In an interview on Editing Newspapers

Can books tell us much about what it’s like to edit a newspaper?

Peter Forster’s The Spike is probably the least well-known but the author does, unusually, set himself the task of describing, as he puts it, “the nature of the job, and the conditioning effect upon the person who does it”. The plot is rather trite, but he at least does give you some indication of what it’s like to see the news sked and have the power to decide what’s important in it.

And, having been an editor yourself, did you think it was an accurate portrayal?

Yes. Instead of describing high politics, the prime minister on the phone, proprietors breathing down your neck and all that tends to make up the caricature notion, he talks about the problems between the editor’s secretary and the secretary in the sports department, and the problems of having too many lunches in the same week with people you don’t need to have lunch with, and how easy it is to waste your time. He talks about primadonnas on the brink of resignation, and how lawyers and diarists have different standards of truth…

It’s not a great novel. To some extent it’s a novel of management with a romantic plot, but it does at least attempt to deal with the personal aspects of editing a newspaper. It’s a kind of cautionary tale. It’s got a wonderful opening line: “He eased himself into the chair behind the big desk and thought, ‘Well now it will be different’.” Now he was editor! And it describes all the things he thought he would do before he became the editor, and how they would be done. And the things that stop him doing all these things are not big things. They’re all the little things that I can recall so well. It is one book which describes the experience from the inside. Most of the books about newspaper editors tell it from the outside, from the point of view of people who are critical – of which Trollope’s is one of the most famous.