COMMENT
Business Buzz
with Harry Pearson
MEET THE JONAH OF JOURNALISM !
After surviving the ravages of the pandemic , Harry Pearson explains why Tees Business will even survive employing him ...
Battling through the pandemic to produce this
issue is a great achievement by the dedicated team behind Tees Business . In fact , it ’ s an even greater achievement than anyone involved might imagine . Because not only has Tees Business had Covid-19 to deal with , the magazine has also survived the most dangerous thing anyone can do in the history of print media – employing yours truly .
You see , there ’ s something I didn ’ t tell the editor when he offered me this gig five or so years ago – and that is that over the past three decades I have proved myself to be the Jonah of journalism , sending apparently unsinkable publications to the bottom with the regularity of Boris Johnson saying , “ Um ”.
Don ’ t believe me ? Well , how about this for starters . Punch , the humorous bi-weekly that gave us St Trinian ’ s and Mr Pooter . Launched in 1841 , this venerable institution survived two world wars , yet when it published a piece by me about pigeon racing in 1991 it went belly up six months later . Punch was revived by Mohamad Al-Fayed in 1996 . Sadly , the lesson had gone unlearned . The editor paid me to go to greyhound racing at Pelaw Grange and pen an article about the crowd . The magazine survived for just seven more issues .
And then there was The Listener . The BBC radio magazine , first published in 1929 , paid me £ 75 for a short story about a tortoise in October 1990 and shut up shop five months later . I can add dozens of less well-remembered titles to the list too , from cricket monthlies to big glossy productions that had Kate Moss on the cover and smelled of aftershave samples , via titles aimed at independent women in their forties who liked chardonnay , snowboarding and Jimmy Choo shoes .
Sometimes whole airlines have gone bust just because the editor of the in-flight magazine asked me to write something about football stadiums , fish and chips or the world ’ s biggest jelly . Remember when you used to be able to get the hovercraft across the
Don ’ t let unlucky Harry near your pet tortoise ...
English Channel ? That came to an end in 2000 . Some will say the service was no longer viable because of the opening of the Tunnel , but I can ’ t help thinking the fact that somebody at Hoverspeed commissioned me to write a piece about Belgian beer for the onboard publication eight months earlier was really the decisive factor .
And most remarkably of all there is the News of the World . First available on the newsstands in 1841 , this infamous scandal sheet was for a considerable time the biggest selling English newspaper on the planet . It shut down amid great fanfare in 2011 . Most people think that was because of the phone-hacking scandal and the tireless campaigning of the various celebrities whose privacy had been illegally violated . Well , sorry Hugh Grant , Steve Coogan and co , I ’ m sure you did your best , but the fate of the News of the World was actually sealed in August 2010 when the sports department asked me to appear on a weekly football podcast . Nor , I should add , was the News of the World the first national newspaper I ’ d shut down . That signal honour fell to the Sunday Correspondent in 1990 – and all they did was publish a letter I ’ d sent in slagging off Henry Kissinger .
If nothing else , I hope this summary demonstrates how incredibly difficult it is to keep a publication going , especially in the age of the internet and with the added bonus of a pandemic . And I hope it also shows we can still make a living , doing work we love , even when life keeps pulling the rug out from under us . So well done all the good folk at Resolution . Despite the tough year , the future looks bright . Because let ’ s face it , if Tees Business can survive me , it can survive anything .
Harry Pearson ’ s latest book The Farther Corner – A Sentimental Return to North-East Football is out now .
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