With apologies to anyone I may have overlooked, and to bemused, non-journalistic readers to whom none of the names will mean a thing, I present the provisional staff list for our proposed new broadsheet newspaper, The Daily Salut! ...
For everyone involved in creating The National in Abu Dhabi, the sense of excitement was all the sharper because we were taking part, surely, in the last big newspaper launch the world would see.
But imagine you, too, had the means and inclination to publish a new title.
Forget, for a moment, the office space, printing press, circulation department, marketing, photographers, advertising staff and all the other essential people and material you'd need for such a venture. First things first: let's assemble our team of writers and reporters (whose roles are not always interchangeable).
And who might be among them? The answer is the great bunch of friends and former colleagues who met in a grown-up Victoria pizzeria this week. Among those attending this reunion of ex-Daily Telegraph journalists were some who had left the DT voluntarily for better jobs elsewhere, some who had been fired and at least one who had just retired.
But back to the recruitment, starting with the specialists:
Health? Celia Hall. Science? Nic Fleming. Nicole Martin and Matt Born would fight it out over media (we wouldn't need two, so one would be assigned to some other specialisation), Sarah Womack would return to her old social affairs beat while her old man, Jonathan Petre, handled religion.
There are few better arts correspondents than Nigel Reynolds but he could also be the features editor. Hugh Davies will look after show business coverage. Becky Barrow can be our City editor.
We still need someone on education, crime, the courts, Parliament, sport and travel, and other slots would have to be filled, but so many good people have left the Telegraph since the Barclay twins arrived that this should not present any great problem.
Fiona Barton is our news editor, ably backed by Anil Dawar with Thomas Penny running the night news desk and John Crowley in charge of foreign. Paul Hill and Kelly Scott (absent from the reunion) would come back to manage foreign and home news logistics and, since the travel budget would be limitless, I would join Graham Tibbets and Catriona Davies back on the road as a general reporter.
We'd need more than three but there are plenty of others, still hanging on at the DT or dotted around the media, who would rise to the challenge. I have Facebook friends who would race back to be part of our newsroom, which would necessarily be located in Fleet Street.
Sub-editors and the "back bench" production staff, plus a few foreign correspondents, would be drawn from Salut!'s regular readership.
There would be no style guide; we wouldn't need one. For the time being, we'll use the cartoons Matt did for most of us when we left the Telegraph, fiddle with the captions and hope no one notices.
The top jobs wouldn't be hard to allocate either, so many senior executives having been among DT casualties in recent times.
Fantasy Murdochism this may all be, but if the craic from the other night is anything to go by, it would be great fun - and we'd get a half decent paper out of it. Anyone fancy financing it?
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