- Disabling protests - 30th June 2025
- A good storybook - 30th June 2025
- Cancel culture part three - 27th June 2025
During 23 years with the BBC, and a 41 year career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, it has always been fundamental to WRITE A GOOD STORY, and this is now put centre stage by the death earlier this month of the former journalist Frederick Forsyth, as well as by the emphasis given to the number of journalists who go on to become famous authors.
Good writing is good writing.
In novels you explore fundamental themes as well as human emotions, and doing a story on The Eye you may not do these things, but the basics are the same.
You want people to read it!
With this in mind, it has always been intriguing to me how many journalists (and former journalists) go on to become famous authors, and the spotlight has been thrown on this by the sad news a few weeks ago that Frederick Forsyth has died.
Mr Forsyth returned from Africa where he had been covering the Biafran war in Nigeria, but possessed no money or prospects.
Against friends’ advice, he decided to write a novel, and worse it would be about Charles de Gaulle.
The book The Day of the Jackal was an unlikely success because the central question of any thriller—will the villain succeed?—had already been answered.
Mr De Gaulle had died of natural causes the year before the book’s publication (1971); readers knew the assassin failed before they read the first word.
The book’s thrill lay not in the ‘whether’ but the ‘how’, and as a journalist, Mr Forsyth had covered several assassination attempts on Mr de Gaulle during the 1960s, so the book reflected his time in the field as a reporter.
But Mr Forsyth was far from the only one – the list of famous authors who were journalists originally is endless
There is, for example, the celebrated Robert Harris, whose latest book ‘Conclave’ had particular significance recently!
After leaving Cambridge, Mr Harris joined the BBC (where I was for 23 years) and worked on News and Current Affairs programmes such as Panorama and Newsnight (both of which I have been employed with).
In 1987, at the age of 30, he became political editor of The Observer, and later wrote regular columns for The Sunday Times as well as The Daily Telegraph.
Then there is Cardiff-born Ken Follett.
After graduating in 1970, he completed a three-month postgraduate journalism course and began working as a trainee reporter for his hometown newspaper the South Wales Echo (where I started in 1983).
I would never pretend to be in the league of these people, but journalists and authors do at least share a common background sometimes.
It comes down to A GOOD STORY – so read my book of the same name about it!
The memories of Phil’s astonishing, decades long award-winning career in journalism (when writing a decent story was paramount) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in ‘A Good Story’. Order it now.
Tomorrow – why experts in Wales as well as globally have warned about the changing nature of crime today, after high-street firms were hit by cyber attacks.
