Early Career
Beginning as a pop columnist for the London Evening News in the early 1970s, his work developed into a column titled "Ad Lib", a gossip column and lifestyle guide. It survived the merger of the Evening News with the Evening Standard. In 1976 he wrote a book about the Rolling Stones's 'Up and Down with the Rolling Stones' with their drug dealer 'Spanish Tony' Sanchez which became a best seller.
Blake was the first eponymous editor of 'Bizarre', a column in The Sun launched in May 1982 concentrating on celebrity gossip. A tug-of-war subsequently ensued over Blake between The Sun owner Rupert Murdoch and Daily Mirror owner Robert Maxwell. Maxwell won the bidding war and Blake launched a pop column called "White Hot Club". In 1985 Blake and the "Daily Mirror" were adjudicated against by the Press Council after "The Sun" scooped the "Mirror" with the biggest UK pop music story of the summer whereupon Blake invented quotes from former Bucks Fizz star Jay Aston for a front page "Mirror" story when in fact he had not spoken to Miss Aston or to anybody else to obtain the quotes. He became editor of Maxwell's Sunday People, an appointment which lasted until Maxwell decided he wished to appoint a female editor. Blake found himself President of the Mirror Group in the USA in the run-up to Maxwell's anticipated purchase of the National Enquirer, a job which imploded when Maxwell failed to complete the deal. He resolved to enjoy his hobby of sailing, with occasional contributions as a TV writer in the Daily Mail.
Read more about this topic: John Blake (journalist)
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or career:
“It was common practice for me to take my children with me whenever I went shopping, out for a walk in a white neighborhood, or just felt like going about in a white world. The reason was simple enough: if a black man is alone or with other black men, he is a threat to whites. But if he is with children, then he is harmless, adorable.”
—Gerald Early (20th century)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)