OMG! Anyone can haz summit dinner?

I take back everything I just said about old school editorial rigour.

This, from Newsnight’s Paul Mason:

On newsnight in 4 mins time. Anyone at the summit dinner wants to keak me the draft pls send to work email ; )

No shit.

G20? Nah. It’s “Gee, 2.0!”

Already being dubbed the social media summit, G20 landed in London today. As the world leaders gather for talks, there’s an awful lot of progress is taking place online too.

I work near Old Street, not at all far from the financial districts of Bank and Moorgate – where the bulk of the trouble from activists happened – so my day was punctuated by the wail of sirens and the ceaseless sound of helicopters overhead. Louder still were my colleagues around the office.

“Gawd! Look at this rozzer battering this fellaaargh over the head,” (*) said one, watching the unrest unfold on a grainy BBC video, shot and uploaded minutes earlier.

“Yeah, someone just lobbed a computer through the windows at RBS,” said another whilst gawping at the Guardian’s blog.

Today – victory! – everyone in London shunned shabby citizen journalism in favour of the real deal. Old school editorial rigour and new-fangled communication technology.

Dave Hill (recently crowned Digital Journalist of the Year) for example, wrote a series of excellent blog posts for the Guardian. Colleagues listened as I dictated excerpts all day, whilst they monitored their own favoured sources – amongst them the BBC’s interactive content map, Guardian’s microblogging stream and Times Online’s CoverItLive feed – passing on any particularly juicy tidbits.

I expect the real analysis of media coverage will begin when G20 ends. Until then, I am mostly pressing refresh.

* Irritating cockney accent added for artistic effect.