Rising to the Deadline: One Woman’S Sexy Climb to the Top in Newspapers

By Alexandra Bell

Sorcha is a young country girl who makes it to the top in the big, bad world of newspapers. From a farming family, she learns her trade in country papers before graduating to a main newspaper in the big smoke, Dublin. There, she rises to the top in a profession renowned for its back biting and betrayals, making it on her own verve, skills, and sheer tenacity.

Along the way, she has a lot fun. Sorcha quickly finds that she has no sexual inhibitions, with either men or women. She takes great pleasure in her many sexual adventuressome of which turn out to be hilarious. But despite all the fun and games, she also enjoys in her upward journey in the newspaper world. As she works, she learns more and more about what really goes on behind the scenes in the arcane atmosphere of newspaper production.

Rising to the Deadline is a story of raw, thrusting sexuality, but its also a touching story of how a young, talented country girl, with no important connections, makes a huge impact in the newspaper business, beating the old boys network at their own game.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Nov 29, 2010
• ISBN: 9781426944598

Book preview

Contents

Chapter I

The arrival

Chapter II

Going to the big smoke

Chapter III

Seduced by the deputy editor

Chapter IV

Crooked property

Chapter V

Days of wine and poses

Chapter VI

The bored of directors

Chapter VII

Arts and farts

Chapter VIII

Eating out the editor

Chapter IX

Slip sliding to oblivion

Chapter I

The arrival

THIS is the story of the decline and fall of a once great newspaper, not so much because of the arrival of the digital age, but because of the many absurd antics of the people working on the newspaper, staff and management alike. A new recruit to the paper, called Sorcha, later to become known inside the newsroom as Sorcha the Scorcher because of her many bizarre sexual predilections, was the person who epitomised the rot within.

It all began in total innocence. Sorcha was brought up on a remote farm in the north-west of Ireland, one of six children born to a couple who were born and bred into the very business of farming. The farm was comparatively small, about sixty acres, but the land was reasonably productive and yielded a fair living for the family in the 1960s. They kept a number of cows, generous in their milk yields, fed many hens, so providing a steady trade for their eggs at the weekly market in the nearby town, and also devoted a certain portion of their land to wheat and barley.

The family farmhouse was modest but not ostentatious; these days, it would be considered close to ruin, but in those far off days, people were happy enough with what little they had. Sorcha’s father always used to say: We may not have any luxuries, but we’ve enough to get by on. There were no foreign holidays in those days, but the trusty old family banger of a car took them all on trips to the seaside, twenty miles away, if the weather was favourable and her parents could take a break from their farming routines. The whole place was entirely typical of thousands of other farms up and down the country, unexceptional places, except that in this particular case, the farming family produced a truly remarkable daughter, Sorcha.

She began reading at a very early age and by three, was devouring nursery style books with great avidity. Enid Blyton is my favourite, she always told her friends and in later years, she always said that it was the books of Enid Blyton that inculcated in her a love not just for reading, but for writing those very words. She progressed through national school and into second level at a convent school in the nearby town; all the while, her ambitions were set on a career in writing and what really appealed to her was journalism on a daily newspaper.

The thoughts of getting that big scoop, unearthing some scandal that the political elite didn’t want the public to know about, meeting famous people and wining and dining in all kinds of exotic places at home in Ireland and around the world-that was her conception of daily newspaper journalism, a place above boredom and corruption. It certainly didn’t turn out to be boring, but the corruption was there by the bucket-load.

Little did she know that as her own career progressed, she would be involved in many scandals of her own creation. As for the thoughts of a daily newspaper, one that was held in such high esteem by better-off members of the public, actually daring to reveal a big political or commercial scandal, she soon found that this was la-la land, a purely Utopian thought, quashed by pressure from the all-powerful commercial people in the newspaper. After all, the people who sold the advertising space for a living, and the commercial heads who managed them, were the people who really held all the aces in the newspaper world. They didn’t want any revelations spoiling relationships with their advertisers and depriving them of all the not insignificant luxuries that were used to bribe them.

All this came later. The first thing that Sorcha did when she was ending her secondary school career was to sign up for a journalism course run by the county vocational educational committee. It was pretty basic stuff and it had a couple of tutors, one a seasoned hack from the local weekly newspaper, full of drink and cynicism, the other a retired and more refined writer who still contributed the odd column to newspapers around the country. From them, Sorcha learned the first principle of journalism-always get the name right. She started getting small pieces published in the local newspaper, an easy enough task, since one of the lecturers worked there. He was keen to encourage young people to join this great crusade called journalism, despite the fact that he recognised that one of the main benefits of the profession was keeping the local licensed trade in the luxury to which it was accustomed.

