Country of the Blind by Brookmyre Christopher

Author:Brookmyre, Christopher [Brookmyre, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2012-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

He shouldn’t begrudge them their day in the sun with the Voss thing, either. What was bothering him, he knew, was just another bout of the periodic crisis of purpose and identity that afflicted every print news editor in the latter third of the twentieth century, usually precipitated by a big, world-scale event such as this: dealing with a stark reminder that your job wasn’t to break the story any more. That lay in the domain of the TV and radio boys. Sure, he knew that when it came to actual coverage, to intelligent, insightful rendering of the facts and details, his paper pissed all over the broadcasters – and from an increasing height since the Beeb and (particularly) ITN started interpreting the news for the sentiently challenged, assuming the comprehensive faculties of a four-year-old viewer. But in a way, that made the reality of it even more painful. These fucking morons told you first. No-one had picked up The Saltire on Monday morning and learned with a jolt that the Grim Reaper had shown up at Craigurquhart the night before and said “taxi for Voss”. No-one bought it on Tuesday because they wanted to find out the latest developments in the investigation. But still they bought it.

Ken knew the game had changed for the print boys, and he wasn’t some anachronistic fossil who couldn’t deal with it – in fact it was his proven ability to deal with it that had put him where he was now. But the hack’s most primal instinct did growl every so often: to be the first to know, first to tell. No – the only one to tell. For your paper to be the only place someone could “read all about it”.

But that was just a self-torturing pipe-dream, a practical impossibility, even when you did get something ahead of the competition, like some local scandal or even just a new angle. First edition was on the streets for the back of ten at night. Anything you ran that the others didn’t have would be quickly shoehorned into their pages within the hour, with some half-redundant new quote added so that they could tag their version of your fucking story with “Exclusive”. And by that time it was hardly relevant anyway, because the public already knew the juice before any paper hit their doormat, having heard it on the morning radio or caught it at the arse-end of Newsnight.

There was barely such a thing as an exclusive any more, not really. Not a big one. What passed as a poor substitute these days was when some scheming politico chose one particular paper to leak some hopefully damaging document to. Or when some starfucker signed up to one or other of the sleaze sheets to exaggerate the sexual content of his or her fifteen minutes. And the success of that tabloid in netting such stories was much like the success of the Rangers in netting league titles: there was little merit to admire when it was simply a matter of having the biggest chequebook.

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