IT always comes as a shock to beancounters when negotiations with editors over World Cup or Olympics travel budgets founder on the same rocky argument.
“But you’re sending a team from the sports desk AND a team from the news desk,” wails the Man in the Pin-stripe Suit. “Surely it’s a sports story and can be covered by sports writers?”
“Not so,” replies the editor. “The sports writers will simply cover the sport.”
“Perfect!” yells the frantic money manager. “You’ll get what you want and we’ll save half the costs.”
“Afraid not, old boy,” says old smoothie-chops. “What we will GET is the organisers’ PR . . . what we will MISS are the bust-ups, the drugs scandals, the misbehaving WAGs and the drunken orgies.”
Mahogany Row sees sense in the end, of course: they agree to half the budget you asked and, as your application was for double the amount required, honours are even.
The Triesman Affair, on the other hand, was what one infamous Sun editor would have called “a reverse ferret”. The Mail on Sunday sting that ousted the noble Labour Lord from his chairmanships of the Football Association and of England’s team bidding to host the 2018 World Cup was a rather tawdry kiss and tell, obtained by means of a recording device hidden upon the person of a self-styled ex-girlfriend.
Now, if an editor is prepared to sidestep the tenth commandment of the PCC’s Code of Practice (Thou shalt not “seek to obtain or publish material acquired by using clandestine listening devices”) then we might at least expect a little more than a one-sided account of the old guy’s snogability in the back of a Wembley passion wagon.
Because, as one of Britain’s best investigative reporters yelled down the phone at me, “That was NOT the story!”
Since we worked together on the Express in Manchester in the Seventies, Andrew Jennings has spent forty years as an investigative reporter and documentary film maker. He’s a Panorama reporter now, with a string of glittering prizes including a Royal Television Society Award for his Channel Four investigation into Olympic corruption. That said, Jennings prefers to boast of the six-year ban imposed by a vengeful IOC and the current ‘freeze’ he’s suffering in dealings with FIFA President Sepp Blatter.
In other words, he’s a man worth listening to. So I listened.
“There’s something funny about this whole episode,” he began. “Stings are definitely an in-house, DIY operation. You don’t trust amateurs. You would NEVER ‘buy in’ a sting, that’s not something we’d ever do at Panorama.
“If an alleged ex-lover came to you with a tape you’ve got three choices: turn her away, turn her over or toss her a fee and investigate the allegations yourself with your own people.
“You trust your own staff, your fake sheikh or whoever. What you need is an experienced team that can get the story and who know what to do if and when it goes pear-shaped.”
Unsurprisingly, the MoS was letting its scoop do the talking: “he might think that but we couldn’t possibly comment”, was the official response from Peter Wright and his triumphant crew. But in Derry Street’s nearby watering holes journos shrugged off criticism of their tradecraft.
As they see it, this was a case of a slighted old flame getting lucky: she records the conversation to prove their relationship and, in the process, the head of the FA and World Cup bid badmouths the Russian and Spanish FA.
Kerr-CHING! It’s jackpot time.
To be fair to Wrighty and his team, the MoS did follow up their scoop a week later with a spread on bribery at the top of the international game.
Meanwhile, Jennings dismisses the scorn sports writers poured on Triesman’s claim that Russia might be prepared to help Spain pay off referees in the 2014 Wold Cup in exchange for Spain supporting Russia’s bid in 2018.
“Vladimir Putin is determined to stage the World Cup. It’s like a Big Willy contest with other world leaders but the difference is he’ll put money behind it. He won’t just go the extra mile; he’ll do a global circuit.
“He’s already won the 2014 Winter Olympics for Russia [at Sochi, a Black Sea resort] and now he wants the World Cup in 2018.”
Jennings is irrepressibly confident that there really is a big story behind the Triesman tittle-tattle. “I talk virtually every day with fellow journos, ‘football blazers’ and spooks,” he says. “This sort of talk comes up all the time.
“Too many sports journalists say nothing, afraid that if they spill the beans they’ll ‘lose access’. I’d warn them to produce or they’d lose their bloody jobs!
“It is utterly hypocritical of these self-regarding reporters to utter faux rage over Triesman's comments when such allegations are common currency in every press box, every bar and wherever a hack meets another hack, inquiry agent or football official.”
Strong stuff! But I commend to you the Jennings unrelenting output which so enrages the sporting Establishment.
It can be found on the maverick award investigator’s website at www.transparencyinsport.org.
I CAN’T help feeling that Murdochs père et fils have a hit list of enemies they’re working through in alphabetical order: having done their best to blitz the Barclay Brothers and bombard the BBC they’re now aiming their bile at the British Library.
Young James’s attack on the Library’s plan to digitise and make available behind an online paywall three centuries of Britain’s national newspaper collection is surely both outrageous and – in the widest sense of the word – antisocial.
One cannot copyright history, which is what news becomes almost before it reaches the breakfast table; even literary and musical masterpieces eventually pass into the public domain.
If the public’s right to access library-stored information cuts across the Murdochs’ quite reasonable determination to charge for their newsgathering investment then the answer must be some form of statute of limitations.
Let News charge for today’s Times and twelve months of archive access. After that, log on to the Library.
