Guardian now live-blogging... itself

And so it came to pass. The Guardian, which has never knowingly left a topic un-live-blogged - an episode of Countdown, really? - has now started live-blogging itself.

After opening up its newslist at the end of last year, the Guardian yesterday set up a 'Newsdesk Live' blog, which sees reporter Polly Curtis guide us through a day of news-gathering.

There are a lot of meetings - 9.15am web meeting, 10am conference, 12pm afternoon meeting and so on - and for young journalists interested in how a national works there's a certain amount of interest in the mechanics.

But the weakness, of course, is in the nature of the news that is actually discussed in the supposedly 'open newsroom'.

One point I wanted to clarify is that the newslist above and the stories I cover in this blog will be breaking and live news. An extended newslist, which isn't available publicly, has all our exclusives and plans for the next day's paper in it.

Which kind of sums up the problem with the whole project. Exclusives and embargoed stories are what makes the next day's paper different from yesterday's website (the top three stories on today's front page, for instance, received no mention in yesterday's blog). And without being able to discuss them, what are you left with? Well, really it's a blog commenting on all the web stories you've already published that day. Live-blogging will eat itself.

There is an argument, of course, although one that's anathema to Fleet Street hacks, that in the world of digital-first, embargoes and even exclusives are anachronisms. If you have a story, publish it, immediately.

We can quite understand why the Guardian doesn't want to go there, yet, for all Alan Rusbridger's talk of being digitally-led. But ironically, the project supposed to crown the Guardian's transformation into a web 2.0 organisation highlights just how far it still has to go...