"Six bulletins. Six! Tu te rends compte?"
So clucked an old hand on the "French side" at the Factory this evening once all the fuss was over: a fuss my veteran friend, soon due for a well-merited retirement, considered to be over-excited coverage of the Hutton report, Blair's gloat over its findings and the resignation of BBC chairman Gavyn Davies.
I had other things to do myself than count how many bulletins and urgents shot out into cyberspace from AFP on the English "wire" as the drama unfolded, let alone in French and other languages.
But as I told my colleague, if he thought putting out six red-print bell-buzzing bulletins in French about this latest twist in the tragi-comedy of British governance was excessive (and if indeed that's how many there were), "just imagine how many Reuters may have sent! That's today's media world."
As far as I can tell, it's that other big news agency which has for a decade or more now taught journalists to hit the "news flash" priority range of buttons the most often and hardest in the game, lending it all the sense of competitive urgency I'm increasingly convinced is bad for business and in nobody's interest.
Now that I know a good fellow named Laurent in Abidjan to be among the Faithful Five ¾ -- "I check out your blog almost every morning," he astounded me by disclosing -- I should apologise for so much boring focus here on the return of the Condition in the past few days and weeks.
Nevertheless, today's well-handled furore gave me the textbook example of the Condition at work!
As the noise levels from TV sets pouring out live coverage of events rose around the editorial floor, along with the electric tension and effort most people were engrossed in to turn round the Factory's own raw news from London as fast and as well as they could, my brain began to reel and it became so hard to concentrate on Africa that I stuffed the iPod earphones into my head and switched out all the racket inspired by the story of the day with a remark to Karin, my partner:
"If anybody needs me, just knock! I'll catch up on this lot tonight or in the morning."
Perfectly inappropriate though my gut reaction to all the organised frenzy was in a news agency journalist, this mind of mine was extremely busy exchanging irritating signals with my bowels which had me rushing twice to the toilet in quick succession...
Intestinal order and a focus on the African news on my own screen were soon restored by Patricia Kaas in her 'Piano Bar' -- an uneven album where the remarkable French singer (PK official site) makes an excellent and original job of several "golden oldies" and an unmemorable mess of one or two, like 'La Mer'.
When it came to going-home time, though, my system needed the kind of purge kindly provided (now that some of the Kid's tastes have begun to give as much pleasure to her dad) by a very loud dose of 'Absolution'.
I've become deeply attached to Matthew Bellamy's often pretentious, over-the-top lyrics, Dominic Howard's manic brilliance with a drumkit, the cheerful plagiarism of Rachmaninov and other romantics, some wild basslines and the sheer energy of Muse (note: the clever Flash version and the generous freebies on the official site are probably too much for people with slow connections, but there's an HTML version and a range of download options).
That cleared my head of the Factory.
While downloading a QuickTime video or two, I found further agreeable distraction in this sort of thinking:
"Unless you are a British football fan with a summer house in Rwanda and a harem of lingerie models and more groupies than the Rolling Stones, there is no way you should have seen enough sex and violence that it should be boring.
"These are two of the most basic triggers hardwired into our DNA."
Or so Patrick LeClerc thinks in an editorial about writing at 'Quantum Muse,' which has just joined my ever-growing list of sci-fi and "alternate literature" sites to keep an eye on.
Frankly, I find such matters, weighty or otherwise, more interesting by the day -- infinitely more so than the making or undoing of Tony Blair and the likes in the "headline" news.
There's plenty of violence, and most of it saddening, in the affairs that have kept Lord Hutton so busy since August, but precious little sex, which remains of far more abiding interest and sells infinitely more paper and creative work than any "sexed-up" event.
I do have a professional interest in reading what Britain's Guardian newspaper chooses to make of it all after it late in September so bluntly spoke of "10 ways to sex up a dossier".
Whenever I hear anybody at AFP or any other news factory (since it happens pretty much everywhere) ordering some poor wretch to "sex up" a story, however "senior" they may think themselves in the hierarchy of such institutions, that particularly loathsome trend of our times grates on my ears and triggers the most unpleasant of responses in my guts.
There are, of course, good and bad ways of writing a story, but if it needs "sexing up", then it's definitely not news.
11:47:46 PM link 
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