(What? Better things to do, you say? How impertinent.) If so, you will know that we are in recruitment mode and have been meeting lots of interesting journalists in recent weeks. Why am I giving you a meandering start to the column today? Well, a few reasons.įirstly, you might have read last week’s missive. I am sure both would also like me to point out that they too are successful authors. Michael Booth, our Copenhagen correspondent, has been a partner in words since my Time Out days. Andrew Mueller and I have a long history of mad commissions. And many of the writers who I met all those decades ago are still with me. Over time, I discovered that I was not bad at both finding the right writer for a commission and liaising with everyone needed to deliver something that read well and hopefully caught people’s attention – then continued to keep them engaged. And, years later, I worked with Simon Kelner at The Independent, an editor with crisp views on everything from politics to newspaper design: the perfect all-round editor. He and deputy editor Nigel Kendall also wrote genius headlines that made a story sing. Dominic Wells at Time Out just had a way of envisioning a story, which showed a mental dexterity that I wanted to emulate.
For starters, I was surrounded by people who were far better writers: just look at my days at The Independent on Sunday, where I worked alongside Maggie O’Farrell, author of current hit Hamnet, as well as Kate Summerscale and Jojo Moyes, both of whose books always leap to the top of the bestseller lists.īut, from the beginning of my career, I was drawn into watching editors put pages together. When I approached this choice long ago, I went for the path that I hoped would one day lead to editing a magazine.
Both routes can be fine ones it’s hard, for example, to think that there’s any difference in prestige among your peers between the two roles. Take one direction and you continue as a writer, take the other and you set a course for becoming an editor (there’s also a well-used side gate here that gets you the hell out of the profession). On magazines and newspapers, there’s often a fork in the road that appears for young journalists.
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