Clare McDermott

A beneficial side-effect of the NUJ’s industrial action during the 1980 summer Olympics (mentioned elsewhere) was the subsequent creation of a separate Sports Desk in space vacated next to the main newsroom on the fourth floor of 85 Fleet Street. As the NGA telegraphists during the sympathy strike were transmitting only copy passed by the Editor, I spent several days and nights in the World Desk filing slot. The strike-induced slow flow of stories gave me time to wonder why sports editing was squeezed into the tight space around the World Desk hub.

When the dust had settled, I asked Clare McDermott, then sports editor, to explore the technical feasibility of setting up a separate unit elsewhere to free up scarce floor space for the World Desk. With valuable help from Ron Cooper and George Shillinglaw, Clare built a self-contained sports operation with its own ADX computer codes, television screens and telegraphists, thus enhancing the performance, speed and cohesiveness of our own sports team.

As World Desk Editor Clare later applied his skill at maximising the use of limited staff resources in maintaining a high-quality news file under relentless pressure of ever increasing wordage and of growing demands for speeding up turnaround time of the day’s news. For example, some of the evening and overnight shifts were brought forward to reinforce European daytime staffing levels. Eventually editorial control of the world news file was transferred from London to New York and Hong Kong for part of the 24-hour cycle. ■