I'm back....
after a small interlude which was terribly journalistic and didn't at all involve being out of the country near some mountains. Honest....in case any of the Scott Trustians are reading.

I'm due to give a seminar at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in three weeks entitled Can You(Tube) save the World? How user generated content is changing how natural disasters are reported.
Do you agree with the premise? I am panicking slightly at the thought of talking for half an hour on the subject.
Anyway I think UGC won't take over journalism but it is definitely altering it - disasters that we would have waited days to get reports back from in the past are now being heard about within hours. That doesn't mean to say that citizen journalists will take over the world but you can't have a situation like the (perhaps apocryphal) story about how the Bengali famine of the 1940s was covered - a paragraph in the Times.
Two months later.


Finally - thanks to Adrian Monck for this on nobility and journalism - http://adrianmonck.blogspot.com/2007/01/higher-calling.html
I'm not sure I agree. I would love it if it was a higher calling - but I am always fervently reminded that until recently in censuses and other social class evaluations journalism comes firmly out as a grubby trade not a profession - and perhaps we should remember that.

That's enough from the ivory towers for today anyway....