Sam Parker’s journalism portfolio can now be found at: cuttings.me/users/samparkercouk

In addition he tweets as @samparkercouk.

–

On this website are blogs and older articles. To see more recent stuff please visit the link above.

It started, like all blogs, as a labour of love, but sadly I no longer have the time to keep it updated. But I am happy for it to exist here in the ever-growing digital graveyard of forgotten blogs. At least until cuttings.me develops to function to redirect URLs.

Sam

It was the day that Charlie Brooker’s role as Twitterati royalty was turned on its head, and the writer was forced into a bewildered fire-fighting exercise as the angry Tweets rolled in. The reason? A Guardian column that saw him resemble that other giant of rib-tickling, sententious hyperbole, Bill Hicks, more than ever before.

Just as the late American comedian saved his strongest sermonizing – Old Testament style – for those he viewed as poisoning the public psyche, so too Brooker hit his finest form for years by slagging off tabloid journalists for the same crime. For Hicks’ infamous: ‘if you work in marketing: kill yourself’ read: ‘you’re wasting your life actively making the world worse.’

But where these comic soul mates begin to diverge is that Brooker, with his trademark, just-smelt-a-fart face, has to accept some pretty legitimate accusations of hypocrisy.

For a start: his own growing media profile has long relied upon ‘the warm cave of celebrity chef shag-shocks and tragic tot death- porn’ (a classic Brookerism) to thrive. From savaging TV with his early TVGoHome website, through to repeating the trick on Screenwipe, Brooker has gorged on the gruel served in the D-list celebrity workhouse with the same enthusiasm as any tabloid: he just made sure his shit came out the other end smelling a little smarter.

The newspaper that pursued the News of the World phone-hacking scandal so vehemently – Brooker’s Guardian (for it is, make no mistake, Brooker’s Guardian, despite his defense of ‘just being a freelancer’ – or was that same exemption for tabloid freelancers subbed out of his column?) – also commission their fair share of celebrity fluff. Their ‘Lost In Showbiz’ column is a high-brow take on low-brow culture that they probably imagine aligns them with the traditions of Chaucer, but the problem with this approach is that it ties you inextricably to the same appetites you’re sneering at, as Brooker knows as well as anyone.

Then there is his most high-profile project to date – a weekly current affairs show jointly created with David Mitchell, Lauren Laverne and Jimmy Carr – that thumps its left-wing agenda against your cranium with all the dull insistence of a depressed male stripper’s testicles in a public exhibition no one is really enjoying. Just as Brooker imagines tabloid hacks must require ‘a mental leap beyond the reach of Galileo’ to delude themselves that they’re contributing to honourable journalism, it must require a similar feat for Brooker to imagine that 10 O’Clock Live is genuinely contributing to constructive political debate in this country, when in reality its attention-deficit attempts at both debate and satire resemble the ‘banter’ levels of the average 6^th form common room.

There is a telling taunt in Brooker’s acerbic symphony. He tells tabloid hacks: “chances are you’re quite smart. And you probably love to write – or did, once…” I suspect this was the point that Charlie really got to them. The implication is clear: unlike him, they’ve sold out. Everyone starts off thinking they’re going to win a Pulitzer or write the Great British Novel at the weekends, but most of us end up churning out lowest common denominator candy floss for shadowy, media ring-masters with dubious tastes in right-wing governments. But not Charlie.

In this, there is more than a grain of painful truth. But what Charlie Brooker really has that most journalists do not isn’t a more accurate moral compass, or even just the ability to turn a wicked phrase. What sets him apart is the balls and entrepreneurial spirit it takes to set up your own satirical website in the late 90s, rather than stay with PC Zone until you’re made deputy editor and then retire in a death-rattle of averageness like the rest of us.

And here, for all the hypocrisy of the piece, is where intuitive journalists should stop debating how offensive Charlie has been and start asking themselves how he got in the position to offend them in the first place. It wasn’t with a degree from Oxford or via a Daddy in the Guardian news room. It was having the kittens-head-sized-cojones required to carve out an identity for himself in an industry where a million voices are bleating at once.

