From my scrapbook-1

Like most journalists I used to maintain a scrapbook, of mostly book excerpts, news trivia, and first drafts of features/ book reviews I did for magazines. Sixteen single-ruled school exercise books of jottings, scribbled in my shabby hand-writings that are at times illegible even to me. I drew extensively (wouldn’t use the word ‘plagiarise’) from scrapbook jottings for my magazine writings.

Excerpt from The Press Inside Out by Bill Grundy

Newspapers are very odd things. Unlike sausages or shoes, production lost through strikes cannot be made up by overtime when a strike is over. An edition lost is lost for ever.

The problem every newspaper faces is to be able to influence the influential, who are few, and yet attract the mass; to push a political line, and yet have some claim to fair reporting.. . .Reporting in depth is often confused with reporting at length. Many long stories tell readers more than they wish or care to know.. . .News is not what they buy newspapers for. . .As for newspapers, it is not the number of readers, but their spending power that makes a newspaper viable.

News and the BBC: In its early days news played very little part in BBC’s thinking. As the story goes, one night an announcer said: ”This is the BBC. There is no news tonight”. BBC was regarded as merely a miracle where a gentleman with an impeccable accent and manners would read aloud, in as non-committal a voice as he could manage, stirring things about fat-stock prices and hoggets and shearlings; exciting to farmers, perhaps; less so to others.

Page One of Daily Mirror, London (of May 17, 1960), in reproduced here in its entirety.

Mr. K !
(If you will pardon
an olde English phrase)
DON’T BE
SO BLOODY
RUDE !
PS
Who do you think you are ?
Stalin ?