George Pitcher: Articles of faith

Once a bleary-eyed denizen of journalists' dives, the PR boss and former hack George Pitcher is now the media's man with a ministry. Ian Burrell hears his confession

Close your eyes and take communion at St Bride's church in the City of London and you could be forgiven for thinking of El Vino's, the legendary Fleet Street watering-hole of hard-bitten hacks and red-nosed PRs. That's because the wine is El Vino's No 17 port. And when you open your eyes, you may wonder how much you've drunk, because you may find the minister looks just like an old Fleet Street hack. But there's no need for black coffee – George Pitcher, Britain's first religious minister to the media and admitted "bleary-eyed veteran of the El Vino's circuit" – is basing himself at the 1,500-year-old house of worship.

Pitcher is to be ordained as a curate, with a brief to take a spiritual message into newsrooms, television studios and, if necessary, the bars and hang-outs of the media village. "I won't be waving the Gospels," he says. "I'm more likely to be waving a copy of the Communications Bill and saying: 'What are the moral and ethical issues here?' " He won't be giving up his day job, either: he will continue to work as a PR.

The media ministry is being created with the agreement of the Rev Canon David Meara, rector of St Bride's, known for decades as the journalist's church. Canon Meara explains: "Within the media world, George is accepted. He has the integrity and sense of authenticity that comes from knowing about journalism and the pressures of working within the media."

Pitcher describes his partnership with the rector as "good cop, bad cop". He is well aware of how his role may be seen. "Journalism, because of the nature of the work, has to be a fairly thick-hided activity," he admits. "You're required to be quite cynical and, in many instances, quite nihilistic."

While working at The Observer, Pitcher saw the grief of colleagues when Farzad Bazoft was murdered by Saddam Hussein's henchmen, and realised that, even in the charged atmosphere of a newsroom, "you have only to scratch the surface lightly to find spirituality." He had to scratch a little deeper to find his own religious convictions. Although he took a divinity A-level and once nurtured an ambition to read theology at Cambridge, he opted instead to "drink, get laid and write agit-prop". He says: "I got very far from what anyone would consider a life of faith. In fact, I was a complete git between 1975 and 1995. I was a self-satisfied, self-obsessed, selfish, ego-driven journalist. If you have the capacity to be a complete git, journalism provides the stage for you to strut your stuff, and I did."

The death of two colleagues – Bazoft, in 1990, and his close friend John Merritt, in 1992 – began to change his thinking. Then, Merritt's 10-year-old daughter Ellie passed away – from leukaemia, like her father – in 1998. Meanwhile, Mobbs, Pitcher's Italian wife, overcame ovarian cancer after a pioneering operation at the Royal Marsden hospital, in London, and then defied the odds to have four children. "I was abusing people in dreadful ways – hiring and firing," Pitcher recalls. "But running alongside it all was God's grace."

He is determined that media colleagues will not think of him as too much of a changed character. "This could be interpreted as: 'George has got God and is off with the botherers,' " he admits, but he insists that he is not born again. He also worries that clients may start to imagine that he is itching to get out of a Thomas Pink shirt and put on a dog collar. "There's a stereotypical image of the Christian: of the wet, easily duped Derek Nimmo figure in open-toed sandals," he says. "But Christianity is also about being muscular and robust."

Pitcher, 47, dabbled with civil engineering and North Sea diving before coming to journalism in his mid-twenties. After freelancing from a tiny flat off Fleet Street, he went on to become industrial editor at The Observer. He still writes a column for Marketing Week but, for the past 11 years, he and Charles Stewart-Smith, a former editor of News at Ten, have run Luther Pendragon, a PR firm near St Bride's.

Pitcher's ministry will embrace the new Fleet Street of lawyers, PRs and bankers as well as the newspaper diaspora. Canon Meara says that, in spite of the relocation of the national press, St Bride's remains "the spiritual home for journalists in Britain and across the world". The church's earliest connections with the world of publishing date to the day when William Caxton's assistant, Wynkyn de Worde, pitched up in the parish in 1500 to print books for local clergymen. The presses set up in the neighbourhood produced the first newsletters and ultimately the national papers that became Fleet Street.

Pitcher presides over his first Easter service next month and Canon Meara is convinced that the former old git from Fleet Street is perfectly cut out for the job. Pitcher says: "The rector appreciates someone who can drain a communion cup without sagging at the knees."