In the nox­ious stew of today’s world, the recent clos­ing of News­pa­per House, home of the Argus, Cape Town’s evening news­pa­per since 1857, is a minor bit of gris­tle. But I began my jour­nal­ism career there, so rather than a polit­i­cal dia­tribe in this week’s perch post, I’m going to indulge in nostalgia.

My first job on the Argus was sell­ing adver­tis­ing (I arrived in South Africa a notch above broke), but what I real­ly want­ed to be was a reporter. Bren­dan Boyle, a friend and reporter on the paper, wan­gled me an inter­view with Ian Wylie, the deputy edi­tor, who told me to write something.
Fif­teen hun­dred-plus words on my adven­tures in post-Prague Spring Czecho­slo­va­kia were six times more than he want­ed. “But,” he said, “you can spell and you’re not a half bad writer. Maybe we can turn you into a reporter.”
There was no job open­ing, so I knocked on his door once a week until he final­ly said: “If I give you a job, will you stop both­er­ing me?”
Three weeks lat­er, on Feb­ru­ary 2, 1973, I walked with con­sid­er­able trep­i­da­tion into the Argus news­room and intro­duced myself to Neil Lurssen, the news editor.
He point­ed to an emp­ty desk.
I went and sat down. An hour or so lat­er I was dis­patched to cov­er the open­ing of Par­lia­ment parade.
In those pre­his­toric days before com­put­ers, we banged out copy in “takes”, three or four short para­graphs per sheet of paper. A “slug line” — the sto­ry sub­ject, date and reporter’s name — went across the top, the word “more” at the bot­tom and “ends” at the appro­pri­ate point. You made three car­bon copies, which could be among the ori­gins of the sobri­quet “ink-stained wretch” applied to old-time reporters.
When I hand­ed over my cou­ple of hun­dred words, Lurssen made me stand in front of him while he scanned them. The fourth para­graph end­ed “… fol­lowed by two mag­nif­i­cent­ly groomed white hors­es with pen­nant-bear­ing rid­ers and six­teen shin­ing brown hors­es in rows of four.”
“How do you know there were that many hors­es?”, Lurssen asked.
“I count­ed them,” I said.
Incred­i­bly, my first-ever news sto­ry was a sin­gle col­umn side­bar on Page One. It would be some time before I got on the front page again, however.
More than a few efforts end­ed up on the “spike”, a long nail extend­ing from a wood­en base on a cor­ner of the news editor’s desk. Unwor­thy copy was stuck on it and left to rot; a per­verse ver­sion of a hanged man left dan­gling on a pub­lic gib­bet as a warning.
I’m will­ing to bet if the spike had sur­vived the tran­si­tion to the dig­i­tal age, rather than see­ing it as part of the learn­ing process, some­one would run to HR to com­plain about being “bul­lied”.
In a spike anec­dote from the beloved “too good to check” cat­e­go­ry, a crusty reporter on an Amer­i­can dai­ly wrote a piece slugged “Uranus”, with the added nota­tion “Embar­goed Until Noti­fi­ca­tion”. The last copy he ever dropped onto the news editor’s desk alleged­ly read: “I quit. Spike Uranus.”

                          WHAT EVERY SCRIBBLER NEEDS

After a few months in the gen­er­al news­room, I was trans­ferred to the week­end edi­tion, over­seen by Humphrey Tyler, a diminu­tive, old-school jour­nal­is­tic mad­man who pushed and men­tored me. His most mem­o­rable piece of advice guid­ed my ensu­ing jour­nal­ism career: “If you can find a heart­string boy, pluck it.”
Over the course of a few months, city engi­neer Sol­ly Mor­ris decried me as “an ene­my of Cape Town” for a series of sto­ries on some his grandiose (and ulti­mate­ly failed) devel­op­ment schemes. The Sec­re­tary for Trans­port accused me of pen­ning “infa­mous lies” about his plans to des­e­crate the glo­ri­ous coastal Gar­den Route with a (thank­ful­ly nev­er built) six lane high­way. A major Cape win­ery threat­ened to with­draw a mas­sive adver­tis­ing cam­paign and sue over a whim­si­cal sto­ry about its cheap­est vintages.
That none of the com­plaints cit­ed any fac­tu­al errors didn’t help my nerves when I was sum­moned to Wylie’s office.
You were fired with a “pink slip”, sev­er­ance details writ­ten on a piece of pink paper.
Wylie had an enve­lope in his hand.
“Mr Pizzey,” he said, “you’ve giv­en me a lot of trou­ble recently.”
“Yes sir,” I man­aged to mur­mur. “I’m sor­ry about that. Who have I offend­ed lately?”
“I am in no doubt you have offend­ed some­one,” Wylie said, “and no doubt I shall have to deal with it.”
He hand­ed me the enve­lope and said: “Open it.”
The note inside was a six per­cent raise, effec­tive immediately.
“Thank you,” I stammered.
“Yes, yes,” Wylie said with a flap of his hand. “Well, go and earn it. Go offend some­one. I’ll deal with it.”
Not exact­ly on a Pen­ta­gon Papers or Water­gate lev­el, but Wylie was back­ing his reporter against local polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic heavy­weights. Edi­tors don’t come bet­ter than that.
Today, jour­nal­ists are demot­ed and even fired to appease often anony­mous crit­ics who use social media to denounce any­thing they can claim offends what­ev­er cul­tur­al sen­si­tiv­i­ty they espouse.
In many ways, the “good old days” real­ly were just that. I for one cel­e­brate them, and like no doubt many of my gen­er­a­tion of jour­nal­ists, mourn their passing.

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