Paper Monitor
11:08 UK time, Thursday, 8 March 2012
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Paper Monitor's formative impressions of journalism were shaped in no small part by the New Musical Express - that weekly almanac of what is currently hip in Camden Town's grottier live venues.
The NME turns 60 this year and, to celebrate, the Times runs an about the publication's history.
In particular, it focuses on its 1976 advert for "hip young gunslingers" to serve as staff writers.
Famously, one applicant was Julie Burchill - then a 17-year-old Bristol schoolgirl. Another was Neil Tennant, subsequently singer with the Pet Shop Boys. And much of the competition was just as retrospectively noteworthy:
From Worcestershire a prog-obsessed schoolboy called Jonathan Coe, later to draw on his fixation with the Seventies music press in his novels. From Camden, a schoolteacher with dreams of being a novelist called Sebastian Faulks. The shortlist was eventually narrowed to four: Burchill, a PhD student from Edinburgh called Ian Cranna, a fanzine writer and bookshop assistant from Stockport called Paul Morley and a 23-year-old gin distillery worker from Essex called Tony Parsons.
Burchill and Parsons, famously, were hired - two young, working class iconoclasts, enthused by the dawn of punk, in an office full of hacks who cut their teeth in the hippy era and were suspicious of change.
Of course, the NME was looking for more than just writing talent. On her first assignment, Burchill demonstrated a novel technique of gathering interesting quotes by slipping amphetamines into the drink of her subject, a relic of the hated flower power days.
"The job interview was more like an audition," recalls Parsons. "They were picking people who looked the part more than anything."
This set a new stylistic tone for a publican that would adorn teenage bedroom floors for decades hence.
Indeed, the Independent reports that the NME is to From Bristol and Essex to the world.
The 
