I know how bankers feel. We journalists are also watching a public inquest into our profession, and it’s not pretty either. Months into the UK’s Leveson inquiry into press standards, and with journalists now being arrested, the central fact is still Leveson’s starting point: the News of the World hacked into the voicemails of murdered teenager Milly Dowler. I’m not a great phone hacker myself but I feel kinship with those who did it. They are parasites who use other people’s lives as material, and so am I. Journalism is parasitism. It has to be.
Soon after starting work in the FT’s office at Southwark Bridge in London, I realised that journalism didn’t feel like a job for adults. Partly, that’s because it was fun. Putting out the newspaper every day felt suspiciously like making the school magazine. My colleagues called their articles “stories”, as if we were still teenagers at play. Indeed, journalism is so enjoyable that half the planet now seems to do it for free on their blogs. Presumably accountants and bankers feel that their jobs are more grown-up.
Falling pay hasn’t helped us feel grown-up either. In 1947, Winston Churchill wrote a story about an imaginary conversation with his father’s ghost. Churchill tells the ghost that he writes books and journalism. “Ah, a reporter,” the ghost replies. “There is nothing discreditable in that. I myself wrote articles for the Daily Graphic when I went to South Africa. And well I was paid for them. A hundred pounds an article.” Churchill’s father visited South Africa in 1891. If he wrote those articles for certain newspapers today, he would still get £100, or maybe nothing.