With her first one or two pieces, Sorcha didn’t quite get people’s names right and she soon heard about this, with a vengeance. On publication day, a Friday, if she was walking down the Main Street and met someone whom she had mentioned in her column that week, should there have been even the smallest error in the spelling of their name, all hell broke loose. The furies were unleashed and no-cone could be angrier that a local bigwig, or would-be bigwig, whose name wasn’t exactly correct. Sometimes, a torrent of expletives poured forth and the seventeen year old journalism student had to hide back her tears as the verbal abuse continued. But it was a good lesson and after just a few incidents like this, Sorcha said to herself: In future, I will ensure that every name I include in my copy is spelled with total and absolute accuracy, she said to herself, like a mantra, but she stuck with her self-made pledge unwaveringly.

From this step to the next step, of ensuing that all the facts were right was a much more considerable task, but one that Sorcha set about with her usual determination and vigour. She soon realised that while she had always wanted to write for a career, her real skills were in investigative reporting, unearthing the sordid facts that the people concerned would much rather were left unpublished. After a year of doing this part-time course, she was sufficiently well versed in the evil ways of the dark empire of journalism to become a full-time correspondent with the local paper.

It helped considerably that her tutor from the course, the man who still worked for the local newspaper, was not only regarded as an upstanding journalist, the very pillar of integrity, but on the sly, he also happened to very much addicted to a touchy feely approach to the young staff under his control. If they were male, they had nothing to be concerned about, since he had no inclinations in that direction, but if you were female and still in your late teens, you had to consider yourself at risk.

Surprisingly for the time, Sorcha had no particular inhibitions or shyness about sexual matters. Brought up on a farm, seeing the animals mate was almost an everyday occurence of which little notice was taken. When she was at secondary school, some of her fellow pupils encouraged her to unleash her sexual libido and little groups of girls frequently met in a hidden place in the school grounds, where the would-be journalist would think little of kissing another student, feeling her breasts through her blouse, or if they were both feeling very randy, putting each other hands in their knickers until they both became sopping wet. Sometimes, Sorcha would say to her fellow student: Stick your hand in my knickers and feel how my hairs are starting to grow. Feel my lovely warm slit and make me want to wet myself.

So on the evening when the senior journalist and herself were working late at the paper, with few other around, it came as little surprise to Sorcha to find that as she was bending over the made-up pages of the newspaper, ready for the printing press-in those days, the typesetting was cast in hot metal and the type had to be locked into formes-making sure that everything was just as it should be, she suddenly felt a hand creeping up her skirt. It couldn’t be anyone other than her boss, who in reality was the dirty old man of local journalism, an upright citizen, but not in the way that most members of the public thought. He had already had a serious drinking session at one of the local pubs, where encouraged by a succession of drinks on the house, he had promised the pub owner that the previous week’s minor court case involving a driving offence perpetrated by his son, simply wouldn’t appear in the paper.

After all, in local communities like these, the court cases were scrutinised in the most minute detail and if someone knew a cousin seven times removed of the person convicted in court, it made for doubly scintillating reading. The Germans have a wonderful word for the enjoyment of other people’s misfortunes-schadenfreude-but that had nothing on the sheer relish with which these court cases were not alone enjoyed but positively savoured to their merest morsel. It’s amazing how people simply lap up every last full point of these court cases, Sorcha said, to one of her colleagues.

Having done his good deed for the day, with the publican let off the hook, the journalist in question headed back to work, well oiled and decidedly randy. As Sorcha was bending over, checking all the made-up pages for the last time, before they were clamped to the press, she felt this hand going up her skirt.

She just uttered a quiet cooing of disapproval, tut, tut and not much else, but didn’t actually mind too much at all, when her male colleague eased his hand inside her knickers and began massaging her clitoris. She soon became wet and leaked fluid down her legs, ruining her stockings in the process. Sorcha found it all quite enjoyable, actually-finger me hard, she cried-and it was the first of many invasions of her privacy that were to prepare her with great thoroughness for her life on the great national newspaper in Dublin, where succumbing to the sexual predators who were her superiors was the fast route to getting her name in lights. She happened to be a good investigative news reporter, exceptionally able to ferret out the facts, but this skill by itself wasn’t enough. To make progress in journalism, as she soon found out, Sorcha had to be ready to open her legs to all and sundry. She was to find out that although some of her male colleagues and superiors were notorious micreants in this regard, it was really the women who were by far the worst, the randiest and most depraved when it came to taking advantage of their female underlings.

