Almost ten years ago, I had my first adventure with blogging at the World Summit on Sustainable Development – where I ran what was probably the world’s first ‘live blog’ from a fast-moving global event.
Daily Summit was a blast, but I was left with one frustration – how tough it was to get people working for the governments at the summit to talk openly, and on-the-record, about what they were trying to achieve.
There were statements galore and gazillions of press conferences – but little that bridged the gap between ‘official positions’ and the gossip in the corridors that only insiders get to hear.
So I wrote the Human Voice, an article about what I hoped blogging would do to the way organisations communicated with the outside world:
How long ’til a Chief Executive of a major multi-national has a blog? Which government minister will boldly blog where no minister has blogged before? When will blogging become a way of communicating for senior civil servants?
And when are we going to hear from the organisational infantry – slogging away in the trenches, but fighting interesting battles and helping win the occasional war?
Ten years’ later, of course, all this is commonplace (thanks largely to Twitter). But many organisational bloggers/tweeters remain unbearably stiff and formal or – worse – pepper the world with exhortatory missives about the greatness of their product, the importance of their issue, or the awesomeness of their boss. It can be hard to take.
So hats off to Tom Fletcher, the British Ambassador to Lebanon, for this tweet:
Interesting piece on paintballing with Hizballah. (RT not endorsement, &breaks our travel advice on so many levels). vice.com/read/paintball…
— Tom Fletcher (@HMATomFletcher) March 24, 2012
Not only did it make me laugh – it alerted me to what is a great article.
We figured they’d cheat; they were Hezbollah, after all. But none of us—a team of four Western journalists—thought we’d be dodging military-grade flash bangs when we initiated this “friendly” paintball match.
The battle takes place underground in a grungy, bunker-like basement underneath a Beirut strip mall. When the grenades go off it’s like being caught out in a ferocious thunderstorm: blinding flashes of hot white light, blasts of sound that reverberate deep inside my ears.
As my eyesight returns and readjusts to the dim arena light, I poke out from my position behind a low cinder-block wall. Two large men in green jumpsuits are bearing down on me. I have them right in my sights, but they seem unfazed—even as I open fire from close range, peppering each with several clear, obvious hits. I expect them to freeze, maybe even acknowledge that this softie American journalist handily overcame their flash-bang trickery and knocked them out of the game. Perhaps they’ll even smile and pat me on the back as they walk off the playing field in a display of good sportsmanship (after cheating, of course).
Instead, they shoot me three times, point-blank, right in the groin.
Against HMG travel advice, indeed. Read the whole thing. You’ll be glad you did.
