Very Top Five… Skills for journalists

Did someone not once say “if the pen is mightier than the sword, then journalism is the whetstone”? I’m sure somebody must have done.

Anyway, do you want to check out the skills zone for current trends or indications of paradigm shifts?

By the way, if you can use the words ‘paradigm shift’ without your face sagging into a grimace under the weight of all the sarcasm, then you will make an excellent political journalist.

Journalism is a cavalcade of caustic, faustic drudgery. It even says that in the dictionary (Any journalists reading this won’t check, they’ll just copy and paste it and take my citation for granted.)

Journalists have a surprising combination of tenacity and laziness. That is to say, they flatter themselves with the belief that they have the ability to discern the wheatiest stories from the misleading, irrelevant and uninteresting chaff. In practise this means they’ll superciliously scan through a report and make up their ‘story’ by pouncing on one wildly unrepresentative strand and spinning it out to cover three pages.

There are many different types of journalists, from political journalists (Who report how terrible politicians are) right through to opinion columnists (Who give opinions on how terrible everyone (including politicians) is.). Regardless of what sort of journalist you end up being, you’ll need easy mental access to the following grab bag of skills.

5. Headline creation

Headlines are supposed to get you to buy the newspaper, and they should hook readers in a punchy way.

Getting the words to rhyme is excellent form, as is including the sorts of puns that would disgrace even the worst sort of dinner party bore. For examine, imagine if John Locke, the philosopher and physician of the 17th century, had been seen wearing a dress. The headline wouldn’t say “Locke seen wearing a dress,” it would be “LOCKE FROCK SHOCK.”

And the journalists would go into paroxysms of delight.

4. Misrepresentation

This is most common in areas in which most people don’t have an adequate knowledge to evaluate the worth of a concept on their own, such as science, medicine or law. The brilliant thing is that the journalist who’s writing the article doesn’t have to understand it either!

Let’s say you want to write a story about GM foods, or a pharmaceutical product. All you have to do is find a scientist with a crazy opinion about how long-life cabbages give you brain cancer and present it alongside conventional wisdom (that they don’t) and suggest that these two opinions represent the two leading equally-weighted alternatives in a contentious field, and ta-da! Instant hysteria, and the chance to write dozens of follow up articles on how YOU, the readers, reacted to hearing the ‘news’ about cabbages, letters from concerned parents, discussions between experts on the pros and cons of each side of the argument, etc etc.

And you can’t be sued for libel even though you have practically invented a scare out of nothing, because, “hey! I’m just reporting leading researchers’ opinions here. You can’t interfere with the public’s right to know information that might be important to their health.”

3. Leaving your options open

Did you hear that a celebrity turned down an invitation to attend a charity dinner for dying orphans last week? Did you report it, and deride him as a massive wanker for being a no-show? If so, woops, turns out he couldn’t come because he was at a dying kiddies home, making a massive anonymous donation, which another paper has just reported.

No problem! Your initial story should have been written with enough leeway to report both stories with the journalistic integrity required to do ‘em justice.

If you’re an editor (A person who is to journalists what a giant bloodsucking bat is to regular-sized bloodsucking bats) then just change writers for this new story, and juggle around your writers in future as necessary depending on whether you want to pan a celeb or laud them with obsequiously brittle candour.

If this happens in an opinion column, then oh no! You can’t just change writer to report your massive change of tack. But if you're in this situation you could still be in the clear, just write the new story as if it’s the first time that the celeb has revealed himself not to be a massive wanker, and discuss the significance of this as if it’s a real thing rather than something you made up to save face.

Alternatively, just say “oh, that first piece was sarcasm, everyone knows that celebrity is a jolly nice guy,” if you can stand the g-forces tearing on your morals with such a huge change of direction.

2. Attract stories

Make yourself the go-to person for your area of expertise by greedily claiming to have an opinion about every little thing to happen in your chosen field for several years, and eventually everyone in that area will come to tolerate your consistent inability to just go away, like a stain on the toilet that just shift, regardless of how hard to scrub.

Next thing you know you’ll be attracting stories like a media magnate. Eh? Eh? Geddit?

1. Hounding

Realised that most of the things that happen to most people, even celebrities, are mundane? You can get into trouble for making stuff up, so your job is to make the boring, irrelevant or personal stuff that happens into news.

So follow a celebrity around and make notes on everything they say, form a firm personal opinion about how sensible and normal they seem; perhaps the sort of person you might go for a drink with. Be secure in the knowledge that like most sensible, normal people, they will eventually something a bit stupid, unkind or offensive that they probably don’t mean and wouldn’t have said if they’d had a chance to think about it. Pounce! And publish that.

Speed this process along by asking them barbed questions, or by barracking them, or by barricading yourself outside their house with a telephoto lens and long range sound recorder. Eventually, by you and your colleagues grinding insistence, you’ll slowly shift their perceptions of normalcy so they won’t know what’s right and what’s wrong, and will trot out these crazy out-of-touch nuggets of newspaper gold as a matter of course.

