Tagged! Now for three fictional journalists
Stuart Bruce has tagged me (and is lucky I saw it; it’s only because he posted this morning and I’m searching for other stuff) to come up with some fictional journalists:
Philip Young, author of the excellent Mediations blog, has tagged me in order to get me to blog about his new Scoop! blog so that it can start getting the attention it deserves. Scoop! is all about journalists in fiction so I’ve got to name three PR practitioners or journalists that appear in fiction. I then tag three others in the hope that they follow suit. Easy enough, except that Philip has made it nine times harder by restricting the list to UK/European fiction. That’s too hard so I’m going to bend the rules slightly and include film/TV as well as novels.
Well, I’ve never played in an online tagging game, but let’s have a shot. Their being UK or European is a hassle - I’d have nominated the one in Thomas Harris’s “Red Dragon”, who’s a marvellous sleazebag.
I suppose I’m not allowed to include the war-terrified journalist who stars in my as-yet-uncompleted (in fact barely even started) novel? Damn. Nor the one in On Green Dolphin Street, as he’s American. Double damn.
1) Millon De Floss, the journalist/stalker in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels (such as The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book). Fforde - Jasper - is an excellent bloke and the novels are terrific fun.
2) The main character in Ink. (Try as I might, I can’t find a web link to this. Which may mean that I’m dreaming it.) As it happens I know Bill Scott-Kerr, who was the book’s editor. He’s also the guy who picked up Dan Brown. You may have heard of at least one of Brown’s books..
3) Um. This has had me stumped for more than 24 hours, which may say something about how many novels I read. I’m mentally scanning my bookshelves. Philip K Dick.. John Brunner.. not much journalism going on there. No, it has to be William Boot of Scoop, because apart from anything he’s so lifelike.
OK, so who do I tag? That’s a lot easier: Neil McIntosh, near-supremo of Guardian Unlimited; Bobbie Johnson, technology writer on the Guardian; Simon Waldman, deputy editor of Gdn Unlimited. I’m pretty sure none of them is fictional.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- PR treats journalists not as resources, but like car companies treat parts suppliers (updated) (5 February 2009; score: 25.66%)
- Not required on voyage: an understanding of journalists (24 September 2004; score: 24.68%)
- An economic theory of what journalists do (28 November 2008; score: 22.88%)
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February 28th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
I loved Jasper’s early stuff, although I think it faded as time went on - TEA and LIAGB were great, but I thought that TWOLP and SR just didn’t have the same spark. He’s a great chap, I met him in Worcester - did you see the car he’d painted up with the Escher print?
If we’re allowed repetition of titles, wasn’t there a PR in Lost in a Good Book? Flack (by name, that wasn’t an insult to PRs)?
February 28th, 2006 at 6:06 pm
I interviewed Jasper for the Independent a couple of years ago; he’s also a friend of my wife’s, being with the same publisher. He can fly planes and do flic-flacs, though probably not at the same time.
Also a very interesting example of an author who really gets the Web.
February 28th, 2006 at 10:25 pm
In Trollope’s The Warden, Tom Towers is editor of The Jupiter, a thinly veiled picture of The Times. Trollope clearly believed that the press printed stories without regard to the effect on innocent peoples’ lives.