> he's trying to publish his findings at "the annual meeting of the Ankh-Morpork Caged Birds Society". [...] Trying to commandeer the attention of the attendees like that is simply disrespectful;

Ah, I see the confusion, no, these are two people running an actual newspaper.

When the coworker says "this is a report" it's because they're holding it up in their hands to display it, as an example of something their average working-class reader might care more about than estoeric politics.

Alas, the 2-hour edit window is closed, but:

> She held up a piece of lined paper, crammed edge to edge with the careful looped handwriting of someone for whom holding a pen was not a familiar activity. "This is a report of the annual meeting of the Ankh-Morpork Caged Birds Society," she said. "They're just ordinary people who breed canaries and things as a hobby. Their chairman lives next door to me, which is why he gave me this. This stuff is important to him! My goodness, but it's dull. It's all about Best of Breed and some changes in the rules about parrots which they argued about for two hours. But the people who were arguing were people who mostly spend their day mincing meat or sawing wood and basically leading little lives that are controlled by other people, do you see? They've got no say in who runs the city but they can damn well see to it that cockatoos aren't lumped in with parrots. It's not their fault. It's just how things are. Why are you sitting there with your mouth open like that?"

Fair enough, then.