Charles on… anything that comes along

It is annoying to see the annoying company Ryanair - whose motto I imagine to be “if they’re stupid enough to fly with us, they’re on a mental level with sheep and should be treated as such” - given occasional credibility over ludicrous ideas without anyone asking the straightforward question.

Such as: would implementing that idea actually cost Ryanarse money, or profits?

When Michael O’Leary makes a stupid pronouncement, the media seems happy to repeat it. None seems happy to examine it and throw it back at O’Leary to ask whether he has lost his mind and is trying to annoy his shareholders as well.

For instance: charging people to use the toilet. (That’s a Google search link: the top link at the moment is to an April 2010 story saying that Ryanair is going ahead with it… and the third link is from February 2009, with “pilots aghast at proposal to bring in £1 charge”, which shows you how long this story has been bing-bonging around the mediasphere.

Let’s examine this the way it should be examined: from a business standpoint. If Ryanarse starts charging for access to the toilet, I think it will lose money. Here’s why.

1) emptying the toilet reservoirs (known, charmingly, as the “honey tanks”) is a fixed cost. It’s done at the end of every flight. And the toilets are on aircraft are never in a wonderful state.

If Ryanarse starts charging for the toilet, fewer people will use it. Obviously. It may also have to do more cleanups from parents of young children who run out of money. It’ll also have to get staff to watch over the toilet to make sure people don’t hold doors open for each other - which will be unpopular with the aircrew, since nobody like to be toilet cop.

So it will get a bit of money from people paying to use the toilet, though there will be fewer visits - meaning that the fixed cost, cleaning the toilet reservoir, will only be slightly offset by the takings. And aircrew will have two new grievances: cleanup and toilet cop rota.

But while Ryanarse makes some money from selling toilet access, it will lose money from sales of coffee, tea and other liquids. This is stupid, because it already has the highest prices for coffee and tea and food according to a 2008 survey by Which? Holiday:

The Irish airline charges £2.50 for a bottle of water and £2.50 for a cup of coffee while a small bottle of red wine costs £5.00.

Why will it lose there? Because people will think “Hmm, if I drink this coffee I’ll have to pay for letting it out too.” So the passengers won’t buy the coffee or use the toilet. Ryanarse is suddenly losing money: the profit it used to make on coffee/tea sales. And that is pure profit: apart from heating the water, pretty much everything that it buys for coffee/tea - instant coffee, teabags - can be reused on another flight if it isn’t used. Whereas the toilet reservoirs have to be emptied every time; it is actually more efficient to encourage their use - that way, you get your money’s worth for the cleaning services.

Michael O’Leary - who I think is despicable; if you want to think of the future driven by his credo, imagine Adam Smith’s invisible hand slapping the human face forever - ought to be able to see that charging for access to the toilet is a stupid move, economically. It would actually make better business sense to announce that the “toilet charge” will be rescinded - and raise the price on coffee and tea. In fact, expect it.

And if O’Leary is too stupid to see it, then perhaps his shareholders could show him this blogpost.

And finally, to the business press: next time O’Leary puts forward a stupid idea like this, ask whether it can make business sense. Think about fixed costs and operating costs. And quiz him. When he can see he’s going to lose, he caves in. I think if this is implemented, it will be a money-loser. But you’d need to ask the hard questions - how many drinks are sold per flight before, how many after, what’s the take - to know whether, when Ryanarse announces it’s not implementing (or is withdrawing) these charges, precisely why it’s doing it.

My suggestion: it won’t be because of an outbreak of warmth in O’Leary’s heart, which I imagine as a coal-black thing that would make Lord Voldemort shudder.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• No comment. Apart from to say that Ryanair are a load of... (18 October 2007; score: 70.96%)
• Ryanair's "ban" on phone chargers: not really staff bullying, but very subtle PR (23 April 2005; score: 58.84%)
• The missing tag is "firsttimeparent" (19 February 2007; score: 38.38%)

This piece first appeared in The Independent around September 2000. Given all the talk about some handheld(ish) computer released by some company or other, I thought it might be interesting to look back on…

A couple of notable phrases: “Microsoft’s failure in this market is unusual..” and at the end that “In the long term though functionality is sure to win out over form”. Debate among yourselves whether this was just history talking…

Handheld computers

BY CHARLES ARTHUR

Technology Editor

Handheld computers cannot do what most people want them to. This may seem surprising, given that millions of models using operating systems from Palm, Psion and Microsoft have been sold since 1984, when the British company Psion introduced its first handheld model.

But all are severely limited compared to the expectations placed upon them, which can be traced back to two sources: the 1960s TV series Star Trek, and the hit BBC radio series first broadcast in the 1970s, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy written by Douglas Adams. Only at the turn of the [21st] century does it look like people will soon be able to buy products with the facilities that people have been hankering after for decades.

The sight in the 1960s of William Shatner as Captain Kirk landing on alien planets and flipping out a palm-sized machine which could act as a radio, intelligent locator and general categoriser of knowledge had a subtle effect on the baby boomers’ belief about what computers of the future could and should do. It was voice-activated, and context- and location-sensitive. Similarly, in the radio series, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was actually the name of a computerised guidebook. It contained as much information as the galactic hitchhiker could need. While its indexing method was hopeless by any standards - the traveller had to look up a number in the index and enter that in order to get the corresponding entry (”so bad it could have been designed by Microsoft,” Adams later quipped) - it did create the belief that someday one could build a handheld machine able to hold all the knowledge not just in the world, but in the galaxy. And if aliens had them, why shouldn’t we?

The reality of the first retail products was rather different. The Psion 1, the brainchild of David Potter, was launched in 1984. It had a mighty 10K of non-volatile memory, an alphabetic keypad and a one-line 16-character LCD screen. Entering data was tedious. It would not have passed muster with Captain Kirk. However its descendants are now widely used by people in jobs requiring simple data collection, notably including traffic wardens.

In August 1993 Apple Computer launched its $700 Newton, which seemed at the time to promise at least some Star Trek functionality. It had handwriting recognition software able to “learn” your specific cursive style; there were promises of wireless communications and word processing.

It turned out to be an example of the computer industry’s occasional hubris. The software did learn your writing style, but often failed to interpret the letters correctly. The Newton was a flop (officially abandoned in 1998, but dead some years earlier) which poisoned the well for entrepreneurs in the US handheld market for some years. Bill Gates of Microsoft reckoned it put the market for such products back by two years. (Probaly an underestimate.) Palm Computing, founded by Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky in 1992, only managed to survive by selling itself to the modem maker US Robotics early in 1996.

