On Kosovo

I worked yesterday morning at 5 a.m. on the Newsworld ticker, meaning I write the short, snappy and hopefully grammatically correct headlines that scroll across the bottom of the screen on CBC's 24-hour news channel. The cool thing about the job is that you're normally the first among all CBC platforms to report anything breaking -- TV, radio and online all need to write scripts or stories, change lineups and either broadcast or publish the results, while on the crawl, I write out my roughly 200 characters including spaces (which, by the way, is very short) and pow, it's on TV.

This was particularly exciting yesterday as breakaway Serbian province Kosovo prepared to declare its independence and become the world's newest country. And, because of the speed and ease of getting it up I was able to update with each minute step towards independence: first the fact that it was anticipated, then with the prime minister saying they would, then with parliament meeting, then with the reading of the independence document, then with parliament voting, signing and celebrating their new Republic of Kosovo.

And, of course, it didn't stop there. From that point on, it was a flurry of activity with revellers hitting the streets in Pristina, protesters throwing rocks at embassies and a speedy international response, including Serbia saying they would never recognize the 'illegal' declaration and Russia calling for a UN security council meeting to revoke the declaration. Later, Afghanistan became the first to recognize the new country -- an essential part of actually becoming independent for the Kosovars -- and several others are expected to follow suite today, including bigwigs like the U.S., Britain and France.

The whole thing was rather thrilling, and I watched every new report from Pristina, update on the BBC and newsflash on the wires breathlessly. To me it was an obvious embodiment of one of my favourite sayings about journalism -- that it's writing history on the run.

Now of course, my newsflashes along the bottom of the ticker won't go down in history like the news reports and various stories both online and in newspapers. Students writing papers on Kosovo from this week onward will be looking for those items, but my record may fade into oblivion. I do however, take heart that I got to watch every minute of it, livestreamed online and replayed on various news channels almost instantly and in my own little way feel like some small part of it.