Hacks? Critics? Writers?What's in a Name?

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time these past few weeks going over the year’s posts (60) to try to give them a little bit more “shape” ie coherence. It was probably this post back in June which planted the idea of the need for some editing of my posts. For whatever reason, there does seem to have been more of a pattern to my writing this year..  The interest in organisational reform didn’t entirely peter out – but morphed into a larger concern about systems of power and the State..

I will, in a few days, be uploading this year’s collection of posts which also shows that an important thread running through the year has been the need for writing which – as one post put it - 

jolts me – not for its own sake but to help first identify minds which look at the world in original ways but which also understand that clear language is an essential tool for such originality…Recently deceased essayist Tom Wolfe was a favourite of mine ever since I first read his Mau Mauing the flak catchers in 1970 but the “creative writing” courses which have contaminated journalism in the past few decades have made me suspicious of even good journalists these days. James Meek remains an exception for his ability to reduce economic complexities to 5 or 10 thousand word essays – ditto Jonathan Meades for his forensic analyses of cultural issues.

But it was Arthur Koestler who first stunned me (in my late teens) with memorable writing – hardly surprising given his amazing background. Only Victor Serge could rival the enormity of the events which shaped him. How can those who have known only a quiet bourgeois English life possibly give us insights into other worlds? And yet a few writers manage to do it.

But somehow, academic specialists are rarely able to produce prose which grips…Is it the unrealistic restriction of the scope of their inquiries vision which causes the deadness of their prose – or perhaps the ultra security of their institutional base??

It’s this question which led me to offer this matrix of good journalistic writers – dividing them according to their focus on people, ideas, events and places. This made me realise, in turn, the fine line there is between such categories as journalist, novelist and travel writer. Or perhaps the distinction is, more properly, that between generalists and specialists – with the latter including not only travel writers but those who focus on books, films, drama and art (designated "critics") and sports (of each variety – including politics).  And the former covering essentially those we refer to, derogatively, as “hacks” – since what they do is to hack out “news” from the public relations handouts they receive

I accept that the focus of my table on the former type of writer is as a result somewhat elitist....

I wanted to include examples from countries beyond the UK and managed 20 – whose nationalities are clearly designated in the table. I’ve tried googling (in French and in German) to try to get a sense of who might be the equivalent European journalists but the google curse of neophilia means that only references to younger names are given….

Good “Journalistic” writers – by focus, base and nationality

Source of income	People	Ideas	Events	Places	Mixed genres
freelance	Masha Gessen (RU) Biographers	Peter Watson Naomi Klein (Can)	Victor Serge (Be) Kenneth Roy	John Ardagh Dervla Murphy Jan Morris Neal Ascherson Philip Marsden Giles Milton	George Orwell Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Ger) Francis Wheen Arundati Roy (India) Joan Didion  US Tariq Ali (Pak/UK)
Academia	Biographers	Mark Greif USA Mark Lilla USA Perry Anderson USA	Historians Political scientists Economists	Geographers Anthropologists Sociologists	Raymond Aron (France) Michael Pollan USA
Journal newspaper television	Oriana Fallaci (It) Clive James	Francois Bondy (Sw) Claude Roy (Fr) Chris Hitchens Martin Jacques Paul Mason George Monbiot Duncan Campbell Owen Jones Adam Curtis	Arthur Koestler Vasily Grossman (Ru) Seb Haffner (Ger) Joseph Roth (Ger) Rudolf Augstein (Ger) Paul Foot Patrick Cockburn Simon Jenkins	Luigi Barzini (It) Andrew Sampson Svetlana Alexievich (Belarussia) Robert Kaplan (US) John Hooper John Pilger Robert Fisk Tobias Jones	Anthony Lane James Meek Andrew O Hagen
Think Tank		David Goodhart Susan George (US)