Tuesday, September 16, 2003
I used to drop off articles for The Irish Times in the days before email (or rather, before they were accepting submissions via email), when they needed a floppy and a printout of the piece. The Features floor was as dull as every other office I’d ever been in, but I found it amazing that while most people’s work makes hardly a mark on the outside world, there were newspapers being loaded onto trucks downstairs.
Out in RTE, there was a similar mismatch between the setting for the work, and the reach it has.
Upstairs was all cube farms with walls just high enough for prairie-dogging. But walk down the stairs (past the rail of costumes – in the radio building?) and here are the studios. The host’s desk with flat panel monitor and all the gubbins, a semicircle of table with three mics and sets of cans for the guests. A big window out to the producer and engineer outside.
While the news is on, Marian Finucane walks in, says hello, puts on her headphones as her theme music is on, and times her cheery ‘Good morning’ to the nation in less time than it takes to describe it.
She ran the interviews (talking about blogging, of course) smoothly and with a view to getting good quotes out of us, and suddenly we were outside again, signing waivers and heading out to the cab.
It’s hard to imagine our words being broadcast around the country, but the taxi driver had obviously been listening: ‘So you’re the bloggers, then?’ he asked as we drove away.
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