I'm en route to Preston - off to film a presentation that BBC College of Journalism blogger Graham Holliday is giving to a group of students. I've stopped off at a cafe in Euston station in London. The sight before me offers me a real-life thought for the day.
The lady to my right has her laptop open and is frantically firing off emails. The elderly looking gentleman to the far left is reading his paper. The man directly in front of me is reading a book. Someone else is devouring breakfast.
It's a similar scene behind me. Suited men steal 20 minutes or so to do some last-minute preparation for that all-important meeting. They stare at bar graphs looking for truth ... or ideas. Another man peers at his iPad. Yet another can be found reading a printed copy of the Economist. The majority of the people around me - unsurprisingly - are carefully avoiding dropping bits of their breakfast pastry on their smart outfits.
The disparity between my daily experience and my perception of theirs hits me soon after.
I live my life on the internet pretty much, occasionally looking up at the TV screen to keep up to speed with the likes of Spooks (I'm a BBC staffer; I'm bound to favour BBC content). My priorities, goals, aspirations, hopes, dreams and, most importantly, sources are to be found on the internet. My connection to it is a seemingly vital conduit providing ideas for output as well as a network of contacts useful for distributing that output.
But, seeing the people all around me, I'm reminded that not everyone wants or needs to be as connected as I do. Some read books. Some still read newspapers and magazines.
My day centres around Twitter and Facebook. The spectre of building online communities looms large every single day. And yet look at the people all around me. How many of them are on Twitter? How many of them are plumbed into Facebook morning, noon and night?
The answer? Not as many as we'd like to think. That doesn't make the internet a waste of time for journalists. Far from it. It's still vital. But it has its limitations. Not everybody is on it all of the time.
So, if you're trying to reach those people who are on it less than you are, the chances are you'll have to build a little bit of lag time into your story research. It's going to take a little bit of time too for your perfectly scripted blog post to do the rounds.
Give yourself a little time.
