Here Is The News

This has been far too introspective for its own good so far, so let's see what we can do to bring the rest of the world down to the same level.

I am addicted to The News in most of its various forms. T.V. is simplest, with no effort or imagination required, but I seem to be spending more and more time on the BBC web pages, and then there's Facebook. It's still news, but much of it dreary minutiae. This is redeemed by the first opportunity to see the latest additions to people's families and assess just how drunk the youth of today were last weekend. And some of it is funny, like conversation can be in a pub - not worth remembering but a pleasure as it happens.

Physical print may be threatened by the opportunity to read from the web, but the words still spill forth by the bucket-load. A recent trend is for BBC reporters to use their blogs as scripts; their commentary on the days events appears mid-afternoon and they regurgitate it at six and ten for the computer illiterate.
Yet I still buy a paper (The Guardian) several times a week, not for the stuff I already know about, because it happened yesterday and I've seen/heard the news ten times since, but for the peripheral, obscure content for which there's never time on the airwaves. Increasingly this, too is being provided on the web, but so far it lacks the cohesive house style that you get from a paper. Guardian readers, with our beards and love of real ale, are members of a gentleman's club and more legitimately than our Members of Parliament, for we pay to join!