Clever ploy by the NUJ to make us Stand Up for Journalism, by cramming so many people into the room for last night’s rally that we didn’t have a choice about standing up 😉

This meant I missed John McDonnell and couldn’t hear much of Tony Benn (oh well…) but I managed to catch a good tub-thumper about the campaign from Jeremy Dear, who spoke well about the range of threats to quality journalism in the UK. He gave a couple of scary examples from the States, where local news site Pasadena Now has taken to employing cheaper journalists from Bangalore to cover city news. Never mind that they’re 12 hours out of sync and can’t follow up on local stories – I’m sure recycling the City Council’s press releases will hold local government to account just as well. Worryingly this is also being taken up by Reuters, to cover Wall Street by writing up wire reports and press releases from India.

This is where the root of the problem lies, Dear believes. Journalism isn’t being threatened by new technologies, convergence, citizen journalism, or any of that per se, but by the fact that many of the changes in newsrooms around the country are being done for the wrong motives – viewing journalism as just one more commodity, and forgetting its purpose in society, to ask the questions that not everyone is able to, and to contribute to democracy, education and social cohesion.

Anyway, I also managed a sighting of NUJ new media rep, blogger, and generally nice chap, Donnacha Delong, who must surely be on the endangered list after the amount of bother he’s had of late, after being outed as (gasp!) a web2.0 cynic. Kudos to him though that he’s been giving as good as he’s got on comment fields on both sides of the pond.

So that’s now four whole demonstrating bloggers for my “bloggers on parade” featurette, hurrah! Watch out at the next demo you go to – I shall be in proper blogger-stalking mode.