Flat Earth News: Journalists - do not read

I've just had one of the most exhausting few weeks of my life. Fellow journalism students at City might think I'm referencing the massive workload we've had (two reporting port-folios due on the same day is enough to crush the strongest of spirits) but I'm not.

My exhaustion is self-inflicted and on-going. I'm reading a book. A book about journalism. A book about journalism by a journalist who thinks journalists are no longer doing journalism. No no, instead, they do 'churnalism'. This basically means they are expected to write up to ten stories a day by evil editors who will chop off their hands, Saudi-style, if they don't hit their target. It means they rely on Press Association press releases to write those ten stories and that they often have neither the time nor the talent to check the facts of those ten stories because the deadline means deadline or, like a former editor told me recently, "only doesn't mean deadline if you're dead, a family member's dead [questionable excuse] or you're unconscious [does being drunk/hungover count?]." It sounds really, really crap.

As someone spending a goddawful amount of money to be training as a journalist, I should have immediately burned this book, Flat Earth News by veteran hack Nick Davies, on sight. And other journalism trainees should have done the same - what's a few Waterstones up in flames if the alternative it is to have our souls smashed to shit by seasoned journalists who know too much?

In all honesty, most of Flat Earth News is probably spot on but I don't want to know that. Leave me to be idealistic and naive, or at least let me learn the truth in my own time. I start a month's work experience at two magazines tomorrow and by Nick Davies assertion, that must make me a idiot, a fool, all of the above or just a glutton for lies, the lying liars that tell lies and the lying media that lets those lying liars lie.

Down with Davies and his insider knowledge. Up with the liars.