For God’s sake, doesn’t any journalist have a sense of humour? First a public rebuke on the BBC for being “pompous” now journalism.co.uk doesn’t see the funny side. Any minute now, I’m expecting the National Union of Journalists to issue a press release calling for the government to take action against bloggers issuing death threats to their members.
For the last time: it was a joke. It was certainly satirical, in that one of the problems of British journalism these days IS that – due to the pressures of rolling news environments – a lot of the time journalists can simply “not be bothered” to cover stories in a less superficial way. And yes, it probably isn’t fair to draw this wider conclusion from this simple exchange of tweets but he was a bit arsey, I thought it was a nice line and figured he was broad-shouldered enough to take it. If I was being self-important, I would have written a 2,000 word essay about it (and believe me, I could), not a short quip before writing about something else entirely.
But of course, I mentioned it was a joke in the comments of that article this morning, for the record. Why didn’t Judith Townend mention that fact? Could it be that she “couldn’t be bothered”?
It’s nice to be noticed, but in the middle as I am of this act of journalistic mass-onanism, I am starting to feel like the biscuit…
UPDATE: That journalism.co.uk website has (as of 11.30pm on 2 September) generated one hit for this website. Not exactly a hub of activity then!
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