Rantings

He’s no journalist… he’s a poet Roy Greenslade Media Guardian. April 25: There is a superb reminiscence on the gentlemenranters.com website today by Colin Dunne. His contributions are always a joy to read, but I especially commend Which of you ****ing poets subbed this? It reveals how the acclaimed modernist

Click here for notes about contributing copy  Ken Ashton has been a journalist for most of his life, working on a national, evening, and local newspapers; he’s been a sports writer, covering major events, won press awards, and even found time to be mayor of Prestatyn. He took a change

Next month will mark two years (apart from a necessary obit) since the last edition of this website. During that last year, there had been more than three million hits on the site and so it was probably not surprising that one or two people noticed, and caringly wrote to

We are taking an extended break at Palazzo Ranter.  In the meantime, we can still accept copy. So please get typing   This Week We are breaking up for the hols today (spend too much time with the Hackademics, and it’s catching) so, first… a very merry Christmas and a

This Week We’re breaking up for the hols next week, so if you have any Christmas stories, please file them now. (Otherwise, we might break up a week early…) If you need to be reminded when service is resumed, please use the box on the right to register. If you

This Week We all know the feeling. You’re watching TV or a movie and see somebody portraying a newspaperman and you think: ‘That’s not how we do it. We don’t behave like that. We don’t act like that. We don’t talk like that…’ Then you watch live news coverage of

This Week We start with the Leveson Inquiry on the grounds that it’s still too new to have become boring (but it will, Oscar; it will). The thing is that it could in theory produce at least one good story a day for its entire run, and it could be

This Week A funny old week, in which the Daily Mirror apologised in a Page 2 correction (they’re all getting into this idea) for a mistake in referring to the, er… oh yes… to the Daily Mirror. They got the quote wrong. Well, it happens, I guess. At least, it

This Week We’ll get round to the Leveson Inquiry in a minute; we don’t want to appear preoccupied with the thing. The important news is that Tabloid, the movie based on (but not giving credit to) Tony Delano’s brilliant book, Joyce McKinney and the Case of the Manacled Mormon goes

This Week We start with a special offer… Most readers of this website have fond memories of World’s Press News. Dozens of you have written of the days when it was required reading – and often urgent reading because that’s where the jobs were and you needed to get off

This Week First, a service message. If you are planning to communicate with this website please use a unique catch-line in the email subject box. You know, like you used to do when you wrote a copy. If you simply hit the Return button on the weekly round-robin blurb –

This Week There will be no Ranters next week, as the entire editorial team takes a break. But we can of course accept copy during the shutdown (please use a new and unique subject line when you write, as you used to do for catchlines). If you are likely to

This week The News of the Screws saga isn’t going to go away, so what would Harry Procter – legendary [sic] ace red-top reporter in our (and my dad’s) day – have made of it all? His daughter Val Lewis – she married Lynn Lewis and, like most of Harry’s

This Week There was a time (predominantly the 60s and 70s) when it would have been unusual to have entered any newspaper pub (certainly in the north of England) without being regaled by stories of the most recent escapades of reporter Gilbert Johnson. He died last week, aged 81, after

This Week There was a time (predominantly the 60s and 70s) when it would have been unusual to have entered any newspaper pub (certainly in the north of England) without being regaled by stories of the most recent escapades of reporter Gilbert Johnson. He died last week, aged 81, after

We are like Jews in our love of telling long, lugubrious, and insulting stories about ourselves, and our fierce resentment of anyone else doing so. – Nicholas Tomalin in the Sunday Times   This Week We start with the republication of a piece that appears here in response to popular

This Week We start with the republication of a piece that appears here in response to popular demand. True, the folk who have asked for it remember it the first time round, more than 40 years ago. For some it was inspirational, for some motivational; some it encouraged to seek

This Week We have a movie clip this week. It’ll come as a boon to all those Ranters readers who are still experiencing difficulty in getting to grips with the printed word. This one’s actually a trailer for a movie that’s currently doing the rounds of film festivals in Europe

This Week Another week, another book. Another Keith Waterhouse classic, in fact, resurrected for your edification and delight. It’s the third of Waterhouse’s own favourites, following Waterhouse on Newspaper Style and The Theory and practice of Lunch. This one is The Theory And Practice of Travel, and it has little,

This Week Another week, another book. Another Keith Waterhouse classic, in fact, resurrected for your edification and delight. It’s the third of Waterhouse’s own favorites, following Waterhouse on Newspaper Style and The Theory and Practice of Lunch. This one is The Theory And Practice of Travel, and it has little,

This Week If it goes on like this, we will have to find a fount of type called Hushed Tones and put a reporter on the door to collect names of mourners. This week, Plain John Smith remembers Arthur Brown, who died earlier this month. Then Mark Day (we start