It was a Thursday around lunchtime in the half-full Rome foreign-press-club bar, barely 50 yards from the Trevi Fountain, and John Phillips was mulling his many troubles, never quite making eye contact, preferring to study the remnants of a bucatini all’Amatriciana. Business was tough, money was tight, and there was that recent small bother involving the United Nations, which was suing him for more than he was worth on several counts of criminal defamation. But he wasn’t really thinking about any of that now.
Instead Phillips was thinking about the slow, sad demise of his beloved profession—along with many of its practitioners. He closed his eyes in thought, recalling a former Rome correspondent for The Daily Telegraph and The Sun. “Very funny man, did very well,” he said wistfully. “But in the end, the booze killed him.”
