Sports journalist - phoning in results : William Pitfield

Transcript

Telephone - as far as the journalists side of it's concerned - a telephone was very much used of course and I used to telephone a lot of the news stories direct to London and the regional newspapers by telephone four maybe five, sometimes different papers, practically every day and this would take up to an hour or more of my time every day. And at the other end there would be a person called a copy taker who would take it down verbatim your story. Papers like Fleet Street had a large number of lines and large number of copy takers; there was never any delay because it was they couldn't afford delay because if you were phoning a story say about four o'clock in the afternoon that would be probably in the paper by about twelve o'clock at night, so there was a very strict time limit on it. Of course there were no sophisticated communications, so what I had to do was to employ a runner. In those days, in a football match for example you sent two or three pieces as the match was progressing. You would write it out as the match was going on, on a piece of paper, and then the runner would take it back to a telephone.