Ah, the joys of returning from a holiday. The unread emails that fill your inbox like soldiers in a hostile army on the horizon; the voicemail messages that speak of urgent deadlines already missed and, if you are a journalist, the nagging feeling that something important might have happened in the world, that it was your responsibility to know about, and you still don't know about it two days later.
Hacks generally fall into two camps. Those who frantically spend their time abroad hunting down newspapers and unpicking World Service bulletins from short wave radio hiss to keep abreast of the news, and those who banish all media and resolve to take the pain of catching up on their return. I am a committed follower of the latter strategy.
But lo! What do I find on this occasion? When once I might have turned straight to the big media sites for a refresher, today I instinctively gave the blog bookmarks a good pounding before anything else.
Does that mean I've crossed some invisible line? I have reached my own private tipping point, where I have at least as much trust in the efficiency of the private blog to brief me on the world as I do in the mass media. And, among the usual run of stories, the most intruiging thing I missed while I was away turns out to be the suggestion that the White House blew the gaff on an al Qaeda mole in 2004 for short-term political gain and that an unintended consequence may have been compromised UK-Pakistani intelligence operations that arguably could have led to the 7 July bombers. (Via various people).
It's all a bit tenous for now. The dots can certainly join up to create a damning picture - Bush administration needs to prove it is winning War on Terror in election year and stuffs allies' intelligence ops in craven bid to gazump press coverage during the Democratic party convention. But joined dots only ever give a crude likeness. Cock up is usually a safer bet than conspiracy.
Still, it's an intruiging story and it broke on the blogs. Go blogs! Go trusting volunteer individuals to aggregate the news for you while you're on holiday. And indeed the rest of the time.
Observer anti-new media hysteria monitor wields cold water menacingly over flames of blogging zeal.
Of course, the currency that the blogs pass around to substantiate their allegations is links to trusted old media brands. And we'd all be worse off without the venerable tradition of the Sunday newspaper.
