It feels like it’s been a long day. It started early, as all Thursdays do, with the breakfast show interview. We had mostly lifestyle features lined up for this evening’s show, which don’t sit too happily in the middle of a news-focussed programme, so I learnt about the Newsblaster instead. It’s a computer journalist that will look at news stories from a range of sites and condense them into five-sentence briefings. Very clever, really, as it clearly has some understanding of the English language, but a little worrying for the other online news sites from which it is harvesting its content.

…and journalists, of course.

I almost feel like I shouldn’t have been talking about it, but I know listeners will be interested in it so to deliberately snub it would be wrong, even if it might keep my job safe a while longer.

Work was good. Staying back late to get the section edited last night gave me time to work on other things that have been on the ‘to do’ list for some time. It also cleared space for meetings with suppliers about forthcoming products, which is always good for firming up relationships. In fact, in one of today’s handshake sessions I got to meet someone I have spoken to every month or so for the last five years but never actually met.

It seems bizarre to me that we can go through life like this, knowing people very well on one level but not on another. Then again, I think of the number of online friends I have (my Buddy List has 292 entries on it) and how few of them I could put a face or even a voice to and I suppose it’s becoming more and more common to have friends you don’t know than friends you do.

The last meeting over-ran by half an hour so I only just had time to run out, shut down my computer then scoot across to ITN by way of the sandwich shop. I jumped on a bus and all seemed to be going well until it zoomed past Gordon, who was walking, and took some bizarre turning down towards Holborn and most distinctly away from the studios.

Anyhow, I rode it to Chancery Lane and arrived at LBC in time for a couple of interviews that we needed to pre-record with some guests who couldn’t make it into the show for a live appearance.

The show itself went well. Web User’s features editor joined us to do the news and did very well. It was her first time on The Lab, but she fell in with the style of the programme almost right away. In a break from tradition, we spent the first fifteen minutes playing music. LBC is a talk station, of course, but it was OK because the tracks were relevant to IT. We’d downloaded them from the IT Anthems microsite and while we played them, and I read the lyrics from the song sheets, Gordon attempted to guess what they were.

He did surprisingly well.

Although not particularly what I’d choose to listen to, some of them were quite good, too, and they were all very well produced. If they didn’t mention company names you could believe they were regular music tracks.

The phones were very busy this week and we didn’t manage to get through every caller, but what was nice was that after one man rang up with a computer that wouldn’t shut down properly two other listeners called in with suggested solutions.

Anyhow, to bed, I think. I suspect I’ll sleep well tonight.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 11th, 2002 at 11:45 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.