When once an AFP correspondent somewhere sunny and hot, with a fine beach, submitted one of those stories they file that are of no interest to anybody but prove they're alive and working for their money, I sent it to clients with a "P5" code.
To my surprise, it zapped off into cyberspace like any other story from a P1 (priority one) news "FLASH" to a run of the mill P4. Where did it go? I wondered; who received it among our thousands of client papers, radios and TV stations?
A look at the "wire" told me that I appeared accidentally to have stumbled on the system whereby confidential messages are despatched, unreadable to ordinary mortals like you and me. The clients must have shrugged their shoulders and put it down to a glitch.
Oh well. No more P5s. I haven't risked a P6, who knows what might happen? But I'm seriously considering founding a P13 Club.
P13, you may recall, is the number I give -- and I'm not alone in this -- incoming stories which should end up in the trash-can. No offence to sender, but no news value either.
Since returning to the agency after those months off with the Condition, the conviction that took hold of me then has strengthened instead of abating: we'd all be far better off, journalists and "consumers" of our work alike, if we only released the half of what we do, but did that better. Ok, I exaggerate, but maybe you know what I mean.
A case in point today was when 'Le Monde' published a story we had to pick up. It was about a police inquiry for a French anti-terrorist judge which concluded that Rwanda's current president and then rebel leader Paul Kagame was to blame for the missile attack of April 6, 1994, that killed his predecessor, downing a plane in the incident that triggered the genocide of what the Rwandan government today says was a million people.
Rwanda's ruling party was very swift to deny this, of course. A party official said that the French probe had revealed no new elements and no proof to back up a notion which has been floating around since 1998.
So chunks of my afternoon and then of the early evening were devoted to subbing somebody's lengthy account of the tale in 'Le Monde', writing up a fairly long story about the denial, and then writing the single story that put the two together. The sub-editor to whom I gave the latter immediately remarked that it was the only one of the three any client -- radio, telly, newspaper or Internet -- was likely to use.
This was self-evidently true.
And yet!
I would, rightly, have had my knuckles firmly rapped had I not done all three stories. At the expense of other worthwhile African news I might have been writing. Or maybe even one of those excellent features we none of us always have time for, though we're told clients clamour for them.
This is an absurd state of affairs! It's not just the Factory, of course, it's the whole "system" worldwide, where the technology has leapt so far ahead of us that we have no choice but to play this ridiculous real-time game, because the stories are there, almost instantaneously, and because if we don't somebody else will. It goes almost without saying that the worst offenders are the TV networks, always castigated when this kind of issue arises because any striking image is now seen as making a story. And a non-photogenic story isn't a story at all.
Zappity-zap!
What to do?
Yesterday, we were "late" with some event. I was told that the Associated Press had beaten AFP to it by I can't remember how long. And when I replied that I didn't give a monkey's toss, or words to that effect, I was accused -- largely in jest, I trust -- of "dereliction of duty". This, of course, is nonsense, but it does raise a serious point. After all, we are in a highly competitive game where timing has become only too important.
I will happily concede -- or "admit", if that's what's required -- that since my return to the Factory in the latter part of last year, I've endeavoured to remain more laid back when it comes to the imposed sense of urgency; more concerned, I convince myself, with getting it right than with being first. And aware that there's far more to life than AFP and career, though once such a thought felt like treason.
But still I do occasionally lose a wee bit of sleep, even now, over stories I know I could and should have done better, much better. Younger journalists tell me -- have done for years -- that they lose a lot of sleep, especially over the mistake they realise they made in the middle of the night.
Rather like teachers who have quit their profession in disillusionment and disgust -- I know several of those -- I've remained friends with journalists who simply dropped out of the news agency game when they could, and when there was far more money around for schemes that would enable them to do so and land on their feet elsewhere. Indeed, an almost mythical name or two came up in a related conversation with colleagues at the weekend.
I'm sometimes reproached, occasionally on good grounds, for having become too laid back. But even if I wanted to drop out myself -- which I don't, since I like the people, the environment and much of the work -- realism tells me, as it does others, that any chance of starting afresh elsewhere at our still relatively young age is now next to nil. We're locked into a rapidly changing media environment just as surely as some of the young hopefuls I ventured a little advice to the other day feel locked out of it.
Hence the notion of a P13 Club, a loose-knit group of like-minded journalists who -- like me as an outcome of having to face up to and deal with the Condition (in as much as it was a physical manifestation of my diseased mental state arising partly from contradictions and stresses in the job) -- have been forced radically to rethink priorities. I know there are many people who, more or less, share my concerns.
We can't turn the clock back. We can't abandon the technology that is at once a great boon and a major hindrance to intelligent, necessary and on-the-ball journalism. We certainly can't launch a revolution which would slow things down to a manageable pace where every story that gets put on the wires is flawless and important.
The very nature of much of "the news" is that it's ephemeral. What will remain are the most essential historical facts and the analysis of them.
But I'm coming increasingly to respect those few with a permanent ability to step back from a news story, see what matters and what doesn't, and above all, how to write it really well. It may take longer to do it like that, but does this really matter? Isn't churning out over-hasty copy an insult to the intelligence of those on the receiving end?
"Did you hear what Nick just said about you?" deputy desk chief Carole -- soon, sadly for us but happily for her, to take up a posting elsewhere -- asked a colleague yesterday when I mentioned his skill to her quietly.
"No."
"He said, 'I give him work, he turns it into art.' Now that's praise indeed."
And so it was, but I didn't mean his ears to turn red.
Maybe a whole bunch of us need informally to discuss and reconsider how we might use the beneficial aspects of the "system" to better effect and get rid of the dross, the wasted trees and the sheer, unnecessary rubbish that foists "information overload" on our clients -- and thus the public at large -- almost as much as it does on us.
The Internet is certainly a tool for this. Such debates are already in hand, maybe lots of them. J.D. Lasica already famously touches on the issues, sometimes, and also monitors the blogosphere and alternative media. Just for instance, today he tells us that the remarkable Wikipedia has passed the 500,000 article milestone ('New Media Musings'). I missed that at 'Kuro5hin' too, being obviously unable to absorb everything in my newsreader each morning, but it says a great deal about changes even to information sourcing and data sorting that will continue unless Big Brother somewhere pulls the plugs on the Net.
I plan to explore, put out feelers.
In part to this end, I'm grateful to Jonathan Dube, the award-winning editor of 'Cyberjournalist', a "labor of love", for his recent reply to an e-mail, welcoming this year-old experiment at 'taliesin's log' into the company of J-Blogs, listed among those "published independently". Fellow "Engdesker" -- ah, these etiquettes! -- David is already in there with his "personal site", Sharp Words.
So that makes two of us now from AFP, in some very varied and international company, including some friends I've made in the blogosphere. Journalists, they say, couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery. I daren't detail in public how the "Engdesk's" commendable coffee-machine venture was only redeemed from near disaster by thunderbolts from on high.
But hope springs eternal.
It strikes me that what I think of as the "P13 debate" doesn't merely concern journalists in the Factory. It's a dangerous malaise affecting the whole profession.
There's no lack of people both in AFP and outside it who must have worthwhile contributions to make.
10:57:39 PM link 
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