I was at one of my oldest friend's Charlotte's Solstice day party on Saturday.
It started at 3pm and ended at 3am and was hosted at the commune/shared-housing home that Charlotte lives in in Islington.
The day involved a fig tree ceremony where all party goers congregated in the garden, meditated and made a wish for the community and for themselves. Yup - was full-on, tree-hugger, liberal paradise.
The sun was still shining when a lady came up to myself and a friend and asked could she have a cigarette, we happily obliged and we got to talking. She was in her fifties, already a bit tipsy and was a journalist - an investigative journalist.
She was now teaching a journalism course in a London Uni and as she put it, was delighted to be giving something back to the younger generation after an illustrious career, working for all the broadsheets.
The talk turned to Twitter, upon where she declared herself a complete technophobe and wanted to know what all this twittering was about. Indeed she was very concerned about what jobs her students would have when they graduated, as all these bloggers, were thinking they could do the job of a proper journalist.....
It was music to my ears, I had in front of me a living and breathing Fleet street dinosaur, aghast at what the Internet was doing to newspapers.
She declared: 'Well, we'll always need newspapers, you know.'
I replied 'Why's that?'
She retorted 'er, well, em...well.....er..can I say that you have a very one track mind?
No, no,' I replied, 'I'm merely playing devil's advocate....'
'Well, people need papers, its important for the brand - you can't have a news brand like the Guardian if it doesn't appear in a paper. These bloggers like Guido Fawkes are biting the hand that feeds them. Take what the Telegraph has recently done with MP's expenses - a splendid job. Now, yes you could call it cheque book journalism, but that has required an army of full time journalist pouring over the fine detail of those expense claims.....how can a blogger like Guido Fawkes ever do that?'
The conversation went on, like this, to and for, was quite enjoyable, although I had to try and not upset her too much with my controversial views - it was a party after all.
I was particularly interested in the article in the Guardian (online) I saw on Monday about the Guardian launching a crowdsourcing project on the MP expenses data:
'The response has been enormous, the results intriguing and, thanks to the efforts of many thousands of Guardian readers, not one MP who has put in a dodgy expenses claim can think about relaxing just yet.
In a groundbreaking "crowd-sourcing" exercise, the Guardian appealed for help in sifting through the huge amount of data on MPs' expenses that was unleashed at the end of last week. Almost 20,000 people have taken part in gathering facts for the online project and about 160,000 pages have been examined.'
Just as well I wasn't aware of this on Saturday.....
so if we now get 40days of rain it's clearly your fault for bringing bad Karma to a celebration of the sun god. Thanks Sinead. Thanks alot!
;-D
Posted by: Alex Hens | 26/06/2009 at 01:26 PM