Yesterday the Guardian started liveblogging its own newsdesk. While some applauded this latest move toward an open newsroom, others said it was navel-gazing meta news gone mad. For me, a liveblog was just the wrong medium.

I, a certified wannabe hack eager to learn about journalism, am surely the ideal reader for the newsdesk liveblog. But even I wouldn’t sit at my laptop obsessively refreshing the Guardian page. That’s what I did with its London riots liveblog while in Trinidad over the summer and desperate for breaking news affecting my friends and family back in the UK.

Still, I am curious about how a big national newsroom works, as are, I’m sure, many of the Guardian’s equally time-poor readers. At the risk of sounding like a born-again multimedia geek,  wouldn’t a video insight into the newsroom have been great?

While I’m not going to keep checking a meta liveblog when I could be reading the actual news, let alone slog through the entire 3,800 words (yeah, I counted) at the end of the day, I would definitely have put aside five minutes to watch a nicely edited video. We could have had some fly-on-the-wall scenes, some interviews with journalists and editors, some great visuals of the subs laying the pages up. And I’d bet that in four or five minutes you’d capture more of the newsdesk atmosphere than in an entire liveblog.

But that’s not to say video is always the answer. While I’m hooked on Sky’s rolling news as an accompaniment to my morning routine, I don’t understand their headlines video bulletin. It’s essentially an old-fashioned broadcast news anchor reading out the day’s headlines.  In the time it takes to find the video and wait for the ads to play and the video to buffer, I could just have just scanned the headlines on the Daily Mail’s homepage.

Online journalism presents us with a multitude of new media. We shouldn’t just use the latest toy for the sake of it. More than ever before, we journalists have the opportunity to use precisely the best medium to tell each particular story to our specific audience. But I’m not going to hate on the Guardian newsdesk liveblog too hard, because it reminds me that online and multimedia journalism is still a new and exciting medium open to experiment and innovation. And that’s the joy of being a young wannabe hack.