The newspaper is dying, shouting about "responsible publishers" and "conscientious advertisers" doesn't change a thing

It's an old joke that the point of journalism is to fill in the gaps between the adverts. And there has always been a tension, sometimes even a conflict, between the newsroom and the ad sales teams that mostly pay the wages of those journalists. Every paper will have a story of how an advertiser pulled copy because of a story, every editor will have witnessed a raging red-faced sales director screaming how that 'scoop' meant that he's lost thousands in sales - "I was that close to a long-term deal" the SD will shout while the editor waffles about journalistic integrity.

Journalists don't like advertising despite (or maybe because of) working in a business that's dependent on those ads for its existence. Journalists also don't like competition for that advertising (especially from things they don't consider to be media let alone journalism). Here in a classic of self-importance is James Mitchinson, the editor of struggling newspaper, The Yorkshire Post:

"I have long been convinced that the indiscriminate nature of the programmatic advertising business model makes it vulnerable to exploitation. It has caused a race to the bottom, with some publishers – not all – and editors gaming the business model with their commissioning decisions, rather than thinking about what is in the public interest."

There are some suppositions here that are worth noting. We get an attack on the advertising business model and Mitcheson talks about "...outlets that seek to commoditise audiences in order to exploit an indiscriminate paymaster..." on the presumption that advertising decisions are in any way indiscriminate when any ad man will tell you that the opposite is true. And it's hard to accept without a wry smile the suggestion that "quality" newspapers just do "honest journalism" and haven't ever been bottom feeders.

We get the sense in Mitchinson's comments, the use of terms like "conscientious advertisers" and "responsible publishers", that he seeks to divide publishing into good and bad - we can see some of his targets clearly in this part of the commentary: "...the hateful, partisan, agenda-driven Goliaths who think nothing of demonising immigrants, legitimising domestic abuse and scandalising the courts...". But who is Mitcheson, or even a "responsible publishers' network", to say what content the public should or shouldn't consume? And why, since Mitchinson thinks the power is in their hands, should advertisers trash their marketing models to suit what a group of essentially self-interested publishers decide is "responsible" or "conscientious"?

What Mitchinson, and so many others, fail to realise is this journalism they lay claim to ("...public interest journalism; journalism done for the betterment of the communities it serves...") only exists so long as people - directly or through advertising choices - continue to consume the product, the content, those editors put before them. And, right now, the eyes of the majority are turned away from local papers like the Yorkshire Post because it offers little they want. Even those "agenda-driven Goliaths" that Mitcheson hates so much are losing customers, struggling to keep advertisers and wondering how much longer their business model ('producing content to get people to see the advertisements') can continue.

It's unclear, other than seeking to create what in other business contexts would be an illegal cartel, what Mitcheson wants to achieve. We hear of "public interest" (as if that's something that can be defined glibly by a bunch of newspaper editors) and "editorial principles" (as if editorial strategies should should ignore economics) but the telling comment lies at the end: "...improve the whole of the internet and make a wholesome contribution to society."

Mitcheson, like most of the traditional media, is fearful of how platforms like Facebook and Google have changed the way in which people consume news (plus, of course, how the advertisers have shifted spending from black and white copy in the Yorkshire Post to animated and engaging promotions online). To counter this, the fearful journalists have created a bogeyman built from fake news, targeted advertising and "toxic" content which they wave at each other, at the government and at the public in the manner of an old fire-and-brimstone preacher threatening his elderly, half-asleep congregation with eternal damnation.

Dying industries, and traditional, especially local, news journalism is a dying industry (and has been for at least two decades), always look to cartels, regulation and the heavy hand of government to protect then in their dotage. This doesn't better the "...communities it serves and therefore society as a whole..." but is seeking moral enforcement in the cause of economic interest, the very thing Mitcheson claims his crusade is directed against. The problem is that this strategy, while it might stave off the last day, doesn't begin to resolve the problem with the regional paper business model. The Yorkshire Post is neither fish nor fowl - not a local paper and not a national paper - has a daily circulation not much over 10,000, and competes for advertising with national and local competitotrs as well as with other advertising platforms such as Facebook and YouTube (or the advertisers own carefully curated website promoted via Google).

