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Working in the media used to be fun. You were part of a thriving industry in print and broadcasting with a licence to speak your mind and a chance to bring down the government every week. You could be working with interesting or eccentric people, many of whom enjoyed a drink after their work was done. Or even before it was done. And the pay wasn’t bad either. This went on for a long time.
Declan Lynch started at the age of seventeen with Hot Press magazine, during the pioneering days of rock journalism and of Ireland’s rise to international rock’n’roll glory – and its emergence from a fearful culture which was imploding with scandals of Church and State. His story takes us from a time of almost medieval practices – sticking down corrections with glue, laying out type on ‘the stone’, doing interviews with the Rolling Stones on a payphone in the hall of a Rathmines flat – through the years when the media was on such a roll, at one point the Sunday Independent for whom Lynch was writing was taking a million pounds a week in advertising.
Today the author is still a columnist with the Sunday Independent, at a time when the media as we have known it in modern times is under tremendous pressure – battered by the edgelords of Silicon Valley and by Trumpist propaganda relentlessly branding ordinary decent journalism as ‘Fake News’. Yet in this richly insightful and often hilarious trip through the glory years and beyond, Lynch argues that the determination of the tech bros and their political allies to destroy the ‘liberal media’ is also the best compliment they could pay it. And he answers the crucial question: why was Hot Press assistant editor Liam Mackey running through Newbridge at 2 a.m. with his shoes in a biscuit tin?
To ‘roll away the stone’ is to conjure up images of resurrection and victory – as well as the old printer’s stone. Journalism was once the best job in the world, and this book offers inspiration that it can rise again.
Declan Lynch has been a journalist since 1978, writing for Hot Press and the Sunday Independent, amongst others. He is the author of several books, both fiction and non-fiction, including the excellent Tony 10: The astonishing story of the postman who gambled €10,000,000 … and lost it all.
