Media: Get her off the pitch (and into the kitchen)?

Media: Get her off the pitch (and into the kitchen)? 

"When I stopped writing about sport later in 2000, it wasn't that I finished with it. Mainly, I was finished with the lifestyle of the sports writer – or, at least, the lifestyle of the middle-aged female sports writer, which (as Alan Bennett once beautifully said of being Prince of Wales) is not so much a job as a predicament. But if I had mixed feelings about sport while I was fully submerged in it, I have even more mixed feelings now that I have been safely back on dry land for over half a decade, blocking my ears to Premiership transfers, refusing to look at points tables, and reading newspapers resolutely from the front to the back, instead of the other way round. 

My idea of myself is that I can now identify equally with both sports fanatics and sports agnostics – acting as a kind of human bridge – but it's not strictly true... I am the agonised and restless result of a scientific experiment, like the poor, tortured creatures in The Island of Dr Moreau. I am neither one nor the other. Which is why I feel compelled to look back at those four years in sport and think, 'Was being persuaded to become a sports writer the best thing that ever happened to me, or should I consider suing the paper for the lasting damage it did me?"

- Lynne Truss, former sports columnist for The Times and author of Get Her Off the Pitch: How Sport Took Over My Life (HarperCollins, 2009), in light of today's revelation that Annabel Crabb is a bit over the political beat and has a pollie-with-your-waffle ABC cooking show in the works! Will Crabb give up her round to turn Nigella on us full-time? Not likely.

In sports journalism related news, The Australian reports that the kerfuffle between News Limited and Fairfax and the International Rugby Board over rights screen advertising segments in their online videos is "seen by some as a land grab by the code" and others as publishers infringing on traditional broadcasting rights (i.e. radio and TV) by commercialising their content via the 'net. Such a fuss, Ms Truss. 

Girl With a Satchel