"Slaapwandelende pedo"

There are times when the news gods choose to bestow favours upon journalists.

I now know this because a case landed in my lap that even the accomplished novelist Jordan could turn into a must-read splash, so bizarre and structurally perfect were its circumstances.

Sitting in the press bench thinking about what to have for lunch and waiting for the robbery trial I was there to cover, another Ormskirk case came before the court listed only "for mention".

Usually this means the lawyers wrangle about the practicalities of the case without debating the actual charges. Not so on December 22 2008.

CPS prosecutor Fiorella Brereton stunned me by coming out with this.

A sleepwalker accused of a sexual assault - against a child.
A lengthy battle to clear his name - actually almost 12 months to the day.
Not just an incident that happened at any old time of year either - but after a New Year's Eve party as we were working on the New Year's Eve edition of the Advertiser.

As I say, even Jordan could knock up a splash with those lines to go on and, thanks to the total lack of other reporters in court, call it an exclusive.

And so it came to pass that I went round to Alan Ball's house in Ormskirk, had a chat with him and wrote the story which has since popped up in the Echo, Lancs Evening Post, Daily Telegraph, Mail on Sunday , Daily Mail (from where it has been linked to by lots of American media including USA Today, Huffington Post & Washington Post) and - my personal favourite - has been translated into Dutch and featured in De Telegraaf where the story has provoked more than 20 comments.

Apart from proving the power of sheer good luck, this story illustrated the way a report can spread across the world thanks to the web and makes me realise how little I do to push my work to a new online audience.

In the past sharing was bad and we kept our exclusives to ourselves, but as news sites grapple for more web users it's hard to see how that mindset will survive.

How satisfying would it be to see some of the 10m+ USAToday.com unique users clicking through to the Ormskirk Advertiser's story instead of the Daily Mail? Would that have been the case if it had been submitted to Drudge?

Right now it's a one way relationship with the internet - journalists are comfortable with the idea of going to Facebook & co to find a story - but rarely link their reports back to the community it came from.

It will probably take some convincing before regional papers accept that there's more benefit in sharing the story online for free to increase traffic over making a profit by selling it to a newswire or national paper.

That said, and as much as I hate "predictions for 2009" style preaching, I do think a reporter's job will start to include seeding our work and getting stuck in online to create a buzz around the stories we've filed.

Hopefully the days when we'll be expected to translate them into Dutch are still some way off.

Not at all content

I'm a journalist, I like words as a general rule, but there's one I have a problem with: "Content".

At some point, probably while I had my back turned, it became acceptable for this industry that prides itself on plain English to stop discussing columns, copy, video footage, photographs and graphics and instead talk about "content".

If we must have a pointless umbrella term can we at least have a sensible one like, oh, I don't know, "news"?

A friend told me I was being precious when I ranted about this to him, but I disagree.

It's not that I don't understand that one day it's news the next day it's fish and chip wrappings - or some kind of online metaphorical equivalent - but I still think the c-word does journalists and our readers a disservice.

The word means everything and nothing and it's a euphemism of the worst kind that illustrates the muddled, navel-gazing that the industry succumbs to when talking about online journalism.

It's as though someone, somewhere has decided that because the new-fangled interwebnet2pointzero is here we need "content" - not cracking video footage, pics that generate hits or Pulitzer prize prose - to publish on it.

"Content" has a one size fits all ring to it, and the whiff of costs and corners cut and that's my other problem with the use of the term.

Brilliant reports, in any form, require an investment of time, talent or training - it can't be done on the cheap.

You shouldn't go slopping it about like Amy Winehouse trying to pour Sambuca shots, and no decent online editor does, so why use a term that makes it sound like we do?

It's time to relegate the phrase to manager speak and press officer babble where it can take it's place alongside "going forward", "cascade", and "synergy".

Class dismissed.