Daily Archives: November 4, 2009

The fearful commentariat

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Nice piece by Shane Richmond in the Telegraph about how fear and loathing of Twitter is leading newspaper columnists to make utter fools of themselves.

It’s now possible for columnists and companies to hear what people are saying about them. That’s unnerving for columnists, not least because their opinions are now frequently challenged by people who know more than they do. Instead of responding like adults – correcting when they’ve made a mistake, engaging when someone raises a sensible point and defending themselves from false accusations – they are whining like children and dismissing technologies that they don’t understand.

It’s not the complaints culture on Twitter that annoys me, it’s the complaints culture among columnists that is getting tiresome.

Amen. Worth reading in full.

Perfect timing

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Emma Freud told an interesting story on the radio this morning about her father, Clement. He had, she said, “a perfect death”. On the day in question, he’d been to the races (at Exeter), had won on the horses, had a good lunch with his “second best friend” (apparently he was punctilious about ranking his friendships), and was writing his column (about the Exeter meeting) for a racing newspaper when he dropped dead in mid-sentence. The next day, Emma and her Mum woke up his computer and found that the last words he’d written were “In God’s good time…”.