However, in the UK and Europe Psion was thriving, and had developed its Psion Organiser 3 series, which had a miniature keyboard and inbuilt software including limited word processing, a calendar, contacts book and spreadsheet. It looked like a miniaturised version of a laptop computer, and proved very successful in its local market.

But on the west coast of the US, Hawkins and Dubinsky were developing a palm-sized machine which would have some, at least, of the ease of use both of Captain Kirk’s communicator and The Hitchhiker’s Guide. Hawkins envisaged a machine - which later became the Palm series - that would not stand alone, but would synchronise and back up its files with a standard PC. Thus it would not have to do everything; only have enough functionality to be useful while out of touch with the PC.

For data entry, he developed a shorthand cursive system called “Graffiti” which all Palm users have to learn. He tested the ergonomics of the product by carving a block of wood into a size and shape that he could carry comfortably around in his pocket. Function and form thus developed in parallel.

The Palm operating system was hugely popular, even though the basic machine only offered a calendar, address book, task (”To-do”) and notes list, plus a calculator and search system. Its success stemmed from its ability to coordinate with a PC; the openness of the operating system; and the coincidental rise of the Internet. The first point meant users could access their databases more easily than with tiny keyboards; the second that software developers could write programs to enhance the machine; and the third, that those programs could be widely and quickly distributed. Psion, with its EPOC operating system, had attracted some software developers but was held back by its European location (where Internet development lagged by a couple of years compared to the US) and lack of connectivity to PCs.

Launched early in 1996, the first Palm computer sold 1 million units in 18 months. In 1998 Hawkins and Dubinsky left with Ed Colligan, marketing head of Palm: they were dismayed by the slow working of the monolithic 3Com, which had bought US Robotics. They set up their own company Handspring, and licensed the Palm OS, which then had 80 per cent of the world market, served by 100,000 developers, while Psion and Microsoft scrabbled over the remainder.

Microsoft’s failure in this market is unusual, but seems to stem from its WindowsCE operating system (renamed and rebuilt as PocketPC in spring 2000) being too complex for the limited power of the machines. WindowsCE is used in petrol pumps and set-top boxes for decoding digital TV signals.

The future promises rapid change. Until 2000, handheld computers sat apart from mobile phones: an address list on one could not be transferred to another. As usability expert Jakob Nielsen noted, this is absurdly inconvenient. Mobile phones are no good for noting data (such as phone numbers) while you are in a call; but handhelds have been little use for making phone calls.

But Handspring especially has been forcing the pace, as its Visor machines, which use the Palm OS, include a slot called the “Springboard” where the user can plug in items such as a camera, memory module and - from autumn 2000 - a GSM modem.

That abruptly made the Handspring into the potential killer combination of handheld address list and mobile phone. Palm rapidly announced that by the end of 2000, all of its products would have wireless capability. Separately, IBM demonstrated a version of a Palm machine with an add-on board which gave it voice recognition capability, using the ViaVoice technology. Suddenly, the humble handheld was beginning to look like the machine which would be able to do everything.

But mobile phone makers and Psion are not finished. The so-called “third generation” of mobile phones, which will have high-speed data connections, were being designed in 2000, and the Symbian consortium (which uses the Epoc OS) won a contract to provide the OS for a number of phone companies.

What was still unclear at the end of 2000 was whether handheld computers would swallow mobile phones, or vice-versa. The handhelds had the functionality; the mobile phones had the usability. However the mobiles rapidly lost that edge as new WAP (Wireless Applications Protocol) phones attempting to squeeze Internet interactivity into a few lines of a monochrome LCD screen. In some respects, it was a step back to 1984. But the market’s explosive growth may mean that there is room for everyone to survive. In the long term though functionality is sure to win out over form.

end//

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Well, that about wraps it up for the Portable Media Center (or Centre) (12 July 2004; score: 44.68%)
• Handheld video players: survey shows people aren't interested (3 November 2004; score: 34.47%)
• And since everyone else is saying it... here's my "Apple on Intel" story. From April 2000 (6 June 2005; score: 31.82%)

Hot on the heels of Kevin Braddock, who posted (and then rescinded) a long list of PRs who had sent him annoying emails, I’ve been noticing a rise in the number of rubbish emails - badly targeted, irrelevant, trivial, stupid - that have been landing in my inbox.

The cause, as we all know, is companies that gather lists of journalists, assign vague labels (”technology”) and then pimp those lists to all sorts of PR companies. Meaning that the puzzled (to begin with) journalists get bombarded with emails about all sorts of “technology” topics, from heavy plant machinery to web apps for diets to which company has won a contract to do the voice and computer networking for Company X. (The latest to annoy me again in this way is Cision, which keeps pimping my email in this way. I really dislike them. I’ve search my very large email repository for emails sent via Cision, and NOT A SINGLE ONE has been useful or relevant. That’s quite a non-achievement.)

This is always done with no regard or interest or even checking as to whether the journalist is interested, or has ever written about this topic. That’s because, of course, it costs the PR nothing to send the email; the annoyed journalists’ wasted time simply doesn’t show up on the balance sheet. (One can make similar points about environmental degradation and the economy, but that might be conflating the trivial and the important.) An economist would tell you that the journalist and the environment both fall into that plain category of “externalities”, aka “I don’t mind, and you don’t matter”.

So here’s how I explained it to a PR person in an email. I’d asked them to stop sending me their irrelevant rubbish. The PR person wrote back with what he thought was a stout defence.

PR person: I sent this release to you on the basis that your readers might be interested in how a company like XXXorganises its [computer] network, despite this type of story not being your main focus.

In other words, what the PR person was saying was this: “Despite the fact that you’ve never written about the topic, haven’t written anything else that looks like that subject, and haven’t written anything about any of the other scores of emails that we’ve sent you. It was just nice and easy and since you didn’t come round to our offices and actually kick us, you must have been really enjoying receiving them.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong. Should I spam every PR company with requests for interviews with everyone I want to talk to - film stars, rock musicians, top technologists - even if those PR companies don’t handle those sorts of clients or subjects? Should I send out an email every week to every PR person and company in my contacts book saying “Look, I’d really like an interview with Steve Jobs, Jonny Ive, Sergey Brin and Larry Page - can you sort that out?”

No, because it would be a complete waste of time for virtually everyone. But it would be trivially easy - I could set up a computer script that would do it without my interaction. Or I could just put a few different names in each week.

Imagine what it would be like to be in PR: as a recipient, you’d ignore it at first, but if every journalist did it, you might find it wearying. And then you might begin by asking the journalist to stop.

