This was the same everywhere; Budget reports were ordered, and couriered to news rooms as soon as the Chancellor sat back down – unless you were on a trade paper and then some lackey drew the short straw and had to loiter at the Westminster press room door for their pre-booked copy. Now, you can download it from the Treasury website from the comfort of your own desk.
Press releases arrived mostly by post, and were followed up with a phone call. By the turn of the millennium, life had partially moved on: many press releases delivered to Financial Adviser were sent by fax machines – themselves a now-near obsolete piece of technology.
It was not just Budget reports and press releases that arrived by old-fashioned means such as ‘snail mail’.
There was the famous incident in 1996, when Scottish Life International’s PR company, Clarendon, decided to send every news room a special present in boxes, sent by couriers, to announce the launch of a product.
When the journalists opened the boxes, they were aghast to discover some terrified and extremely dehydrated birds.
Some 77 pigeons had been couriered overnight, without food or water, together with a letter asking the financial journalists to let the birds go – they were homing pigeons.
Inside the newsroom
There were other items that caused a stir in the Financial Adviser newsroom.
More recently, there was the case of the three child-sized body bags dumped by my desk in One Southwark Bridge, by an evidently frightened seasonal postroom worker.
The goods lift opened, and the temp asked around for me. When I replied in the affirmative, he gave me a strange look, and proceeded to pull the three large, black body bags out of the lift. Without saying anything else, but shooting me a parting look of extreme suspicion, he laid the bags down reverently next to each other and walked off.
Thankfully, these were merely three enormous giraffes sent from a Newcastle-based company as an unusual Christmas gift, whereupon the mature news editor at the time (me) and the equally mature deputy news editor (Marc Shoffman) decided to use these to surprise people dragging themselves, red-eyed, into the office lifts after the Christmas party.
Those days are very much a thing of the past: over the years, the FT’s anti-bribery and corruption rules have rightly erred on the side of caution and brought such practices to an end, in the interests of ensuring top-class, independent journalism, free from ‘fear and favour’.
