Sean O'Hagan meets Andrew Marr
When I got up this morning, Jimmy was watching Frost. After the obligatory 'Something of the Night' comment aimed at Michael Howard, I mentioned that Andrew Marr was taking over, and that, really, he is a National Treasure, so it was amusing to read
Marr's canonisation as a national treasure seems assured
More interesting is
something has gone radically wrong with print journalism'. The fault lies, he says, with an increasingly London-centric media, and with the current reliance on stories culled from the wires or from 'people relying on "Googling" instead of real research'.What is needed, he insists, is 'a return to fresh air reporting. There's a vivid, interesting, unexpected, quite amusing Britain out there, but it just does not appear in today's newspapers. Why? Because we are all doing central London stuff, and celebrities, and lifestyle, and it's basically quite boring.'
Ages ago I read of an editor somewhere in Yorkshire who took over the local paper, and cut out all the lifestyle/television/celebrity stuff and instructed his reporters to go out and report. Sales soared.
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