MEDIA STUDIES

Classic columns to order

MARY KENNY

It is a truism that there are many more columns in newspapers than there used to be. I remember sitting on a street bench in Paris when I was an au pair girl in the 1960s, reading Katharine Whitehorn in the Observer with admiration. Gosh, the sheer distinction of being a national newspaper columnist. Less distinction today, I'd say, when papers are awash with writers' columns and the currency has necessarily been devalued.

This is said to be because even if you pay the Lynda Lee-Potter fee (around £300,000 per annum) for a columnist, it is cheaper than sending people to Africa actually to report the news.

But I believe there is another reason. There has been an information explosion, yet information is useless without interpre- tation. I want all this information made coherent to me. That is why, for example, I will read Andrew Alexander in the Daily Mail on Fridays, or Ferdinand Mount in the Sunday Times, to have the single currency, say, or education (a particularly difficult subject to make interesting) analysed and interpreted in a way that I can make sense of. By the same token, it is the reason why my student son cannot go without Richard Littlejohn in the Sun. He makes the outra- geous coherent.

Different columnists, of course, serve dif- ferent purposes. Some are there to enter- tain, some to annoy — Julie Burchill, A.N. Wilson, maybe Suzanne Moore — and some to uphold consistent values in a bewildering world — my colleague Peter Hitchens. Some are there because they know a lot about their subjects and you can trust their knowledge, and some are there just to share their lives. I was touched to see an Express reader's letter about the late Jean Rook, the self-proclaimed 'First Lady of Fleet Street'. I wasn't a great fan of La Rook and she started a lot of the bitchiness about the royal family which has since become everyday Glenda Slagg fare, but I was impressed, all the same, when the read- er wrote, 'She shared her life with us.'

Women columnists often fall into cate- gories arising, I would say, out of Jungian archetypes. You have the Rebel Girl, the Femme Fatale, the Scornful Feminist, the Bluestocking, the commonsense Aunty, the Wise Mother, the Mad Old Trout. Archetypes may be as tiresome as stereo- types but in the popular press I think it can be useful to consider category. As Foucault tells us, category is the first step in making sense of the text: 'what kind of thing is this?'

And I think a columnist, or aspiring columnists, must ask themselves every now and then, 'What am I for? What is my func- tion — to entertain, to reveal, to reflect readers' values, to inform, to interpret, to comfort, to outrage, to be a polemicist?'

Writing a column should look easy, but should not be consistently easy. I often think of Dolly Parton saying, 'It takes an awful lot of money to look this cheap,' and mentally paraphrasing, 'You have to be very clever to make something quite intense look this simple.'

This sounds pretentiously French and deconstructionist, but I believe the best columnists are also conceptual thinkers. They have an idea and they develop it. It's not enough to have a strong opinion, although strong opinions well articulated are provocative and entertaining. You have to add something to the casserole which makes it worth tasting. You have either to have had a riveting personal experience Jill Tweedie was wonderful because so much had happened to her — which fires up the opinion, or extra knowledge which illuminates it. Even prejudices should be substantiated.

I wish, for example, that someone was writing an accessible column at the moment about what is happening in Japan. Of course, any professional writer can cobble together a piece, pick an expert's brains, read through the cuttings, but that is not the same as being able to write with a feel- ing for the subject, from the inside.

So specialised knowledge and conceptual thinking — that is, ideas — are important.

`We should be OK we're not in uniform.' So is trust: the reader has to trust you and that takes investment of time. It takes two years, minimum, for a columnist to be known to a newspaper's readers. (If you move a columnist's place in the paper, it takes six months for the readers to find the columnist again — the mailbag dips for that period.) It takes another two years, mini- mum, for them to trust you. Over the years when he was writing in the Sunday Tele- graph Peregrine Worsthorne could play with the most quixotic ideas, because the readers trusted him. He could deal in para- dox and use witty reversals because they knew where he stood. In my last five years with the Sunday Telegraph I was getting to the position where I could develop paradox more subtly. If I wrote a piece, say, on the awful side of family values — the Mafia is a family, the IRA is a family — the readers knew that I wasn't saying the family was awful, but playing with paradox. If you try to do this too soon, readers just get con- fused and trust evaporates.

Advice to aspiring columnists consists in this, briefly: have something to say and develop it; give reasons and sometimes per- sonal experience to illustrate your opinions; give information — with added explana- tion. Have some personality: you must be to some extent an egotist but, confusingly, you must also have humility. Repeat your themes from time to time. If you are, say, a defender of marriage, the readers expect you to get out there and defend it, but bring fresh angles and new elements. Don't write about a subject you have no feeling for — it shows. Have a consistent philosophy: it helps to be a feminist or a Catholic or a homosexual because this makes you reflect on the construction of society and the meaning of life, but temper this occasional- ly with humour (or anger). Go places and meet people. Travel. Read.

But two of the most important needs of all are: have an editor who is on your wave- length and appreciates your 'voice', and develop an authorial 'voice'. One of our subs at the Express said to me the other day, `I do have a laugh when I read your column, Mary. I can just hear your voice.' Now that, I thought, is a hit, and I was greatly pleased.

The author is a columnist for the Express on Sunday. This is one of a series of guest Media Studies during Stephen Glover's absence.