Why I'll never drive down the M6 motorway (and other nonsense)

"Hey... you've written here that's it's the biggest earthquake EVER!"

I am a former newspaper reporter – in fact, I’m so old that I can remember the day they installed “the internet” in our office at the Crewe Guardian (one dial-up modem, connected to the editor’s subbing machine).

And one of the first newspapers I worked for – the Uttoxeter Advertiser – was produced on hot metal in the next room, with me typing out the stories on an electric typewriter, printing them out, and walking them round to hand them over to the printers. But that was actually in 1993, and it was very much a step back in time, even then.

I did my time in college and then a couple of years apprenticeship, picking up a number of half-remembered rules as I went on.

Some of those rules have stuck with me to this day, much to the chagrin of my younger colleagues. I’ll often cut a swathe through someone’s copy, changing numbers and buggering about with their sentence structure, I just can’t help it.

But am I right? Some of those "rules" may not have actually been correct (shock horror) – they were very much the whims of the kind of nutjobs that became local newspaper editors in those days. Others are just things I believe to be right, and I’m more than likely to give people the Paddington stare if they dare to challenge my “professional” opinion. But they may not even have ever actually been rules, or perhaps I wasn’t really listening properly (my rather relaxed interpretation of the Magistrate’s Court Act over the years being a case in point).

I’ve found myself softening my approach over recent years – some of these archaic rules seem to have been designed simply to make reporters’ lives a misery, and frankly, life’s too short to demand we include everyone’s ages in our internal comms. But they’re still there, stuck in my brain. Here’s a few, I’m sure there’s more to come:

You CAN start sentences with “And…” and “But…”

You should never start a story with a number.

Only one sentence per paragraph.

If you name someone you should include their age.

One to nine, 10, 11, 12, 1,000,569, etc.

He said:

He added:

(And nothing else)

It’s the M6, not the “M6 motorway”

It’s “2am”, or “two o’clock in the morning”. NEVER “2am in the morning”.

The word “local” is not to be used.

It’s “The First World War”, never “World War One”.

And there’s only one cenotaph, in London.

Every story needs a quote.

If you’re asked for 300 words, that’s what you write.

Babies and dogs sell newspapers.

There’s nothing funnier than a fish pun. Unless it’s a cheese pun.

Everyone in a photo needs to be named in the caption.

If you want people to read it, put it in the first three paragraphs.

If in doubt, leave it out.

If you can easily take 50 words out, you can afford to lose another 50.

Something is never “brand new”.

If it’s “the best thing ever”, that means it has always been the best thing, and always will be.

If it’s a news report, it doesn’t have an opinion of its own.

I know there’s a few old colleagues out there who’ll set me straight on these, and add a few of their own. Hopefully it'll also give my current colleagues an insight into my old brain and explain some of my eccentric decisions!