One fact, one joke, one error


So went the traditional recipe for the diary, which brings humour and scepticism to the news pages. And it’s by no means all trivia, reports Conrad Landin


M


artin Waller has a recurring dream. It’s mid-afternoon, and The Times’s City diary is only half full. It’s a decade and a half since he edited the column, but Waller’s nightmare speaks to the


difficulty of this particular flavour of journalism. “I’m not comparing it to reporting from the front line of a war or heavy investigative journalism, but you have to walk in, and you have to find six or seven exclusive stories every day, and you’re getting about a quarter of a page out of them,” he says. “You’re sitting in a room full of people who have really good


stories, but they don’t always tell you. How do you prise it out of them? You’re sitting there staring at empty space.” Ever since the Evening Standard launched the Londoner’s


Diary – “three columns written daily by gentlemen for gentlemen” – in 1916, newspapers have flocked to balance the daily diet of hard news and invective comment with something altogether different. Quite often, diary columns will take in politics, high society and popular culture – but with a good deal more scepticism and humour than you’ll find on a newspaper’s other pages. “The old line used to be, one fact, one joke and one error,”


says Joy Lo Dico, who edited the Londoner’s Diary from 2014 to 2018. “While a regular news story would take anything in a rather straight, po-faced fashion, the diary story acknowledged there were a load of personal elements in any sort of row.” Yet as newspapers retreat from their once seemingly


unassailable position at the front line of public life, so too has the diary. The Guardian’s diary column was scrapped entirely in 2014 by then editor Alan Rusbridger, himself a former diary reporter. The Londoner’s Diary, like the London Standard as the paper calls itself these days, is now weekly. So too is the Daily Telegraph’s Peterborough, while the Daily Mirror’s diary does not appear every day. But is this merely the death of a format – or the death of an


entire journalistic approach? The job of a newspaper diarist, after all, demands a different set of skills to news reporting. Sometimes diary stories will be found in the same places as news stories. This could be at a press conference or keynote speech, for instance – but here the diary story is usually between the lines of the event’s


18 | theJournalist


message, in a joke cracked by the speaker or in the IT problems that plague their presentation. Other diary stories demand an altogether different


beat, made up of society parties and Westminster drinks receptions. “You might think it would be easier to get a line out of someone when they’re three champagne flutes down,” former Standard diarist Marie Le Conte writes in her book Haven’t You Heard?, “and you’d be partially correct, but it is harder than it seems to turn up to a party, sometimes


‘Did I go too far?’


Reporting on TUC Congress some years ago, a colleague told me he’d witnessed a prominent trade union leader accidentally taking a selfie while attempting to photograph the star speaker. It went straight in the Morning Star’s TUC diary column. Then a press officer


phoned: by no means did said union leader take a selfie – it was an absurd suggestion! I spoke to the source, who said it had certainly looked like a selfie – but a mistake was not out of the question. The press officer was not, however, seeking a published correction – which would merely repeat the very slight embarrassment caused. The differentiation


between diary stories and news means there’s a place


for rumours and jokes in a serious paper, without the need for total certainty and double sourcing. But some readers take


everything at face value, as Martin Waller learned to his cost. “The stories you lie awake at 4 o’clock in the morning worrying about – [thinking] ‘oh God, have I gone too far?’ – they’re not a problem. The ones you think are totally innocuous are the


ones that turn around to bite you. With one of them, I think I used the phrase ‘eyebrows are being raised’ about something, and they turned around and said: ‘You accused me of a criminal offence.’ And we had to backtrack on that one.” In an era of spiralling


disinformation, is it acceptable for trusted news sources to have inconsistent accuracy thresholds? There’s a definite danger, especially when stories are seen in isolation online, that the joke won’t land. The answer, surely, lies in


media literacy – which the NUJ is campaigning for governments and public institutions to take seriously. As well as distinguishing between fake news and trustworthy reporting, there’s a strong case for media literacy to include helping citizens to recognise different kinds of content.


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