Don't believe the hype about tabloid tactics

My day begins with a swim before breakfast at the Navan Road pool in Dublin, where an invigorating 40 lengths does amazing things…

My day begins with a swim before breakfast at the Navan Road pool in Dublin, where an invigorating 40 lengths does amazing things for one's alertness.

You're ready for the day then - though some people get going before they even leave the pool: last week a fellow swimmer was actually using a mobile phone while still in the pool. That's taking things a bit far!

It was a glimpse into how mobiles are taking over our lives. Much of the day I'm linked to the office by the umbilical cord of the mobile phone.

As a court reporter and crime journalist, I'll often be found at the Four Courts. Often we have two or three cases we're interested in, which means a lot of scurrying around.

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I also have to call a 'snapper' at some stage. Actually photographers hate being called snappers, but we wind each other up the whole time. There's great banter between hacks and lensmen, not only on the same newspaper but among journalists on all newspapers. For a newspaper that's very picture-driven like the Star, it's important to be able to work closely with a photographer. Sometimes it can be a bit like big-game hunting, when defendants or civil litigants try to hide their identity. There's nothing worse than the coat-over-the-head job.

Mind you, I've even seen that 'foolproof' ruse circumvented: a broadsheet photographer once dropped to the pavement outside the court and fired off some shots from worm's eye level, catching the stunned perpetrator looking down from under his tent of invisibility.

With a lot of stories there are angles that aren't covered within the court reports. For this a writer-photographer team go to a home address to follow up the story. For instance, recently we had an eviction story in which the Corporation wouldn't say why they were seeking to evict a woman in a wheelchair from her ground-floor flat; she was weeping in court, saying she didn't understand it, and the judge said it was a draconian move. That was a natural story to find out more about.

I went with a photographer; of course when we got there the woman wasn't in.

So we waited. Then a photographer from another tabloid arrived, followed by an Irish Times reporter on a bicycle. I'd never seen a reporter on a bicycle in my life.

Mind you, some people might tell us to get on our bikes, metaphorically speaking, but only from time to time. The large majority still want to talk, thank God.

If they don't, we apologise for bothering them and move on to something else. The idea of the foot-in-the-door is nonsense. That's the TV drama image of the tabloid reporter, based on some old Fleet Street excesses.

In reality, you're attitude when you approach people for an interview is crucial. If you are friendly, they are likely to be friendly back. If you spent your time behaving aggressively, you wouldn't last long.

In crime journalism, there's a lot of work maintaining library files on known 'players' for a later date. I have to talk to dangerous characters all the time. I've had several death threats, though it has all died down a lot since Veronica Guerin was shot. There's a lot of stuff we can't use because of the harsh Irish libel laws, which fatten lawyers and often protect the guilty.

In the Star we try to tell as much as possible, but in a very pared-down, waffle-free language. A broadsheet might carry a court report in 24 fat paragraphs, but we can distil that down to 10 - we do the hard work so the reader doesn't have to. 'Keeping it tight' is a real challenge, but it gives more to the readers because you can get more stories in. I always quote Mark Twain, who apologised at the end of a 40-page letter to a friend in Paris: 'Sorry about the long letter, I didn't have time to write a short one.' Exactly.

In an interview with Jackie Bourke

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