Welcome to JBlog. I guess my half-hearted marketing campaign – if you can call it that – has paid off. So many blogs out there, so little time to read them all. So thanks, and I hope you’ll stay.

What is JBlog? It stands for Journalist Blog. A little ambiguous, but I didn’t want to tie myself down.

I’m not a journalist. I’m yet to be employed by a company to write, with the exception of a few freelance contributions here and there. You could argue that by writing this blog I have become a journalist by default, but I’m yet to be convinced that bloggers are journalists at all.

I will become a journalist, eventually, but until then I’m an outsider peering in with much interest. That interest stays with me everyday. I have a habit of thinking in headlines. I shout at news reporters who don’t wear ties*. I spend ages staring at newspapers in shops, wondering how the sub-editors came up with that headline – and what I’d have put instead. You could say that that’s very rich. How dare I give my thoughts on an industry I know very little about. I have no experience.

But I do! I have 19 years of it. Granted, I wasn’t entirely aware of what was being said on the 6 o’clock News while I crawled about in nappies, but lets face it, everyone has experience in the media. We live it every day.

Every book on journalism I read is full of retrospective. They look back on things that have happened in the past, and comment on them. I’m going to tackle it from a different angle – I’ll try and talk about what is going to happen. What is the industry becoming? I need to know. I’ll be in it soon.
I come at journalism with naivety. I’m proud of it. I want to use my journalism to make a difference. Change lives, opinions, history. I might fail. There’s a good chance I will. There’s an even greater chance I’ll fail if I don’t even try.

With JBlog I’ll look at the news and then tell you what I think about it. Simple as that. I’ll also use JBlog to chronicle my own career as a journalist – but that isn’t its main purpose.

I can’t claim to add anything significant to the global debate, but I do like to think I offer a unique perspective on the industry. After all, how many of these people commenting on the ‘myspace generation’ actually have a myspace page? Not many, I’m sure.

Please e-mail me any thoughts, I’d love to hear them.

Dave

*I can’t stand newsreaders not wearing ties. You’re on BBC1 for heaven’s sake. Get a tie on. Even ones in warzones. Sure, you could say it’s hard enough working in tough conditions like that, but they managed to get a camera, microphone, equipment van and at least two people over there – so why not a flippin’ tie? Get it sorted.