Dead donkeys and deadly coffee form a heady mix

Television fans of a certain vintage will remember a nineties sitcom on Channel 4 called Drop the Dead Donkey; set in a television newsroom with a handful of caricatures rather than characters but no less memorable for that because it poked fun at the realities of life in the media world.

The title came from a phrase deployed at those editorial conferences where managers and editors determine (or guess) what tomorrow’s news might be.

Lots of television station like to have what they call an ‘And finally…’ story – a lighter tale of some sort; a kicker story, ideally concerning animals or children.

Invariably, these are not on the mainstream news agenda; often they are light-hearted or downright funny – but sometimes they might be sad stories concerning those aforementioned animals.

Which is why they are also known as ‘dead donkey’ stories; in other words, a news item of no real significance; perhaps even a filler.

And the phrase grew legs because the proverbial dead donkey can often be removed from the programme or publication if a more significant story needs extra time or space.

For those of a younger generation, there are a couple of elements of this scenario which might be difficult to understand – but biggest one of all is the notion of a small group of people sitting in what back then was a smoked-filled room, deciding what should be on the news agenda for the next 24 hours.

Because that agenda is no longer set by newsrooms or editors; it changes by the minute on social media – sometimes in a marvellous way as it moves so quickly it makes your ears bleed…and sometimes so quickly that it completely overshoots the runway.

Back in the nineties, the news cycle was a one-way conversation; big media decided what you needed to know, and they told it to you.

The right of reply – sending a letter to the editor – hardly qualified as a two-way conversation because, by the time, your letter got to the powers-that-be, the news circus had pitched its tents in another town.

Now that right to reply is instantaneous, and that’s a very good thing too – because replies, like news itself, lose a degree of their importance if they are not immediate.