Michael Fathers
The Reuters brand
Wednesday 15 June 2011
Well that’s it then. The secret is out. Reuters is no longer a news agency. It’s a “brand”, where it seems staff are hired solely for promotional purposes, according to the editor-in-chief Stephen Adler [● Reuters hires Harold Evans as editor-at-large].
I look forward to the not too distant future, I hope, when Reuters moves into the sportswear industry, or perhaps the liquor trade and we see advertisements with the Reuters logo tattooed across the rumps of young floozies in Reuter bikinis or on Reuters “Nightlead” whisky with the strap across the bottle, “The Baron’s first choice”. Branding, I am glad to learn, now seems to be Reuters destiny as it fulfils its new role as an international mixed-goods conglomerate selling anything the market will bear.
Pip, pip and tallyho.
Michael Fathers
PS: Tell Stephen Adler when you’re next in touch with New York that I could fix him with a good line in grass skirts in time for the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand.
vbnbnbn
I look forward to the not too distant future, I hope, when Reuters moves into the sportswear industry, or perhaps the liquor trade and we see advertisements with the Reuters logo tattooed across the rumps of young floozies in Reuter bikinis or on Reuters “Nightlead” whisky with the strap across the bottle, “The Baron’s first choice”. Branding, I am glad to learn, now seems to be Reuters destiny as it fulfils its new role as an international mixed-goods conglomerate selling anything the market will bear.
Pip, pip and tallyho.
Michael Fathers
PS: Tell Stephen Adler when you’re next in touch with New York that I could fix him with a good line in grass skirts in time for the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand.
vbnbnbn
85 Fleet Street
Wednesday 16 June 2010
Michael Fathers
Punch, Or, the London Charivari, to give its full original title, was published from 1841 until 2002 with a hiatus from 1992 to 1996.
From 1843 to 1900 the Punch office was in a single-storey building at 85 Fleet Street, in the heart of London's blossoming journalistic empire. Here its writers and artists often composed their material, surrounded by the workplaces of the very professionals whose writings and deeds fuelled Punch's columns – the myriad newspaper offices on Fleet Street, the Middle and Inner Temples, the Apothecaries Hall, and the Royal College of Surgeons. From the windows of their office, Punch's early contributors watched the Lord Mayor's Show and other spectacles that took place on one of London's busiest thoroughfares, and then turned these displays into cartoons and commentaries. Many of these journalists learnt their trade in, or followed the examples of, the new cheap illustrated periodicals of the 1820s and 1830s which owed their success to their ability to re-present in comic form the funerals of monarchs, the processions of priests, stage dramas, displays of exotic species, exhibitions of new machines, illustrated scientific discourses, and a plethora of other sensations which drew the same London crowds who bought cheap periodicals.
Punch Tavern, 99 Fleet Street, was originally the Crown and Sugar Loaf but was renamed in the late 1840s because of its association with Punch magazine whose journalists frequented the pub. It was rebuilt in 1894-5. The Crown and Sugar Loaf has been restored as a separate pub in part of the original premises and is the venue of meetings of the ● Short Lunch Club.
● SOURCE Punch and comic journalism in mid-Victorian Britain by Richard Noakes | Punch Tavern
Arthur Spiegelman
Monday 22 December 2008
In 1970 long before Arthur Spiegelman became a Reuter star and was among the foreigners and “colonials” dumped in London bureau from the World Desk and the North America Desk on the other side of Fleet Street, he suggested a bite to eat on my first night shift with him. He introduced me to the rat hole in Shoe Lane between the Daily Telegraph and Express buildings where printers and lorry drivers would eat their pies or a bowl of tasteless pasta. It was run by an Italian tyrantess with characteristics similar to Mrs Moon, one derogatory comment and you were out. Arthur swore by her pancakes, especially those with fresh lemon squeezed on sugar. When I said to him I had never eaten a sweet pancake, he said, “Are you a foreigner or something? I bet you’re from New Zealand”.
Michael Fathers
Michael Fathers
