This week marks my 20th anniversary in journalism, and given that there is absolutely no other news right now, I shall write about that. I am from a generation of journalists that could luck into jobs with minimal training, and by minimal I mean none. We came after the era when vocational training was a requisite, but before the 2008 crash, when media jobs were rarer than hens’ teeth and salaries reduced to chicken feed. Believe me, I know how lucky I am.
So I learned on the job, and while my innate elegance doubtless gives the impression that I picked this up as effortlessly as Audrey Hepburn learning to model in Funny Face, I was more Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2, trying to fit into this new world and yet blowing stuff up. But I have learned from my mistakes, and given that these include once slagging off a powerful magazine editor when said editor was standing right behind me, you can consider these lessons a masterclass from la crème de la crème.
Lesson one: always do your prep
I like Tom Hanks. You like Tom Hanks. We all like Tom Hanks, the nicest guy in the movie business™. Who could be so awful that Tom Hanks would have to reprimand them? Hi!
Normally, before an interview, I read up on all relevant material. But with Hanks, I got cocky: sure, sure, Forrest Gump, Big, Sleepless In Seattle – I know my Hanks! And so, with the blithe confidence of a fool, I asked him why he had never played a villain. Suddenly, all the Hanksian “aw shucks”-ness fell away and he told me that he had played a villain, in the film Cloud Atlas. “You really should do your prep before an interview,” he scolded me, returning to that point several times and telling me to “check that film out”. I’m sorry, Tom Hanks. I never did watch Cloud Atlas and I’m sorry about that, too (kinda).
Lesson two: record everything
Early on, I was dispatched to interview Elizabeth Hurley about her swimsuit range. As this was just going to be a little thing, and about swimsuits, I thought I could get away with taking notes in my half-arsed shorthand. No chance. Hurley took a pointed glance at my notebook and placed not one but two dictaphones between us. “To be on the safe side,” she said, with a dagger of a smile. Chastened, I took out my dictaphone. I never went to journalism school, but I consider myself a graduate of the Hurley and Hanks School of Journalism.
Lesson three: your boss is not your friend
I blame the Guardian for this misapprehension, because my first boss at the paper, fashion legend Jess Cartner-Morley, is very much my friend. She tolerated more from me in my decade on the fashion desk than most therapists would accept from their patients, including finding me multiple times under my desk sobbing over a boy. Other bosses have been less tolerant. There was the magazine editor I wrote for so often I thought I could share my personal problems with her. A firm “This is not appropriate, Hadley” corrected that. Your boss is your boss. They are not your friend. Tattoo this on the inside of your eyelids.
Lesson four: check your facts
Back in the very early days, I interviewed an author a decade or two older than me. I unthinkingly described her hair as “silver”. She complained, saying her hair was brown. We went back and forth and, with the callowness of youth, I thought the whole thing a bit absurd. Fast-forward a decade or so and I spotted this author at a book festival and she was right: her hair was brown. Also, no longer being so youthful myself, I have a lot more sympathy with such details.
Lesson five: don’t bomb your office
OK, it’s finally time to tell this story. A while back, the tabloids had a running schtick in which they planted fake bombs near members of the royal family to show how badly guarded they were. A colleague came up with the wheeze that we should fake-bomb a tabloid paper, and so I made a bomb, a block of Blu-Tack stuck to a Chairman Mao alarm clock (long story). Lacking the necessary wiles, I failed to get past the security guard at the Sun; so I returned to the Guardian, put my fake bomb on my desk and went to the bathroom. When I came out, the entire office was empty. Baffled, I looked out the window – and there were all of my colleagues, outside. Someone on obituaries had heard the ticking of the Chairman Mao alarm clock and called the bomb squad. I had succeeded in fake-bombing a newspaper office: it just happened to be my own.
Other papers were soon calling the Guardian to find out who the idiot was and, to his eternal credit, my then editor, Ian Katz, took the flak. Well, I can live on the run no more, and so I am outing myself as the actual Guardian Bomber. And this is the number one thing I have learned about journalism: you will meet the greatest people, who will always have your back, no matter how stupid you are.
Here’s to another 20 years in the job, if my poor bosses can bear it.
