Roll Away the Stone: When Journalism Was the Best Job in the World (pre order)

Roll Away the Stone: When Journalism Was the Best Job in the World by Declan Lynch

Working in the media used to be fun. You were part of a thriving industry in print and broadcasting with a licence to speak your mind and a chance to bring down the government every week. You could be working with interesting or eccentric people, many of whom enjoyed a drink after their work was done. Or even before it was done. And the pay wasn’t bad either. 

This went on for a long time. 

Declan Lynch started at the age of seventeen with Hot Press magazine, when Ireland was rising to rock’n’roll glory – and emerging from a fearful culture which was imploding with scandals of Church and State. His story takes us from a time of ancient practices – sticking down corrections with glue, laying out type on ‘the stone’ – through the years of great abundance for newspapers. 

Today the author still writes for the Sunday Independent, at a time when the media as we have known it is under tremendous pressure — battered by the brolicharchs of Silicon Valley and by Trumpist propaganda relentlessly branding ordinary decent journalism as ‘fake news’. 

In this richly insightful and often hilarious trip through the glory years and beyond, Lynch argues that the determination of the tech bros and their political allies to destroy the ‘liberal media’ is also the best compliment they could pay it. And he answers the crucial question: why was Hot Press assistant editor Liam Mackey running through Newbridge at 2 a.m. with his shoes in a biscuit tin? 

Declan Lynch has been a journalist since 1978, writing for Hot Press and the Sunday Independent, amongst others. He is the author of a number of books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Tony 10: The astonishing story of the postman who gambled €10,000,000 … and lost it all.