How journalism works - a bit of a glimpse into our world

And why it’s not enough that everyone’s “delighted”

Hello Rainmakers,

Thanks for all your support and encouragement.

Your supportive messages and comments mean a great deal to us. 

We embarked upon this adventure with a desire to do something different and worthwhile.

This post today, which comes at the end of August, traditionally a fairly quiet time news wise, is a way of giving some insight into how news and the production of platforms like this works in practice.

We hope you enjoy it.

THE NEW JOURNALISM AND RAINMAKERS

On the bookshelf I stare at, when I look up and away from the glare of my screens (yes, plural, screens, get me) there are two books that I keep standing up and flicking through to check myself.

One is the 26th edition of McNae’s essential Law for Journalists, which gives us case law and details about what is legal and allowed in an increasingly litigious world.

I’ll be honest, though we get the odd complaint, or additional contextual comment, we haven’t had any serious legal issues this year, though we have reported in great detail on several complex legal cases which cover the tricky terrain of when deals go bad, including Anna Cooper’s excellent deep dive into what went wrong with ITG.

The other tome is The New Journalism by Tom Wolfe and EW Johnson, a collection of examples of long form magazine and newspaper journalism from what many of us felt was a lost tradition. Their ambition then was to produce factual journalism that was written in the style of fiction writing, that brought the writer into the story.