never got back to me to even acknowledge that they had printed my column or that I had received positive feedback. There have been mutterings from my friends that the text vote is merely a cunning ruse with which to fleece people of their hard earned pennies. I must say it does seem that way.
Mind you, with all this "paper 2.0" style of journalism happening at the moment (the London Paper has "the columnist", London Lite has "top of the blogs") it's little wonder that papers are happy to use free content from its army of readers. Saves £17k a year of a journo's wage, doesn't it? Let's face it, after the initial excitement of seeing my name in print and the fact that people (at least to my face) quite liked it, I am faced with two choices:
1) call it a day there and then
2) write another column for the paper in the hope that it is published again, thereby filling another chunk of otherwise empty, meaningless (i.e. written by someone else) page.
Win-win for the paper - there'll always be a clutch of people like me eager to write in, in the hope of getting "discovered"... It's kind of like a very slow, laborious X Factor for wannabe journalists. Or people with the misguided impression that their opinion is of interest to the great British public, and in need of an ego massage. Like, erm, me.
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