I
cancelled my paper at home this year – it felt like a final break with
daily journalism. Those who suffered my presence on the sports desks of
various publications in the 1980s and 1990s will know this is a good
thing.
I still read the papers at work – Daily Telegraph, Sun,
Yorkshire Post, whatever else is around. Occasionally I buy the Indy,
Guardian or Observer.
Whatever the paper, whatever state the world is in, I always read the sports pages first. Old habits die hard.
There’s
so much common ground between the papers, but I tend to search out
individual columnists who have a real flair for writing.
Martin
Samuel’s sports opinion pieces in The Times every Wednesday are
terrific. His recent columns on the London Olympic bid and the demise
of cricket in state schools were spot on – real voice-in-the-wilderness
stuff – and he’s always entertaining when the England football team is
failing at a major tournament. Sometimes he overdoes the literary
quotations though. Who does he think he is – Brian Glanville?
Away
from sport, Simon Hoggart’s parliamentary sketches in the Guardian
Online are funny, informative and very cutting. You get the impression
that he knows his stuff inside out, and that when he’s really sticking
the knife in, his victims deserve it.
I tend to follow hard news
via TV, and BBC and Sky’s rolling news service during the London
bombings was chilling, gripping stuff.
The Popbitch target
audience is surely about 20 years (and the rest)n younger than me, but
this online scandal sheet makes the national newspaper diary and gossip
columns seem awfully tame. It makes me smile, even when I’m not exactly
sure who is being stitched up. Good, vicious stuff.
Back to the nationals, but still online for my daily dose of Doonesbury, an American cartoon strip that appears in The Guardian.
The
writer/cartoonist, Garry Trudeau, is probably the only true genius
working for the dailies. In fact, if I couldn’t get this online I’d
have to start buying a daily paper again. Thank God for the internet.
Chris
Wilson wrote about sport for the Sheffield Morning Telegraph, Daily
Star and Yorkshire Post. He is managing editor of the Regional Magazine
Company, which produces a series of lifestyle, property and business
magazines in the north of England
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