My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism

My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism by Andrew Marr pp, Macmillan , £ What would publishing houses do without the memoirs.
Table of contents

What does a newspaper editor actually do all day? How do hacks get their scoops? How do the TV stations choose their news bulletins? How do you persuade people to say those awful, embarrassing things? How do journalists manage to look in the mirror after the way they sometimes behave?

My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism by Andrew Marr

The purpose of this insider's account is to provide an answer to all these questions and more. My Trade , Andrew Marr's brilliant, and brilliantly funny, book is a guide to those of us who read newspapers, or who listen to and watch news bulletins but want to know more.

Andrew Marr tells the story of modern journalism through his own experience.


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This is an extremely readable and utterly unique modern social history of British journalism, with all its odd glamour, smashed hopes and future possibility. An intelligent mixture of history, analysis and practice.

See a Problem?

What would publishing houses do without the memoirs of former newspaper editors? Well, they would probably take fewer financial hits for a start. Though we journalists may be fascinated by the self-serving stories of Fleet Street's past luminaries, precious few outside our narrow world seem to care much for the mixture of behind-the-scenes reminiscences and name-dropping tales that make so many journalistic books so tedious.

I am delighted to say that Andrew Marr has broken the mould: It is also a book that, due to his TV "fame", might well attract wider interest, and it certainly deserves to do so. It is not really an autobiography, though we learn about Marr's career. It is not, thankfully, one of those hand-wringing laments for a mythical golden past. It does contain anecdotes, though they are always relevant to his wider argument.

It is not a sermon, but it does raise questions about the ethical morass of modern journalism. At the same time it is often witty, consistently self-deprecating and, most importantly, makes an important contribution to the increasingly bitter debate about the nature of the British media.

My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism

Marr largely eschews bitterness himself, though David Montgomery and Charlie Wilson - executives with whom Marr clashed during his unhappy editorship of the Independent - come in for some trenchant criticism, and the en passant description of Janet Street-Porter as "dreadful" was a rare glimpse of personal animus, albeit one with which I heartily concur. In effect, the book amounts to six lengthy essays which, as he readily concedes, are "reflexive and relaxed". But in drawing parallels across history, Marr comes up with a number of telling insights, many of which have not struck other commentators.

For example, he notes how newspapers have abandoned covering stories from around Britain.

Since the disappearance of the Manchester printing operations, followed by the withering of regional bureaux, the national press has become a metropolitan press. He argues convincingly that the trust between readers and popular papers has broken down because the public no longer believe tabloid stories, and he then worries over the "scrabbling for sales" that has driven broadsheets to "dabble in the tabloid agenda".

His analysis of the hegemony of consumerism, symbolised for him by the Sunday Times's overall content, is spot on. But at the same time he understands the shifts in culture and technology that have helped to carry papers along the route to their probable doom.