Philip Young, author of the excellent Mediations blog, has tagged me in order to get me to blog about his new Scoop! blog so that it can start getting the attention it deserves. Scoop! is all about journalists in fiction so I’ve got to name three PR practitioners or journalists that appear in fiction. I then tag three others in the hope that they follow suit. Easy enough, except that Philip has made it nine times harder by restricting the list to UK/European fiction. That’s too hard so I’m going to bend the rules slightly and include film/TV as well as novels.
Three UK/European journalists in fiction
1) Tin Tin – the easiest by far and the only one I didn’t have to think about. As a child I was a fan and even now as an adult I’m a bit of a Tin Tin fan. Wouldn’t it be great to have a complete collection on my book shelf?
2) Rita Skeeter – the journalist who features in the Harry Potter novels.
3) Huntley Haverstock / Johnny Jones in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent. Not sure if it qualifies as UK/European as it is set in London and Holland but he is an American foreign correspondent
I’d also have liked to mention Damien Day in Drop the Dead Donkey, but that’s TV and takes me over three.
The other hard bit was thinking who I could tag that might be interested in journalists in fiction. In the end I decided the best bet was journalists or ex-journalists so I tag:
Guy Clapperton who writes an excellent blog from his perspective as a freelance journalist and editor.
Charles Arthur the editor of Technology Guardian and longtime blogger.
David Tebbutt one of the legends of IT journalism and co-developer of the Brainwave BrainStorm software.
Now you’ve been tagged you can add your three journalists in fiction in the comments to this post on Scoop!.
CORRECTION: As David Tebbutt kindly points out his software is called BrainStorm and not Brainwave!
Erm, cough, BrainStorm please.
Anyway, nice of you to tag me.
I'm on the road at the mo'. I'll follow up when I get back. I have names…
On second thoughts, my journalists were the subject matter and Philip is looking for journalists who were incidental to the story.
Evelyn Waugh's Scoop! is the classic and I guess it doesn't count anyway, given the meme name and Pratt of the Argus falls by the wayside because Pratt himself is the subject of the book.
If anything pops into my head, I'll post and trackback. Right now, my mind is on other things.
Thank you, by the way, for your astonishing description of me….
Sorry to be a spoilsport, but I found this:
http://mulibraries.missouri.edu/specialcollections/weinberg.htm
It contains lists of fiction books featuring journalists. In the 'A' section I noticed Kingsley Amis and Jeffrey Archer. So I reckon it might be a fairly comprehensive list.
They're English language so you'd have to pick out the European books.