feeling listless

Journalism Future of Journalism is an internal Guardian conference on the future of their craft. There's a rather tense moment during the panel on celebrity news:

"Robinson asked (Camilla) Wright (from Popbitch) about the scariest call she's ever had from a disgruntled celebrities, commenting: "You do get away with publishing things that a newspaper wouldn't."
At this point Marina Hyde saw her moment to set the record straight and took the Popbitch bull by the horns.
"What about my non-affair with Alan Rusbridger?" she said, looking straight at Camilla Wright.
There was a discreet but distinctly sharp inhalation of breath around the room.
"Perhaps you'd like to say sorry to the group? You never apologised," Hyde continued.
"I'm sorry - I thought I did," said Wright.
"No. No - you didn't. You promised not to repeat it," Hyde responded.
"Do you want me to write one tomorrow?," Wright added.
"Just to me. Just a little email or something," Hyde said.
Robinson interceded at this point, attempting to diffuse the atmosphere a little: "No-one believed it."
"Really? I think a lot of people believed that," retorted Hyde. "How many people read [the Popbitch weekly email]? 350,000? I just wanted to get that out there on a recorded thing. On the record."

Recorded by Jemima Kiss. Good on her. I've noticed in Hyde's Lost In Showbiz columns that although she can be pretty merciless, she's very circumspect about not just repeating rumours but material that's already out in the public domain. All of these panel transcripts have been worth reading if only to gain an appreciation of what, to an extent, these writers are like in real life. Charlie Brooker contributed to the one about comment:

"Charlie Brooker was on fine form: "I get the most abusive comments from people who take me seriously. I once wrote a column calling for the assassination of Bush, and had comments saying they would blow me away with a shotgun so powerful it could get me from 1km away. Anything anyone said after that is meaningless background noise.

"Negative feedback is character building."

He also said that commenters are freer to say what they want than writers. That said, Brooker does seem to get far less flack than other CiF writers. Is it because his work is more comedy than comment, as he says?"

Probably. But it's quite a regular occurrence these days for people to have a sense of humour bypass if the comedy interferes with whatever propaganda they've been receiving and believing from a different source.