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'When Les Hinton first fulfils his schoolboy dream of working on Fleet Street, it is still a place awash in warm beer, black ink, fag ash, and hot metal. Fifty-two years after being sent out to buy a sandwich for his first boss, one Rupert Murdoch, when Les finally leaves Murdoch’s employment in 2011, the business of news has been turned upside down, in a tumble of social and technological change.
'Les Hinton has been present at and noiselessly directed several key scenes in that tale of revolutionary transformation, as employee and later head of Murdoch companies in newspapers, magazines, and television, on three continents over five decades, in Wapping and Wall Street, Australia and California.
'Born amid the rubble of the blitzed docklands of Bootle, and schooled by an itinerant Army childhood, he came to the centre from the periphery, just as Murdoch did. There, with a gang of like-minded outsiders, he set about redrawing the map of the media.
'Emerging out of Hinton’s scintillating stories of half a century of Murdoch and news revolutions comes the voice of a wandering Liverpudlian who is still in love with the life of a newspaperman, and who is now the author of one of the defining media memoirs of our age.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
-
The Journo Who Never Got Away
2018
single work
review
— Appears in: Inside Story , June 2018;
— Review of The Bootle Boy : An Untidy Life in News 2018 single work autobiography 'Murdoch lieutenant Les Hinton doesn’t burn all his bridges in his frank new memoir' -
Read All About It : Hot-Metal Memories
2018
single work
essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , September no. 404 2018; (p. 23-24)'One day not that far away, I suspect, hot-metal memoirs will grow cold on the slab. Thus the triumph of technology over the nostalgia of those days when journalistic skills included not only being up to shorthand speed but being able to read upside down and back to front. The latter skill was necessary for any production journalist who spent long and awkward hours in the composing room, standing across a metal forme from a nimble compositor who arranged the layout of various columns of lead type and photogravure blocks into an immovable mass to be cast into a newspaper page. Trying even to explain a composing room – or, to give its affectionate nickname, ‘the stone’ – to anyone born at the start of this century (perhaps before), is a thankless and indeed useless task. There is an entire archaic lexicon of once-familiar newspaper production terms: define ‘flong’, ‘galley’, ‘WOB’, ‘chase’, ‘slug’, ‘widow and orphan’, and ‘banging-out’ (answers below).' (Introduction)
-
The Journo Who Never Got Away
2018
single work
review
— Appears in: Inside Story , June 2018;
— Review of The Bootle Boy : An Untidy Life in News 2018 single work autobiography 'Murdoch lieutenant Les Hinton doesn’t burn all his bridges in his frank new memoir' -
Read All About It : Hot-Metal Memories
2018
single work
essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , September no. 404 2018; (p. 23-24)'One day not that far away, I suspect, hot-metal memoirs will grow cold on the slab. Thus the triumph of technology over the nostalgia of those days when journalistic skills included not only being up to shorthand speed but being able to read upside down and back to front. The latter skill was necessary for any production journalist who spent long and awkward hours in the composing room, standing across a metal forme from a nimble compositor who arranged the layout of various columns of lead type and photogravure blocks into an immovable mass to be cast into a newspaper page. Trying even to explain a composing room – or, to give its affectionate nickname, ‘the stone’ – to anyone born at the start of this century (perhaps before), is a thankless and indeed useless task. There is an entire archaic lexicon of once-familiar newspaper production terms: define ‘flong’, ‘galley’, ‘WOB’, ‘chase’, ‘slug’, ‘widow and orphan’, and ‘banging-out’ (answers below).' (Introduction)