It should be so simple: know the journalist (by reading what they write about), then determine the email that they might be interested in receiving. But the externality problem in PRs and journalists is huge. I’ve written about it before. I just wish that some of the people who send out these pointless emails would stop, but of course it’s the worst ones who ignore it, and it’s the worst practitioners who pimp ever-expanding lists of email addresses. Sturgeon’s Law is alive and well.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• How I learnt to stop worrying about reinstalling Tiger and stopped the March of Doom (21 June 2006; score: 33.14%)
• My latest stories at the Guardian: Microsoft/Yahoo (doomed to fail!), hardcore games, Xbox problems and time travel (1 February 2008; score: 26.4%)
• In the Guardian: reviewing MusicStation (14 February 2008; score: 25.15%)

From The Independent, November 13 1999:

See, I love it when you can come back to things after ten years. Count the things that have come true.

BY CHARLES ARTHUR
Technology Editor

Doorknobs that talk, computers that you swallow and phones that don’t ring if there’s nobody to answer them will all be reality within 10 years, according to Professor Nicholas Negroponte, director of the world-famous MIT Media Laboratory, and one of the best-known of Internet gurus.
Addressing the theme of how computing will pervade our lives, Professor Negroponte said: “You may wonder about how computing could possibly affect something like a doorknob. But if you think about it, an intelligent doorknob would be a really useful thing.
“You would not need keys: it could identify you by your fingerprints, and perhaps confirm your identity by asking a question - ‘What’s your mother’s maiden name?’ for example. Why would you need keys anymore?”
The smart doorknob could also accept parcel deliveries - and perhaps sign digitally for them; “and maybe it could let the dog out, and then let it back in while keeping out the other nine dogs following it.”
The technology required to do that is already sufficiently miniaturised, he said: such “embedded” systems could surround us. “We will have thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of embedded chips around us, all intercommunicating,” he predicted to an audience in London.
Professor Negroponte, author of the book “Being Digital”, espouses the view that anything which can be expressed as computer “bits” - such as words, images, video, designs, music - will eventually be transmitted in that form across the world, speeding up transactions and cutting costs. Human activity consists either of manipulating “atoms” - irreducibly physical objects - or “bits”, which contain ideas or symbols. His forecasts have been largely confirmed, especially by the move of music to new digital formats such as MP3 and the rise of electronic commerce.
As computers shrink and become pervasive over the next decade, the sort of information they can access will grow, he forecast. “I you want a really futuristic product for 10 years hence - you’ll have computers that you eat, one per day. It will contain devices and sensors which will record all your anatomical measurements, what’s going on inside you, and relay them to a black box that you wear on your belt. If it passes through you, no problem - swallow another.”
The value of such systems is evident if you consider the problems presently faced by doctors, he said: “Today, you go and say something is wrong, and you tell the doctor a story about how you felt perhaps 12 hours ago, which you can only imprecisely recall. From that, a doctor is meant to make a careful diagnosis and recommend a solution. This may be unfortunate timing after the Egypt Air crash, but I have wondered for a long time: why don’t we have black boxes? Then we could take them to the doctor, and they could read them to see what was wrong with us.”
Professor Negroponte also foresees telephone handsets becoming smarter. “Why do phones ring?” he wondered. “If there’s nobody there, no one will answer. Phones should be built smart enough to know if there’s nobody there. And if there is someone there, they should be able to answer them, like a good butler, and find out who is calling and why, and only then decide whether to get our attention.”
But there are still some giant steps to be made for the average user of computers, he admitted. “Who would have believed, ten years ago, that big segments of the population would spend between £1,000 and £2,000 on their own computers - and that those machines would reduce people to tears once or twice a week?”

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Who I feel sorry for in the Wikipedia mess: the journalist (7 March 2007; score: 29.5%)
• Attack of the killer students (with blogs) (30 January 2007; score: 24.83%)
• Ten signs you're in a recession (13 April 2008; score: 23.49%)

So the other day I finally finished reading The Celeb Diaries, which purports to be a sort-of week-by-week (except sometimes it’s day-by-day, and sometimes month-by-month) diary of Mark Frith’s time as editor of Heat magazine - from right back in the days when it was struggling to sell 70,000 copies per week, through to its triumphant days when in one glorious week it managed more than 700,000.

So here’s what I learnt:

1. Posh Spice gave him an interview that effectively saved the magazine on its relaunch because it was exclusive, and newspapers picked it up.
2. paparazzi send you lots of photos all the time and you have to choose between them. Some of them aren’t very nice really.
3. Simon Cowell smokes Kool cigarettes.
4. PR people sometimes are helpful in getting stories, but sometimes they block you, which can be annoying.
5. Portakabin wrote a legal letter to Heat pointing out that the word “Portakabin” should be capitalised and only applied to its products. Other similar-functioning things should be called “portable toilets”. At Heat they found this letter amusing.
6. Some celebs are very talkative. Others aren’t. Film stars are very untalkative and try to control publicity about themselves.
7. Heat goes to press on Friday night and is printed on Saturdays, which can be a bother when Big Brother is on because people get evicted on Friday night.
8. Big Brother was - is? - very popular with Heat’s readers.
9. Sometimes celebrities tell bare-faced lies to you in interviews.
10. He doesn’t drink, except when he has real problems or wins a really big prize.

Things I didn’t learn from Frith’s book:

1. what effect the rise of the internet has had on celebrity magazines. By the end (finally, in spring 2008, after editing since 2000) he’s quietly mentioning that circulation has fallen from its peak. But although he does mention too that Heat set up a website (heatworld.com, apparently) and that it would post stories there, there’s no indication of how important the growth of celeb-spotting websites is to Heat. Has it taken circulation away? Become an important source of stories? What? Nary a mention.
2. what the real commercial pressures were on him. While everything was going up, you’d expect that he could do no wrong. He does mention that Heat was constantly chasing after OK! - the Richard Desmond-owned magazine which kept doing celeb buyups (such as Ashley and Cheryl Cole’s wedding). How is it that OK! had so much more heft with the celebs?
3. what he really, honestly thought of the whole celebrity culture thing. He mentions a couple of times that he would think of the celebs he featured as like playthings - it brings to mind a quote from Shakespeare about gods and wanton children - but the suggestion is that at the end (around new year of 2008) he suddenly got sick of it all, as Amy Whitehouse and Briney Spears imploded. (The two of them, and the paparazzi pictures, seem - from the book’s narrative - to have driven him to early retirement.)
4. any idea of what he thinks of the people he had to deal with. Is Simon Cowell a wicked manipulator, who thought Gareth Gates would be the winner of Pop Idol (Will Young won, you’ll recall), or just someone who likes a fag and lunch from time to time?
5. how he really viewed the difference between national newspapers - especially the tabloids - and what he was doing. Celeb exposes in the tabs are fodder to follow up; but there’s hardly ever a clear idea of whether he viewed Heat as a vehicle for finding stuff out before others, even though he had ex-journos from the Sun and the News of the World working there.
6. why he didn’t elevate Heat’s complaint that some models were dangerously (for their health, for mimicking readers’ health) thin from a repeated trope into a full-blown campaign. Did he propose it and get knocked back at the executive level? Did the idea simply never occur (even though magazines all over the place try campaigns of one sort of another)? Did he shy away from the political necessity involved?
7. whether he liked (or thought of) the idea of including readers’ mobile-phone-snapped photos of celebs out and about.
8. what his special skills are. He must have some - you don’t take a magazine from the ground floor to the penthouse and keep it there without being especially brilliant at something. I guessed that it might be keeping on the right side of people (PR people, celebs, staff, managers) and always being engaging and listening to them. (Yes, yes, I’d love to have that trait too.) But I’m only guessing - there’s no way of knowing what he really brought to the table.