“But you’re sending a team from the sports desk AND a team from the news desk,” wails the Man in the Pin-stripe Suit. “Surely it’s a sports story and can be covered by sports writers?”
“Not so,” replies the editor. “The sports writers will simply cover the sport.”
“Perfect!” yells the frantic money manager. “You’ll get what you want and we’ll save half the costs.”
“Afraid not, old boy,” says old smoothie-chops. “What we will GET is the organisers’ PR . . . what we will MISS are the bust-ups, the drugs scandals, the misbehaving WAGs and the drunken orgies.”
Mahogany Row sees sense in the end, of course: they agree to half the budget you asked and, as your application was for double the amount required, honours are even.
The Triesman Affair, on the other hand, was what one infamous Sun editor would have called “a reverse ferret”. The Mail on Sunday sting that ousted the noble Labour Lord from his chairmanships of the Football Association and of England’s team bidding to host the 2018 World Cup was a rather tawdry kiss and tell, obtained by means of a recording device hidden upon the person of a self-styled ex-girlfriend.
Now, if an editor is prepared to sidestep the tenth commandment of the PCC’s Code of Practice (Thou shalt not “seek to obtain or publish material acquired by using clandestine listening devices”) then we might at least expect a little more than a one-sided account of the old guy’s snogability in the back of a Wembley passion wagon.
Because, as one of Britain’s best investigative reporters yelled down the phone at me, “That was NOT the story!”
Since we worked together on the Express in Manchester in the Seventies, Andrew Jennings has spent forty years as an investigative reporter and documentary film maker. He’s a Panorama reporter now, with a string of glittering prizes including a Royal Television Society Award for his Channel Four investigation into Olympic corruption. That said, Jennings prefers to boast of the six-year ban imposed by a vengeful IOC and the current ‘freeze’ he’s suffering in dealings with FIFA President Sepp Blatter.
In other words, he’s a man worth listening to. So I listened.
“There’s something funny about this whole episode,” he began. “Stings are definitely an in-house, DIY operation. You don’t trust amateurs. You would NEVER ‘buy in’ a sting, that’s not something we’d ever do at Panorama.
“If an alleged ex-lover came to you with a tape you’ve got three choices: turn her away, turn her over or toss her a fee and investigate the allegations yourself with your own people.
“You trust your own staff, your fake sheikh or whoever. What you need is an experienced team that can get the story and who know what to do if and when it goes pear-shaped.”
Unsurprisingly, the MoS was letting its scoop do the talking: “he might think that but we couldn’t possibly comment”, was the official response from Peter Wright and his triumphant crew. But in Derry Street’s nearby watering holes journos shrugged off criticism of their tradecraft.
As they see it, this was a case of a slighted old flame getting lucky: she records the conversation to prove their relationship and, in the process, the head of the FA and World Cup bid badmouths the Russian and Spanish FA.
Kerr-CHING! It’s jackpot time.
To be fair to Wrighty and his team, the MoS did follow up their scoop a week later with a spread on bribery at the top of the international game.
Meanwhile, Jennings dismisses the scorn sports writers poured on Triesman’s claim that Russia might be prepared to help Spain pay off referees in the 2014 Wold Cup in exchange for Spain supporting Russia’s bid in 2018.
“Vladimir Putin is determined to stage the World Cup. It’s like a Big Willy contest with other world leaders but the difference is he’ll put money behind it. He won’t just go the extra mile; he’ll do a global circuit.
“He’s already won the 2014 Winter Olympics for Russia [at Sochi, a Black Sea resort] and now he wants the World Cup in 2018.”
Jennings is irrepressibly confident that there really is a big story behind the Triesman tittle-tattle. “I talk virtually every day with fellow journos, ‘football blazers’ and spooks,” he says. “This sort of talk comes up all the time.
“Too many sports journalists say nothing, afraid that if they spill the beans they’ll ‘lose access’. I’d warn them to produce or they’d lose their bloody jobs!
“It is utterly hypocritical of these self-regarding reporters to utter faux rage over Triesman's comments when such allegations are common currency in every press box, every bar and wherever a hack meets another hack, inquiry agent or football official.”
Strong stuff! But I commend to you the Jennings unrelenting output which so enrages the sporting Establishment.
It can be found on the maverick award investigator’s website at www.transparencyinsport.org.
I CAN’T help feeling that Murdochs père et fils have a hit list of enemies they’re working through in alphabetical order: having done their best to blitz the Barclay Brothers and bombard the BBC they’re now aiming their bile at the British Library.
Young James’s attack on the Library’s plan to digitise and make available behind an online paywall three centuries of Britain’s national newspaper collection is surely both outrageous and – in the widest sense of the word – antisocial.
One cannot copyright history, which is what news becomes almost before it reaches the breakfast table; even literary and musical masterpieces eventually pass into the public domain.
If the public’s right to access library-stored information cuts across the Murdochs’ quite reasonable determination to charge for their newsgathering investment then the answer must be some form of statute of limitations.
Let News charge for today’s Times and twelve months of archive access. After that, log on to the Library.
First published (well, MOST of it) in the Press Gazette, June 2010