For all it feels a bit like Charlie has shat on his own kind, he is still making a salient point. Very few of us aspire to write malignant gossip about other people’s sex lives. Some of us may have to do it in order get started. But transcending all that takes an extra quality few people have.

We may not like it when his guns are turned on us but Brooker, like Hicks, can get away with being holier-than-thou, not because he’s very funny but because he embodies the essential truth of what’s he’s saying. I’m a journalist. I’ve wasted parts of my life actively making the world worse. But I’m not offended by the smug hypocrite – I admire and envy his right to be one.

FOLLOW SAM PARKER ON TWITTER

Last night, the Mail Online won the ‘digital innovation award’ at the 2011 Press Awards – presumably for managing to entice users who claim to despise everything the paper stands for with a killer celebrity gossip section. Meanwhile, the Guardian won the paper of the year for its role in Wikileaks.

On the surface of it then, a bad night for The Times – at least as far as the paywall debate goes. With subscriber figures still modest, formal recognition as an online pioneer, or the main crown as the ‘best paper’ altogether would have been welcome triumphs.

Yet despite this, last night’s results – in which the title claimed five individual writer awards – illustrates the strongest argument for why you should join me behind the paywall. Put simply: The Times has the finest collection of writers on any one publication in the UK by a country mile.

Around a year ago, I wrote a blog for GQ.com on the moral obligation of ‘valuing journalism enough to pay for it’ – inspired in no small part by the fact I was a struggling freelancer at the time. By and large I still stand by it.

But the moral or economic impetus isn’t the real factor behind why I encourage people to sign up. Last night, Caitlin Moran, David Robertson and Matthew Parris all won individual awards (two each for Caitlin and David), which only really scratches the surface of what is the The Times’ biggest strength.

Caitlin Moran is a critic and columnist not so much ‘on fire’ at the moment as tearing her way through the cosmos on a giant, ciggerette-shaped rocket. One of her awards last night paid tribute to her remarkable Lady Gaga interview in Berlin, but devotees will have noticed that everything, from her recent review of a Lily Allen documentary to a homage to holidaying in Aberystwyth has a quality of prose that seems to put Caitlin on a different planet from everyone else this year. It’s exhilarating to read, and not for nothing is @caitlinmoran the person all aspiring writers on Twitter wish they were best friends with.

Then, in a completely separate field altogether, there is George Caulkin (who didn’t win anything last night). A correspondent for the North-East, he is the only national football writer at work today who doesn’t seem to write about the area through a prism of clichés and received opinions. More than that though, he joins Matthew Syed, Simon Barnes and Patrick Barclay on a team of wonderfully distinctive and thought-provoking voices on the beautiful game.

Giles Coren, Robert Crampton, Hugo Rifkind, David Aaronvitch – even Frank Skinner – this could happily turn into a fawning tribute to brilliant individual writers. But the crucial part of this is that they all bat for the same team. Each of these names pushes the envelope in entertaining and challenging us from the pages (print and digital) of The Times. Each of them is worth paying for.

This is what makes The Times’ insistence that they ‘value the quality of their journalism enough to charge for it’ ring true, rather than sound like just a self-important excuse for sticking with an out-dated funding model.

For liberal-leaning, aspiring journalists like me, the fact that Rupert Murdoch is behind it all could be a source of anxiety. It shouldn’t be. Those still learning how to write should be devouring these people’s articles, not rejecting them to make some stand or other against Fox News – or more fool them if they don’t.

There are many things the Guardian, the Daily Mail, NOTW and others do magnificently. Comment Is Free is easily the most vibrant and engaging community platform in the UK. Live-blogging – when it stops trying to reinvent the wheel of news reportage and plays to its real strengths – is fascinating. Integrated web ads may well be our future.

But for me – and I suppose it is a matter of priorities – the most talented and distinctive writers in the country operating at the height of their game is a mouth-watering prospect worth dipping into your pocket for. After the best part of a year behind the paywall I can happily report: I like it here.

TIMESONLINE PROS:
Access to leading writers
Excellent navigation and design
No trolls – comments left by people actually engaged by topics
Paying for it makes you value and consider content far more (surprise, surprise)

TIMESONLINE CONS:
You’re logged out too frequently
Frustrating that articles can’t be freely shared via social media

FOLLOW SAM PARKER ON TWITTER

All journalists dream of locking horns with influential politicians, artists and intellects.

