This time, BBC Sports has teamed up with Gorillaz—the not-really-a-band band headed by a guy from Blur and an animator— to create a title sequence and original score to the station’s Olympics coverage. It’s innovative, it’s beautiful, and it’s witty. It even makes me want to watch the Olympics. I will leave it to your interpretation to decide who the monsters are.

See it here. (I’m cursing the Guardian for not making their —rare— videos embeddable.)

But for now, a video selection in honor of one of my ‘professional crushes,’ Sir David Attenborough, who announced his semi-retirement this weekend. He will still work on projects (like when he narrated Planet Earth) but won’t go on the field anymore. That means no more fighting for territory with giant woodpeckers.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9ob9WdbXx0]

For more interesting but not embeddable videos, check out the BBC Worldwide channel on YouTube.

CNN was playing all afternoon on the fancy screens we’ve just added to the newsroom. When they started reporting on the Northern Illinois shooting, some anchor was standing in front of two giant screens displaying those fancy graphics they like to show, like they’re launching a blockbuster. The graphic today? CAMPUS SHOOTINGS, like that, in all caps, with on the left of the typography… a bull’s eye! That’s right, just what you’d see if you looked through the viewfinder of a sniper riffle and started aiming at students. The circle was a bit tilted, stylized they’ll say, with the obligatory dents at noon, 3, 6 and 9. All you have left to picture is the terrified face of a victim.

Seriously? Do they think? Is there an editor out there making those decisions, or do they just leave it the graphics intern? You can’t even blame it on the rush of breaking news. Even an Illustrator ace needs a little time to make this, enough time to think, ‘hey, how would I feel if my kid got shot today?’. I know I’m rarely forgiving towards television news, but this one is just plain wrong. Sorry I couldn’t find a screenshot, but you probably wouldn’t wanna see this anyway.

First things first, being young is not an excuse. Of course, staffers should be trained in ethical practices, but it doesn’t take four years of J-school to grow a moral sense. We all know from quite young the kind of honesty we expect as a public, and we don’t forget it just because we switch sides. BBC viewers sure know why they were shocked, and most mustn’t have read Kovach and Rosenstiel.

The second point was much more convincing. People are hired in broadcasting on very short contracts, often working at several places at once, especially early on in their careers. All that for a pittance, of course. Sure, most young journalists are passionate and dedicated, but you’d be surprised how much more dedication they can show on a full stomach and with a little pocket money to go to the pub. If they must line up several part-time jobs and freelance here and there, in a constant state of competition, if they are constantly reminded that they are dispensable, they’re gonna be stretched thin, take shortcuts and make mistakes.

A recruiter once made the point to me that journalists are bound to be poorly paid, compared to their training and the job they do, because most – if not all – are truly passionate about it and would still do it if they were paid in chocolate coins. But they’ll do it tons better if they get the real deal. There’s also a lot to be said for contracts of a decent length, not externalized, that make people truly part of the company they work for and care about the work they do. Every industry knows it must buy the loyalty of its employees. Why should media be any different? Dear Mr. media big boss, you get the staff you deserve, the staff equivalent to its pay and the respect it is shown.

Those of you who do not understand what I’m talking about have missed the most beautiful show of videography ever made. I’m talking about Planet Earth, of course. While watching the 11 episodes of the show, I was constantly amazed not only by the beauty of nature but also by the amazing talents of the people who captured those images. It’s the kind of project you must feel blessed to work on, no matter what menial work you do, kinda like the guys who spent two years assembling plastic chainmail on the set of the Lord of the Rings.

While watching the whole thing, I was constantly wondering how on earth they got each shot. (The French have an expression for that; it’s called “professional deformation.” Whenever I read a story, I analyze it as a writer rather than just read it for what it says. It gets exhausting.) How did they manage to film a bear and her two cubs just as they were exiting their den for the first time? For that matter, how did they know where to point the camera on the whole freaking Antartica? How did they film close-ups of monkeys jumping from branch to branch on some of the tallest trees in the world? How did they go down into one of the deepest, most secret caves on Earth? How did they manage to get the most terrible and beautiful shot of a shark I have ever seen?

And how on God’s Earth did they manage to film a snow leopard, probably the most seldom seen – let alone filmed – animal on the planet?

This is where “Planet Earth: The Diaries” comes in. (I would tell you where to download it, but I can’t support that practice. Right?) As a journalist and aspiring documentary filmmaker (yes, that’s yet another project), I find the making-of almost more interesting than the series itself. That’s where I learned the Planet Earth team mounted to a helicopter a camera with a zoom that manages to capture facial expressions from 1 kilometre away. For the monkeys, they used a filming balloon invented by a man with a Frencher than French accent. Another guy waited weeks in a stake out for a bird of paradise to do its dance. Two other guys (a lot of men in this endeavor) lived in a cabin in Antartica for a year to film male penguins protecting their eggs through the winter.

In the Gobi desert, the team went Little Miss Sunshine style.

And for the snow leopard, they simply waited three years for her to show her face.

As I have devoured every episode more quickly than I had wished, I now need to put on my “Dear Santa Claus, I’ve been a good journalist this year” letter the DVD, which has an extra 2 1/2-hour documentary on endangered species and environmental issues. Besides, if only for the voice of Sir David Attenborough…