Eventually, she completed her studies on the journalism course. This was a provincial course run in a remote part of Ireland, with a couple of local tutors, and while they imparted to her much useful knowledge about the actual workings of journalism, the scrap of paper that contained her diploma at the end of the course was of little practical worth. But doing the course gave Sorcha the most invaluable insight of all into the way journalism works; she had become friendly with her tutors and they gave her invaluable introductions into the world of journalism.

No matter that one of her tutors got rare enjoyment from fingering Sorcha at every available opportunity; his preference was for sliding his hand up the back of her skirt, getting into her knickers from the back and feeling her cunt and clitoris that way. The awful thing was that Sorcha enjoyed being fingered quite as much the man who regularly abused her in this way. She said to the man in question: I know it’s really naughty the way you take me, but to tell you the truth, I really love the fingering you give me, Sorcha remarked to her tutor, who had a wide-mouthed grin of delight. She was starting to make her mark in journalism, all the while enjoying many sexual frissons that she found most enjoyable.

Sorcha went as far as she could go with the local weekly paper in her home county; it was a rather skimpy production, not running to more than twenty-four pages a week. Since many of those pages were obituary notices and in Memoriam notices, the mainstay of commercial revenue for the paper, the number of pages for pure editorial was somewhat limited.

All these deadly death notices filled several pages of the paper every week and what’s more, the populace at large was perfectly willing to pay the going rates to have their dearly departed loved ones commemorated in the paper, often including a blurred photograph, which of course, increased the price charged considerably. It was all rather macabre, but the paper didn’t get much advertising from other sources, although sometimes, if a price war was raging between the various supermarkets, they would take out full pages or even double page spread to have a crack at each other.

Then by the time all the press releases from the various local politicians had been carried in full, so badly sub-edited that if they made a grammatical mistake in their press release, it still promptly found its way into print, there was even less room for genuine news and features. The local notes, from village correspondents around the county, were another great space filler, at least a couple of pages a week with tedious and often totally banal notes about who had just died in the locality, which church was going to have a fete next week or who had won £5 on bingo. The people who wrote these notes were mostly old and doddery; few of them had progressed as far as using a typewriter to send in their copy. Computers were unheard of. Most of them sent in their copy in the form of roughly scrawled handwritten notes and it was always tradition for the most junior editorial staff to decipher these notes and turn them into neatly typed up pages, ready for the typesetter, who would put them through another transformation, into hot metal setting.

Overall, the paper’s policy was very conservative and most importantly of all, it gave plenty of praise when it was due, as well as when it wasn’t, and there was a complete absence of critical comment about the activities of the local bigwigs, who kept the cover on their often nefarious commercial activities, such as property development, by the simple expedient of never being mentioned in the pages of the local paper. So extensive and deep rooted was this urge towards ‘touch your forelock’ type of social conservatism that on one famous occasion, when the paper printed several photographs of a particularly busy session at the local mart, the results were unintentionally hilarious and made the paper a laughing stock up and down the country. A bull that was much prized in the vicinity for the size and capabilities of its sexual equipment came up for sale and since it had such a splendid track record in covering the females of the species, it fetched a goodly price.

However, the editor of the paper just happened to be a very good friend indeed of the farmer who was selling the bull. The farmer didn’t want too much publicity about either the sale or the amount of money that the bull had gone for, so the editor duly obliged. In the old days of letterpress newspaper production, on the rare occasions that any well-known local criminal was pictured going into court to face charges, his facial features were blotted out with a black strip imposed across the photograph during pre-press production. The reason for this strip was to ensure that the man in question couldn’t be recognised, thereby unduly influencing the results of his trial. So on this famous occasion of the sale of the prize bull, the editor decided to run the bull’s photograph in the paper that week, with a little story about the great sale in that mart, without giving a precise price for what the bull had achieved. The bull got a black strip of anonymity right across its head.

