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flats. I moaned about it to Richard Owen, the correspondent of The Times. “Peter, take a tip from me,” he said. “Never complain about Rome. No one in London will understand.” He was right of course. The city is sublime and my deal, in hindsight, was a dream. I was on staff, accommodation and expenses paid, with a free office in an Italian daily. No money for an assistant, unlike in Delhi, my previous posting, nor for a car and driver, but a modestly comfortable life for me and my family. In return, I sent offers of stories for the foreign pages every morning, filed a piece of, say, 400-1,800 words three or four afternoons a week, was on the alert for hot news – pope falls off Popemobile, Berlusconi throws a bunga-bunga party – and happy to turn out the odd colour read for the magazines. Compare that with the situation today. Staff jobs grow sparser year by year – I was one of the Independent’s last staffers in Delhi and the last one in Rome – so it’s down to locally hired stringers, paid by the word, struggling to patch together an income from half a dozen outlets with no security beyond the next piece and no money for housing, let alone air fares. Then there’s the internet. This was slow to affect my
own work because The Independent in the early 2000s – cash-strapped as ever – had a primitive website that was only updated overnight. But, all around me, colleagues’ working methods were being transformed. Going to one press conference, I noticed that all the other reporters had brought laptops, primed to ping the minute the conference ended. “Today there’s an expectation that you’ll read your
emails every five minutes,” observes John Hooper, Italian correspondent of The Economist. “It’s very difficult to argue for the 24 hours needed to digest what’s happened.”
world now “
It’s another Peter Popham on the demise of a coveted posting
ppointed Rome correspondent by The Independent in 2002, I found the Eternal City disappointing: gridlocked traffic, graffiti everywhere, swarms of tourists. I had to live miles from the centre in a modern block of
My Rome deal, in hindsight, was a dream. I was on staff, accommodation and expenses paid, with a free office
In fact, in the 50 years since I typed my first piece on a little portable in Tokyo, stuffed it in an envelope and took it to the post office for mailing to London, the profession has changed beyond recognition. The most obvious way is the technology. Richard Owen says: “When I arrived in Moscow as The Times correspondent in 1982, you had to book a phone call to London and hope that you were eventually put through. Naturally, the KGB listened in and recorded the call. In the office, there was a telex machine on which to write and send articles to London. If the KGB didn’t like what you wrote, the telex transmission suddenly died.” Then there were the copytakers for those filing by phone. Elizabeth Nash, ex-Madrid correspondent of the Independent, recalls filing to the paper in those years. “I wrote the copy on my dad’s portable Remington in my flat, corrected it by pen then read it down the phone, reversing the charges,” she says. “It would take the copytakers 40 minutes to get an 800-word story down. They were very deadpan, very professional.” When things occasionally went wrong, there were
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