George Clooney to Edit The Independent

Posted on October 1, 2007

The newsroom at The Independent (U.K.) is about to a lot more interesting: actor, director, screenwriter and activist George Clooney will do a guest-editing stint for the newspaper.

Negotiations are under way for Clooney to follow in the footsteps of rock star Bono and fashion designer Giorgio Armani and guest edit an edition of the paper for the Africa charity Product Red. If talks bear fruit, Clooney, whose high profile campaigning against the genocide in Darfur chimes with the Independent's own editorial stance, would edit the paper for a day next year, possibly in March. Clooney and his journalist father, Nick, have lobbied the UN about the violence in the region and travelled to Sudan in a bid to stop the killings.
The actor, who won his best supporting actor Academy Award for Syriana, has described his Darfur campaign as an attempt to "use the credit card that you get for being famous in the right instances whenever you can". Over the past year the Independent and Independent on Sunday have run 294 articles about Darfur, including a front-page article in August by actress Mia Farrow about how she had witnessed suffering in the region at first hand. The paper also ran an interview with Clooney about Darfur when Armani "guest designed" the paper in September last year. The actor's Hollywood press agent denied that the paper had been in talks with Clooney. However, MediaGuardian.co.uk understands that PR agency Freud Communications, which handles the Product Red campaign, is negotiating on behalf of the paper.
The Independent was unavailable for comment and a spokesman at Freud said that the agency was not currently planning anything with the Independent. The paper secured Bono as its guest editor in May last year in a blaze of publicity. At the time the Independent said the Bono edition sold about 70,000 extra copies; one industry source said the increase was closer to 50,000 copies.

We'd grump about celebrities thinking they can be children's authors and journalists without any prior training, but we're going to give Clooney a pass. He's smart, articulate and is a good writer. The fact that he was People's Sexiest Man Alive and is unbelievably handsome doesn't enter into it at all.