When the journalist Bill Smithies, who has died aged 74 of lung cancer, took up his first professional post in Liverpool in 1962, he was already a newspaper proprietor. In his final year as a mathematics student at Manchester University, he had edited the student newspaper, got into a stand-off with the student union that won him the backing of student newspapers way beyond the city, and graduated as co-owner (with his mother) of the assertively titled Manchester Independent.
That fact alone probably led Alick Jeans, boss of his family's Liverpool Daily Post & Echo, to abandon his usual practice of simply returning each spring to his old Oxford college to choose three of the dozens of wannabee journos queueing to sign up for a three-year indenture. A year or so into the traineeship, Jeans offered Bill the Harvard Business School's concentrated management course. He declined, because he wanted to be a journalist. (His proprietorship he had rapidly ceded to a trust.) And few of those around him, including me, a fellow trainee, doubted the potential of one who arrived technically adept, was an avid and perceptive observer of trends and talents in the national press, and constantly pushed the resources available to him to optimum effect.
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