My former colleague John Short, who has died aged 83, was an excellent journalist and an outstanding mentor to those keen to follow in his generation’s footsteps. His benign, light-hearted manner belied a rigorous belief in high standards but made it easy for young reporters and subeditors to take his lessons to heart.
John was born in Liverpool, one of five children of John, a General Post Office technician, and Agnes (nee Leary), a factory worker and cleaner. His devout Catholic roots led him initially to train for the priesthood at a seminary in Valladolid, Spain. But the wider world called, and after national service in the mid-1950s he landed jobs successively as a reporter at the Birkenhead Advertiser and St Helens Reporter, and then as a subeditor on the Liverpool Daily Post.
His bright and wide-ranging work for the Daily Post caught the eye of Norman Cresswell, founder of the Catholic Pictorial, who was building a team in 1962 to launch a weekly alternative in Liverpool to the long-established Catholic Universe and Catholic Herald. John was news editor at the ‘Pic’ – which earned a name for independence, as well as readability, and reached a circulation not far short of 50,000. It was there that he met Hilda Shepherd, who successfully applied to be his secretary and then married him in 1964 – on a Tuesday, to suit the newspaper’s timetable.
When Cresswell sold the Pic, John turned to academia, doing shiftwork at the Guardian in Manchester to pay for a social studies degree at the University of Liverpool and an MA in mass communications at the University of Leicester. Armed with these, he took lectureships at the University of Leeds and later the University of Ulster in the growing field of media studies, adding new cohorts of young enthusiasts to those he had fostered on the Liverpool Daily Post and the Pic.
Never one to reject novel opportunities, he had an odd but enjoyable spell at the Central Office of Information in Leeds during the era of Margaret Thatcher, when he proved himself to be particularly adept at combining an official news release with a mutinous subtext. He also spent time in Australia as a visiting professor at the school of journalism at the University of Queensland.
Fun and faith marked John’s journalism and his care for colleagues, many of whom went on to distinction in the UK’s national media and overseas. He was a great raconteur and made many friends during retirement in York, where he worked voluntarily for the St Vincent de Paul Society before moving to Ely in Cambridgeshire to be nearer family during ill-health.
He is survived by Hilda and their children, Emma and David.
