I’m not having a good week, been busy with work that (while important and good) isn’t at a very exciting stage, I’m tired (which isn’t going to get any better when I get up at 3.30am for this) and I’ve had a few tiny bits of rejection. Which is probably why a sleight in the Guardian G2 section this morning bothered me more than it should.
A week or so ago I met Guardian journalist Stephen Moss, who was doing a piece about local papers (we had a coffee and a chat in the Town Hall foyer for about one and a half hours, I was there and so was Nick Booth). He wanted to talk about whether blogging would “fill the gap” that a demise of local papers would create and kept trying to get us to say that we were waiting and wanting to do it commercially. We’re not. We said so a number of times. In my opinion it would be stupid, we’re already filling gaps and have been for years — the hole that “papers” currently fill isn’t a shape that blogging can be forced into (and papers themselves don’t fill the hole anyway).
But I’m not in the article. Nick’s new project (a very cool thing) is as it fits the angle Moss is coming from. He talks about meeting “a group of bloggers” — there were only two of us. It would have taken less time to say “Nick Booth and Jon Bounds” than it would to say “a group of bloggers” (does he want us to think a: bloggers are organised – they aren’t – or b: that he met more than two – he didn’t – ?).
Okay, reasons of space, not wanting to mention too many people (there are a lot of people in the piece), but I do feel there’s a touch of arrogance, a not telling the whole story — where there is a point made by me that he wants, he talks only about Nick’s liking for it:
“He also likes the idea that you only publish when you have something to say. It’s a light news day, all quiet on the Birmingham front – go out for a walk.”, well yes Nick did and does like the idea, but it was me that said it. It’s something I say all the time — other people do too, but it was me, then.
It’s getting on my tits cos I’m already in a not-so-good mood, but he’s a fine example of something that bloggers do as a matter of course (link to, acknowledge sources, thank people) that this piece of journalism couldn’t give a toss about. Another reason why I wouldn’t fill that gap if you paid me, and one why soon they won’t have the money to do so either.
Which is a shame, because I found the article interesting, but I can’t trust it to be the whole truth.
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