My Paper Chase
by Harold Evans
Buy on AmazonIn My Paper Chase, Harold Evans recounts the wild and wonderful tale of newspapering life. His story stretches from the 1930s to his service in WWII, through towns big and off the map. He discusses his passion for the crusading style of reportage he championed, his clashes with Rupert Murdoch, and his struggle to use journalism to better the lives of those less fortunate. There's a star-studded cast and a tremendously vivid sense of what once was: the lead type, the smell of the presses, eccentrics throughout, and angry editors screaming over the intercoms. My Paper Chase tells the story of Evans's great loves: newspapers and Tina Brown, the bright, young journalist who became his wife.…
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"Well, editing is not something that you can learn from books. That’s true of many things. But a book that can still be of inspiration. A bit of inspiration doesn’t go amiss. This one is not hostile, like the Trollope. Nor does it see editors as dysfunctional figures, as Forster does. Harry’s book is not much about leaders and opinion at all. It’s mostly about investigation and communication and presentation and making your readers aware of what’s going on. I think that once you’ve read all the way from one end to the other, and then thought how we’re going to maintain that particular tradition of journalism in the internet era, it’s a worthy end to a set of books which otherwise might be rather depressing. The First Casualty suggests that editors’ control over things is straying; in Towards the End of the Morning they are probably doing well, but are rather invisible; in The Warden they do bad things even for good motives and it’s not always easy to separate out the two. But My Paper Chase is a rather inspirational book, about the highlights of some of the best things editors have achieved."
Editing Newspapers · fivebooks.com