Menace failed to halt Dennis
Six journalists were injured by a car bomb at the Old Bailey. Eyewitness Ken Dennis, PA senior Old Bailey reporter, told Press Gazette: “I walked 30 seconds away from certain death. I was sheltering behind a pillar.” In the wrecked press room, pictured above, he found the air thick with smoke and dust and littered with twisted metal and glass. He scrambled through the wreckage to phone the story to PA.
A royal dressing down
Princess Anne criticised journalists covering her horse-riding stay in Berkshire. She told photographers: “You’re getting on my goat. I’ve just got this horse settled, now you’ve upset him.” She also told them the name of the horse she was riding had wrongly been reported as Red Passion, when it was really called Columbus.
Follett fell on his feet
Ken Follett, before he became a best selling author, was taking up a new job, Press Gazette reported. A 23-year-old graduate of the Thomson Regional Newspapers training scheme, Follett was leaving the South Wales Echo to join the Evening News in London. He now says of his days on the Evening News: “I wanted to be a hot shot investigative reporter but I never made the grade.”
Women of the hour
Press Gazette featured three high-flying women journalists on its cover. Felicity Green had been appointed IPC’s first woman director. She was previously executive woman’s editor of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People. Replacing Green, with the title of Daily Mirror assistant editor, was Joyce
Hopkirk, Cosmopolitan editor. Her successor at Cosmopolitan was Deidre McSharry, former fashion editor of The Sun and woman’s editor for the Daily Express. The headline on the news story was a less than politically correct “All change on Fleet Street’s Petticoat Line” and Dog described Hopkirk as having been both “productive and decorative” in the 1960 Daily Sketch newsroom.
Mail splash cash on females
The Daily Mail was spending £400,000 on a three-month campaign to increase its sale among woman aged 16 to 35. The slogan “Every man knows why… every woman needs her Daily Mail” was the keynote of the campaign. The Daily Express was in the middle of a relaunch stressing its record as a campaigning newspaper, symbolised by the Crusader. It also featured its big-name journalists – like Jean Rook, Chapman Pincher, Mary Collins and Osbert Lancaster – in a presentation for the new-look title, entitled “The Giant Awakes”.
Wonders of technology
Press Gazette was taking a look at one of the world’s first electronic newsrooms at United Press International in New York. It reported: “The first thing to learn about the electronic newsroom is that it doesn’t look like a newsroom. Worse, it does not even sound like one. The copy is there right enough, but you can’t touch it with a pencil; you just look at it through glass.”
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog