We all go a little mad sometimes...

9:24am Friday 1st August 2008

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It seems the saga of credit card fraud in Chingford is going to be a long one.

We're still getting calls and letters (one of which referred to me as "sir". I think other people should start calling me that...) more than two weeks on from the initial email and they don't look like stopping any time soon - and nary an apology in sight from Morrisons.

Meanwhile, I've been told by my colleagues - those that wish to preserve their dignity, at least - that certain things are to be kept out of this blog. I imagine this is something to do with a recent entry in which I referred to the standard reporter's response to death and violence. No such luck, I'm afraid. How could I resist sharing with the public at large the fact that two of our senior reporters recently regressed to childhood after receiving a free sample of plasticine? I couldn't, is the answer. But of course, that's not to undermine their abilities as reporters. I suspect it's inevitable that we'll all get a little crazy in the coming weeks - Silly Season is most definitely upon us.

We've had two 100th birthdays in one week and a bomb scare in Leyton, which turned out to be a piece of security equipment that fell off a lorry. There's also a mysterious creature in a garden pond and a Facebook petition to get Chingford universally recognised as being part of London - but of course, once again, the full details will be in this week's paper.

We've also had a spate of work experience girls over the last couple of weeks - and that isn't a sexist remark. They've simply all been female and I can't help wondering if this is a sign that journalism is becoming a female profession. And indeed, if only a small subset of one half of the population are interested in journalism, is the reporter a breed going the way of the dodo?

I also can't help wondering whether any of them will actually end up working on a newspaper. The days of printed news are well and truly numbered, as we're all painfully aware on joining this profession. In a few years, when these bright young things have been through university or other further training, will there still be courses like the one I went through? Will everything be geared towards magazine, TV and online journalism?

According to some rather ominous calculations published in The New Yorker, the last newspaper is to be delivered some time in 2043 - only 35 years from now. Why pay for a paper when you can have one handed to you for free in the street or go online and read it from a website? Or just flick the telly on and have it all digested for you in a handy half-hour, even half-minute bulletin? Why hire reporters when "citizen journalists" will go out and gather news without asking for a paycheque? Quantity, it seems, is the buzzword now, rather than quality.

Catch us while you can, then - we won't be around forever...