A few years ago a magazine with a strange title appeared on newsagents’ shelves. Step forward, Golf Punk, the magazine for punks who like golf, and golfers who like the Sex Pistols, and anyone who likes Bunker Babes. Well, sort of. Now, as the first green shoots of the recession are spotted (copyright: all media, desperate for some good cheer), comes another title which fuses sport and punk.
Football Punk is, like Golf Punk, part-owned by former Liverpool footballer Phil Babb, who promises that it will offer more than “the usual repetitive quotes from players”. Editor Richard Lenton says that having Babb on board makes all the difference: “It’s real fly on the wall stuff from one professional to another. Phil can ask questions that I, as an average Joe journo, couldn’t. Well, I could, but they probably wouldn’t answer.”
Football Punk can be bought at W H Smith and its first issue contains an interview with Steven Gerrard. We have not seen it, and so cannot say whether it is as radical as its editor claims, but we have acquired a draft of an exclusive interview with Chelsea star Didier Drogba. It would wrong to disclose too much, for it will doubtless soon appear in Football Punk, but here is a key excerpt:
Phil Babb: Didier, you seem to have lost the plot a bit at the end of the Barcelona game.
DD: We were robbed.
PB: How did you feel?
DD: Gutted.
PB: You certainly seemed pretty angry.
DD: I was sick as a parrot. I wanted to grab the ref’s head and run it over with Robbie Savage’s Lamborghini.
PB: I wouldn’t do that, Didier. You could ruin the trim. And Robbie has a short fuse. He wouldn’t be very happy.
DD: Yeah, I know. I thought better of it. After all, I’m a role model, not just for kids but for Lamborghini owners, real and imagined, everywhere.
PB: I bet the gaffer was less than happy.
DD: Why? I may have fantasised, briefly, about taking the Murcielago for a spin and aiming it in the ref’s direction but, at the end of the day, one’s psychological life is a bit like football. It’s a game of two halves and I kept my thoughts in the garage.
PB: Sorry mate, I mean about your incandescent rage at the end of the match.
DD: My what rage?
PB: Sorry mate, it’s one of these words you pick up when you leave football and become a Joe Journo. I meant to say, I bet the gaffer was less than happy about how mental you went.
DD: Sorry mate, I know what incandescent means, I just misheard you and thought you said any of ‘incendiary’, ‘incroyable’ or ‘incalculable’. The boss did have a few words, yes. The blokes in suits got involved, too.
PB: What did they have to say?
DD: They said ‘Here are some words saying your sorry. Read them to that camera.’ They needn’t have bothered. I’d calmed down by then and, rather as if I was a character in Dubliners who experienced a Joycean epiphany, wanted to apologise of my own accord.
PB: Nice one. So you realised, after the event, that you’re a role model and that you really can’t go round screaming at refs, even when they’re totally wrong?
DD: Don’t get me talking about that ref. But yes, I am a role model. The kids out there watching deserve better. So does Robbie’s Lamborghini.
PB: Nice one, mate. Fancy a game of Hold ‘em?
DD: Sure. What’s the buy in?
PB: £100,000, with unlimited rebuys.
DD: Sounds good, I’ll see you at the club.
PB: Good man but Didier, there’s just one thing. If you lose, you won’t get angry will you?
DD: No chance. What do you think I am, some kind of hothead?
Football Punk: Inside the Minds of the Men who can Afford Very Fast Cars is £2.00 in W H Smith. The image of a punk car, but not a footballer’s one, is courtesy of Mutation Nation.
[...] Football Punk: Sneak Preview of Drogba Interview : Spada …wanted to grab the ref’s head and run it over with Robbie Savage’s Lamborghini. PB: I wouldn’t do that, Didier. You could ruin the trim. And Robbie has a short fuse. He wouldn’t be very happy. DD: Yeah, I know. I thought better of it. … Spada Professional S [...]
[...] Vote Football Punk: Sneak Preview of Drogba Interview [...]
The headline says it all: ‘Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger takes pay cut‘.
Dan Sabbagh’s piece says a bit more: said editor ‘emailed staff at the newspaper to say that his salary in the upcoming 2012-13 financial year will be £395,010, compared with £438,900 in the current financial year’.
Some voices say: ‘How worthy.’
Others opine: ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’
But we say: good work by Mr Rusbridger. For the sake of the media’s survival, we hope that others in senior positions in the industry will follow suit.
Image of toolkit allegedly deployed by Alan Rusbridger courtesy of Flickr user LollyKnit.
Curious times in the media; strange days at The Times.
Would ‘Dacre Cards‘ – the system of licensing journalists proposed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – have prevented the embarrassment now palpable at the Times over the NightJack story?
Times editor James Harding’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry seemed heartfelt and contrite, albeit that the paper’s former long-serving and much-respected lawyer, Alastair Brett, seems to have been, er, rather dropped in it. Clearly, mistakes were made with regard to NightJack by young reporter Patrick Foster who, once he had hacked into NightJack’s account and thus discovered his identity, then embarked on a quest to expose it via legitimate methods. This, as Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC put it, was “rather like working from the inside of the maze out”.
But had Foster been licensed via a Dacre Card, would this unsavoury episode in the Times’s history have been avoided?
We suspect not. A raft of laws were in existence at precisely the time when many News of the World journalists seemed to believe that they were entitled to hack any phone they liked. Those laws forbade them from doing so, and yet made no difference. Aside from the obvious objection to them – that they will squeeze out freelancers and citizen journalists – Dacre Cards would simply amount to something to circumvent.
What is really required is an ethical shake-up, from top to bottom. Society generally – not just journalists – needs a sense that some things are just plain wrong.
Something remarkable happened today. Yes, the Supreme Court launched its Twitter feed. It even has a Twitter policy, one of caveats, disclaimers and little by way of illumination but regardless: who would have thought that the successor body to the House of Lords would stoop to engage with the world of tweets, hashtags and retweets?
We look forward to the day when court business will be conducted via Twitter. Meantime, check out this link for an excellent blog on the Supreme Court.
Is there a geek inside all of us?
Excellent Nike ad
Memo to would-be hacks: good writing is no longer a tool of your trade
Released almost a year ago, Spada’s groundbreaking research report, British Professions Today, is available for free download
This bank is so well designed that many of its staff never go home (allegedly)
In the latest of our series of white papers, Spada Research examines trends in environmental reporting.
After a raft of phone-hacking admissions and allegations, we are no longer seen as the gruff but dependable watchdog. Neville Thurlbeck, formerly of the News of the World (part of his Damascene conversion; to be continued).