Paper Monitor
12:36 UK time, Tuesday, 29 January 2008
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Will Alex James give it rest?
Paper Monitor has noted previously how the sometime-Blur bass guitarist seems to be cropping up with increasing regularity in the papers as he carves himself a parallel career in the media. What started with a weekly column in the Independent largely about his obsession with cheese seems to be flourishing into the role of a fully-fledged star reporter.
Last night he made the leap to TV, leading an investigation for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's Panorama on the cocaine trade in Colombia. And here he is today, in the Daily Mirror, writing about the self same investigation. And just to put the whole thing in context there's an extract from James' autobiography in which he recalls a drug-fuelled birthday that saw our intrepid reporter-to-be "soused in champagne" and "devoured by lusting women".
Now Paper Monitor doesn't mean to be mealy mouthed about all this but at just about the time Mr James was riding the crest of his coke-fuelled rock star wave, it was toiling away at journalism school, learning all those frivolous things like the inverted pyramid of news story construction, the laws of defamation, contempt of court, local government reorganisation etc, etc
Yet who gets to do the serious Pulitzer-style investigative story?
And as for that picture of Mr James in today's Mirror, holding aloft what at first glance is taken to be a rock of cocaine… are we sure it's not just a lump of Wensleydale.
A few weeks back, while analysing the style of reporting in the Economist newspaper, Paper Monitor carried a salutary warning to any wannabe journalists out there about how to get into journalism.
Allow it to rescind those thoughts and moot the following advice to any aspiring hacks: that intro to the old ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Two Grand Prix live programme - get a bass guitar, learn it, team up with a wannabe cockney "street poet" and get wrecked. Although in the interests of hedging your bets, don't forget your 9am shorthand lessons.
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