January 9th - January 15th 2006
Sunday Limehouse 2005
Saturday Numbing
Friday Unrolling
Thursday How many?!
Wednesday Sandy Fawkes
Tuesday Narnian overtones
Monday Come on Argentina
Sunday 15th January
Limehouse, Winter 2005
Saturday 14th January
Yesterday's thoughts, such as they are, were spurred by an article from The New York Review of Books, and Russell Baker's description of "TV journalism's routine daily style in which the usual suspects are rounded up again and again until the mind goes numb..."
With news channels running ceaselessly, journalism becomes as omnipresent as wallpaper. Tirelessness is its strength and monotony its style, though sometimes it does something absolutely irresistible.
An assassination occurs. The World Trade Center falls. War begins. A mountain explodes. The Indian Ocean rises up in boiling rage. Then things grow calm.... Police helicopters pursue a stolen car. Missing Girl is found dead. The President arrives, departs, declares, challenges; earthquake kills thousands; raid nets millions in cocaine."
"It fills you up while leaving you famished," he concludes, contrasting this with Nicholson (no relation) Baker's requirements of an old-fashioned Sunday newspaper:
You wanted romance, awe, a close scrape, a prophecy, advice on how to tip or shoplift or gamble, new fashions from Paris, a song to sing, a scissors project for the children, theories about martians or advanced weaponry....
You also wanted to escape for a few minutes to the North Pole or South Dakota or the St. Louis world's fair, or to take a boat trip down the Mississippi....
Friday 13th January
Working as I do for the online version of a national newspaper (as opposed to an online news service) brings one face to face with the sharp divide between the old-style news and new-style news, daily editions versus rolling coverage, all-you-need-to-know-today versus what's-happening-as-we-speak.
The former, be it in the form of a printed newspaper delivered to your door or a half-hour programme playing on your television, undoubtedly has the edge in terms of drama: in the time it takes for the new information to be digested, contextualised and (if you're lucky) analysed, your idea of how the world works can shift irrevocably; think of the Kennedy assassination, the fall of Ceauescu, last year's tsunami.
Rolling news, on the other hand, moves to a subtler tempo: stories rise and fall in the running order, their relative importance dictated either by the ebb and flow of information pertaining or, more commonly, according to the producer's sense of what's hot and what's not.
Stories rarely 'break' on Sky or BBC News 24, seeming rather to roll around at first like thunder on the horizon ("Reports are reaching us..") before climaxing with full coverage ("Our main story tonight...") and then receding slowly , over a period of days or weeks, leaving a rubble of post-mortems, public enquiries and human-interest stories in their wake ("After the break, we'll be talking to...").
I may simply be old-fashioned, but I prefer to get my news in one single daily dose, deciding for and by myself whether, for example, my local MP's appearance on Celebrity Big Brother interests me more or less than the death of over 300 Muslim pilgrims in Saudi Arabia, whether I care more about Sir Iqbal Sacranie's (allegedly) homophobic remarks than I do about the (alleged) presence of paedophiles in our educational system.
Indeed, I find it difficult to defend rolling news, whose prime rationale seems to pander to people's perceived need to 'keep in touch', to be first on the block to know that, hmmm, a footballer has been sent to jail, Simon Hughes wants to lead the Lib Dems and celebrity diets aren't all they're cracked up to be.
With the single exception of the events of 9/11, can you think of any time in the last five years when it really seemed to matter that you knew about something within an hour of it happening rather than a day?
Does anyone actually check the news before going out to lunch and say to themselves: "Aha! Abu Hamza's bookshelf held a 10 volume manual pointing to Big Ben as an ideal terror target! Best change trains at Green Park rather than Westminster!"?
Certainly, like the Roman philosopher found at a local Lions v Christians match, I believe "These are my times. I must know my times."
Unlike the Roman, however, I have the benefit of immensely complex news technologies labouring on my behalf. Given a choice, I want to visit not only the Colosseum, but the Forum, the Agora, the Temple of Venus and parts of war-torn Gaul.
What I don't want is to have to listen, again and again, to someone telling me that the lions have won.
Thursday 12th January
Something of a disappointment for those of us who like to keep track of these things, and another Labour government target missed.
Wednesday 13th January
Obituary Watch: Sandy Fawkes
For her last 30 years Sandy Fawkes was a familiar sight in the Coach and Horses and in the French pub in Soho, consuming simply astonishing amounts of whisky.
She wore clothes that had been in the height of fashion in the 1970s, for, since she ate little, she had kept her figure. She habitually wore a fur hat that made it look as if a cat was curled up on her head.
Each night a tragicomedy was played out among the regulars at these smoky bars. The conversation was often hair-raisingly rude, and the clash of characters generated extremely funny incidents, but death lay not far below the surface...
Tuesday 10th January
A headline to terrify small children everywhere:
Polar bears poisoned by chemicals found in furniture
(That was from earlier editions of the Independent. They later changed it to read 'Toxic waste creates hermaphrodite Arctic polar bears' which, whilst still somewhat chilling, doesn't have quite the same Narnian overtones.)
Monday 9th January
Of all the things you might expect not to translate well, I guess football chants have to come high up the list.
Nonetheless, I can't help feeling that supporters of Argentina may be missing a little something when they, apparently, chant:
Come on Argentina. All these people are supporting you and we want you to win.
(But then again, I expect it sounds better in, er, Argentinian.)
......previous week