The photograph of the bull with the strip blotting out its head didn’t cause much of a stir locally; readers recognised that both the bull and its owner were due a certain amount of privacy. But elsewhere and far beyond the confines of this small town weekly newspaper, the incident provoked mirth and joy among the sophisticated intellectuals of the newspaper world. In the various quality daily newspapers in Dublin, it was seen as a prime example of the oafish ways of the rural population. The intellectuals loved looking down on the rural community and if they had an opportunity to pour scorn on their primitive ways, they leapt at it, without of course transferring anything of their guffaws into print.

This local newspaper had another and even more dubious claim to fame. The father of the then present owner, managing director and editor, a shameless triple jobbing if ever there was one, was renowned for the perspicacity with which he ran the commercial side of the paper. It was well-known in the community that advertisers always paid up, never mind how big the size of the ad, and bad debts were simply unknown. People who advertised had always had a very good reason to pay their bills to the paper on time. The father of the then present owner had been an active participant in Ireland’s War of Independence, 1919-1921, and had played no small part in liberating the county from the tyranny of an absent colonial ruler and replacing it with local gombeen rule, in which the shopkeepers and other petty merchants ran the show.

Said gentleman of the press, when his glorious time in Ireland’s quest for independence was over, kept the revolver that had proved so useful in dispatching many of his enemies. This time, however, whenever someone proved slow in settling their debts with the newspaper, he turned up in person on their doorstep with his weapon of mass persuasion in his pocket. In such a way, he kept defaulters to a non-existent level.

By the time that Sorcha had arrived at the paper, his son was well ensconced as the boss and while he didn’t carry on his father’s automatic gun tradition, people remembered that there had been many a time when a recalitrant advertiser was lucky not to have been on the wrong end of the barrel of this infamous gun.

With all the shenanigans at the paper, and its devotion to mind numbing local minutiae, Sorcha felt that it was time to be off, slip the bonds and head for greater fame. She had got to know the owner and editor of a much bigger provincial newspaper, at the other end of the country. Since this particular newspaper cast its circulation net over a much larger area of the province in which it was situated, it had immeasurably more influence than the small newspaper in Sorcha’s home county.

One Monday morning, she arrived at the premises of her new employer, having previously got herself fixed up with a pleasant and relatively inexpensive bedsit, where she could come and go as she pleased, well away from the strictures at home, for the first time in her eighteen years. Sorcha was bang on time for her first day in her new job and to start, she had a little chat with the owner and editor. He was an overwhelmingly bombastic individual, much concerned with making as much money as he could out of all his enterprises and property, which weren’t just in his home city, but in several southern European countries and in the US. Money is everything to me, he had told a close friend one evening, when he was overcome by drink, and it was perfectly true. The truth had emerged with the wine.

He was also very concerned with ingratiating himself as much as he could with local councillors and any other local bigwigs who happened to be around and were amenable to a little persuasion of the monetary kind. The editor also got himself very involved with as many local organisations and charities as possible and if there wasn’t an organisation to match his exact needs of the moment, then he set one up and ensured that he was elected chairman in perpetuity. Money and power were everything to him; many of his junior staff, employed for miserable wages, lived in digs that just happened to be owned by him. On one famous occasion, when the junior editorial employees had pressed long and hard for a much-deserved pay rise, they got their way, despite the fact that they did most of the arguing themselves. The journalists’ union then had little influence in the provinces and on the ways of the devious owners; frankly, it was of little use in improving matters.

Anyway, the juniors on the paper in question did get the pay rise they sought and were much relieved and celebrated in style. But then they soon found that by a mysterious coincidence, the rent for their digs had gone up by an amount equivalent to their pay rise. Sorcha, being a very streetwise young lady, way ahead of her time in being so street smart, had already sussed out these property links and was careful to rent a bedsit that wasn’t owned by her boss.

At work, the boss was a real tyrant. Every now and again, someone on the staff would say something just wind up the boss. A favourite trick was to mention a story in the rival weekly, produced just down the street, and just drop a hint that the journalist who’d written the story had come up with a good angle and had spent a little time digging for dirt. This really annoyed the boss, as his maxim was to to cram as many stories as he could into the paper.

He didn’t like people spending too much time researching a particular story, especially if it had toxic aspects, so all his staff became experts at top of the head expertise, casting each of their pieces with a certain gloss and veneer that made them look as if they had been researched in depth. Public relations people, especially the really knowing ones in Dublin, knew that if they sent in a press release that had a good local angle and looked as if a lot of effort had gone into its creation, it would be a dead cert for publication and might even make the front page. These country papers are a real push-over if you come up with any old half-decent crap, said one of Dublin’s best known pr practitioners.

