Scoop

Scoop is a comic novel by the English writer Evelyn Waugh, published in 1938. It is a satire of sensationalist journalism and of foreign correspondents.

William Boot is a young man living in genteel poverty a long way from London, and he contributes nature notes to Lord Copper's Daily Beast. He is dragooned into becoming a foreign correspondent when the newspaper's editors mistake him for John Courteney Boot, a fashionable novelist and a remote cousin of his.

He is sent to Ishmaelia, a fictional state in East Africa, to report on the crisis there. Lord Copper believes the situation amounts to a very promising little war and proposes to give it the fullest possible publicity.

Despite his total ineptitude, Boot contrives to get the journalistic scoop of the title by accident, and when he gets home the credit goes to the other Boot, which leaves William free to return to his quiet country pursuits, much to his own relief. The novel is partly based on Waugh's own experience of working for the Daily Mail when he was sent to cover the expected invasion of Abyssinia, including the occasion when he telegraphed a story in Latin to keep it secret and the paper discarded it.