But even those that make it must first serve their time quizzing the likes of Dappy, Danny Dyer and Eliza ‘my music is political’ Doolittle.

Which makes meeting someone like Patrick Wolf, the handsome genius in the video above whose talents are as yet unmatched by widespread fame, all the more satisfying for a hack-in-training.

From the dregs to the Biebers, the problem with pop stars is that they’re usually media-trained to within an inch of their lives, coached to trade only in platitudes, drilled to withhold real opinions, ever-weary of an unflattering headline.

They know to smile and nod. They know not to fiddle or ‘umm and ahh’. They have that useful trick of repeating the question in their answer. And yet they so often manage to be charming but dull, like salesmen who can’t switch off.

Give me someone like Patrick any day, with his petulant pout and the eyes that glaze over if your questions begin to ramble.

Someone with enough humility left to be embarrassed and awkward at being sat with a camera in their face and a clock-watching manager lurking, fielding questions about their personal life from an agenda-driven stranger.

Give me the reticent ‘umm and ahh’-ers, whose smiles are hard-won but real, and whose ideas are entirely their own.

They may not make the best anecdotes or the funniest Facebook photos, but they do make the humble act of asking someone more popular and interesting than you a series of questions feel like an honest endeavour, rather than a transaction.

Check out the Patrick Wolf interview - complete with intro – on Spinner.

FOLLOW SAM PARKER ON TWITTER

The latest is this: I would like to tap myself on the shoulder during one of several possible early mornings in 2003, at roughly 3am.

I’d be lying on my back on the bedroom floor of my first ever flat, holding a drink in one hand and cradling a badly out of tune guitar in the other, simpering the lyrics to ‘It’s Cool We Can Still Be Friends’ to no one in particular – a song written by the smiley chap sat to the left of my incongruously-wide legs in this photograph.

“Sam,” I’d say, sitting quietly on the edge of our bed. “You’d better put that guitar away and stop your wailing. Because in about 8 years time, you’ll find yourself sat across a table from Conor Oberst trying to ask him some serious questions about his music, the future of humanity and the political situation in Egypt.

“And instead of listening properly to his answers you’ll be trying not to blush remembering how many times you mistook yourself as being tortured and enigmatic by playing his song into the indifferent night like they were your own.”

Then I’d lean over into my own stunned, spotty face. Perhaps plant a kiss on its furrowed forehead. And I’d whisper: “While we’re at it: give up the music. The closest you’ll ever get to being a rock star is perching awkwardly in their hotel room sofas, asking questions they’ve heard a thousand times before. So stop embarrassing us both.”

And then I’d disappear in a plume of smoke, before the playing started up again.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘overwriting’.

Some people would call it ‘trying too hard’. Others, simply being pretentious. But essentially, it is when an article or even just a sentence is too convoluted, too ambitious, or simply too long and unwieldy to make clear sense for the reader.

Since my time churning out reams of unedited whimsy as a student newspaper columnist, I have long identified this is a central weakness of my own. There is an anxiety when you first start out as a journalist that causes you to grapple for something like poetry – to try and show your ability operating at full tilt – even if it’s 150 words on an Adam Sandler movie.

But the practise is hardly restricted to amateurs or newbies. It’s astonishing how much you see it in the professional world too. Take for example this recent comedy piece on a national newspaper website, by a journalist trying out the high-brow-take-on-a-low-brow-topic thing in reaction to the Katie Price/Alex Reid break up story:

This week, Lost in Showbiz has been forced to drag itself to its laptop from the floor, where it has lain all week, prone and inconsolable. Like the rest of the country, it has existed these last few days in a state of mute incomprehension, the eerie silence rent only by a sound unheard since it was described by Clive James in the aftermath of Diana’s death – “‘No’, pronounced through an ascending sob, the consonant left behind in the chest voice as the vowel climbed into the head voice, the pure wail of lament whereby anyone, no matter how tone deaf, for one terrible moment becomes a singer” – and repeated rueful plays of Katie Price’s No 60 smash hit Free To Love Again, which, in its own way, also makes one think of the pure wail of lament whereby anyone, no matter how tone deaf, for one terrible moment becomes a singer.