Still, no-one complained and if the general reading public had any idea of the shallowness and superficiality of editorial research, they never let on and it never seemed to affect the sales of the paper. Sorcha found that as with the smaller paper where she had started her life in journalism, if there was a really good obituary piece in the paper about someone who was really well-known in the community and who had lots of relatives and general hangers-on, then this was a great boost for the paper.

Neither did the general public have the slightest idea of how the most gigantic rows could be sparked off by the most trivial of incidents. When one of these rows got going, the boss would be in the midst of the newsroom, shouting his head off, uttering profanities that few had heard of before, turning the atmosphere a brighter shade of blue. The older members of staff were well up for this carry-on and they could produce lines of incandescent invective that would match anything the boss would come out with, indeed, discover some rare rude words that had hardly seen the light of day for the past century, they were so archaic. In summertime, these rows were even better.

The ventilation in the newsroom was non-existent, made worse by the fact that in those days, no-one thought twice about puffing away on cigarette after cigarette, or in one or two cases, a judiciously curved pipe would emit great curls of blue smoke that would drift towards the ceiling. In those far off days, in the 1960s, it was perfectly acceptable not only to smoke one’s head off in the newsroom, but to return from lunch, somewhere about four in the afternoon, solidly and imperiously sloshed, with the smell of booze oozing from every pore.

So what happened, usually between May and September of every year, as soon as the weather warmed up, the great tall windows in the newsroom, windows that dated from the late eighteenth century and had hardly been renovated, let alone repainted in the intervening years, were flung open. The lower part of the sash windows was flung upwards, so that plenty of fresh air could come in from outside.

While it was great for Sorcha and her colleagues to breathe in the purer air from outside, the great gaps in the windows meant that whenever the boss and his staff got going with an acrimonious row, the foulest of words and phrases would drift out of the window and almost hang in the air like a quaver on a musical score. Those words and phrases were absolutely scurrilous, referring to the cleaninless and effectiveness of someone’s sexual organs, making the most scandalous references to a person’s family heritage or else inviting them to perform the most unlikely sexual act possible on their own person, without recourse to any second party.

For anyone who happened to be walking along the street outside, when these streams of invective poured out of the windows, it was worth stopping in one’s tracks to hear what was almost like a one act play made up entirely of four letter words. Above the general cacaphony, the strident and belligerent tones of the owner could be heard, uttering the most foul mouthed words one could imagine about a member of staff.

These days, the row would quickly degenerate into an inter union/management squabble and the union big-wigs would be called in. But in those days, the union was weak, so journalists knew they had to stand up for themselves. They also had a much better way of stopping these rows than by complaining to the union. After a while, the row would fizzle out-they nearly always do in the newspaper business-and surprisingly to an outsider, the two sides would make peace. The causes of the row were never mentioned again and everyone simply got on with whatever they had to do, whether it was typing up copy, subbing it or correcting page proofs. People in the street eavesdropping on these tremendous rows simply couldn’t understand how they ended as quickly as they began and how the newspaper could appear the following day as if the whole blazing row had been a figment of someone’s imagination and had actually never happened.

While Sorcha found the boss demanding enough to work for and apt to ask her to cow tow to some local big wig whom he wanted to butter up, she found nothing adverse in his character except for his twin loves of power and money. If the boss felt that he was at the very heart of some local political cabal, and he was involved in some deal or other that was bringing in plenty of cash, the boss was as content as Larry, feeling that all was well with the world.

One strange thing she found about her boss, and a little chilling, too, was that although Sorcha was a good looking young woman with a fine figure and a winning smile, the boss had absolutely no interest in her as a woman. If she did her job as he wanted, he was happy with that, but there was never any sexual innuendo in anything he said to her and he most certainly didn’t make any advances or make any attempt to behave in the absolutely outrageous way of the newspaper man who had tutored her previously.

In a way, Sorcha missed this carry-on and if the boss on her present newspaper showed no interest in her as a sexual and highly sexed being, neither did she find any inspiration in this regard among her fellow journalists. I just can’t find any of them particularly sexy, she mused to herself, an opinion that she was later to reverse, but only when she was leaving the paper.

But her work was quite satisfying. She was writing some good news stories that sometimes made the