Actually the list - both lists - could go on and on. It’s a breathless stream; I find it almost impossible to believe that anyone could be so puppy-doggishly enthusiastic and unworried as Frith. As I read further and further in, and noted how he seemed to avoid those difficult judgements - about Cowell, for example, who surely deserves some commentary on how he used or dropped winners of Pop Idol and, subsequently, X Factor (followed by some reflection on Frith’s part about how he was effectively doing the same as Cowell to the graduates of the Big Brother house) - a suspicion began to grow:

He’s not judging them - in fact he’s holding back all but the foolish detail - because he doesn’t want to get into anyone’s bad books. These are people who he might need to give him a job in the future.

After all, he was only 38 when he left Heat (to go where? Where has he turned up since? Answers in the comments please). There’s a lot more to do. Hell, I wouldn’t write a memoir telling all if I were in his position. But I might think, as I wrote, of how the landscape was changing, and perhaps even inject some of that into the book. (Update: he’s been appointed editor of Time Out - thanks Louise in the comments - as of Friday 24 July 2009 - just the time I was finishing off reading his book. Which reinforces all those suspicions, then.)

I find it hard to believe too that he really kept a contemporaneous diary of life on Heat. You have to be a severely organised person to do that; Piers Morgan’s alleged “diary” The Insider was demonstrably written well after the fact. (Morgan’s claim to have described Cherie Blair and her new-age guru as members of the “Axis of Evil” at a No.10 dinner before the phrase came into use is telling. Durr.) I think that Frith left the job and then had to slog back through the issues, and recall what things had happened when. If he did keep a diary, well, I’m impressed, amazed and even more surprised that it doesn’t have any sort of reflection. Most people are reflective in their diary. Also, most people when writing a diary don’t shift about between tenses within a sentence or paragraph in the way that Frith frequently does. Which to me is another clue that it’s a post-op job.

The one place where you really need Frith to have a bit of insight is in the days after the foolish and infamous “stickers” issue - the one which had giveaway stickers such as “I’m not on drugs, I’m bipolar” (an oblique - to me - reference to Kerry Katona, who denied repeatedly she was taking drugs while some, um, journalists on a tabloid got her bang to rights) and, calamitously, “Harvey wants to eat me” - referring to Jordan’s multiply disabled child.

Wow. The effects of that issue - which Frith, formerly of Smash Hits (and who brought pretty much that sensibility to Heat: have fun, take nobody seriously; except life isn’t like that) thought would just be a laugh - were nuclear. Suddenly the radio, TV and newspapers wanted to talk to him. The phone would ring. Reporters came to Emap to ask him questions. But he could get other people to answer the phone. He could get security to turn away the reporters. Even so, the pressure on him for a week or more was immense.

But in that time, he wasn’t pursued by paparazzi; he wasn’t doorstepped. Let’s crank it up: he didn’t have semi-professional photographers whose rent payments depend on selling a photo to magazines and websites around the world walking three steps in front of him taking pictures constantly and shouting his name - and swearwords - to try to get a photo of him. He didn’t have notes shoved through his letterbox. His relatives weren’t bothered. His partner didn’t get calls. Snatched shots of him walking to and from work weren’t posted with big circles pointing to his clothing mistakes.

In short, he never really found out what it was like to be on the receiving end of what he - well, created is the wrong word, but of the flames that Heat helped to fan. And so he never sits down and thinks “what the hell have I done to these people, if this is what it’s like for me?”

Instead it’s left to Amy and Britney, whose travails (and constant stream of papped photos showing Frith the underside of the world; he swears, for example, that he won’t feature anything about Kate Moss and Pete Doherty because he thinks they’re scuzzy) finally show him that it’s not fun any more. For him, that is. Obviously, for them the fun of ordinary living went out of it a long time back.

It’s a pity, because Frith could have given such a marvellous insider view: how you really turn a failing magazine around - including the extent to which better advertising and marketing play a part, and how much editorial budget makes a difference (for those celebrity buyups) - and then how you keep a small but dedicated staff going even while they’re constantly No.2.

But somehow the emptiness of the book is summed up, for me, by the jacket quote provided by Cowell. It’s the only such quote on the book - surprising, if Frith knew so many people and won so many favours; you’d think they’d be happy to be quoted. But no, Cowell’s sits alone.

And it is this: “Nobody knows celebrities like Mark Frith.”

Think about it for a moment. Why didn’t he say “Nobody knows celebrities as well as Mark Frith”? It doesn’t quite mean the same, what he said. There’s a subtle implication - if it’s indeed direct from Cowell - of “there are no celebrities who are like Mark Frith”. Or, equally, “Mark Frith knows celebrities, but not as anyone else does.” Which might include him, Cowell, who knows a few.

The more you untangle, the more tangled it gets. The more you look, the less there is. It’s entirely apposite for the book. You go looking for something but you find there’s nothing when you arrive. There’s no there, there.

A bit like modern celebrity, in fact.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• So what will Heat magazine dream up for Nadia next? (21 November 2004; score: 87.03%)
• How digital cameras made the stalkerazzi feasible - and what that tells us about print journalism's future (17 December 2007; score: 70.49%)
• Heat magazine has its Ratner moment - because of the race to the bottom driven by Express group (29 November 2007; score: 58.14%)

Wow, there’s been a lot of heat - and pretty much zero light - generated in the last few days, mainly because of a couple of stories from the New York Times, and then because of the endless argument (which shouldn’t be an argument) about “the future of journalism”. Oh, man, this stuff gets boring fast.

