People in the shared offices of THE and TES work hard. When I left at 6 pm for the 91 bus to Kings Cross and home, the office was still half full. And they don't stop for coffee much either, unlike newsrooms in the movies, even though it's freely available in a kitchen with a fancy coffee machine; writing is an intense business. The relentless weekly cycle, 52 editions a year demanding to be constantly fed with high quality, accurate and (one hopes) interesting material, imposes a discipline which many academics could learn something from.
On the BBC news last night there was a piece about an FOI request by the tobacco company Philip Morris to a research team at Stirling University. The research examines why the teenagers start smoking and what they think of tobacco marketing. I thought it might make a good story for me to write. But no. "That story's old", says the news editor, "the Independent did a big story on it today but I don't know why. We covered it weeks ago". In fact it appeared in THE on July 21st.
Journalists know what's going on - it's their job - and often a story has appeared several times in various places, or re-emerges from time to time like a retro-virus. Looking for material about students using professional editing and proof-reading services, I came across a story in the Guardian from 2006. But it was reporting on an article published in the THE.....end of story.
Tobacco story THE July 21 2011 (scroll down)
[Note - this was scribbled on the train home on Friday but entered on the blog on Saturday - at least blogs don't lie about posting time]
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