Why Journalists need to drink more

Back in its heyday, Fleet Street’s pubs were almost as famous as the newspaper offices that crowded the famous London street. Much of the hack’s trade was plied standing at bars and tucked away in smoky boozer’s snugs.

On slow news days, old school editors would often send their journalists to the pub and tell them not to come back to the office until they had found a good story. Many a scoop was banged out on an old typewriter and edited through bloodshot eyes.

Journalists don’t get out so much these days with editors preferring they spend their time scouring social media for breaking news (that everyone else has already read). Even if they did, pitching up at the office with a skin full would almost certainly be career suicide these days.

Despite this, the pub is full of good stories.

Take for example the recent allegations from TV actor Ricky Tomlinson (Brookside, Cracker, The Royle Family) that the former host of TV gameshow Countdown was a spy for MI5.  True or not, that’s the kind of story that only surfaces in the pub.

David Holmes, a reporter for The Chester Chronicle, spoke with Tomlinson after the actor had cut the ribbon at the re-opening of a Weatherspoon pub.

Holmes said: “Ricky wanted to explain the long fight to ‘get justice’. He was struggling to get hold of classified government papers that he believes will prove the Shrewsbury Pickets were the victim of a political conspiracy, but he had secured a number of what he called ‘confidential’ documents and insisted that he knew as a matter of fact that Whiteley was a government spy.”

Holmes continued: ““I asked if I could see the evidence but for unknown reasons he declined. However, he was unwavering in his allegation and since you can’t libel the dead, we went with this as the top line.”

At the time of writing, we are unable to confirm just how much, if any, alcohol had been consumed in the reporting of this story but it is hard to imagine this story breaking anywhere outside of a pub.