Swimming today: 1.05km Swimming Month to date: 2.05km Swimming Year to date: 2.05 km
I think it was CNN who started the 24 hour rolling news concept in the eighties. I remember speaking to a captain in the Army after the first Gulf War who told me that the intelligence coming back from Baghdad during Operation Desert Shield was so poor that the senior Army staff spent most of their their time watching CNN reports to work out what was happening.
Of course "News" isn't a limitless resource and sometimes when I stumble across BBC News Channel or Sky News the content is pretty thin. Nevertheless there are times in rapidly breaking major stories when the coverage is compelling. So, the first indications on Radio 4's "Today" programme that the two suspects in the Charlie Hebdo attack had been engaged by the police sent me rushing to the satellite TV and channel 200 - BBC News HD. For the next few hours the coverage was by turns compelling, repetitive, slightly bizarre (how many kilometres of driving along rainy autoroutes can be shown under a "Live" banner ?) and thought-provoking.
At one stage I realised I had BBC on the TV, France 24 streaming in French on the PC plus Twitter and Le Monde Newspage on the two iPads. France 2 later picked up the story with live coverage and often the BBC were relaying with acknowledgement the France 2 coverage - oddly at one point they seemed to be several minutes ahead of the actual transmission they were acknowledging.
One of the great things the Internet has done is to lower the barriers to doing things and make them easier to do or join in with. News is a good example - a generation ago reporting news needed a camera team and reels of film or, at the least, a notebook, telephone line and printing press, today with a mobile phone and an Internet connection everyone can be a journalist. As now seems customary Twitter was breaking most of the news stories, there were over 20000 posts to the hashtag #Vincennes in one hour as the situation developed.
Lots of people are rushing in to predict what effect this will have on France and the French people and the inevitable hand-wringing over the radicalisation of young Muslims (which has been going on for a long time) has been further increased in the papers and on the broadcast media. The events of the last two days won't be forgotten for a long, long time here.
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