Thinking cap

When Nosheen came for interview for the Editor’s job, she was introduced to me and said “Ah! You’re the girl who reads everything”. Now, this has always been true (I did an English degree, after all), but is more accurate since I started writing News from the Nationals once a fortnight. This basically means that I get paid to read the papers. Ace. It also means that I am a) annoying – any time anyone says “did you see…?” the answer is yes, and b) a dinner party bore – I can talk for hours about the minutiae of the arts.

However, my social problems aside, it can sometimes all be a bit much: when you shift through the sheer volume of stuff that I do every fortnight, it can sometimes be hard to see the wood for the trees. I have to have an opinion about something once a fortnight. Easy, I hear you cry. Well, yes, in some ways. I have opinions about all sorts of things, every day. What the punishment should be for taxi drivers who try to kill me on my bike ride to work, for example. Why Michael Gove is the worst thing to happen to education in a very long time. How AS Byatt can write such glorious short stories and such horrifically turgid novels. But, and this is the catch, while I could ramble on any of these topics for 200 words, no problem, none of them is relevant to our lovely readers, or widely discussed in the press.

So, I tend to drift towards the stories that have been covered the most widely, loudly, interestingly or controversially in the papers and the blogs. This has its own potential problems though: do I have anything interesting to add to the debate? And how coloured has my opinion been by what I’ve read? It’s one thing to read several different papers to try and get a balanced view of the facts, but once columnists and bloggers throw their hats into the ring, it often gets harder to make up your mind.

Take this week’s NFTN, for example. I ended up writing about BP’s continuing sponsorship of the Tate, the BP Portrait Award and the Royal Opera House. Now, this has been a contentious subject, and widely covered by the media. It took me quite a long time to decide what I thought, and longer to condense it into 200 words (and I cheated – it’s more than 200 words, which you can do online!) that people might actually want to read. I’m not convinced that it moved the debate on, but hopefully it gave people all the information they need to make up their own mind.