COMPTON 'MAC' IFILL

by Philip Parkin, Operations Director, Birmingham Press Club

2010 has started on a sombre note with the news that much respected former ‘Birmingham Post’ journalist Compton ‘Mac’ Ifill had sadly passed away in the early hours of New Year’s Day.

Long time ‘Post’ co-worker Steve Pain has put together an obituary, which you can find here, but this is my own tribute to someone who I knew as a friend and colleague for many years.

I first came across Mac when he joined the ‘Post’ at the beginning of the 1990s.

Mac was supplements editor, and had the unenviable task of basically starting all over again with this important department.

He had to work with limited resources and as supplements took off, he often recruited freelance help, which is where I first came to work with him.

As Steve remarks elsewhere, Mac was hard but fair – but he certainly didn’t suffer fools gladly. But if you weren’t a fool, you were OK!

Mac was proud of the fact that, under his leadership, supplements helped bring in a significant sum of money for the ‘Post’, achieved against a backdrop of falling circulation in the 1990s.

Some of those supplements, which included the monthly ‘Commercial Property Review’ and the annual ‘Corporate Finance’ features, were incredibly popular with the business community.

When Mac left the ‘Post’, it was with much sadness. He didn’t want to go, in reality, and I think he found it rather hard to adjust to retirement.

He still had his hobbies, which included Apple Mac computers, on which he was something of an expert (particularly ‘comms’, as he put it), and he also enjoyed socialising, often being found holding court at his local hostelry, the Lord Leycester.

He loved to relate a story about a heated argument he had with someone in the Lord Leycester, which resulted in him getting a pint tipped over his head – it was a story he told with much laughter, as Mac was not in any way egotistical.

However, he was someone who commanded respect. As Steve Pain says, he was a product of the old school – you never saw him without a jacket and tie, and a handkerchief neatly folded into his breast pocket.

He did not look his age, which tended to hide the fact that he suffered many bouts of serious illness, including gout and heart problems. But he never complained, and soldiered on regardless.

I hadn’t seen him for a while, but we remained in touch via email (he was always keen to find out about the latest goings-on at the ‘Post’).

I’ll miss him – and I know that there will be plenty of other people, colleagues and friends, who will feel the same way.

THE RETURN OF THE KING OF GOSSIP

by Philip Parkin, Operations Director, Birmingham Press Club

Birmingham’s king of gossip is dead – long live the king! Yes, the legendary John Bright, formerly of the ‘Birmingham Post’, has been reincarnated, thanks to Birmingham Press Club.

For those baffled already, John Bright was the name given to a long running gossip column in the ‘Post’, which lifted the lid on the more interesting goings-on among Birmingham’s business community.

The Bright column was, for those who made an appearance in it, often highly embarrassing. Despite that, there were very few people on Birmingham’s business scene who didn’t relish being in it.

In fact, many of the city’s suits openly courted the main author of the column, the former business editor of the ‘Post’, the venerable John Duckers.

However, all good things come to an end, and when the ‘Post’ went weekly last month, Bright was abruptly dropped, no doubt much to the dismay of some of its regular contributors (what did Birmingham’s self-styled ‘favourite lawyer’ Adrian Hindmarsh make of it, for instance? Or ‘super-networker’ and otherwise humble accountant Tony Taylor?)

So, the ebullient Duckers decided to relaunch Bright as an online entity – with the backing of Birmingham Press Club, who are sponsoring the site (see story here).

There’s just one problem – the new website can’t be called John Bright, and that’s because the ‘Post’ is intending to re-introduce a Bright column in the New Year (although one imagines that may well turn out to be a pale imitation of what went before).

So, what to call the revelations of the guru of gossip, the titan of tittle-tattle, the wizard of whisper, the master of muckraking?

Well, he’s gone for ‘Duckers and Diving’ – and just in case anyone doesn’t see the connection, the website also goes under the slogan of ‘Birmingham’s brightest business gossip column’. Take a look here.

We all no doubt look forward to visiting the site and reading the latest revelations emerging from Birmingham’s business community – and if you’ve got any tittle-tattle to reveal, please let Duckers know about it via email (johnduckers@live.com), or else all we will read about are the latest events in the lives of Hindmarsh and Taylor. You can have too much of a good thing, you know!

WILL POST AND MAIL JOURNALISTS HAVE A BALL?

by Philip Parkin, Operations Director, Birmingham Press Club

It’s the Press Club’s annual ball this evening, and no doubt a hot topic of conversation will be the changes to the ‘Post’ and ‘Mail’ revealed a few days ago by the owner of the titles, Trinity Mirror.

There will certainly be plenty of ‘Post’ and ‘Mail’ employees at the Ball – not least because our chairman, John Lamb, came up with the idea of donating tickets to the event to those at Fort Dunlop (or Funlop, as we hear it is called).

It will be interesting to hear what the ‘Post’ and ‘Mail’ staffers think of this week’s events, but I can’t believe many of them will be overjoyed at what’s happened, least of all the sub-editors, many of whom will be in line for the tap on the shoulder.

That’s because the ‘Post’ and ‘Mail’ are set to adopt a system called ‘smart templating’, where the reporters flow their own copy into a page template, thus eliminating the role of the down table sub.

It’s not clear to me who then puts the headline on – if that is to become the reporter’s job as well, then you don’t really need any subs at all.

One other potential problem with this system – as everyone in the media knows, it is not a good idea to proof your own work, as it is very easy to miss things you have just written and got wrong.

So, for journalists, subs were always a good fall-back, not just for checking the facts were right, but also for making sure spelling and grammar were correct.

My question is: who’s going to do that now? If anyone knows the answer, or has a view, post a comment below.

Now, turning to the major measures announced by Trinity Mirror, namely the ‘Post’ going weekly and the ‘Mail’ going overnight.

I said in my previous post that I would not give the weekly ‘Post’ much hope of a long and happy existence. Frankly, I would have thought the alternative that Trinity Mirror apparently considered, namely reducing the pagination, was a much better idea.

But then of course, the ‘Post’ would still have been a daily morning paper – the slot that Trinity Mirror wants the ‘Mail’ to occupy.

Of course, when you compare the circulations of the two newspapers, it’s pretty obvious that Trinity Mirror is going to focus most of its efforts on the ‘Mail’.

And, with the Coventry ‘Telegraph’ having already established a precedent for this, the writing has probably been on the wall for the ‘Post’ for some time.

As I have said, I don’t believe the ‘Post’ going weekly is good news at all, and I can’t believe any of those working on it can be happy about it being downgraded in this way.

Well, maybe there is one person – I quote you Marc Reeves, the editor: “I’m delighted to be able to leave the ‘Post’ on a high as it takes a really ambitious and brave step and one that puts it in an even better position to meet the challenges of the economy and the changing media environment.”

Do you really, honestly believe that Marc?