And more to the point, if everyone is worrying about what’s going to happen to newspapers, why is it that it’s the journalists who are doing all the debating and experimenting (I’m counting blogs and other web-only publications, such as TechCrunch and Engadget and the whole Nick Denton stable among the “journalists” thing, because like it or not they’re helping shape the landscape)?

Why is it us, the people who used to just have to worry about the grey stuff that went between the adverts, and not the publishers, who were the ones who put all the paying stuff around it? Because don’t fool yourself: the grey stuff, while it might excite your grey stuff, is expensive to make and isn’t a profit centre. It’s all the things around it that helped generate profit: the physical print, the adverts of various sorts, all sorts of other peripheral things (”special offers”, conferences organised by the newspaper, and so on).

A couple of tweets crystallised this for me. Paul Bradshaw pointed to Robert Picard who pointed out that journalism is not a business model, just a process.

Ian Betteridge then followed up: publishing is the business.

There you have the whole conundrum in a nutshell. Put it another way. Putting books into parcels is a process. Getting orders from people and then shipping those parcels to them at profit - that’s a business. Amazon is the business. Packing books is the process. It might be uncomfortable, fellow journalists, to think of what you do as book-packing, but look at it another way: people order those books because they want them, and are glad to get them.

To repeat: journalism is the process and publishing is the wrapper that you put around journalism in order to make it profitable and sustainable. Journalism will continue, just as putting books into parcels will continue, even if Amazon disappears; you’ll just do it yourself, buying it at a local store and sending it to Granny. Might be more expensive than Amazon, but that’s just how it is.

With that in mind, one has to consider what’s happening to news organisations (”newspapers” is starting to sound a bit 20th-century to my ears). The internet has come along and caught publishers completely off-balance. And there’s a new breed of publishers, who have started on the internet, and are internet natives, and they simply don’t play by the same rules either of print publishing or of print journalism. The former upsets print publishers, and the latter upsets print-origin journalists (in which I’ll include myself, at least until I had an epiphany I’ll explain below).

First, the NYT pieces that caused the row. The first, When the thrill of blogging is gone (sorry, I’m not going to do the daft headline capitalisation), takes as its jumping-off point that fact determined by Technorati that 95% of blogs are abandoned within a pretty short time, and then does the hard work of finding people who used to blog, and now don’t. Fair enough. Seems pretty straightforward to me: find a cultural trend, see if it’s backed up, write about it. Reflect the readership (because there must be plenty of NYTimes readers who’ve started a blog) back to themselves.

This kicked off something of a firestorm on Twitter, or at least those I follow on Twitter, where the NYT was accused of “dumping” on blogs. Er, no, people. It was corralling facts and relaying them. It wasn’t saying “all blogs are dead”. It was saying “lots of blogs die - howcome?”

The second piece, which had more far-reaching effects, looked at the cultural thinking behind a couple of really big news blogs, including TechCrunch. Ping! Get the Tech scuttlebutt - it might even be true! was, again, looking at something that really happens: tech blogs scrapping amongst themselves for page views, and putting up stuff that they suspected themselves wasn’t true, but what the hell, it might be, so let’s get it out there. Hence TechCrunch writing that Apple was looking to buy Twitter - even though Michael Arrington is quoted in the piece saying that he didn’t think it was true when he posted it. A telling quote from him is:

“Getting it right is expensive,” he says. “Getting it first is cheap.”

Oh, my. Twitter firestorm supreme. I found myself pitching into a three-, four-, five, six-way involving Jeff Jarvis, Matthew Ingram, Tim O’Brien (NYT Sunday business editor), Dave Winer… did I miss anyone out? The “print” journalists’ thinking: publishing stuff you know isn’t true just ain’t the way to do it. The response (from Jarvis, certainly): that’s how it is in some places. Jarvis makes this point more eloquently in a post on his own blog. It’s quite an interesting test of your own position whether you think journalism needs to be about “standards” or “process”. I found it offends me in some visceral fashion to think of publishing stuff that I really believe isn’t correct. That’s just not how I think of it being done.

But as I prepared to launch another tweet in the effort to breach the Jarvis defences, I found myself reflecting on something Clive James used to say in his TV reviews. “If I find I share an opinion with [some repugnant person], I reexamine it at once,” he said. Mine is the obverse: if I find I’m disagreeing with Jarvis, it might be time to step back and start questioning my own thinking, because there’s a high likelihood it’s faulty. Which led to my epiphany.

Here’s how it looks to me, viewed through yet another prism. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a really interesting piece in the New Yorker about how Davids - the little armies or organisations - can compete and defeat the Goliaths. He points to the example of a girls’ basketball team which beat many far more experience and able teams by using a tactic (the “full court press”) that’s unusual for that level; Lawrence of Arabia, who defeated the Turkish Army by using desert (essentially, guerilla), not military, tactics; and he points out that actually, David can have a pretty good shot at things by not playing according to Goliath’s rules. Because Goliath got where he did using his tactics. Of course he’s the best at them.

OK: now see the publishers of Gizmodo, Engadget, Gawker, TechCrunch et al as the Davids, fighting the Goliaths of the New York Times and, of course, the Guardian and all the other papers. Should they fight on the same terms? If they want to get beaten, sure. They’ll never be able to find the experienced journalists, the experienced sales people, the special something that the papers have been able to build up over decades. The papers have the news process down pat. They can get those stories into paper-sized parcels and out to people so effectively there’s no room left.

So the blogs have to create their own battlefield, their own rules, and fight there. (I’ll use the metaphor of military action because plenty is at stake in this. Get it wrong, and you get stuff such as the NYT management imposing 23% pay cuts on Boston Globe staff - to which one can only say “yeow”. Because

The [New York Times] company posted a net loss of $57.8 million for 2008, and $74.5 million in the first quarter of this year. The Globe has been the biggest drain by far, with operating losses of $50 million last year and a projected $85 million this year, not counting the union concessions, according to management.

)

OK. So blogs have to create their own rules. Such as what? Such as doing stuff that the papers won’t. Post rumours, and declare them as such; copy and rewrite like mad, so that how fast you can get the post up is more important than whether you checked it; let the readers in effect write the news; publish galleries of Photoshopped “is this the next iPhone?” galleries.

All the while, the Goliaths of the news industry stand by, shaking their heads. Hell, they’re doing it wrong! That’s not how you put stuff into a news parcel! It’s like this… hey, doesn’t anyone want it? Funny, the orders have dried up. And the Davids count the money they’re getting from adverts supplied against millions of page views. (They don’t have as many journalists as in a traditional news room, you say? Yeah. Life’s like that sometimes.)

