Backgrounding may be synonymous with professional stalking

OK I realise it quite evident that I'm very happy to listen to what Emma Watson says not because of the invasive and quite honestly unhealthy celebrity culture my generation is supposedly engulfed in, but rather because I really like people who are unafraid to speak their mind.

Finding such people isn't that hard. In new week, we were taught tools which could ordinarily be labelled as stalkerish and obsessive. Our work as journalists, I have learned, is not really the most admirable of feats all the time. We're not always cracking cases, reporting on crimes, or shaking the dust off buried investigations. We're not always watching the powerful and reporting on their abuse of power or the snatching of power from whom it rightfully belongs to.

Sometimes, we're really just expected to be Googling facts and stalking people. This is tedious work and you might be called a researcher but essentially, you're doing what tons of people do on facebook: hunting what you're looking for or stumbling across something you weren't even originally looking for.

Now I know we're taught to remain objective at all times but the reality is, I've personally had to gather piles of useless data to dig out the needle in the haystack and sow together the story seamlessly. This is not always an objective process. Maybe there are multiple needles and I've only picked out - through a subjective decision-making process - only that which I deemed was OK.

I do need to write about Google and the ways in which I am grateful for it. I understand that I'm writing on a blogging service that Google itself hosts, but I think it is ok to say that Google is not a perfect company and its policies can be debated on. But its search engine - which has of course its own set of flaws - is one of the best out there. At least to my knowledge, the Advanced Search which we played around with in one of the classes is a brilliant invention.

I'm now curious about working with Google Alerts and I'm going to try experimenting with it just by tracking my own name - a bad idea obviously since my name is a common one - and seeing if it shows up on the Alerts.

Oh this is fun. And distracting.