Mitcheson wants advertisers to deliberately buy less impactful and effective advertising so as to privilege his particular view of "responsible" journalism but completely fails to make a case beyond the purely emotive "I want to help make the change; protect quality journalism; improve the whole of the internet and make a wholesome contribution to society". It's not for Mitcheson and a few mates to define quality journalism, dictate what is or isn't good on the Internet, or what constitutes wholesomeness in society.

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Why you should never trust a journalist.

There has, quite rightly, been criticism of New Statesman Deputy Editor, George Eaton for his hatchet job on conservative philosopher, Roger Scruton.

The 75-year-old Roger Scruton gave his candor and trust to George Eaton because he is deputy editor of the New Statesman. Eaton used those civilized and liberal instincts against Scruton, dishonestly edited his remarks in order to smear Scruton as fearful and bigoted toward Chinese people in order to drum up a mini-Twitter outrage, and got him fired from an honorary position, in which he was advising the government on how to build more beautiful housing.

This is seen as an example of today's politics filled as it is with what Scruton called "this store of malice" but I've a feeling that, for all the criticism of Eaton, he have merely behaved as many journalists have always behaved. What Eaton got was a scalp and it doesn't matter how disingenuous he was or how he cherry picked phrases and twisted words, he brought the man down. And the plaudits he'll get from fellow journalists are like the 'expert pundit' in a football commentary applauding the professional foul, the bad behaviour is excused because it was justified by the game.

So my advice to every budding politician is never, not under any circumstances, trust a journalist. It doesn't matter how many drinks they buy you, how often they write or say nice things about you, if they've a chance to kill your career they will. I learned this the hard way...

When I was hauled, for the second time, before the Standards Board for England, I made the mistake of trusting a Yorkshire Post journalist. I was there because I'd been loud and rude to a Labour councillor. For some reason the officious investigators down in London decided this was a really bad thing so they'd have a tribunal - including paying thousands of pounds to ship a barrister up from London. There's me, in bits and pieces supported only by my wife, facing the Standards Board's investigating officer, a London solicitor and a barrister. This barrister read out, in the manner of these creatures, the bad words I was accused of saying - "didn't you say (lots of swear words)" to which I replied, "I don't remember my words, I was loud and rude".

The journalist promised me after they'd found me guilty but let me walk, that he'd fairly put my side of the story. He didn't, he just wrote down all the rude words and the editor plonked an unpleasant headline on the top.

Another time, I went to the leaving do for Olwyn Vasey who had been the Telegraph & Argus City Hall reporter. Most at the do were journalists and, at one point, the head of news at the paper stood up and said the sort of thing you'd expect - well done folks, you've been great, some super stories. Only then this journalist - not appreciating that I was there - talked about the highlight of the news year for them was getting me sacked (long story and I won't bore you with the details excpet to say I'd done nothing worthy of sacking). Think about this for a moment, celebrating forcing someone out of their job because it gets you a great front page.

I could give you other examples - journalists who made stuff up because they hadn't seen what someone else said they'd seen, stories created by getting a couple of friends to castigate someone on Twitter then reporting the outrage. I'm not saying journalists are any nastier than the rest of us, just that they are not your friend. So treat everything you say to them as on the record, always behave professionally, stick to facts, and remember that they are judged by the story - for some, as George Eaton shows, this doesn't make for decency or trustworthiness.

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No we don't need state-funded journalists, we need content people want to buy

Local newspapers are dying. This death is accompanied by a great wailing from the usual sources who argue (without really explaining why) that local papers - even ones that are hardly read at all by the public, even on-line - are "vital to a functioning democracy". The government last year set on Dame Frances Caincross, a left-wing journalist, to look at what could be done to rescue local papers from their impending doom.

Unsurprisingly our journalist concludes that the only solution is state-funded journalism, a new regulator (staffed by worthy lefties like Dame Frances no doubt) and assorted enquiries into the evil that is Facebook (and other monstrous tech giants like Google). It is also unsurprising that, aside from one chap from the Advertising Association, the entire panel of 'experts' advising Dame Frances were journalists or media owners. The outcome of the commission is entirely predictable and won't serve, in any way, to rescue the local press.

