How to write a media column (and get away with it)

What is better the second time around? Cold pizza with a hangover? Elizabeth Taylor’s marriages to Richard Burton? Watching the Blues Brothers movie in costume?

Which brings us to our point. Keen readers of this column will know the author can seamlessly slither from outrage, to attempts at humour, to shameless self-promotion on a whim. Be warned, this is the latter.

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Last year we published a book of these columns called, unsurprisingly, Naked City. COVID lockdown had finished and the wise publishers at Pan Macmillan believed as travel was back, it would make an excellent airport book.

This I think means it can be read while drinking mini spirit bottles in a hotel room, or keeping one eye on the kids at a resort pool while simultaneously destroying an umbrella-decorated cocktail.

Apparently enough copies were sold or stolen to convince them to have a second lash, this time with a book called Dark City. There are stories on cops, crims and even police dogs.

We needed to curate years of columns and re-reading the stuff led to toe-curling embarrassment at some of the puns. It also shows opinion pieces are like white bread. Fine straight out of the oven but stale the next day.

With social media, everyone can publish their views along with funny dog videos and pictures of rapidly cooling restaurant meals, so a baggy-arsed reporter’s opinions are no better than those of the next smart Alec.

It is the stories about people and crimes that survive. Content is king.

What we have found is that if you wait long enough, what is old becomes new again.

We all love a conspiracy story and there is none better than what happened 13 years ago when the car of the then leader of the opposition and later premier Daniel Andrews, along with his wife, Catherine, and their three kids, was involved in a collision with a teenage cyclist in Blairgowrie.

There was another polarising premier involved in a collision that left many unanswered questions.

Sir Henry Bolte in 1972.Credit: The Age Archives

In 1984, after a session at his local pub, Sir Henry Bolte had a head-on collision in western Victoria. Instead of being transferred to the nearest hospital, Geelong, he was taken to Ballarat.

He wasn’t happy when a blood sample was taken for alcohol because he was pissed. The only surprise was that it came back just three times the legal limit.

Following the usual procedure, Bolte’s blood was split into three specimens. One tested at the hospital, a second sent to forensics as a court exhibit and a third given to the injured driver.

Here is where Sir Henry had a second stroke of luck (he could have died in the crash) because the evidence box was left unlocked, the two remaining samples were stolen and the case collapsed.

There was a time when politicians were like magicians. They could make nearly anything disappear.

Sir Henry’s deputy, Sir Arthur Rylah, lost his wife, Lady Ann, in let’s just say mysterious circumstances. In March 1969, she was found in the back garden of her Kew home suffering a head wound. She and Sir Arthur had separated months earlier.

The pathologist, who was profoundly drunk, was persuaded to conduct the autopsy on a Saturday night, with one staff member telling us he had to be held up during the dissection. Under the influence of heavy liquor and heavy detectives, he declared the cause of death a brain haemorrhage.

Sir Arthur married his mistress seven months later.

My favourite columnists of all time – New York’s Jimmy Breslin and Chicago’s Mike Royko. Hard-bitten, funny, brave and raw as veal tartar, they were both prepared to twerk the nose of authorities. Breslin summed up the business with one sentence that should be on the wall of every newsroom, “The greatest sin is to bore people.”

Jimmy BreslinCredit: AP

Breslin and Royko loved nothing better than a story of an underdog. When New York police sacked a young female officer of Puerto Rican descent for posing for a girlie magazine years before she joined the police force, he rolled his sleeves up.

Jimmy pointed out the photos were only discovered when a cop bought the magazine, that most male officers were too fat to be photographed and police of Irish descent were forgiven for just about any sin. She got her job back.

Breslin made a career out of following the path less travelled, observing sports journalists loved to crowd around winners when the real story was with the losers.

He will forever be remembered for two columns about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Flown to Dallas hours after the shooting he went to a press conference the following day to hear from the surgeon, Dr Malcolm Perry.

Secret Service agents and police officers look on as the white hearse is opened to load the casket of president John F. Kennedy at Parkland Hospital in Dallas on November 22, 1963.Credit: AP

While all the reporters concentrated on what happened, Breslin asked about what the doctor felt.

What followed took the reader inside the operating theatre and the fact that when the doctors saw the wounded president they knew there was no hope. “There was no way to save the patient.”

In his piece A Death in Emergency Room One, filed to a deadline that day, Breslin wrote of the surgeon, “He noticed the tall, dark-haired girl in the plum dress that had her husband’s blood all over the front of the skirt.

“She was standing out of the way, over against the grey tile wall. Her face was tearless and it was set, and it was to stay that way because Jacqueline Kennedy, with a terrible discipline, was not going to take her eyes from her husband’s face.”

It couldn’t be bettered – until it was.

He flew to Washington for the funeral and while others covered the pomp he found the undertaker. His piece, It’s An Honor, is still taught in journalism courses.

“Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9am, in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Hettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting.

“It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living.

“‘Polly, could you please be here by 11 o’clock this morning?’ Kawalchik asked. ‘I guess you know what it’s for.’ Pollard did.

Jacqueline Kennedy kneels at her husband’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery.Credit: Archives

“He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

I don’t have to look far for my favourite Australian columnist because he sits next to me – our own Tony Wright.

Tony has seen off about a dozen prime ministers and probably twice as many editors. As a young reporter in 1979, he was in court when bookie robbery gang boss Ray Chuck was gunned down inside the Melbourne Magistrates building, and 45 years later he is still the go-to-guy when you need a cracking colour piece from a high-profile trial.

He went thataway. Tony Wright with fellow reporter Andrew Rule when Ray Chuck was shot in 1979.Credit: The Age

While he has spent half a career covering federal politics, he has not become a prisoner to the system, writing for the reader, not contacts.

His story that I will always remember is his recollection of being five years old when his farmer father woke him just before dawn.

It is a story about how we should protect our wetlands, but instead of lecturing us, he takes the reader on a journey to reach and agree with his view.

“One winter morning he woke me and we shrugged into oilskins in the dark.

“My dad had already caught and saddled my pony and his stock horse. We spoke in whispers. Something important was happening.

“We rode out across the paddocks and with swamp fog rising around our horses’ fetlocks, we dismounted and tied reins to a log.

“My father walked silently. I tried to step into the outline of his footsteps in the grass.

“And he did the strangest thing. He lay down and motioned me to do the same.

“You don’t lie on wet cold ground. Everyone knew you’d catch your death.

“He held his finger to his lips, and we lay there breathing as the morning lightened and mist billowed.

“He pushed aside a tussock and only a few yards away strutted two long-legged, long-necked birds.

“‘Native companions,’ my father whispered.

“Such elegant birds. Bands of red around their heads … Eventually, the two dancers bowed and walked away wing to wing, as if hand in hand, into the scrub, swallowed by the fog.

“‘Time for breakfast,’ said my dad, and we returned to the horses. I never asked how he knew those two birds would be there that morning.”

It is no secret this masthead has been through a round of redundancies. Neither Tony nor I even checked our potential payouts. Why would we? We both know we have the best gigs going.

Just don’t tell the bosses.

We lost a media legend with the death last week of former Herald and Weekly Times photographer Terry Phelan, who was calm, determined, generous, and brilliant at his craft. He took thousands of snaps and guided hundreds of journos, including this one. Terry proved that in this caper you don’t have to be mean to be good.

Subscribers can order a copy of Dark City from Readings for the discounted price of $29.99 (RRP $36.99) with the code DARKCITYAGE online, or by quoting Dark City Age in store. This offer is available until October 11. Shipping fees apply for online purchases.