LIFE AS A JOURNALISTFrom The Kalgoorlie Miner, January 4, 2008
Book: Journo’s Diary
Author: Chris Thomas
Reviewer: Laura Tomlinson
Rating: ***1/2
RICK Hughes is a first year cadet journalist for weekly newspaper, The Weekend Star.
Incompetent as a journalist and equally incompetent in his personal life, Rick is undersexed, under-socialised and underpaid.
Hughes begins his year with rare drunken dalliance on New Year’s Eve with a woman who turns out be Heidi Delsminka – con artist extraordinaire.
Hughes wakes up after a night on the turps in a pile of vomit (presumably his own) and staggers home minus his wallet, only to discover soon after that the woman he spent the night with is a known con-artist who takes advantage of drunken men.
So begins a new year that continues the way it started – disastrously.
While negotiating the perils of the newspaper world – alcoholic sub-editors, mad photographers and equally insane interview talent, Rick somehow manages to do some writing – though his first article about a walrus sculpture and its drunken artist doesn’t go down too well.
Heidi’s web of deceit is nothing compared to the one Rick is spinning, trying to go about his daily business while Heidi becomes more and more high profile and robs more and more people.
Rick knows he’s sitting on a major scoop that the paper would very likely fire him for keeping quiet about – not to mention the fact that he is withholding important information about Heidi’s whereabouts from the police.
Heidi steals from men, Rick slowly becomes a better writer, and then in a drunken moment of stupidity admits that he slept with Heidi and she conned him too. Unluckily, he it at the Weekend Star’s office dinner, in front of his editor.
Cue six months of police, threatened disciplinary action from the newspaper, shoddy undercover investigating by Rick and a nasty head wound.
The novel is an interesting and realistic study of the often strange life of a cadet journalist. It’s hilarious, and in parts somewhat risqué but has an eccentric and endearing ‘everyman’ character. Rick is the bumbling idiot you can’t help but like.
The only flaw was that too many sample news articles were included in the book as Rick’s work – the initial walrus story was hilarious to even the general public, but reading articles gets slightly tedious even if you’re a journalist.
Journo’s Diary is a great buy for anyone in the media industries in particular, but still entertaining enough to be a great read for those who aren’t.
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CHICKENS AND PHANTOM PANT SCRUBBERS
By Debra Hamel - book-blog reviews
Metropolis Ink, 266 pages
Rating: ***1/2
( http://www.book-blog.com/2004/12/journos_diary_b.html )
Twenty-three-year-old Rick Hughes's troubles begin five days before he starts his new job as a journalist (he is the "journo" of the book's title) at an Australian weekend paper, the Weekend Star.
His drunken sexual encounter with a 40-something "nice Valkyrie-type called Helga" leaves him walletless and plagued, for months thereafter, by his own stupidity: his "Helga" is in fact a certain Heidi Delsminka, wanted throughout Australia for credit card fraud and armed robbery.
Over the next year, while struggling in his job, eating poorly, and vaguely looking for sex, Rick chronicles the problems that ensue from his interlude with Heidi in daily entries in his diary.
At the same time he details for readers the minutiae of his life: his argument with a fast food place over the availability of Diet Coke in bottles in the restaurant; evidence that his roommate George may be having sex with chickens on the sly; his vague efforts to determine the identity of the "phantom pant scrubber," someone who spends an inordinate amount of time in the men's bathroom at work apparently scrubbing his underwear with steel wool. ("What the hell is wrong with his arse?" Rick writes.)
There is much crude talk of bowel movements and their ilk in the book and a fair number of post-Heidi drunken interludes that do not, however, end with Rick pantsless and broke. Rick also includes in his diary the text of the articles he writes for the paper, with increasing competence, on usually uninteresting small-town issues.
Journo's Diary, as its name suggests, is written in the form of a diary, and the book stops when the pages in Rick's diary run out. The book is chapterless, but its organization into journal entries segment it into bite-sized chunks. The book itself is a quick and sometimes funny read, though its pace is slowed by the inclusion of the text of Rick's newspaper articles.
These do contribute to our understanding of Rick's life as a disillusioned first-year journalist, but they are not interesting of themselves. Detailing as it does a twenty-something lifestyle--Rick's life is at least more raucous than mine has ever been (though that's not saying much)--Journo's Diary will appeal in particular to the younger crowd, and to anyone who's ever worked as a journalist.
