Coronavirus diary, Friday 3 July

Changing Times...

After struggling to handle, let alone read, The Times, especially the huge broadsheet pages of the Sunday Times, I can now enjoy my daily news. 

And it is thanks to Robert who has finally persuaded me to move with the times - literally!

It has taken a long time for an old dog to learn new tricks, moving on to the new fangled but amazing internet, including The Times iPad daily edition app. I most enjoy the excellent columnists and leader/comment columns and, a new pleasure, readers' comments. They pour in. 

I probably bore people with my accounts of newspapers and reporting in 'my day' - going back nearly 80 years. Finding and writing stories was easier than getting them into print.

In my early days the tools of my trade were a soft-lead pencil and a reporter's notebook. No typewriter - no ability to use one.

I had shorthand but my stories - 'copy' - were written in long-hand on small cut-offs from newsprint, the huge rolls of paper on which the news was printed. A lengthy piece would take pages.

The reporter's life. Cartoonist: Gren for Bob Skinner

One advantage was it taught me to write legibly. In police court I would scribble away while keeping up with the case and then phone over the story, usually standing in a public phone box outside the court. There were no mobile phones.

As a freelance, my stories for the national press would be phoned to London in the evening. Not by me but by the ever patient Rosemary.

Long stories, even dramatic ones, could be tedious to retell time after time, for her and for the 'copy takers' in Fleet Street. Every so often, they would ask, 'Much more of this? We used to scan the newspapers next morning hoping for the best.

The effort could be lucrative, especially when  a story was accepted by several papers. The cheques that followed, always in guineas - one pound one shilling - paid for many of our holidays.

Today, there is a whole world of difference in reporting and newspapers. Copy is sent direct, in seconds, from laptops, iPads or phones from anywhere in the world. No copy takers. No sub-editors. The stories are pasted into pages, not with lines set in hot metal made up into pages. 

I still miss the 'good old days'. It is not easy for an old dog to learn or appreciate new tricks.

Note: the cartoons above were specially drawn by Gren for Bob's book, Don't Hold the Front Page, an account of his years in journalism and public relations. Grenfell Jones was the South Wales Echo's star cartoonist for over 45 years.