Paul Callan

Paul Callan (born 13 March 1939) is a British journalist and editor.

Callan reached prominence as editor of the Londoner's Diary in the Evening Standard in the 1960s, and then with a Daily Mail diary column. He achieved a succession of scoops, and was responsible for training up a generation of young journalists, notably the gossip columnist, Nigel Dempster.

Callan later moved to the mass circulation the Daily Mirror where he wrote the "Inside World of Paul Callan" column which broke a number of major stories embarrassing to their subjects.

Tiring of the gossip columns, Callan moved over to the celebrity interview. Callan's amiability and nose for a story made him a favourite of actors and publishers alike, and he has interviewed virtually every major Hollywood star in the last forty years, and members of the British royal family.

He is credited with the shortest interview ever published. Meeting the reclusive Greta Garbo at the Hotel du Cap Eden Roc near Cannes, Callan got as far as, "I wonder . . " before Garbo cut in with, "Why wonder?", and stalked off. The story ran across a full page in the Daily Mail.

He married New York journalist Steffi Fields in 1973, who moved over from being London correspondent of the fashion bible Women's Wear Daily to the position of news editor of the London bureau of the NBC television network.

Callan and the writer (later national newspaper editor) Janet Street-Porter are credited with inventing a new form of radio, albeit unintentionally. At the launch in 1973 of the London Broadcasting Company, or LBC, the pair were pitched as co-presenters of the breakfast show. The intention was to contrast the urbane Callan with the less couth Street-Porter, whose accents were respectively known to studio engineers as "cut-glass" and "cut-froat".

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