How I messed up my first job

Journalism in 1998

I’ve caught the lurgy this week, but rather than arrive at the party empty handed, I’ve dug out a post from my personal archive with a few light updates. I hope you enjoy it.

It’s 26 years since I started my first (proper) job, which means my career is the age of your average Gen Z-er. Trendy! You could say it’s feeling pretty confident – it knows its way around the place, but it’s aware that there’s always more to learn.

The great thing is it never has to repeat the mistakes it made as a toddler…

“What might they have been?” I hear you ask.

Well, I wasn’t conducting brain surgery, so no lives were lost. But lives were definitely… affected.

Let’s take a look at a little story from my very first role as a Listings Sub-Editor...

From little acorns to mighty oaks

The year is 1998. The city, London. I’m finally in my first proper job after leaving university and finishing a journalism course. My hopelessly naive dream of strolling into a job at Vogue and interviewing Kate Moss every day has long vanished and been replaced by the cold realisation that I’ll be lucky to scrape editorial assistant at Wind Tunnel International magazine.

But it’s ok. I’m in the press! At least I must be since this job is at the Press Association, a ‘UK-wide news agency'. I’m working three days a week in the ‘Listings’ department. But not the TV Listings Team, which sits opposite and seems glamorous by comparison (simply because it has ‘TV’ in the title I think).

I’m in the Arts and Ents team, which sounds like a piece of plastic cheese from the Trivial Pursuit board, but is in fact responsible for churning out times and dates for various newspapers and magazines so their readers know when to go to the cinema, theatre, night clubs etc.

My role is to input the weekly cinema times into a database, which looks like something Dr Who might have used. But first I have to wait for incoming faxes from the cinemas themselves. There’s a lot of sitting.

I’d probably be earning more if I were still on the dole, but I’m fed up of the rejection letters and sitting on park benches crying with the pigeons, so I get into it as much as possible.

By Monday lunchtime we usually have a fax from ABC Streatham and Galashiels Pavilion, who hand write theirs, which means it takes a bit longer to decipher and therefore feels a bit more skilled. Not quite what I trained for, but hey-ho.

After some more sitting and a bit of a rush towards the deadline (exciting!) all the data from around the country is in for that week and my job is done. It’s back to the pigeons for me, while my full-time colleagues run the data in the format their paper likes them in.

Boring but necessary interlude about listings

You might be aware that publications report their cinema times in slightly different ways. So the Mirror might say:

Babe: Pig in the City: 17:00 (not Mon-Thu)

Whereas the Metro on the other hand might put:

Babe: Pig in the City: 5pm (Fri/Sat/Sun only)

You get the idea.

As data inputter it was my responsibility to add in all the possibilities via clunky short codes so each sub-editor could run the information in the style of their paper (using the gigantic desktop publisher that served the whole department).

I get a promotion!

It wasn’t long before my talents were spotted and a few months later I was full time, not just inputting the data, but also using the giant desktop publisher so I could edit the sections for the Scotsman and the Guardian’s G2 section.

Check me!

I’m not sure whether the career progression went to my head, but something led to a fatal lack of concentration one morning that would go on to affect the Scotsman’s cinema listings and one Scotsman in particular.

If anyone other than Andrew Neil, then Editor, had taken his young godchildren to see the Rugrats movie when I’d said it was on (‘Sat/Sun only’) when it was in fact definitely not on (‘not Sat/Sun’) then I might never have learned from my mistake.

But armed with the information in his own paper (loyal) he’d dutifully set out that Saturday morning with these two nippers, quite rightly expecting to enjoy the cartoon film at the time I’d printed. Sadly it wasn’t to be, and Andrew made a very heated complaint first thing on Monday morning, which my boss relayed to me with a shrug.

It seemed his rants were nothing new. Still, it was a wake up call for me: how many other peoples’ Saturday mornings had I ruined in this way? How many other kids’ screams had I single handedly caused? What power I had! What responsibility!

The moral of the story is that even when you're in the weeds of something, feeling like a tiny cog in a big wheel, stuck on the bottom rung of an extremely long career ladder, and about as far away from interviewing Kate Moss as you thought humanly possible, you're still contributing to some sort of bigger picture.

And you might be able to make a story of it 26 years later when you’re desperate to keep your weekly posting streak on Substack going.

Thank you for reading! Please give it a like if you enjoyed it as it helps others find it. And let me know if you have any similar stories - or if you did a similar role.

And thank you to those who liked and commented on last week’s piece ‘Click on this headline or else.’

Have a great weekend.