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So there we go, a handy how-guide to journalism. Feel free to use this as the basis for careers talks at schools.

Very Top Five... horrific stories which became Disney films

Disney have been delighting fickle kiddies for generations with tales of heroism and fabulousness. But just where did Disney get those zany story ideas from? Sometimes they made them up specially, but often they adapted a book, fairytale or myth.

Like strong coffee, these stories were often too hot and bitter for Disney’s taste, so they added saccharine and watered them down a bit, leading to this; the very top five horrific stories which became Disney films.

5. Hercules (1997):

This is from a Greek legend and they are always seriously messed up and usually involve a bit of incest or patricide (or both) or similar.

In the Disney film he does some quests, kills the Hydra and shiz, marries Megara, and the film ends. Happy happy.

But the fun is just beginning in the Greek version; Hercules and Megara have children and live together for many years. “That sounds lovely,” you might say. But then that naughty scamp Hades slips Hercules some potion, which drives him temporarily mad. “What fun this sounds,” you might delightedly purr, “but I’m sure Hercules wins out in the end, doesn’t he?” Well, sort of. He murders his Megara and their children in a fit of rage though. Woops.

Then he is all like; “Well, can’t be helped,” and gets married to another woman called Deianira. Then he starts having it off with Iole on the side, so Deianara soaks Hercules’ clothes in the Hydra’s acid blood, so that when he puts them on he is horribly burned. Now, as you may recall from the film, Hercules is immortal, so the burning just means that his skin is ripped off, and he survives, albeit in terrible agony. So he decides to voluntarily immolate himself on a funeral pyre, finally divesting himself of his mortal shell and joining his parents as a God on Mount Olympus.

Epic win for Hercules. But I can’t see Disney making that story into a sequel any time soon, to be honest.

4. Aladdin (1992):

Quite apart from the fact that Aladdin has a laughably (but apparently consolingly) white face among the other, swarthier denizens of Agrabah, this is another story based on an old legend. This one’s Arabic, from the Book of One Thousand and One Nights.

One main difference is that in the original story there were more genies, which might strike you as surprising. Surely Disney wouldn’t miss out on the chance to add to the cacophony of fun that is Robin Williams? Well, apparently they did.

Also, the Princess is called Badroulbadour, which has been sanitised for Western ears to the far less alien-sounding Jasmine. The change in name means that we are provided with a waft of exoticism, while actually it’s quite familiar and non-threatening. Plus Badroulbadour sounds quite like an embarrassing disease.

This logic of making the characters and setting as Western as possible did not apply to Jaffar the evil Vizier, who isn’t even in the original story and was caricatured to be as Arabic as Disney’s artists could manage before their pens split under the malign forces of xenophobia throbbing through them. Disney clearly thought that the original story had fewer evil Arabs than was suitable for a children’s story.

3. Snow White (1937):

Snow White is based on a fairy tale by the brothers Grimm, two writers who were renowned for having a good long think about stories that were completely unsuitable for children and then writing them into stories for children.

Although Snow White the film actually does contain many of the same elements as the book; An evil stepmother who tries to kill Snow White because she’s better looking (according to a magic mirror), and she gets some dude to take Snow White into the forest and chop her heart out as proof of death. But he takes pity on her and lets her go, and kills a pig instead. This is all in the film and book, and surely now that you’ve had a think about it you’ll agree that’s pretty intense. Oh, but in the book it’s Snow White’s actual mother, not her stepmother. Somehow a bit worse?

In the book, Snow White is encouraged to try and kill her mother, an aspect notably lacking in the film. One other difference with the book is that at the end the evil Mother comes to Snow White and Prince Charming’s wedding at the end. “They patch up their differences?” you say, “How jolly!” Well, no, actually, because the dwarves force the stepmother to wear iron shoes and dance until she drops dead. She conveniently dies in the film too, but due to falling off a cliff rather than being tortured to death at a wedding by some angry dwarves.

But Snow White the film and Snow White the book are daringly similar, on the whole.

2. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996):

This one’s based on a book by Victor Hugo, a 19th century French writer (and all round dreary git.)

The book has a complicated plot and lots of moping. Some highlights are that Esmeralda is hanged for attempted murder, and Quasimodo, who she has been totally blanking all the way through the book, lies inconsolable with grief at her grave until he starves to death.

The book is littered with killings; many of the central characters are murdered by Quasimodo for looking at his cathedral in ‘a funny way’.

1. Tarzan (1999):

A poor English infant is left in the jungle, and adopted by apes. The book (1912, Edward Rice Burroughs) and film are in agreement on this, except the film involves more Phil Collins music.

In the film, Jane is the first human that Tarzan meets. Not so in the book. Here, despite being brought up by apes, Tarzan is well aware of humans from an early age. Black natives, in fact. And this is where the whole story starts to take a nasty turn down a very dark alley.