What the established news organisations in the US really need to have right now is some people on their commercial side who really live on the internet, in the way that so many technology journalists have been for years and years. I wonder to what extent they do; all the talk about paywalls has that slight tinge to me of people who don’t live there, and look at all those millions of page views and think “surely we can persuade a few of them to pay”. I think actually that to talk about paywalls on web-only generalist content is to look in the wrong place. There are plenty of ways to make money on the internet - publishers like Denton and Arrington show us that. (Well, we can infer that they do from the fact that they haven’t vanished. If someone wants to send me their financials, or point me to them, I’d be happy to publish them.)

There is one note of relief: unlike war, it’s not absolute. There’s plenty of room for everyone to thrive in this: the Davids and the Goliaths can live alongside each other. But the latter have to adapt so that they can get it right, and trade on the things that have got them where they are - which in effect means their brand reputation - and capitalise on it. Else those Boston Globe cuts aren’t going to be the last.

In the meantime, it seems that the journalists are having to do not only the packing of the news parcels, but also try to build the business around them. Thus you get efforts such as “how to save newspapers in 140 characters“. Many are praiseworthy, but aren’t the humble (or not) scribes plenty busy just trying to pack the parcels? Rather like the stockbroker’s friend who asked “Where are the customers’ yachts?”, I’m tempted to ask “where are the publishers blogging and tweeting about the next business models?”

Because remember: journalism is the process. (Talking about the “future of journalism” is a bit daft. The future of parcel-wrapping? Yeah, probably more automated.) Publishing is the wrapper that makes journalism profitable. Denton and Arrington have created wrappers that work for internet content. Has everyone else?

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• The fourth man in the Quinn saga? And has any report *ever* found against a government minister? (21 December 2004; score: 36.63%)
• Journalism or "churnalism"? Nick Davies of the Gdn weighs in.. (31 January 2008; score: 35.98%)
• How editors think the newsroom works, and how it really does (8 November 2006; score: 31.06%)

It can be quite depressing to be part of a story that’s being about a subject you know about, where people who are ostensibly your peers - that is, equipped with the same skills as you, with access to the same tools as you - are reporting on it. Because it shows how rubbish people can be at simply reading a piece of text and regurgitating it.

If the future belongs to amateurs, one has to really worry. Though the professionals aren’t always doing such a bang-up job.

Case in point: PaidContent. PaidContent UK wrote a story which absolutely correctly said that Guardian management is considering whether to keep the printed Technology section going. Prices of raw paper have risen; job ads, which was always meant to be the raison d’etre of “G3″ specialist sections (Guardian 3: there’s G1 - the main paper - and G2, the “features” bit), have moved online, especially for technology jobs.

Nevertheless, the Technology supplement does get job ads, and it does occasionally get display ads. So the idea of closing it isn’t a fait accompli.

Robert Andrews got wind of the review that’s going on, which is part of a far larger look at costs, and wrote about it. (I could argue about the link text - “may” would have been good - but anyway.)

Robert did try to contact me before writing; I was offline (though I had my mobile…). He did speak to the Guardian’s press office. Apart from being finicky - Online started a long time ago and Vic Keegan wasn’t the launch editor - it’s a good piece of journalism: find something out, speak to those who are in a position to speak about it.

(I’d take issue actually with this:

The move is thought to be due to worsening tech ad spend but also the fact that many readers, naturally, are online natives with a voracious appetite for tech news throughout the week… one school of thought has it that a weekly dead-tree edition seems like anachronism.

Actually, it’s very evident that the people who read the print section aren’t exactly the same ones who read the Technology content online. They get something extra. And it’s important for other reasons: it’s easier for a civil servant to show a piece of paper to a minister; easier to wave in their face than a website.)

(Note also that Azeem Ashar adds some detail in the comments.)

Next up: Press Gazette. Following up the PaidContent story, they actually did contact me - we spoke by mobile. Look, there are my quotes in the story. Accurate. Journalistic. Good. Can’t argue with the headline or intro. Though I would say that there aren’t any staffing implications. We’re more than busy anyway, and we could be just as busy even without the print section - we’d be writing stuff for the main paper, the features section, and so on. (And again, interesting comments.)

And now we begin the slide downhill - and the depressing thing is that it’s the lousy reporting that actually gets bounced around the blogo/twittersphere.

First, MediaWeek, which has a story that was originally headlined “Guardian to close Technology supplement”. And then an intro: “The Guardian is considering dropping its Thursday Technology supplement, according to Paidcontent.”

Exactly how crap is that? Intro and headline completely disagree. And it’s a complete ripoff of PaidContent’s er, content. I emailed to complain, and the headline was changed. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been. (MW says it came from Brand Republic. Thanks a lot, BR.)

And finally we come to the World Editors’ Forum, which wrote:
Headline: The Guardian reconsiders Technology supplement
Intro: The Guardian is due to drop its Thursday Technology supplement, paidContent:UK reports.

I mean, come on. That’s just incompetent. I’m sorry, but it is. The headline is correct; the intro, wrong. That’s not what PaidContent said.

Some more:

It is also feasible that the printed edition just could not compete with its online counterpart, which is updated daily. Technology enthusiasts, moreover, are presumably more inclined to log on regularly than wait for the Thursday paper to land on the doorstep.

“Could not compete”? What rubbish is this? Have they bothered to find out who runs the online content (me) and who edits the physical section (me)? Apparently not. even though I’m all over the internet like a rash. Hell, my mobile phone number is on this site. I’m not a hermit.

Nick Passmore launched the Online supplement in May 1994. In 2005 it was rebranded Technology with the arrival of new editor Charles Arthur, and its science counterpart supplement Life was merged into the paper when the paper adopted a berliner format.

Nice - they’re read the comments on the PaidContent story. Except they didn’t research this blog. I didn’t arrive until November 2005, two months after the September relaunch in Berliner format.

So let’s see, that’s a slew of factual errors, a basic subbing error (headline doesn’t agree with intro), in a piece just four paragraphs long. (I haven’t bothered to fisk it all.)

The trouble is that this leads to people saying “Oh noes! The Guardian is dropping technology coverage!” NO IT BLOODY WELL ISN’T. Which I pointed out (and they then corrected.)

So the score: two lots of good reporting, where sources are checked (PaidContent, Press Gazette); two of crap reporting (MediaWeek/Brand Republic, WEF). Trouble is that the meme that gets passed around Twitter (for sure) is the idea that it’s going to close - no doubt, none of the subtlety in the original story.

