Inventing Emma

Everyone loves to hate a youth columnist. Like the demons who tell us we're too fat to wear leather, or that our sophisticated posturing looks like student agit-prop, they tell us what we don't want to hear with all the sensitivity of a venomous step-child.

Former Naked City presenter Caitlin Moran, now with The Times, and Emma Forrest, when she wrote for the Sunday Times, were met with vitriol - Forrest ended up running away to America in a fit of self-loathing at the "hate lust" foisted on her by her contemporaries.

At 27, Emma Jones is a late starter compared to Moran, Forrest and the former grande dame of angry young women, Julie Burchill. But her latest appointment has generated almost as much venom. Jones is the face of the new, inclusive Sun. Editor David Yelland has made it clear that, while he does not want to alienate The Sun's core reader-ship, with circulation in long-term decline, he wants more of the young, female readers that have helped the circulation of the Daily Mail.

"We need to develop new columnists - so, for that matter, does the whole market," says Yelland. "From where I sit, I see a long-term problem for newspapers in finding new voices. Emma is the youngest columnist we've ever had. She is a superb young journalist who will grow in stature."

Jones, the daughter of teachers from North Wales, began her career on the Flintshire Evening Leader. After a brief spell as PA to violinist Nigel Kennedy, she sold a story detailing his eccentricities to a newspaper and was poached by the Sunday Mirror. She earned further tabloid stripes on the Mail on Sunday, coming to the attention of The Sun's Bizarre team for her coverage of Oasis star Liam Gallagher's "lost weekend" from his then wife, Patsy Kensit. Jones was then appointed editor of Smash Hits magazine, before Yelland poached her back to The Sun a few months later at a salary believed to be close to £100,000.

Jones's columns, while hitting the right tabloid touchstones, lack the bite or analysis to take the stories on. She lacks the edge of a Burchill or a Lynda Lee-Potter, and gives little impression of being a natural Fleet Street "killer bitch" columnist.

Arguably, this is no bad thing, but without the ability to look at a subject from a new angle, her columns can read like an A-level paper on pop cultural studies. She appears not to be naturally opinionated, which even the finest of writers would find a hindrance when writing a column. On drugs, she raises the obvious point that "drugs are available in every secondary school in every town in the country". On abortion, she raises hackles by noting that 200,000 babies are aborted a day, but sheds little light on why.

But it was her appearance on a recent Question Time, described by one newspaper website as "not so much car-crash TV as a 24-car pile up", that really curled toes. Flanked by Menzies Campbell, Teresa Gorman, John Maples and Chris Mullin, Jones giggled and gurgled her way through questions about Mick Jagger's knight-hood and the snoopers' charter like a pleased toddler joining the grown-ups at the big table for the first time. None of which in itself should be a reflection on Jones, who is clearly a capable show-business journalist.

Jones, herself, says criticism of her Question Time performance "goes with the territory". Caitlin Moran thinks a lot of it comes down to envy: "Even though I saw her on Question Time and found it excruciating, I do detect both jealousy and misogyny in a lot of people's reactions to her."

Julie Burchill agrees that journalism is still "far too stuffy", and a high-profile new female columnist on The Sun can only be a good thing. But leaving a twentysomething showbiz journalist with no current-affairs credentials to sweat it out under the headlights of a heavyweight discussion show suggests a triumph of branding over common sense.

THERE are also larger questions, say media analysts, over whether columnists themselves can act as circulation builders. Established female columnists such as the Daily Mirror's Sue Carroll and Lynda Lee-Potter on the Mail have a captive audience of millions.

But Tim Armes, marketing director for press buyer Mediavest, doubts whether a non-celebrity columnist like Jones has the necessary pull on her own. "Signing a new columnist on The Sun will have less impact than signing a columnist on the Mail or Guard-ian," he says. "You'd need it to be the Beckhams, or another celebrity, to get real pull on the back of a new columnist."

Jones is styled as the spokes-woman for the era of Pop Idol and Big Brother, and has made much of her ability to speak to a generation that votes only with the remote. In one column she argued that the world of Big Brother is the epitome of young, modern Britain: affluent, bored with politics and fascinated by sex and TV. Which is all very well, and in keeping with The Sun's brand positioning.

The great music press-turned-social commentary columnists of the Burchill and Parsons era grew organically through their own passion, but that passion seems to be missing in Jones. As an invention, the creation of her own editor, she risks becoming a Frankenstein's monster. Without a heritage of fire-in-the-belly writing, so far she has come across as lacking conviction, a fatal shortcoming for a columnist, even one who makes a virtue of speaking for an apathetic generation. Her defenders will say she's only young, but lauding indifference and defending the drab is hardly what put the soaraway into The Sun.