impressive, even if I did decide that being an MP was a doddle. The idea was that we were supposed to see how our laws were made. Badly, as far as I could tell. We had a great day out in London and our soppy public administration lecturer let everyone go off and enjoy themselves if they wanted. Two of us stuck with him all day, though and were treated to lunch in a pub in the City and a night at the theatre. We saw Alan Aykbourn’s Confusions, which was odd because I’d seen it before at the Theatre in the Round in Scarborough, back when it was still over the library in Vernon Road. I knew that being at the back of a huge London theatre in a box where we almost needed oxygen took a lot away from the performance. There were so many details you just couldn’t see from there and I was used to being at most two rows back from the central stage where you were almost in the action. I saw the opening night, for one thing, and Alan Aykbourn uses a lot of local people in his work. One of the characters was actually sitting in the audience that night and not a few people realised who it was based on. We got none of that in London.
But it gave us an experience we hadn’t had before. I’d been to the theatre in London before but only to see big productions and musicals; not intimate theatre. Take my advice – if you ever want to see an Aykbourn play go to a small theatre and sit as close to the front as you can.
That’s what the journalism course was all about. It was to give us as many experiences as possible so that when we finally went out into the great big world, armed only with a notepad and pencil we wouldn’t be fazed by it. It certainly prepared us for the opportunities we would get working in newspapers. The people we would meet; the places we would go. The chances we would have. They even sent us for a day working at a real newspaper – the Sheffield Star - with real, qualified journalists, who took us out to do proper stories, or at least to watch them do them. We were all allowed to write something that had a chance of reaching print by the end of the week. Nothing massive, of course, we weren’t qualified for the big stuff, but a short press release that needed rewriting, an announcement of an event, things of that sort. I was delighted a few days later to spot my piece on a paper being read by someone on a bus. I wanted to rush up to them and point to the story and say: “I wrote that! Read it now!” I didn;t of course, but I had a huge smile on my face for the rest of the day. What I should have done was go out and buy a copy of the paper and cut out that story to begin my cuttings book. I didn’t do that either though.
I didn’t get quite the same thrill again until the first time I bought a portion of chips and found my byline on the paper wrapped round them. That was a few years later, when I worked in Lincoln and had taken over the Market Rasen office to prepare for my final exams.
I’ve not explained yet about the qualification system in journalism, have I? It’s different these days. They’ll take on anyone who’s prepared to write for buttons and work long hours. But back then you were expected to know your stuff. You had to understand people and how the world worked and what would happen if you libeled someone and how you could libel someone. After completing a full academic year learning the basics of the trade you were taken on by an employer and signed up for a two and a half year indenture, near the end of which you took a qualifying exam called the proficiency test. It was a tough day. Four exams in 10 hours. And you had to pass them all. You were on something like two thirds of a qualified wage until you passed proficiency and didn’t get a proper wage until you did.
You couldn’t leave in the intervening time and you had to do more or less what your employer said. We had a strong union back then. In fact the NUJ had a long running strike at East Midlands Allied Press in Kettering just after we all finished the pre-entry year and the struggle resulted in much better wages and conditions than before. For example, you used to have to work as many hours as there were stories to fill, so if you didn’t get everything done by five you just kept typing. Often you wnet straight from the office to a council meeting in the evening, covered that, returned to the office and carried on typing till you finished everytign that had been on the agenda. But the Kettering crew fought for a fixed hours week (well fortnight actually) and a maximum working day. They also got a pretty hefty pay rise. Once EMAP cavedin it was only a matter of time before the rest of the big publishers saw the writing o the wall and gave everyone the same. The NUJ was a strong group back then, and got what we fought for, even though the printers didn’t back us.
Thing as, the printers held the power back then. If an editor was prepared to break the union agreement and get part timers in it was more or less possible to produce a newspaper, because the printers would still set it and print it. But if the printers went on strike – no paper. The thing was, when the computer revolution finally hit newspapers (actually it was pretty early on i the life of the work computer.) Journalists accepted something called direct input. It meant that we could put text into the computer, the sub editors (who were journalists) could edit on computer, and then send the finished article through an automatic system to come straight out of the machines and onto the rollers. We no longer needed the skilled compositors who had been the ones to put our copy into the system and set up the pages. Their union tried striking, of course, and asked us to support them, but we told them where to go. They hadn’t supported us, so we didn’t really care if they would be out of work. What’s sauce for the goose, and all that.. Some of them retrained. Most of them were out on their ears. Serves them right for not supporting their brethren in the earlier fight!
I’ve digressed again haven’t I? I was talking about what journalism lessons were and then I moved on to the exam system and indentures and somehow got onto unions and sticking it to ‘the man’ to get the best pay and conditions we could. Some time later we secured what EMAP had started by having a national strike and every local newspaper in the country was affected. By then I was working up in the frozen North for a wholly different newspaper group but I’ll get on to that eventually. Perhaps. If I think it’s relevant to the tale later. I suppose it might be included in a chapter about meeting famous people. Because that was where I spent an afternoon watching Elton John get drunk, and learned the recipe for a Slow, Easy Comfortable Screw Against the Wall cocktail. But that is another story.
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