The problem is that, despite working in businesses that depend to a greater or lesser extent on advertising, journalists seem not to have the slightest clue as to why advertisers invest their cash in the manner they do. Here's one pretty typical example from Twitter:

I think most journalists know that. They’re at the mercy of hapless publishing giants and similarly incompetent media buying agencies who are so obsessed by Facebook et al that they’ve stopped investing in what’s important.

As you can see journalism ("quality journalism" is the official management term here) is dying because those naive advertisers have been duped by Facebook and Google into shifting their spending there rather than leaving it with publications that nobody reads. Now it's true that marketers, for brand advertising at least, are pulling back from relying on Facebook and Google, but they are not shifting their spend back into print newspapers (magazines are a different matters - take note that the top four TV listings magazines sell nearly 4 million copies every week).

The reason brands are pulling away from social media is that the owners of that media are limiting the advertising's reach by manipulating the algorithms - where once millions of likes meant millions in reach, it now means thousands. Plus, with consumers shifting their attention to other social media, the responsiveness of Facebook advertising degrades - even with supposedly sophisticated targeting Facebook is using a heavy roller to crack walnuts.

There is an old joke about newspapers that the purpose of the journalism is to fill in the gaps between the advertising. We shouldn't forget that most local papers exist because they provided a vehicle for local businesses to advertise. Yes those newspapers did journalism but much of the point for the journalism was to get folk to buy the paper. I recall being told by one former local paper editor about his first assignment as a junior reporter - go to a funeral with the instruction to write down the name of as many people attending as possible. Local papers carried photographs with lots of people in because those people - and their nearest and dearest - would buy the paper.

The stock in trade of local newspapers wasn't "quality journalism", it was births, deaths and marriages, cars for sales, cinema listings, job adverts, sports results, school prize givings and evening classes. The sale adverts from the local department store were just as important (probably more so) than the report of what Alderman Smith had said about the parks department at Wednesday's Council meeting. The paper was a record of the boring mundanities of life in a community - Bradford's Telegraph & Argus has been sharing online some images from the past: football teams, ballet classes, scout troops and girl guides not councillors or MPs.

People still want all these lists, this record of everyday life, it's just that so much of it has moved elsewhere - not to Facebook (although a glimpse through community pages will show that they absolutely capture those everyday events and happenings) but to job sites and car sales sites, to direct messaging and to email. If local papers want to do their "quality journalism" maybe they need to think about how to get back the bread and butter of past times rather than try to blame social media for a demise that was predictable in the 1990s at the outset of the 'world wide web' - long before Facebook or Google came to dominate the world.

It is crazy to see the solution as some sort of state-funded cadre of local journalists producing copy that nobody reads because someone has decided that it is "quality journalism". Instead news media need to turn off the button marked "free" (and it would help here if the BBC didn't crowd out so much on-line, something Cairncross does note) and start expecting the public to pay for news. Most of them won't because they're not really that interested but if the cost is low enough there's no reason why local media cannot work. What we can't have, however, is journalists believing they've some sort of privileged position in society (all the guff about democracy and so forth) and expecting taxes to provide for them.

Oh, and next time we have an enquiry into an area where advertising is central perhaps we should put marketers in charge? What Dame Frances and her advisors have shown us is that they - mostly journalists - really haven't the faintest idea why advertisers make the spending decision they make. And I hope such a panel would conclude that we don't need state-funded journalists, we need content people want to buy.

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On safari with the poverty tourists

Since the Brexit vote in Britain and Trump's election in the USA, there has developed a genre of journalism that involves the writer departing from their comfortable, elite environs (London, New York, San Francisco) and venturing out into the badlands where people voted either the leave the EU or else for Donald Trump. On safari with their patronising pencils:

Hale, who is 65 and lives in San Francisco, is a career activist who got her start protesting nuclear plants and nuclear testing in the 1970s. In 2005, she was one of the founders of Third Way, a center-left think tank, and it was in that capacity that she and four colleagues had journeyed from both coasts to the town of Viroqua, Wisconsin, as part of a post-election listening tour. They had come on a well-meaning mission: to better understand their fellow Americans, whose political behavior in the last election had left them confused and distressed.

