Roy Greenslade
Making the Headlines
Merchants of Truth: Inside the News Revolution
By Jill Abramson
The Bodley Head 534pp £25 order from our bookshop
American journalists are scorned by their British counterparts for beginning their articles with what is known in the trade as ‘drop intros’. Rather than tell readers the story in the opening sentences, they seek to intrigue them with some tangential material before they go on to relate the salient facts. Although these conceits can sometimes be entertaining, the delay is usually frustrating.
In Merchants of Truth, Jill Abramson practises the same strategy in long form. The delay is particularly maddening because the vast majority of buyers will surely be eager to read her first-hand account of being fired as executive editor of the New York Times. Yet she makes us wait until page 258 before giving us the riveting blow-by-blow narrative of her departure in May 2014.
As she notes, very fairly, the men responsible for her downfall dispute her version of events. But her account of the disagreements and the Machiavellian management manoeuvres she experienced is engrossing and anyone who has worked at the highest level in newspapers will recognise the realities she describes. If they
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'As it starts to infect your dreams, you realise that "Portal 2" is really an allegory of the imaginative leap: the way in which we traverse the space between distant concepts, via the secret conduits we place within them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf