BBC College of Journalism Blog - A vigorous and robust discussion about journalism from every perspective.

This is a guest blog by the Rev. Art Lester, minister at Croydon Unitarian and Free Christian Church, and a former journalist.

Every morning I log onto Google News to see what's happening. I steal a quick glance at my wife Gilly's Guardian.

The other day I realised I was just looking for excitement, wanting to gloat at someone's misfortune or cringe in anxiety at what the Iranians were or were not doing. Maybe it has to do with endorphins or dopamine or something; I seem to need my morning fix.

News media have to fill their pages or air time with something. And to be fair, I have colluded in this when I worked as a journalist in my younger days. Nothing scares an editor like an empty page.

In my first newspaper job, the editor of the small weekly in a coastal town in the States told me to go over to a nearby shrimping dock and get the local news. A lot of old guys were sitting in the sun, some re-weaving nylon nets, others just talking.

Being young and optimistic, I went directly to a man and told him I was from the newspaper and wanted any news he might have. He just shook his head and I walked off. I tried it again with two or three more, all with the same result.

I drove back to the office and told the editor there wasn't any news.

"Get back over there and stay till you've got a story," he said, not smiling.

I went back and this time left my notepad in the car. I sat on a bench, watching a man in a stained undershirt repairing a huge yellow net using a wooden tool I had never seen before. He noticed me watching and I asked if I could come closer and see what he was doing.

I forgot about the news and began to learn about how to make a sheet bend knot. The man's name was Oscar and he started talking. About the port, about the problems people were having with osmosis on their new fibreglass shrimp boats and how the old wooden ones were better. How the new government quota system had caused two brothers to sell up and move to Rocky Mount. How the fire in the back of the café meant he had to drive five miles to buy his Cuban sandwiches for lunch. Who had gotten married and who had run off with whom and who was carrying a shotgun in his boat in case he spotted the man who cuckolded him.

About the shark that had been caught in someone's net and when opened up had been found to contain a human hand in its stomach. Did anyone have a picture? Sure, just ask Jimbo Jacks at the chandler's shop.

I went back to the newsroom with more stories than I could use in three issues. And a grainy picture of an open shark's belly.

So what is real news, and where do you find it?

Every morning, the Indian spiritual master Meher Baba used to have read out to him what he called the "bogus news" - the ordinary run of media stories which might become history someday but probably won't.

Then he liked to hear the real news, about how people around him were doing. That sort of news is the basic stuff of community.

And there is always plenty of it around - if you just take the trouble to find it.

Art Lester's The Coffee Table Book of Doom was published last year.