Note that after the first sentence, the next extents for 126 words (the average, they say, is 15) – all of which undoubtedly was meant to convey the basic irony of the piece, but can anyone genuinely say they read this fine the first time through? Or, more pertinently, found it funny? As Shakespeare said, brevity is the soul of wit. Or as one unimpressed commentator put it:

full stops and shorter sentences. You should try them.

The same week, a link did the rounds on Twitter alerting everyone to Tim Radford’s excellent (though ironically, a little long) ‘25 commandments for journalists’. The first two read:

1. When you sit down to write, there is only one important person in your life. This is someone you will never meet, called a reader.

2. You are not writing to impress the scientist you have just interviewed, nor the professor who got you through your degree, nor the editor who foolishly turned you down, or the rather dishy person you just met at a party and told you were a writer. Or even your mother. You are writing to impress someone hanging from a strap in the tube between Parson’s Green and Putney, who will stop reading in a fifth of a second, given a chance.

This, I think, is one of the most difficult lessons to learn when trying to become a journalist. I’ve heard it described, bluntly but rather brilliantly, as ‘killing your babies’ – the ability to take an idea or a paragraph that you’ve lovingly crafted and sacrifice it for the benefit of the greater whole.

As one still prone to ‘overwriting’ – and I’ll happy send anyone who is interested a compendium of my own mangled paragraphs – my writing heroes have always been those that show the very opposite quality.

None more so than a man synonymous with sparse, concise prose – Ernest Hemingway, who discovered his literary ambitions after being a newspaper reporter. In fact, of the many fascinating things Hemingway said about writing, one was that he owed his success to his first job as the Kansas Star cub reporter, specifically the strict style guide he was give that probably went along similar lines to Tim Radford’s.

You’d be hard pushed to find a single overwritten line in Hemingway’s entire bibliography. Rather, by adhering to strict principles of simplicity (in terms of syntax, rhythm, structure) he produced what is widely regarded as some of the most poetic prose of the 20^th century.

There is one other thing Hemingway said about writing that  I try to remember to repeat to myself on a daily basis:

The first draft of anything is always shit.

And it’s true. How many of us (too few, I suspect) stop to reedit even that most superfluous of self-expressions, our Tweets, to get them in tip top shape?

What I suspect Hemingway also meant is this: over-write to your heart’s content – it’s where the pleasure lies, after all – just be sure to walk away, come back to it later and get pruning. Otherwise no piece of writing will ever be what it could have been.

Learning how we can reconcile this fundamental principle to the fast-paced world of modern journalism – in which our efforts to break announcements, top Google searches and be first with pithy critiques so often define our idea of ‘success’ – is a challenge facing all young journalists today.

It is also, I believe, one of the few areas in which our job has become more difficult than it was for overwriting generations gone past.

FOLLOW SAM PARKER ON TWITTER

photo by: talkSPORT

Phew! Thank god Richard Keys’ talkSPORT interview is over. It has to rank as the most excruciating, humiliating and insincere mea culpa since, well, Tiger Woods, roughly a year ago.

But while the porn star-loving golfer’s public castration was characterised by teary-eyed, all-American emoting, Keys’ step down was more about not really saying sorry…

‘It. Is. Wrong.’ he said over and over – merely punctuating a series of pig-headed attacks on everyone from the media, Rio Ferdinand, Karen Brady and TV presenters who are vain enough to use Twitter.

Essentially, it was the sound of a horrified, bewildered man grappling to understand the true nature of the very industry that – only a few days ago – he considered himself a giant of.

How little he knew about all this ‘new media’, bubbling up beneath him, ready to force some fair play into the 1980s dressing room he and Andy Gray had build in the Sky Sports studios.

Funniest of all, after spending more than an hour digging himself a hole on live radio, he was forced to resign anyway – surely making his buddy Andy Gray feel like the lucky one for the first time in a few days.

Looking at all of the incriminating footage, it’s actually Gray who comes off worse. Asking his female co-presenter to tuck his microphone down his pants (‘cos that’s where ma co-oak is hen!’) was like seeing a bloated 50-year-old businessman slap a waitress’ arse. Total wanker.