Frankly, that’s a bit crap all round, and makes one consider the final score.
1) how well can proper journalism (PaidContent, UKPG) survive when you have copy/pasters all around? Copy/pasting is cheaper than finding stuff out. Quicker, apart from anything.
2) look how easily ideas get crunched into misconceptions in being translated into 140 characters, especially if they’re taken from headlines that are just plain wrong.
3) some people can’t read, parse and regurgitate a piece of text.
4) I wonder how many times have I written something that’s unwittingly incorrect because I haven’t been able to get at original sources? Not often, I hope. But this is the sort of experience that makes me even more determined not to accept lazy copy/paste stuff, and to check stuff with sources. Properly.

See you next Thursday in print.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• My new job: editing the Guardian's Technology section (26 October 2005; score: 52.48%)
• The online money is in distribution, not content (10 January 2008; score: 47.2%)
• What I've written lately: podcasting, the annual quiz, 2007 reviewed (sorta) and Google vs Wikipedia (21 December 2007; score: 35.06%)

Welcome Tim Carron Brown watchers! We bring you news!

After my various posts and stories over the years about Tim Carron Brown - you know, the guy who seemed to have the bad luck to always be at the top of companies that couldn’t quite keep ahead of the maw of liquidation, bankruptcy or simple vanishment - we bring you news from Bournemouth.

You’ll recall that he had been charged with… oh, let’s bring it up again:

Timothy Carron Brown, the company director behind the collapsed television production house Iostar and the £43m dotcom disaster Efdex, is due to go on trial for cheating the public revenue and forgery.

The prosecution is being brought by HM Revenue and Customs, and involves four companies of which Carron Brown has been a director, including Omedian, Anstruther Management, Company TV and Second Sight.

Carron Brown was amongst those blamed for the failure of Iostar, the television company which channel Five’s newly appointed chairman and chief executive Dawn Airey briefly joined as chief executive last year.

(Or take a break to read some more background on Iostar’s vanishment.)

He has now been charged with 13 offences, including two counts of cheating the public revenue, four counts of being knowingly a party to the carrying on of a business for a fraudulent purpose, six counts of forgery and one count of using a forged instrument.

When Carron Brown was contacted by the Telegraph at the time (May 2008), he denied all the charges.

Hard to know quite what changed his mind in the interim - was it the people who had formerly worked with him at Iostar who were prepared to be witnesses for the prosecution? Was it the long interviews with the police? - but on Friday he pleaded guilty in the Crown Court. (I’ve had this from two entirely separate sources, so I’m happy to report it. Anyone can point me to the Bournemouth docket, I’ll link.)

I’m still intrigued by the comment that was left on this blog on May 13 by “Piers Diacre”:

While it may seem that a lot of people are snivelling about Tim Carron-Brown, mostly they seem to be ex-employees who had willingly signed on to work for his companies. So what if the business plan did not work or was ahead of its time or was never going to work. At least Tim had the guts to try and the ability to get many of his ideas at least in to launch mode.

Yeeeess. Some things do not and cannot fly, though. Launch mode doesn’t work on cars, for example. Iostar never seems to have had a sustainable business, even if its business plan or model was, in theory, great. That’s the difference. I think that’s why Dawn Airey departed muttering about lawyers and suing people. My, she was angry.

“Piers” again:

It may be that a lot of the fault is, but surely there are others who share part of the blame - the usual suspects - disingenuous directors,greedy investors will be the first to blame the man in charge.

If Tim is blessed with one thing, it is a very fine business brain indeed - without it he would never have been in a position to get the backing for the three or four businesses he tried to start in the .com space.

I am happy to have him as a friend and he is been a very good friend for many years.

That’s good to hear. However, I understand there may be others who feel, how shall I say it, rather differently about TCB. Such as Peter Teal, who wrote a book called Crooks & Cronies, over which TCB sued (successfully).

If you want to leave a comment (no libel please: facts only) then please do; please leave your email because I intend to follow up on this on a bigger forum. Alternatively, just email me - charles.arthur@gmail.com - with details. If you want or need to remain off the record, that’s fine.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Timothy Carron Brown taken to court? But what happened next? (Updated) (26 October 2008; score: 130.8%)
• Tim Carron Brown sentenced to two-and-a-half years' jail for 312,000pd VAT fraud (updated) re Omedian, Companytv, Second Sight Ltd, Anstruther Management (26 June 2009; score: 115.98%)
• A rapper with a cochlear implant? Yup, there is (18 January 2008; score: 76.32%)

There have been some calls by beleaguered MPs looking for an out for “an independent investigation into MPs’ expenses”.

Seems to me that this is already going - the Daily Telegraph has had 25 people going at it for weeks.

So here are five reasons why, and one reason why not, the Daily Telegraph is better than an “independent investigation” into expenses.

1. It has a professional team which has access to all of the data
2. It is publishing the results of the investigation concurrently with its findings
3. It is answerable in the courts if it gets it wrong on any item
4. It has not been appointed through any political manoeuvring
5. It is giving those suspected of wrongdoing the chance to reply

There is however one reason why it’s not as good as an independent investigation:

1. The actual investigation isn’t being done in public; we see the results, not the working.

On balance, I think we’re better off with the Telegraph doing it. As I write this, the Telegraph is publishing more - Ian Gibson. Who is offering an explanation about his second home flat which he sold to his daughter at, allegedly, half its market price.

Can you imagine what an “independent” investigation of all this would look like? They would vanish into a room forever. MPs would come and go. There would be little murmurings. There might be “salmon letters” (which come from an inquiry when a person may be criticised in the final report) flitting back and forth. And then, don’t doubt, a great big nothing.

No, I think we’re better off with the press doing this sort of stuff. Perhaps we could try it with some other evidence where we aren’t quite certain we’re getting the true story. Any chance that the full papers from the Deepcut inquiry (inquiries?) could find their way to the Guardian?

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Ken Livingstone not exactly going gentle into, well, anything (14 July 2008; score: 27.19%)
• Steve Jobs piece in The Independent magazine (29 October 2005; score: 26.95%)
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• Felix Salmon » Blog Archive » WSJ.com’s barbell strategy | Blogs |
  

  My feeling is that Murray’s latest bright idea is doomed. He’s giving away most of the stuff that people want to read, and he’s trying to make money from selling stuff people need to read. The problem is that for all the WSJ’s astonishing levels of self-regard, there’s precious little of that material out there. Open the paper and ask yourself how much of it really isn’t replicated, for free, anywhere online. The answer is that there’s very little — certainly not enough to persuade hundreds of thousands of people to pay good money for an online subscription.

