Letting old cats out of their bags: Pallab Ghosh

Pallab Ghosh was Felix Editor from 1983/84. He is currently a science correspondent at the BBC. I met him in the BBC offices. When he was Editor they printed in their in house print shop and the Editor was also the manager of the print shop, who printed club leaflets. He tweets as @BBCPallab.

TA: Something I’ve noticed is that there is a general underlying tone, but there are changes from year to year. One year it’s a bit more light hearted, then the next year it’s a bit more serious. How did you choose that?

PG: Yes it tends to go like that. I took my inspiration from a guy called Steve Marshall, who was Editor when I was a first year. He had this certain approach (humour). The Editors who followed him were a bit more straightforward. They wanted to kind of distinguish themselves by not having the same approach. You only get one shot at it and it’s great fun. So you shouldn’t have any regrets at the end of it.

TA: How did you get involved at Felix?

PG: I didn’t think of journalism or newspapers as my thing. I was quite keen on athletics. I went along to a meeting of University of London Athletics Club and there was no one there – I probably turned up at the wrong place. So I thought, I’ll have to find something else to do.

There was a guy across the hall from me who was involved in the student newspaper. So I got involved. The Editor at the time lived in the same halls, and he was nocturnal. So Patrick would say “come along and meet Steve”, and we’d go along to his room and they’d get chatting and then he said “come along and work on Felix and do some collating”. I was very under confident about my writing. I was more there for the craic – as in the Irish term, rather than something untoward going on. Then I got more into it, did a bit of photography. When it got to the end of my third year I hadn’t been involved in that Editor’s Felix, because he was far too straight laced and whatever and not part of what Felix was about. So I decided to put myself forward as Editor, because I really liked the layout and design.

TA: My lecturer Alan Armstrong told me that you produced the halls’ newsletter actually.

PG: Yes. It was this thing called the Wellsian. The newsletter of the H. G. Wells society, which we created while I was there. It just gave me a taste of doing layout and design, which I loved. Back then, the production was one of the main things that the Editor did. Obviously, he gave it an editorial direction, but I thought if I got a staff of writers I could manage. Then when I got elected I redesigned the paper and I got other people to write the news stories. I hoped that my girlfriend at the time would write the editorial. She was too busy so I had to do it myself. It was with one hour to go and I wrote it and it was fine. It was just this thing in my head that made me think I couldn’t write, then I found out I quite enjoyed writing. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

So I just drifted into it [being Editor] and because I enjoyed Felix and liked the journalism I decided to become a journalist.

TA: Did you do the header yourself?

PG: I commissioned someone to do it. I was into layout myself but with the logo it’s good to do that. It was someone who wanted to be a professional graphic designer. We had a chat and it was just something bright, and a new dawn, and I wanted the cat on.

TA: The logo changing so much is really weird. I remember my brother trying to give me advice and telling me I shouldn’t change the logo. I said look at the issue archive they change the logo every year.

PG: There’s the sense that The Times you don’t get them changing the logo because it’s the brand. But that’s the biggest way you can make your mark.

TA: I think with Felix the name is the brand. What it looks like changes year by year, and that’s almost part of the brand that it changes year by year.

PG: Yeah, because you don’t get Editors changing at The Times every year.

TA: Any standout moments from your year? News stories or features that you think came off well?

PG: Well. I’m the only Felix Editor that riled the Rector so much that they brought out their own newspaper against me! It was just generally a body of work that rattled lots of cages and got a reaction. Everyone was involved in Felix in one way or another. They’d rush to open it to see who had been slagged off, who hadn’t been. You know, obviously the news is important, but with a student newspaper it should be part of the community. If I were to describe what I felt proud of it would be that everyone was engaged in it. We couldn’t print more than a certain number of copies as we’d exceed our budget, but they were gone by 9:30 – first lectures.

TA: Looking back on stories that seemed to be very important, how important do they seem in hindsight?

PG: Well, there was a story about a student who had committed suicide, which was a serious story. We produced a special issue on that – I don’t know if it made it to the bound editions [which are big editions that has every paper in one place]. Most of the time it was reporting the news. There were no big standout moments. My Felixes were more magaziny. There was a bit of news, which was reported.

We ran a campaign to save a tea room. It was the Head of Biology who was trying to shut it down so we portrayed him as Hitler.

TA: So what stories stand out as big stories from your year?

PG: So there was the student who was shot dead. It turned out he had killed himself. So that was challenging to report that.

There was a pornography show that the RSM used to show. And one of the students campaigned against it. It doesn’t bear thinking about these days that the RSM used to invite these strippers along and show pornographic films, some of which were kind of very hardcore, involving animals and so forth.

TA: That was allowed?

PG: Exactly. It seems bizarre. One of the students campaigned against it. So that was a good running story. I had some good running stories I think. Stories that matter to people. You’re at the mercy of that happening. Quite a lot of the time the news can be slow or uninteresting, so you’ve got to make sure that the rest of the newspaper’s entertaining in some way.

TA: Did you do that with the rest of the paper? Make sure it’s entertaining so there’s always something fun for people to read.

PG: Yeah there’s always something fun for people to read and it looked good. You know, whether there was good news or not. But news is the thing that people care most about.

You have a sense for what people care about and you talk to them about it and you report it.

TA: Were people ever upset by what was in the paper? Did you ever get any complaints?

PG: Oh I got loads of letters of complaints, which I published (laughs). Some of them were written in the right spirit – a bit of banter back – but I got complaints, and I published them. It made for a lively letters section.

TA: At the time did you feel upset, I mean, I can’t imagine you found it fun to receive those?

PG: Oh it was! I deliberately set out to upset people and it was sort of great satisfaction to me that they were (laughs).

TA: Did Felix prepare you for your career in science journalism? Is it different how you do things now compared to back then?

PG: The process is the same. You have a sense for what people care about and you talk to them about it and you report it. That’s the same now as it was hundreds of years ago. One of the things Felix does teach you at an early age is the stories. Once upon a time people used to leave school and work on the local paper and work for the local radio stations doing the basics; they’d learn what stories were. Now people do journalism courses it’s all about the academia of impact of news and that sort of thing. Many editors complain that people don’t know what stories are. If you’re an editor, you’ve got a community, you know what works, almost instinctively.

TA: Do you think working in Felix gives you a sense of what students care about and what they don’t care about? And if they should care about it, how to make them care?

PG: To be honest I think it was instinctive. I just wrote about stuff that I found interesting and it worked. It got a reaction and went to plan. So. I think you know what you’ve learnt in retrospect.

TA: Do you feel science journalism and communication are going through a renaissance period?

PG: Well first of all I’d make a distinction between science journalism and science communication. Communication is what NASA and CERN do. They feel like they have an obligation to put on their websites – and I feel the web has changed things a lot –and also through the media explain what they’re doing. But, at the end of the day, it’s still propaganda. It’s for them to show that they are doing the right thing, that it’s important. I think even with things like explaining the Higgs, what science journalists need to do is to ask awkward questions: has it really been worth the money? Do these results really stand up? Is it all that it’s cracked up to be? Unless science journalists do that there’s no reason for the public to get their science news from any other place than the NASA website or Wellcome Trust website.