For several long unnerving months, I was Nancy.
That's what some said at the Factory. "Ah, you're Nancy. I see!"
You'd never believe it these days to look at us. Nancy, bless her and no idle compliment this, hasn't changed much over the years since I was finally put on to her contract while she was on maternity leave.
Back then, I was surprisingly timid for somebody who'd just taken his previous boss to court and won. I'd been union deputy and occasional fall guy to a wily Tunisian. Much to the chagrin of most other employees at 'AfricAsia' magazine, a monthly which survived for four years alongside a French bedfellow, Faouzi and I were astute enough to see that after month upon month of late salaries and unconvincing excuses, we had a choice.
One option was to wait for the company to go bust. Then we'd all be out of a job, without compensation. The other was to shut it down by going to court, having the official receivers brought in and force everybody out of work, but ensure that we got paid enough to survive a spell on the dole.
When the court handed down its judgement, I remember rushing out and sobbing instead of celebrating with the others, leaning over a bridge across the Seine. I was weeping with sheer relief!
Later, I got my first temporary contract at AFP, where I'd done the tests on the quiet. Even then, it was a nightmare. One Thursday, I got a call: "You start on Monday."
If I remember right, it was the Sunday night that the same bloke, who's still around and thus should perhaps remain nameless, called again and told me I wasn't required after all.
Oh, and for the record, 'Afrique Asie' is back on the newstands, has been for years, and claims on the Net to have a quarter of a million readers. They even get it on AFP's Desk afrique. I wish all who sail on that particular ship well enough, I'm told it's a stout vessel, but if there's one magazine I could never bring myself to read again, that is it!
I recalled that tough time today, when I went out for a cigarette break and found one of the Factory's fundamentally decent people, a senior editor, in the stairwell with a young journalist hopeful of a job.
The poor woman was clearly stuck, obviously wishing gently to disabuse him but not wanting to put him down completely. After all, he'd just been told by management that the five months he'd worked in one of AFP's bureaux abroad counted for nothing when it came to employment prospects in the engine room in Paris.
But that, unfortunately, is how it is.
As in almost every other media company I can call to mind, we've not quite got a hiring freeze but there are already so many people inside the place on temporary contracts, waiting for a permanent job to come up, that the chance of a toehold for a newcomer is even slimmer than it was in the days when I was Nancy.
Well, I gave my senior editor friend a helping hand to break the tidings, which earned me a grateful smile. There is always a chance, but I've seen dozens of professionally trained aspirants like that youngster show up with stars in their eyes. I know how few of them make it. And I've never forgotten how it feels.
It's always hard to give it to them straight, every single time, but they're much better off -- and so are you -- when you do. I remember being Nancy well enough to know that there's almost nothing worse on the job front than being sustained by false hopes and vague promises that will never be kept. But I did have two or three tips for the guy too, which he seemed to appreciate, so I'll pass them on.
If you want to break into the media nowadays, the chances still are that you eventually will if you're any good. The prospects aren't hopeless, but being good matters more than it once did. One of the few real "advantages" of the ever-increasing competition in the profession has been the slow collapse of nepotist networks.
A particularly favourable time to go knocking on doors is before the holiday periods, just when you might feel least inclined to do so. It's precisely then that news editors are sometimes wondering where they're going to find decent temporary replacements for absent regulars.
Don't expect miracles. If you get a temporary contract, the chances are that you'll be shovelling shit, working on boring but necessary stories that nobody else wants to do and putting up with the most anti-social hours. Almost all of us have been there and done it. I spent several years at it until people started handing stuff I actually enjoyed my way.
Be a specialist. You can expect to be doing "general news" for starters, but if you have something like fluent Chinese or inside knowledge of the workings of the Vatican tucked away on your CV, this well get noticed. And possibly, eventually, used.
One of my English freelance friends broke into journalism because he knew the history and functioning of France's labyrinthine trade union system and labour laws better than the back of his hand. This, believe it or not, was of interest to obscure clients in Scandinavia and elsewhere. He's had lean years and fat ones since, but now he's often doing completely different things and sometimes having to turn down work. And he's been paid to travel to interesting places I've scarcely heard of in the course of the job.
Above all, don't be shy.
If there's one thing most experienced professional journalists hate, it's arrogance in a newcomer, people who reckon their copy's so good that they behave like kids throwing tantrums when others change it. Almost nobody really writes that well, least of all me, and I've been at it since 1976.
But worse than arrogance is insufficient self-confidence. Journalism is not a profession for people who dither, can't organise their ideas and are indecisive. And these days, that's truer than ever. I've never bothered to try to measure how much faster the news moves on today's media, not how much more of it there is, than when I started.
If I could and did, I think I might fall off my chair.
As for Nancy, did I ever dare tell her that I was on her contract for so long while she was getting into motherhood that until she showed up one day in the Factory, I'd begun to think she was a myth?
9:55:32 PM link 
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