[cnn-photo-caption image=http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/11/09/art.amanpour.writer.jpg caption="Sr. Writer Tom Evans"]
Our Sr. Writer Meets His Father’s Former Editor
By Tom Evans, CNN
It’s not every day that a journalist has the good fortune to meet a man who has inspired not only his own generation but also his father’s. That’s exactly what happened to me this week when I met Sir Harry Evans, who was editor of London’s Sunday Times for 14 years from 1967 and editor of The Times for one year until he abruptly resigned in 1982 after tensions with its new proprietor Rupert Murdoch.
More than a quarter century after his resignation, Sir Harry and his wife Tina Brown, an accomplished journalist and editor in her own right, came to our New York studios to talk with Christiane Amanpour about old media, new media, and what’s next in a world where newspapers in the U.S. and other countries are shedding thousands of jobs and news web sites are gaining popularity and influence.
It was a very different era for newspapers when my father Peter Evans, a journalist on The Times, worked for Sir Harry back in the early 1980’s. My father was the newspaper’s Home Affairs Correspondent, covering issues such as race relations, immigration, police and prisons. Here’s what my father told me this week about his recollections of Sir Harry.
“He was the only editor who had ever given me a chance to correct my own copy. I loved his hands-on approach. He cared for his writers but was demanding in his quality. Of the seven editors I worked for, he had most intuition. He knew how to take the germ of an idea and develop it, without distortion. His news sense was supreme.”
Everyone thought Sir Harry was a genius. His journalistic skills and editorial integrity were legendary in the UK and overseas as he challenged authority, broke down barriers, and fought for transparency on issues that many wanted to cover up. Among those issues were the Thalidomide drug scandal, the exposure of the Soviet spy Kim Philby, and the publication of the Crossman Diaries on the inner workings of government, despite Britain’s Official Secrets Act. Sir Harry also found time to pen a series of books entitled “Editing and Design” that influenced a new generation of journalists as they began their careers.
I recall the beginning of my journalism career in a training room listening to senior newspaper executives telling us about the glories of a trade that was, in its heyday, a craft in which young reporters were frequently judged on their stamina in a pub as much as their stamina in pursuit of a story.
One of my fellow trainees listened with particular awe to those executives, especially those from the Thomson group, the parent organization of The Times and The Sunday Times, as well as my first newspaper, The Western Mail in Cardiff, Wales. That colleague was focused on a single mission - how he could join the Sunday Times’ famous “Insight” team of investigative reporters that had free rein to travel the world in search of scoops. So enthusiastic was this particular cub reporter about investigative reporting that we subsequently nicknamed him “Insight”. However, neither he (who ended up being an investigative attorney) nor I met the great Sir Harry Evans then.
But that opportunity came this week in our CNN newsroom in New York. After I shook hands with Sir Harry, I asked him if he remembered my father. In what turned out to be an emotional moment for me, he said he did and fondly recalled my father hard at work at The Times, grappling with a challenge unknown to this current generation of journalists, the mechanical typewriter. Sir Harry remembered my father as something of a perfectionist, frequently ripping out paper when there was a typo in his copy and starting afresh time after time, until he was satisfied with his work.
For Sir Harry and my father it was all about the best possible reporting and writing, sometimes under impossible deadlines, with technology that from today’s perspective seems almost medieval. But they and many other newspaper men and women were fired up by the intense competition of Britain’s Fleet Street, a sense of purpose supported in most cases by powerful newspaper proprietors, and above all a burning desire to seek the truth and challenge conventional wisdom.
If I can be half as good as they were, and still are, then I will have accomplished something worthwhile in my career as a journalist. None of this though would have been possible without the inspiring example of my father and journalists like Sir Harry. So it was extremely touching when Sir Harry signed my copy of one of his “Editing and Design” books, the one called “Newsman’s English”, and added the words, “To Tom, who doesn’t need it”. It was the highest tribute he could have paid me.
Thank you Sir Harry, thank you dad, for being such a wonderful role model and for inspiring me and many other journalists of my generation.
Editor’s note: in case anyone is wondering, Tom and his father are not related to Sir Harry!