Or by the seaside smugly observing poor people struggling:

The elephants that lumbered up and down Blackpool’s beach have long gone. Britain’s political parties have stopped decamping to the town for their annual jamborees. Even the deckchairs have left: the local government sold all 6,000 of them three years ago to a company in the affluent county of Cheshire. The one thing that hasn’t disappeared is the people.

This sort of poverty tourism feeds a set of consumers eager for the latest instalment of voyeurism, the next explanation as to why these stupid people voted for Brexit or plumped for Trump. We get depressing descriptions of people's lives interspersed by showing how they're all bigoted, racist, misogynist, overweight and unhealthy. What there isn't is any attempt at all to understand why, at least not beyond glib, smug quips about "shit life syndrome" or lurid reporting on illiberal attitudes towards druggies, welfare queens and high school drop-outs.

The whole approach - whether it's a Financial Times journalist going to Blackpool, a Guardian writer venturing to Stoke, or some San Francisco researchers driving through rural Wisconsin - reeks of 19th century anthropology where intrepid researchers ventured into the dark jungle in search of lost tribes to write up in their next book - published to great acclaim and talk of how brave, how brilliant. What we don't get is any real sense of understanding as journalists turn for insight to the public sector elites that dominate many of these places - to the very people who are failing to turn them round.

It's no surprise then, that the descriptions focus on the dysfunctional lives of people who live in these places, on the drugs and alcohol, the depression and the sense of hopelessness. What's lacking from this poverty tourism is any sense of empathy, any appreciation of what having a shit life is really like. And why so many people with those shit lives are in Blackpool, Stoke and rural Wisconsin. It struck me as telling that the UK edition of J D Vance's gripping 'Hillbilly Elegy' describes it as "a great insight into Trump and Brexit" - it may be that but more importantly it's a revealing story of the struggles faced by the white working class in the deindustrialised Mid West. That Trump and Brexit were stuck on the book's front cover tells you everything you need to know about the interests and priorities of bien pensant bookshop browsers in London or New York.

What's missing is any suggestion as to what - other than familiar cries for more government cash - should be done to change shit lives into lives that are all right. We get little criticisms of government like this:

For Jonathan Portes, chief economist at the DWP between 2002 and 2008, the lack of a plan was, in retrospect, part of the problem. “There’s an argument for saying you can’t do [welfare reform] separately from having some sort of place-based economic strategy as well — and we never really had that,” he says. “Just telling them, ‘Well there’s 5,000 new jobs in London every week, and people seem to find it perfectly easy to move 600 miles from rural Romania to take one of these jobs, so why can’t you move 200 miles from Blackpool?’ — it’s true but it sort of ignores the social context.”

The truth, of course, is that we had decades of place-based economic strategies some funded through ERDF Objective One and Two, others by UK government funding (City Challenge, SRB, Estate Action - a potpourri of place-based regeneration) but, in the main, the places that were poorest in 1968 are more likely to be poor in 2018. And, while all this money helped, the economic fundamentals for places like Blackpool, Barnsley or Stoke haven't changed all that much.

When you read Vance's book, you get a little sense of the irritation many like him (hillbillies, rednecks, chavs, pikies - the white working classes of Britain and America) feel at the way they're portrayed in these poverty tourism pieces. We're given the idea that such folk are dull, listless, ignorant and essentially helpless, that only the intervention of bright, engaged, educated and empowered people from outside can resolve the problem. We're to say "there, there" and provide a big middle-class hug to all these sad, incapable poor people out there in the sticks.

Perhaps instead of that hug, we should try a little bit of understanding? Get underneath why their lives are shit? Maybe we can stop hassling them about lifestyle too and focus instead on the things that could help? But then, I've a suspicion, the journalists, academics and think-tankers believe they're done their job by pointing at Blackpool as saying "ewww, isn't it horrid" (albeit taking 5000 words to do so). After all their readers will now be armed with all they need to hold forth about the evils of capitalism, the failures of Tory welfare policies and the noble work being done by the public sector elites in these towns, people who are sacrificing the comforts of civilisation to do good work in these sad, broken places.

