No news is...
āSummertimeā¦and the livinā is easy. Fish are jumpināā¦ā
I swing my feet up on the desk in my office at 4 Millbank, open Don DeLillo's excellent Underworld, and buzz my assistant to mix me another Martini. Another 47 days until Parliament's back, so no need to worry about workā¦
WHOA! Stop right there.
The MPs may be away from Westminster, the papers may report Tony Blair in Barbados, but our newsroom is a hive of activity. Hmmmā¦ not quite a hive, perhaps. To be truthful, thereās an air of summer calm about the place.
In parliamentary termtime, producers charge around screaming at each other; correspondents huddle to calibrate the latest Blair/Brown rift; and ā a bit like that old film - picture editors burst out of edit suites, tape in hand, to sprint along the corridor and get their lead story into before George and Natasha have finished reading the headlines. (Yes we do still work on old tape technology, sadly.)
In the summer, itās more relaxed. Politics doesnāt stop, but it generally goes a little slower. We still of course need a core team to cover whatever happens, so I canāt let everyone go off on holiday.
This year for example thereās been an important political dimension to the two big August stories, the Middle East crisis, and the alleged terror bombing plot. David Cameron has launched a new party logo, and revamped his candidate A-list to try to get more women into Parliament. Thereās even a leadership contest going on. (No I donāt mean between Gordon Brown and John Reid ā that oneās not officially started yet; I mean .)
But while the daily news ticks over, what weāre all really doing here is planning the autumn. And in this, thereās a certain symmetry between the political parties and political newsrooms. Many people in the Westminster world may be ārecharging their batteries,ā but most of us are also working ahead on the next phase of the political story.
So our focus is on the party conferences which get underway early in September. Like buses, you wait all year, then they all come along together. The TUC, this year in Brighton, often sets the tone for Labour; hot on its heels ā and handily in the same place - come the Lib Dems; then Labour swing into Manchester, breaking the seaside tradition; and finally the Conservatives, opting this year for Bournemouth.
We will do an enormous amount of broadcasting from these conferences. So now, in these quieter August days, weāre putting the building blocks in place for that ā planning our coverage, negotiating space for a few desks in some God-forsaken conference centre car park, and booking hotel rooms.
Away from that, thereās all the admin that needs to be done to keep a news team ticking over ā and which never seems to get done when Parliament is sitting. Completing appraisals, filling gaps in staffing, designing a new rota for the producers, that sort of thing.
So Don DeLillo will have to wait until I get home. And sadly even if I did have the time and inclination for Martinis, I donāt have an assistant to mix them.
But at least the pace IS a little less frenetic, which gives us all the time and space to think.
āSo hush little baby, donāt you cryā¦ā
Comments
When the MPs are on holiday the war machine goes on - and so does the resistance. It's obviously important that you plan your coverage for the party conference season, but why did only Indymedia (and Guardian online) cover the Foreign Office blockade on Monday?
It's comforting to know that the editors are busily preparing themselves for their jaunts to the seaside to participate in the stage managed conferences.
The zeal of the political parties to ensure that the conferences remain on message must make the whole event seem like a week long trip to the end of the pier show.
Personally, I would rather see the media start to treat the conferences more like the end of the pier show and instead concentrate on making sure that the reporting that is going on follows the traditional high standards of the Ö÷²„“óŠć.
I'm still smarting over the prominenence the Ö÷²„“óŠć gave to a wrongly tuned TV monitor on a late night Swedish News show.
Good to hear there's still people working at the Ö÷²„“óŠć.
Any chance of covering the emerging Unity Trust Bank story?