While studying journalism at university we were all encouraged to subscribe to the Press Gazette, a chuntering trade magazine so largely unremarkable that I can remember only one thing about it.
We were also encouraged to join the National Union of Journalists as student members, which entitled you to a pretty boss PRESS card but apparently not to any sort of communication from them, as attempts to get advice on a copyright issue were resoundingly ignored. Tbh, it wasn't actually that important and they were right to ignore me.
The one aspect of the Press Gazette that left any sort of impact on me was a column entitled “My First Editor” (probably, as I said - “unremarkable”), which I used to air my imagined grievances.
As I suffered humiliating knockback after humiliating indignity, I got a lot of mileage out of imagining the floral smackdown I'd dispense in the column in a decade's time when I was a respected industry professional. In truth, my knockbacks weren't all that humiliating and my indignities weren't that humiliating and I was just as much the problem thanks to a toxic combination of arrogance and entitlement that I've not entirely overcome.
In fact, next time I'm asked my weaknesses in a job interview, I'm probably just going to come clean and say “arrogant and entitled.”
But my future contribution to My First Editor (or whatevz) bubbled away like revenge gumbo, constantly evolving as I discovered a new hate figure. Time has been far kinder to me than I deserve, and some of the people I blamed I can now credit for teaching me, guiding me and inspiring me. Some of them are still dickbags, mind you, and they'll get their reckoning in the My First Editor column of the afterlife.
At some point in the last half-decade (I've been in print for eight or nine years now), the role that My First Editor played in my brain-tank evolved. I stopped using it as a dartboard for my wounded ego and I started to think – to worry - about how I would be remembered. I used to picture old editors' faces going grey with shock and realisation as they poured over my words and realised how wrong they were.
Now my greatest fear is that the haunted look will be my own.