  It seems like whatever strategy people have for charging for content online, it’s the wrong one. Charge for general news? Everyone can get it. Charge for niche content? Nobody will buy it. It’s like watching people trying to buy pots of striped paint.

• How could 9,000 business reporters blow it?
  

  In May 1990, the Wall Street Journal published “The Reckoning,” a devastating, 7,000-word account by Susan Faludi, then a staff writer, of the human toll wrought by the leveraged buyout of the Safeway grocery chain. It is safe to say that that piece, which tied the Safeway lbo to workers’ suicides, heart attacks, and more, would never be proposed, let alone published, today.

  Faludi’s article was distinguished by more than its scope and length. It also took on a practice that at the time was at the very heart of Wall Street’s business model, not to mention one of the preeminent firms of the era, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. It then expanded the story’s scope to take into account the social costs of high finance. Similarly, the Journal’s Alix Freedman took on the tobacco industry at the height of its power in 1996, when she won a Pulitzer for stories exposing how ammonia additives heighten nicotine’s potency.

  By contrast, in the past few years, business-news outlets, increasingly burdened financially, less confident editorially, competing ever more fiercely among themselves, torn by the tradeoff between access and scrutiny, have slowly given away their sense of perspective. The result was an insiders’ conversation—journalism that, while well executed on Wall Street’s terms, in the end missed the point. There have been exceptions—a preliminary list would include Shawn Tully at Fortune, John Hechinger and others at the Journal, Mara Der Hovanesian at BusinessWeek, Diana Henriques and others at the New York Times, and Scott Reckard at the LA Times. But to this day, and even after the collapse, the most complete accounts of the mortgage mess have been provided not by the mainstream business press, but by This American Life’s “Giant Pool of Money,” and Chain of Blame, a book published last year by reporters for the Orange County Register and National Mortgage News.

  ….and further down….
  

  The rise of M&A [mergers and acquisitions, when companies buy other companies] coverage represents the triumph of Wall Street insiderism. It is the opposite of Faludi’s vision. Significantly, M&A has become a business-press career launching pad: Andrew Ross Sorkin, who writes the Times’ DealBook column, and former Wall Street Journal M&A reporter Nik Deogun are among the field’s superstars……
  … Predatory lending happened in plain sight; it didn’t take a muckraker to see what was wrong. Yet business journalism kept its blinders on, played it safe, fixated on stock market concerns, and allowed its BS detector to atrophy just when it was needed most.

  Fascinating analysis by a former Wall Street Journal staffer of how everyone - well, pretty much every business reporter - got caught up in the personality-driven stories and share price twiddles, rather than getting down and dirty with the balance sheets and earnings reporst (and derivatives). A long but hugely worthwhile read. And the incredibly ranty comments (basically, “bloggers all said this endlessly”) are intriguing… though the very last one, pointing out that there had been an article about Madoff in 2001 in Barrons, shows that it wasn’t all one-way traffic.

  Just a motorway, with a footpath in the other direction.

• The “Lack of Vision” thing? Well, here’s a hopeful vision for you
  

  So you’re on an ocean liner and it sinks. Step No. 1 is: Tread water. Step No. 2: Grab the first floating thing that happens by.
  That’s where the newspaper industry is located today — desperately grabbing at whatever debris is available

  OK, nice that you noticed. So what have you got?
  

  The old way:
  Dan the reporter covers a house fire in 2005. He gives the street address, the date and time, who was victimized, who put it out, how extensive the fire was and what investigators think might have caused it. He files the story, sits with an editor as it’s reviewed, then goes home. Later, he takes a phone call from another editor. This editor wants to know the value of the property damaged in the fire, but nobody has done that estimate yet, so the editor adds a statement to that effect. The story is published and stored in an electronic archive, where it is searchable by keyword.

  The new way:
  Dan the reporter covers a house fire in 2010. In addition to a street address, he records a six-digit grid coordinate that isn’t intended for publication. His word-processing program captures the date and time he writes in his story and converts it to a Zulu time signature, which is also appended to the file.

  Basically, the new way is data-driven - and more flexible in all sorts of ways for that. It’s the journalist as data wrangler, which I’ve argued before is exactly where we need to move to.
  

  Why this matters
  The 2005 story can be found by archive search, but the labor cost of reacquiring and sorting for relevance every story listed under the search term “fire” is expensive and inaccurate. Consequently, its commercial value approaches zero.
  On the other hand, the 2010 “story” is only a subset of a much more complex and valuable data set, which exists within a data structure that allows its information to be retrieved accurately and reconfigured in useful ways.

  Get it? Some don’t.
  

  So I understand my curmudgeonly colleagues when they scoff behind my back at the word “metadata.” They don’t see its value, so they mock it. The beancounters? I expect even less from them. And the newspaper management class? Don’t get me started.

  Actually, it’s different at The Guardian - can you say Open Platform? - where the management class does have an acute realisation (sometimes driven at them by the journalists) of the importance of all this stuff.

• tynan wood: my job and welcome to it
  

  What gets under my skin are the comments that invariably accompany these screeds about the future/death of journalism. It’s amazing to me how many people out there firmly believe they know how to do my job better than I do, despite the fact they have no idea what I actually do. So I thought I’d try explaining what I do, and how it’s changed as a result of the blogosphere, in an effort to clear up some misconceptions and, hopefully, shut some people up.

  Another long read. And worthwhile too for its description of how an article gets written and then….
  

  Popular blogs that do nothing but write a quick summary and link to the original may end up getting more traffic – and by extension more ad revenue — than the folks who paid me to do it.
  This is fucked up.

  …
  

  Now there are some (notably Dave Winer) who say journalists will disappear and be replaced by sources. In other words, why should anyone bothering reading my story when they can go directly to the 8 or 12 people I interviewed, or 8 or 12 others of their own choosing? Why let me or my editors be the filter?

  My response is, why shop at the grocery store? Why not hunt and kill your own food? All you need is a gun and a hunting license. Why not farm your own vegetables or, for that matter, build your own cars? All you need are tillable land and the right parts (though you’d need someone to make those, I suppose). Why not write your own software code – there’s plenty out there for the tweaking. Why rely on professionals for anything?

  The answer? Because most of us are lousy shots. We don’t know how to raise our own food or hoist an engine block. We’re not coders and don’t want to be. Because there is a difference between amateurs and professionals, and it is easier and faster to rely on people who already know how to do these things.

  Seems like a good point to me. But maybe we were all happier as hunter-gatherers…

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• How Google News penalises exclusive journalism (27 July 2004; score: 46.5%)
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