Mercurius Cantabrigiensis
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- Joined
- 8 November 2007
- Messages
- 46
- Reaction score
- 17
Having read the “Oh dear, not Jane’s too” thread, I suppose that a logical question must be to ask which magazine represents the 'gold standard' in defence journalism mentioned there? Should we all be switching out subscriptions from International Defence Review to Brand X when they expire? Or is this gold standard a fantasy?
An indecent number of years ago when I worked in the aerospace industry, I learned that a well-known aerospace magazine had a vacancy that I could in theory fill. Over my lunchtime pint, I daydreamed of starting a glamorous new career.
That afternoon, I tried the simple of experiment of counting the number of pages of text in the magazine in question, counting the average number of words in each page, and counting the number of staff writers who were listed on the contents page. Simple arithmetic told me the approximate number of words each writer had to generate for each issue.
Then I worked out the approximate number of words in the report I was writing and thought about how long that job was taking. Suddenly that glamorous new career started to look more like the ‘rowing of the galley slaves’ scene from Ben Hur, and those daydreams collapsed. I’ve often wondered how many would-be applicants for the job did the same calculation and came to the same conclusion.
In today’s economy I don’t suppose that the journalistic workload has reduced any. At a Farnborough lunch a couple of years ago, I found myself seated next to a young lady from a well-known aerospace magazine. Just as the conversation with out host started to get technologically interesting, she excused herself and headed off for her next appointment. Apparently it’s not unknown for reporters to have air show appointments at 30-minute intervals.
So given the speed at which reporters apparently work, it’s hardly surprising that the odd fake story gets through. In the 1960s, even dear old Flight magazine (which almost certainly had a lot more in-house expertise than it does now) fell victim to a hoax – but being Flight, gleefully published an account of the hoax in a subsequent issue.
Perhaps a good analogy lies in the world of fine art, where one dealer once assured me that any full-time professional dealer who claimed never to have been taken in by a forgery was lying.
Stargazer2006 was quick to agree that Jane’s was not all that it should be, but as RP1 quickly pointed out, he’d managed to get a major mistake in only a single paragraph of text. We have all done it. So when I see ‘howlers’ or hoaxes in print, my reaction is not to assume that the writer in question is of limited competence, but to think “There, but for the grace of God, go I”. But according to my nearest friendly historian, even those widely-quoted words of John Bradford contain a reporting error…
An indecent number of years ago when I worked in the aerospace industry, I learned that a well-known aerospace magazine had a vacancy that I could in theory fill. Over my lunchtime pint, I daydreamed of starting a glamorous new career.
That afternoon, I tried the simple of experiment of counting the number of pages of text in the magazine in question, counting the average number of words in each page, and counting the number of staff writers who were listed on the contents page. Simple arithmetic told me the approximate number of words each writer had to generate for each issue.
Then I worked out the approximate number of words in the report I was writing and thought about how long that job was taking. Suddenly that glamorous new career started to look more like the ‘rowing of the galley slaves’ scene from Ben Hur, and those daydreams collapsed. I’ve often wondered how many would-be applicants for the job did the same calculation and came to the same conclusion.
In today’s economy I don’t suppose that the journalistic workload has reduced any. At a Farnborough lunch a couple of years ago, I found myself seated next to a young lady from a well-known aerospace magazine. Just as the conversation with out host started to get technologically interesting, she excused herself and headed off for her next appointment. Apparently it’s not unknown for reporters to have air show appointments at 30-minute intervals.
So given the speed at which reporters apparently work, it’s hardly surprising that the odd fake story gets through. In the 1960s, even dear old Flight magazine (which almost certainly had a lot more in-house expertise than it does now) fell victim to a hoax – but being Flight, gleefully published an account of the hoax in a subsequent issue.
Perhaps a good analogy lies in the world of fine art, where one dealer once assured me that any full-time professional dealer who claimed never to have been taken in by a forgery was lying.
Stargazer2006 was quick to agree that Jane’s was not all that it should be, but as RP1 quickly pointed out, he’d managed to get a major mistake in only a single paragraph of text. We have all done it. So when I see ‘howlers’ or hoaxes in print, my reaction is not to assume that the writer in question is of limited competence, but to think “There, but for the grace of God, go I”. But according to my nearest friendly historian, even those widely-quoted words of John Bradford contain a reporting error…
