Tuesday, January 15, 2008

That's me in the corner

One of the first person singular users at Rumspringa Magazine, David Jacobsen Turner, is presently (was recently?) a trainee at Weekendavisen, a Danish weekly which sports the slogan "Personlighedernes avis", i.e. the paper for personalities, strong characters.

And David Jacobsen Turner reports back to the student magazine Lixen how the atmosphere at the editorial offices is nothing like that of the notorious hectic and buzzing news room. Staff members tend to be quietly absorbed in their con amore projects, no stories are obligatory, no trips are simple duty calls. The staff consists of an equal mix of trained journalists and academics who are often able to rely on each other's expertise rather than the usual suspect experts used in other media.

It sounds like a caricature, and David Turner knows that it does: He has been assigned a snug office of his own just down the hall from these people, and the risk of developing self-obesity is immediate!

Yet he can't believe his luck: "I fucking freaking love Weekendavisen," declares the trainee and relates how he is free to dispose of the standard news pyramid structure in his articles, how he has said "perhaps" in three subheadings already and, of course, how he says "I":
I write 'I'. You bet that I do. I-I-I-I-I.


Read all about it (in Danish) at Lixen; use the search word: "egoboost".