My Paper Chase

"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."