From Paul Reynolds‘ column on the BBC:
As I leave my post as world affairs correspondent for the BBC News
website, I would like to reflect on the shock I experienced nine years
ago when I left the “mainstream” BBC to join the then orphan child of
News Online.
I found that I was in direct contact with the public. Horror. This had not happened to me before.
For several decades, I had been broadcasting from a studio or on location at home and abroad, but always insulated from the listeners. Letters, then the only means of communication to a correspondent, were quite rare.
Someone would occasionally write in and the BBC postal system would catch up with me some days, or even weeks, later. It was, perhaps, a word of praise or a hint of complaint. Sometimes I replied. Sometimes I did not.
But writing online proved to be a different experience. It means the piece sits there in front of the reader. It is not something they might have half-heard over the airwaves. And they can contact you immediately. They do.
Read the rest of his column >>