Cast From Telegraph Starship, Outgoing Literary Ed. Describes Redundancy as Like “Having a Birthday”

Yesterday was my birthday (please send cash, not presents, Dear Readers), so I felt some empathy for poor old Sam Leith, The Daily Telegraph literary editor who has become the latest high profile victim of editor Will Lewis’s guillotine. Writing in The First Post yesterday, Leith described the experience:

What they don’t tell you about being made redundant is that in every respect apart from the aspect of losing your job, future prospects, security and so forth, the experience is more or less identical to having a birthday. You get the day off work. You feel entitled to go to the pub at opening time and stay there. And people, for the first time in ages, seem actively interested in what you’re up to. Your phone rings constantly. Everyone buys you a drink. Your Facebook page – if you have one; an indulgence normally only available to those who have the hours of empty time in front of a computer that paid employment secures – fills up with the equivalent of what my old friend Tom Utley likes to call “floral tributes.

In other words, he sounds pretty relieved to be leaving the Telegraph’s digital starship. By many accounts, Leith was one of the brightest young talents still manning the holodeck at the Telegraph’s pseudo-futuristic “news hub” in Victoria, pulling together the books pages, writing a well-regarded weekly opinion column, and clocking up 10 whole years of his life working there (just think!) in the process. If Will Lewis and Co. are prepared to axe talented, loyal young foot soldiers like Leith, you just know they’re in trouble. How can they expect to tempt the best young (CHEAP!) journos to join them in the future, when the message they’re sending out to prospective employees, loud and clear, is ‘don’t bother, there’s no future in this game anyway’?

Sad to say, but Will Lewis, who sold himself as the Barclay Brother’s digital saviour – a kind of newspaperman Luke Skywalker, whose chosen lightsabre was inane technological jargon – increasingly looks like he will only succeed in crashing the Telegraph into the Death Star trench of news media 2.0 also-rans, as Guardian media guru Emily Bell foretold a little while ago.

Posted by Jack Roberts in Creative Economy | December 5, 2008 1:58PM |