The honest world of real journalism

Journalists? Up there (or rather down there) with lawyers, estate agents, MPs, Premier League footballers and private investigators, if you ask me.

 They’d sell their mother down the river for a story, lie their way into your house, nick your private pictures off the mantelpiece if you let them in and don’t even think about what they’d do with your mobile phone.

 That seems to be the general public perception this week of the profession from which I have made my living for the past 25 years.

 The revelation that News of the World reporters may have listened to Milly Dowler’s voicemail messages is surely bringing a sea change in the way the public views newspapers. Footballers, Z-list celebrities, soap stars have always been viewed as fair game, I think. That’s because media attention and all that comes with it is part of the territory. But an ordinary 12-year-old girl who was brutally murdered by a serial killer?

 And the problem for the likes of me is that the general public, who know no better, will think we are all up to it. That the reporter from the local paper, who knocks on the door of the victim of a car crash and whose visit is often a means for the relatives to get out their grief, really will steal pictures of the victim off your mantelpiece.

 That it is no longer safe to pick up the phone to an apparently friendly reporter from the local weekly, who is asking if they can come and visit.

 On the day the Milly Dowler allegations broke, I was among dozens of regional and weekly journalists at the funeral of Clive Leighton, a much-loved former colleague cruelly taken from us by cancer at the age of 58.

 One of Clive’s many claims to fame was his (possibly exaggerated) boast that during his career of over 30 years, he had managed to close more newspapers than any other journalist in the country. That was because his journalistic flair, which he possessed in spades, didn’t always match his commercial acumen.

 But Clive knew newspapers; he knew their readers and he knew how to give readers, if not always advertisers, what they wanted.

 And Clive would have been horrified at these revelations. As for those of us at his funeral, some even said what was going on made them ashamed to be journalists. 

 Because a hard-working reporter on a regional daily or weekly is as far removed from the news desk of the News of the World as David Beckham is from whoever plays in the No 7 shirt for Tamworth FC this season.

 But the danger of what is going on here is that we all get tarred with the same brush and that the journalistic profession is damaged beyond recognition. 

 At a time when the incoherent mess which makes up most of 'citizen journalism’ is posing a growing threat to the skills many of us have spent a lifetime learning, that would be a disaster for the world I love.