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On the manufacture of fake news

I know others have commented on this but it's pretty important that we understand that fake news is not simply something manufactured by 20 year old Macedonians or Russian spies. Throughout our media stories are created based on the flimsiest of evidence. Or indeed on evidence that really doesn't exist at all.

Here, from that impeccable establishment media source, The Economist:

The report does not say what proportion of the 53,000 sample tweets related to Ms Cox’s murder, and what share concerned Brexit more generally. When The Economist asked the authors for help, they declined to share their data with us, citing death threats they said they had received since the report’s release. So we undertook our own analysis, examining tweets from June and July that included the terms “Jo Cox” or “#JoCox”—some 341,000 unique messages. Of a random sample of 800 of these, none was celebratory, and just four seemed to be derogatory toward Ms Cox, criticising her support for Syrian refugees, for instance. From this, simple statistics suggest that the true number of tweets cheering the politician’s murder would lie between 0 and 1,500. (The Hope Not Hate report reproduces about 30.) Mr Awan notes that our sample did not include tweets that mentioned only the killer, Mr Mair; it is also likely that some tweets were deleted before our collection.

Now, as the report notes, it's terrible if even one Tweet celebrates a murder but the thrust of media coverage - driven by the original Hope Not Hate press release of this shocking study - was that such activity was commonplace when it wasn't.

We see this pattern repeated by newspapers again and again with the thread of fake news creation often going back to a press release from a worthy organisation like a charity or campaign group. From sugary drinks and booze through to vaping and fracking the misuse of evidence, even the creation of evidence simply to generate a news story, is widespread. Journalists used to challenge and question the claims made by those issuing press releases but it seems today that there's either no time or no inclination to do that basic journalistic job of checking the facts before publishing.

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Journalists and maths - things that don't really mix. The case of the boozy MPs.

It's from the Sun so all the gory details (doubtless given the source more of the former than the latter) are behind Rupert's paywall. However the point is this:

BOOZY MPs have sparked a fierce backlash from campaigners by splashing out £11,000 in just one week in Parliament’s bars.

Terrible. All these MPs clogging up bars, sloshing back copious quantities of booze while they should be running the country (or something like that). The problem here is shown by some basic maths. There are 650 MPs which means that, to spend £11,000 in a week, the average MP spent £16.92 - just £2.42 per day. A bear in mind that there are a load of other folk who can buy beer in the House of Commons. So MPs are drinking less than a pint of beer on average (the price list is here - the cheapest beer is £2.70 for a pint) and people are having a go at them?

The 'campaigners' in question appear to be folk working for Alcohol Concern - or so it seems. Quoted in the Daily Express, Jackie Ballard (a former Liberal Democrat MP and professional nannying fussbucket) the boss of Alcohol Concern showcased another lie to make a lame point:

Jackie Ballard, head of Alcohol Concern, said: "At a time when alcohol is causing grief to individuals and costing our society £21billion a year, Parliament should be leading by example."

Seems to me that Parliament is absolutely setting an example - the level of consumption is well within the guidelines of the health fanatics and reveals that, far from being a bunch of drunks, MPs are avoiding boozing on the job. The idea that spending an average of £6.62 on the first day back represents partying "hard into night following election gains" seems to be stretching the point given that this won't even buy half a bottle of the House's house sauvignon.

This is just another example of prohibitionist campaigners taking advantage of the seeming inability of journalists to grasp simple maths. With the result that we get shock horror headlines over takings that would represent a pretty lousy night for a typical city centre boozer.

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Thou shall not suffer a witch to live - even when she's innocent

The acquittal of Rebekah Brooks:

Mrs Brooks was found not guilty of four charges including conspiring to hack phones, making corrupt payments to public officials and conspiring with others to conceal evidence from police.

This is the last sentence of a hatchet job on Rebekah Brooks in the Daily Mail. A litany of Rebekah's sins and failings (the greatest being that she rose to success in Rupert Murdoch's evil empire) that begins with that classic of the tabloid genre:

Rebekah, the world class schmoozer who bewitched three Prime Ministers... and Rupert Murdoch.

Mrs Brooks didn't rise to success because she was talented, capable, delivered what worked and sold newspapers. No, she succeeded because she used her witchy woman wiles to control the men around her and her glamour ensnared three prime ministers. The Mail - which had clearly prepared the article well ahead of the verdict in Mrs Brooks' trial (a verdict the paper, I suspect, was disappointed about) - even found someone who was at primary school with her to pass comment. As if the bitchiness of a ten-year-old's "best friend" is a guide to the grown up woman's character.

And before you get the idea that this is merely your typical Daily Mail sexism - here's a man writing in the Guardian:

She is brilliant with men, charming, tactile, very nearly seductive. One man who dealt with her often – a man who is happily married and 20 years her senior – recalls with some embarrassment that “whenever we spoke, she left me thinking that, well, if things had been a little bit different [a sigh] perhaps we would have been together”.

You see folks - Rebekah got to be the boss because she was sexy and flirtatious, nothing to do with whether or not she was actually good at her job.  To bemused journalists Mrs Brooks is unexplainable - the working-class origins, the unashamed sexiness, the frightening red hair - she must be a witch casting her enchantments on the men around her, manipulating them up to her tower and offering them the world. Before moving on to the next, and more powerful, person.

The failure to kill the witch this time (and we know how much the left love to apply the word witch to successful women) clearly disappoints many who were already building the great fire on which the evil enchantress was to be burned. Even the Telegraph was disappointed that the 'Wicked Witch' turned out not to be so wicked after all.

Whatever we think of the Murdoch empire, the manner in which Mrs Brooks is described is appalling. We don't see her pained as a successful, high-achieving woman but as a manipulative and exploitative witch - someone with a dark side whose rise to fame came from enchantment rather than from being good at the jobs she was given.

So these journalists, commentators and knowing media folk cannot suffer a witch to live - innocent or not. Especially when she works for Rupert Murdoch.

Me, I like witches.

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More on the death of journalism

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With our breath bated we waited, What could it be? What terrible act would bring down the minister - departmental failure, corruption or...what's this? Ah, Twitter!

The newspaper that likes to think of itself as that little bit more right-on than all the others has chosen as its lead story - emblazoned across its front page - a sad little tale about Twitter:

An anonymous Twitter account called @toryeducation* is regularly used to attack critical stories about both Gove and his department. It is often abreast of imminent Tory policies, suggesting it is coming from close to the centre of government. However, it is also used to rubbish journalists and Labour politicians while promoting Gove's policies and career. 

There was a time when newspapers reported news, when journalists wrote about wars, dug into real scandal and investigated actual corruption.  For sure there was plenty of gossip and, to serve the market for this stuff, the newspaper would have a diary column tucked away somewhere in its bowels. Now, it seems, stories that merit a couple of lines in that diary now run on the front page.

We are, I fear, watching the death throes of journalism. It is being killed by two things - firstly the economics of publishing newspapers means that real story-finding is too expensive and secondly, political journalists now see themselves as players rather than observers and reporters. Newspapers are filled with a mix of rewarmed press releases and tittle-tattle. The comments of other journalists are reported creating a  purposeless and news-free circus.

Is it any wonder that each year fewer people bother to buy newspapers when they don't report on the real world  but on the land of pine-scrubbed kitchen table make-believe that these London-based "journalists" occupy. While there are wars, terrorist attacks, banking crises and much else besides, The Observer deems that a snarky little Twitter spat is more important.

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Is Lord Leveson stupid?

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He's certainly giving a good impression:

The competition from bloggers and tweeters, "may encourage unethical and potentially unlawful practices to get a story"

This is providing crap journalists (who are remunerated for their work) with an excuse: "it was those nasty bloggers, m'lud, they made me do it".

And what on earth makes m'lud think that bloggers don't know we're:

...subject to the same laws as print and broadcast journalists.

(Although some like Eoin Clarke only find out the hard way).

The problem is that Lord Leveson wants to introduce laws that only apply to journalists and the newspapers they work for - not tweeters, facebookers or bloggers: just journalists in traditional newspapers. Stupid.

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Labour's still wedded to the license state

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The bizarre polity that is modern India was - under its then perennial Congress Party rule - described as the 'license raj":

This is when India got its License Raj, the bureaucratic control over the economy. Not only did the Indian Government require businesses get bureaucratic approval for expanding productive capacity, businesses had to have bureaucratic approval for laying off workers and for shutting down. When a business was losing money the Government would prevent them from shutting down and to keep the business going would provide assistance and subsidies. When a business was hopeless an owner might take away, illegally, all the equipment that could be moved and disappear themselves. In such cases the Government would try to keep the business functioning by means of subsidies to the employees. One can imagine how chaotic and unproductive a business would be under such conditions. 

Every economic act, every profession, every industry acts solely on the basis of licenses granted by government. Not only was this corrupt but it crippled the Indian economy for a generation.

This lesson in failure - with India falling ever further behind places like South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and, latterly, China - is still ignored by social democrats. Ignored by those who see the purpose of the state as the direction of individual actions to a greater good - or rather to the preferences and interests of the political class.

Such a man is Ivan Lewis MP, the Labour culture shadow - Mr Lewis wishes to license journalists:

Lewis will suggest that newspapers should introduce a system whereby journalists could be struck off a register for malpractice.

Not only is this illiberal - but then we expect that from Labour politicians - it is stupid and enforceable only by arbitrary power. It would represent the first step towards the social democrat establishment controlling the output of the press, a big stride towards the hounding of journalists for the grave sin of criticising Labour politicians. And it is wrong.

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The Guardian are in it for the money, you know!

Yesterday the Guardian, behaving exactly as you would expect a struggling business to behave, shut down its ‘Guardian Local’ operation – or rather ‘experiment’:

The Local project has always been experimental in both concept and implementation. We've learned a lot from the beatbloggers, under the expert guidance of Sarah Hartley. We have also learned from the local communities who got involved with telling their stories. And using this we have continually refined our approach over the past year.

As an experiment in covering local communities in a new way, it has been successful and enlightening. Unfortunately, while the blogs have found engaged local readerships and had good editorial impact, the project is not sustainable in its present form.

Since the Guardian is losing loads of money (and wants to keep expensive London-based writers on its books), we shouldn’t be surprised by this decision – this ‘cut’. Nevertheless, the squeals of pain were heard, how could the Guardian do this? How could the cuddly, woolly-lefty, caring, sharing Guardian close down this wonderful community resource?

Here’s a reminder:

“The Manchester Evening News and its sister titles have made a huge contribution to the fortunes of the Group for the best part of a century. GMG would like to pay tribute to all the staff for their hard work and achievement in a sector dealing with structural change as well as economic downturn.

“GMG is mandated to secure the future of the Guardian in perpetuity, and we have a strong portfolio which has to be in the right shape to achieve that goal. The Group board and the Scott Trust have made the decision to sell in light of these strategic objectives.”

The Guardian severed its historic connection to Manchester, pulled out from local journalism and closed its Northern operations purely and simply to provide cash to prop up the ailing national title. The ‘experiment’ of Guardian Local was nothing to do with journalism or community but an endeavour aimed at spreading the Guardian brand. Its purpose was to make money for the Guardian, it didn’t so it is closed down.

It was never community journalism.  To do that we’d have to heed Mike Chitty’s words:

At some point we have to recognise that change that is prompted from outside, that is funded by someone else, that delivers someone else’s policy goals or answers someone else’s questions is really unlikely to provide us with any hope of transformation.

At some point we have to recognise that for any real long-term success we have to start from where WE are, and work with what WE have got, and break this dangerous habit of relying on external ‘benevolence’.

The Guardian is just a business. It has no interest in Leeds beyond the story and, of course, the cash.

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I blame it on Paxman....

.

This morning I heard:

Angela Rippon interviewed on dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease

And...

A Dutch sports reporter being asked about a bizarre medical procedure on Van Persie’s ankle


When did journalists get to be experts on anything? Let alone medicine!



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