And The World Carries On ...

[fiat_knox]

BBC Journalists Strike

Once, a strike by journalists would paralyse TV. With no news, you'd have to sit and watch a blank TV screen - or perhaps the test card. When ITV and the Beeb went on strike back in the 1970s, many TV shows went off the air for prolonged periods. Sapphire & Steel stopped in mid-story for about eighteen months, and an entire story of Doctor Who, Shada (penned by Douglas Adams) never made it to TV. Other shows bit the dust at that time, but none so popular as a Doctor Who story - the reason why they took it off the air, to show that the strikers would leave no sacred cows untouched.

And now? If you want news, do you go to the Murdoch firewall and pay money to see his lies? No. You go to Twitter and get the news from people on site as it happens. You drop by the blogs, and read comments and opinion pieces from independent amateur and professional journalists.

In short ... exactly what you'd do normally do nowadays anyway.

Let them strike. Support their strike action. But at the same time, keep on blogging - keep on making the concept of broadcast talking head news and news behind a paywall obsolete, until they all finally get the point that we don't need them any more. Least of all Murdoch.

(Gods, if Richard Desmond - owner of Channel Five - happens to Google his name and comes across this blog post, here's one word of advice. Diversify. Get out of papers and broadcast news. Invest in blogging and amateur stringers with videocams and Blackberries. Get really good video quality equipment disseminated as cheaply as possible into the hands of people with Twitpic and Facebook accounts. Corner the market in future news - because you won't find it in a TV studio in Bush House with ageist talking heads ("OMG a wrinkle!" "You're fired!") and smart suits and autocues any more).

And finally ...

Edit: I misspelled "Murdoch" as "Murdocu." Perhaps a Freudian slip, since I consider the tycoon little more than an old school Romanian dictator?