Rachel Johnson

If a rat can cook, can anyone be a writer now?

And now everyone is a hack, what hope for the professionals?

So this is how my average weekday morning goes. Give briefing to a telly researcher on a subject I have written sum total of one article about, complete long Q&A for self-publicity purposes for a magazine (which will appear under someone else’s byline), supply a written quote to help a reporter on a daily broadsheet fill space, update my website in case the one person who to my certain knowledge has checked it out ever visits it again, post blog for this magazine’s Coffee House, then break for lunch, hopefully somewhere nice and near like Rowley Leigh’s new Le Café Anglais (plug, plug), where the Parmesan custard and anchovy toast is not merely vaut le voyage, but possibly worth Eurostarring over from Paris for.

Hours worked ┠four, or if you subtract the hours spent drinking coffee/Facebooking/reading the newspapers/sighing heavily, three. Words written ┠1,500. Pounds cascading into the coffers after this morning of industry ┠zip, zilch, zero.

Now I understand why James Whittaker, the former royal correspondent of the Mirror, would snap ‘Am I talking in my own time?’ if taking a call from a production company/another journalist/researcher. The opportunities for providing content for nothing are apparently limitless, and at the same time the market has been saturated by a similar oversupply in content-providers. As Professor Roy Greenslade says, ‘In effect, every citizen is now a journalist. Journalistic skills are not entirely wiped out in an online world, but they are eroded and, most importantly, they cannot be confined any longer to an exclusive elite group.’ Aaagh! The joyful message of the cartoon movie Ratatouille is that anyone can cook, even a rat. And the sinister message of the age of Prof. Greenslade, the free newspapers and the blogosphere is that anyone can be a journalist, as well as all the rats who already are.

So this is where we are.

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