We had a terrific joint event with the American University of Paris last night.

Award-winning journalist and NUJ member Nick Davies talked to over 100 fellow hacks and students about his book Flat Earth News. It was a fascinating talk - amusing and alarming in equal measure - and provoked an animated discussion afterwards.

Nick, who has worked on The Guardian for thirty years with the odd break, turns the media inside out, developing the term Churnalism to decribe the process by which the media regurgitates the received wisdom of those who know how to use it rather than finding out anything for itself. (A search for the term Churnalism on a well know internet search engine today yielded over 110,000 hits so I think he might be onto something.)

I should stress to those who haven’t read the book yet that Nick isn’t talking about the tabloids, the popular press. The idea that The Sun prints rubbish won’t come as a surprise to anyone. No, Nick is talking about the former broadsheets, the proper papers, the so-called papers of record.

All writers should read this book. All readers need to.

Thanks very much to Nick for coming over, to committee member Lennox Morrison for organising the whole thing so brilliantly, to Dan Gunn of AUP for making it possible and to the students who helped out back stage. Lennox also found a great resto for the post-meeting meal. (As a service to the profession, we taught them the first rule of serving a table of journalists: keep the wine coming.)

On a personal note, I was very excited to be told that my intro - and Nick’s lecture - was delivered from the same podium in the same room as Tom Hanks used at the start of The Da Vinci film! Full report (of the meeting not the Da Vinci Code) at Tuesday’s branch meeting.