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Five News
Five news is ten years old, and I was there at the beginning. To anyone who doesn’t know why news anchors now stand up…well, we made it semi-respectable. Most of our innovations were the result of the tiny budget allowed for Britain’s fifth and final terrestrial channel. We had a young, multi-skilled newsroom, before digital…
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The best line on journalism…
My old favourite professional aphorism is this: a journalist’s duty is to betray. It neatly and bitterly encapsulates the moral, emotional and intellectual problems of reporting. But it’s not a tag to be repeated with pride, more of a dirty industrial secret. Last night Mohamed Chebaro, of Al Arabiya and a veteran of international news…
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10,000 visits
And now some news about this blog – since November 6th 2006 when I switched on sitemeter, this site has clocked up 10,000 visitors. Thanks to everyone who’s stopped by. I’m not a volume person, I’m a quality person, and I sense that reading this you’re a kind, intelligent, thoughtful individual with good personal hygiene…
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Afghanistan: not fit for America’s front page
Stella Artois beer is Belgian. In Belgium it is so cheap and plentiful, they could refill the canals of Bruges with its gaseous flows. In the UK, it’s marketed as an expensive and sophisticated Gallic brew – the kind of thing one might order to impress Emmanuelle Béart (showing my age there). It’s an old…