The Tour de France is well into the 1st week, and it's proving to be quite an interesting race so far. Yesterday was the team time trial, and has thrown up the first real time gaps. Our man at Sky Chris Froome is well placed towards the top with a few seconds advantage over his main rivals. This update will be out of date almost before I've finished writing it, but I'm practising my journalistic skills. I say practising, but I don't have any of the said skills, so actually I'm just trying them out.
This reminds me of the trend for some of the numerous on-line newspapers (which are not actually 'newspapers', more like this blog really), where they ask journalists to contribute articles for free and therefore have minimal overheads. Now, this might be alright for paid journalists doing a bit of free work on the side, but if this trend continues, there will be no paid journalists (i.e. professionals) and we will be left with plebs like me and you with no training, just an interest in making ourselves heard, and we have all seen/heard of those types. Does this mean that 'real' newspapers who have an existing online version will gradually move completely to volunteer journalism? I can't see how they would maintain their standards without a host of editors re-writing everything, and then you get editor/journalists who might as well be journalists. Maybe it will just be the journalists out in the sticks who will be replaced by volunteers (essentially bloggers or Twitter writers) with a central controlling team. Whatever the future, we are already some way towards it.
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