Anyway. They’re not the first idiots to be caught out, nor will they be the last. Here’s a list of some of the best ever leaked celebrity recordings of all time…

FOLLOW SAM PARKER ON TWITTER

Predicting ‘the next big thing’ every December/January is, I am assured by my more seasoned colleagues, one of the chores of being a music journalist.

While the record labels slumber through the early part of the year, content to stop releasing new records until the awards show circus has breezed through town, all that’s left for the press to do is glance nostalgically behind or project wildly into the future.

Personally, I quite enjoyed writing this year’s AOL Music ones to watch list, not for the new pop lambs like Jessie J and Clare Maguire who are already being herded into a make-or-break 6 months, but because of DELS, star of the video above.

DELS – aka Kieren Dickins – is a rapper from Ipswich with a wonderful, languid flow who has already teamed up with Joe Goddard of Hot Chip – the result being the freshest and most interesting British hip-hop to have mainstream appeal since Dizzee laid down the grime-to-pop road map almost ten years ago.

It helps that he’s just as invigorating lyrically, the words to ‘Shapeshift’ evoking the joys of childhood games and the melancholy of losing those same powers of imagination in adulthood. Compared to stunted post-Modern prattle of Tinchy, Example and the others he’ll hope to face down in the charts next year, DELS is practically the next word in English Romanticism.

My personal, pointless ‘hot tip’ for 2011? DELS claiming the space Mike Skinner is officially vacating as the people’s urban poet of choice.

FOLLOW SAM PARKER ON TWITTER

Just before Christmas, I went on a press trip to my former home town of Newcastle to pretend to be a Premiership footballer for the day.

The result was this article for FHM.com.

I often like to wonder what it be like to go into the past and tell your childhood self something about the future; whether they’d believe you, what they’d make of it.

This can apply to anything from living in London, sharing a flat with an actual, living, breathing girl and, it seems, playing football with the blokes in the posters stuck to your bedroom wall.

Suffice to say, my 13-year-old self would have loved to hear that he’d one day play football with Rob Lee and John Beresford.

Even if they did spend most of the session taking the piss out of my ‘shovel feet’.

FOLLOW SAM PARKER ON TWITTER

One of the great things about coming to the end of a year is rounding up the highlights from it.

This process is particularly helpful for journalists, a fact illustrated most keenly by Channel 4 who regularly churn out entire top 100s on anything from Children’s TV Shows to (inevitably) Greatest Christmas Moments. It can’t be too long before one of their producers scratches their head and mumbles: ‘Top 100 Top 100 Countdowns…?’ to a silent meeting room.

Anyhow – our own version of this delightful seasonal fodder was AOL Music’s Best Music Videos of 2010 (scribed by yours truly) which included ‘We Used To Wait’ (above) by the magnificently melancholic Arcade Fire.

Great song though it is, the reason it made the list is because the video offers a flickering glimpse of the future in which emoting to songs, films or art will no longer be a case of ‘relating’ to the material on offer but actually integrating our own lives and memories into it via a computer.

Confused? The video is actually a piece of digital art that asks you to type in the postcode of your childhood home (NE66 1XB, since you’re asking), then harnesses the creepy power of Google to locate images from your street, which are then used to populate the video.

Check it out by visiting the video’s official website. The result is a strangely moving 5 minutes as the street you roamed as a child spins past to one of 2010′s best childhood nostalgia numbers (a separate list?).

In time, ‘We Used To Wait’ will no doubt be viewed as a rather clunky moment in music video history (the graphics aren’t up to much and the whole thing crashes quite easily), but perhaps one that sowed an important seed.

If the technology continues apace, within the next decade I fully expect to see a bikini-clad Rihanna shaking her arse in the rainy bus shelter where I smoked my first Benson & Hedges in 1997, or Eminem showering profanities at the kid who stole my Egon Spengler Ghostbusters figurine from Shilbottle Primary School field in 1992.

Both of which would easily make my ‘Top Ten Brain-Frying Memory-Integrated Art Moments’ of 2020.

FOLLOW SAM PARKER ON TWITTER