Most of the book involves Tarzan swinging around the jungle killing black people for fun, either by dropping out of the trees and stabbing them in the chest, or by garrotting them with one of his vine ropes. Then he steals their bangles and swings off again, laughing at his skills and the natives’ stupidity compared to those of “the white race”. Seriously.

Then there is the chapter unapologetically called “His Own Kind” where Jane and some other white people turn up. Jane has a Louisianan maid called Esmeralda who, perhaps not coincidentally by this stage, is black. She is seemingly there only for comic effect, and screeches things like “Oh Lawdy!” when she gets a fright. Which is most of the time. Jane tries to shoot Esmeralda in the chest with a revolver at one point because she thinks it’s a kindness to put “The negress… the poor, faithful, thing… [out of her misery].” Bit harsh…

Tarzan doesn’t even get the girl, she goes off with his posh cousin Clayton from England instead. And Tarzan learns French from naval Lieutenant D’Arnot (with whom Tarzan spends far more time than he did with Jane, even when Jane was still in the jungle) and sets off onboard a steamship to Paris with D’Arnot. WTF?

Very Top Five... Things to do if you're unemployed

Damn, so you’re unemployed? You might well deserve it due to your lack of ability and ambition, or it could be the random stroke of a cruel recession, but I’m going to go ahead and assume the former. Everyone else will, after all.

Suddenly twenty four hours seems an absurdly over-generous amount of time to idly flicker past, every single day. Conversely, the weeks will melt into months and years before you can say “I’ve wasted my only life.”

Ever so insidiously, you’ll notice that your daily expectations get smaller and smaller. You’ll get dressed up to go to the library, and make ‘posting that letter’ your task for the day, and feel all proud when you succeed, in this pathetic simulacrum of meaningful existence.

So you’ll be after some sort of method of dealing with the crushing desperation of feckless unemployment, I assume? By the way, I’ve left suicide off the list, ‘cos, y’know, it’s a really big downer, but remember it’s always an option. Just saying; one less person on government financial support is one productive step towards financial prosperity for everyone else.

Anyway, here we go:

5. Apply for jobs

I just thought I’d get this option out of the way early on, so we can have a good laugh at its ludicrousness and move on with the article. Obviously when you’re initially unemployed you’ll be all keen to seek employment, and lay out all your job application things on your desk all ready to go, with your selection of coloured pens at right angles to your headed notepaper and selection of paperclips (A different colour for every day of the week, to liven things up a bit).

But soon you’ll find that the thump of rejection letters on the doormat is just about as effective a dampener on your enthusiasm as if the postman had come into your house and punched you in the stomach for having the audacity to make him deliver your application letter when it was so obviously a massive waste of his time.

4. Watch daytime television

Let the bright light flicker over your tired eyes. Soon you’ll start to care about what happens to the characters in tedious soaps. You’ll then add these soaps to your daily list of things to do. You’ll set your alarm clock to remind yourself to switch on (You don’t want to be distracted by any of the many, many other many pressing concerns on your time, after all.)

Then there are those programmes where they round up some morons and get them to have a go at each other in a conversational format, normally with a patronising host who can whip out DNA test certificates at any given comically-timed moment. An audience will chatter excitedly like a mob of vultures who’ve just realised that one of their own number is limping.

Vultures also urinate down their own legs to kill the bacteria picked up from wading over stinking, bloated corpses. I think that TV audiences do this as well, but only metaphorically.

3. Masturbate angrily

Why not combine your simmering anger and constant low level unshakeable frustrated arousal with some furious masturbation? Make it the highlight of your day.

Just a thought.

2. Forage

Maybe you’ve toyed with the idea of self employment but lack the skills, capital and inspiration to actually do so? Well here’s something everyone is always over qualified for; scavenging junk from bins.

Go out and liberate things from skips. Then use them to fashion new and fantastic items, like Macgyver. I don’t think MacGyver ever used some brown lettuce leaves and a half-eaten pie to make a square meal, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.

And the brilliant thing about cigarette butts is that there is often still some tobacco in them. Collect five, stick ‘em back together and sell them to a tramp. They’re not fussy.

If people see you foraging they might chuck a few loose coins your direction too. Bonus!

1. Wither

Your personal range of skills is unacknowledged by a cruel society, so why not show your contempt for society right back by shuffling around the house, unshaven and wearing slippers even though it’s way past lunchtime.

Let tedium set in. Just relax, let the world speed up around you, and pass you by, and settle in for a long, long period of unemployment. Possibly for ever and ever.

And ever.

On the plus side, you’ll stop worrying. I’ve never seen a stressed person wearing slippers in the afternoon, after all.

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If the unusually callous vitriol of this article offends you, please find consolation in the knowledge that surely my contempt of unemployment can only be derived from insecurity. But still, I have a job and you don’t. Nyer nyer.