So, I walked past some news today on my way home. As you can see, it was pretty impressive. It’s not every day you see a collapsed building. Roads were shut off, people were milling, TV crews were talking into their cameras. All very exciting.

And so then I think to myself, “I’ve got my camera. I could take a picture.” Almost half of the people there had the same thought; you can even see a reasonably elderly woman taking a snap with her camera phone, presumably so she can then twitter and facebook it to her peeps. But suddenly the idea felt creepy. Had people died? Would it be wrong to be casually snapping away at the scene of a fatal accident? News photographers do it all the time, but they’re servicing the public interest, or at least managing a close approximation of it. Does my massive contingent of 29 followers count as the public? I doubt it.

Anyhow, it turns out no one died and so I vaguely regret not trying to get a good photo. But I can’t quite decide though if I’m a bit disturbed by everyone milling about and recording the event, or whether I’m impressed by them actually doing something vaguely constructive by spreading the information around their various networks.

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And briefly, an old man rant: One of Channel 7 News’ leading stories today consisted of announcing that Britney Spears had entered the country, that they hadn’t been able to get an interview or footage of her, and reading out what she tweeted when she got off the plane. This followed the startling revelation that the winners of the Melbourne Cup were “happy”. If I could remember Seven’s news tagline, I’d quote it here, ironically. That’d show ’em.

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Thursday, November 5th, 2009. It concerns such pressing issues as media, tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.