Tonight:
4°c
When I first went into journalism it was a leisurely business steeped in tradition and alcohol.
The lunches were heavy, the duties were light, and in most newsrooms older members of staff snored the afternoons away over their typewriters, their slumbers undisturbed by the philistine notions of efficiency and shareholder value that elbowed their way into the business in subsequent years.
I anticipated a comfortable future crafting well-turned phrases and thinking grand thoughts about the state of the world.
These days journalism feels rather more like the vanguard of the Light Brigade. Papers are being mown down at an unprecedented rate.
Every week there is fresh blood as another publisher announces a new wave of redundancies.
Some 70 local papers have closed already this year. Those journalists lucky enough to keep their jobs are required to write for their paper while recording a podcast, operating a video-camera and tapping out a blog with their toes.
So what? I hear you ask.
Everybody's having a bad time: stop whingeing about how the recession is hurting you and your friends.
I would make two points in my defence. First, this is not just a short-term problem caused by the economic crisis. It is also a long-term problem caused by the internet.
Journalism helps society to hold politicians to account; molecular biology, or hairdressing, or whatever it is you do, doesn't.
Still, a glimmer of hope has appeared in recent weeks. The insane notion that newspaper content should be provided for free on the internet seems to be evaporating. Rupert Murdoch, who tends to make good commercial calls, said last week that he expected to be charging for News Corporation's websites within a year.
Even the Guardian Media Group, the cheerleader of free online content, is thinking of charging for some of it. If readers can be persuaded to pay for journalism online — and since they've been paying for it on paper for centuries, I don't see why they shouldn't — then maybe the business has a future.
But the prospects for American journalism seem better than those of the British variety for one reason: the BBC. The corporation has a fantastic website.
That's hardly surprising, since it spends £145 million a year of licence-fee payers' money on it. According to Paul Zwillenberg of OC&C consultants, all Britain's national newspapers put together spend around £100 million on their online efforts. And the BBC's website is, of course, free, which makes it tricky for less well-funded competitors to start charging.
If the BBC is allowed to go on dominating online news it will undermine other news providers' ability to survive on the internet, and thus threaten the diversity of news sources that is crucial to a democracy.
If its freedom or funding is cut, the quality of its service will decline, but others will have a chance to grow.
It's a difficult choice, but a clear one; and I think we can rely on policymakers to stick their heads in the sand until time has made it for them.
Domination of the D-cup
Over the past week we have seen a successful campaign by a powerful lobby group leading to further discrimination against an underprivileged minority.
Busty women have shown their power yet again at the expense of us flat-chested types.
Not only are we excluded from employment as lingerie models, escorts, club hostesses and bunny girls; now we have to subsidise our oppressors' underwear.
And we have no chance of getting M&S to overturn its decision. Sir Stuart Rose is hardly going to take out full-page ads in the national newspapers featuring 32AA cups.
• Environmentalists are just not attractive, says AA Gill. In a rant in the Sunday Times, he claims that they are “ranty, repetitive, patronising, demanding, deaf, weirdly bonkers and smelly”.
Fortunately, I haven't been close enough to him to tell whether he's smelly or not, but he's all the rest of it, and a wimp to boot.
He abuses those who bang on about climate change on the grounds that they are unappealing, but he doesn't have the courage to take on their arguments.
Vegas in W1
Crispin Odey, the hedge-fund manager threatening to leave London because of the 50 per cent tax rate, is a quick mover. I should know: I used to dance with him at teenage parties in Yorkshire.
Because of the intimacy of our past acquaintance, I feel I can make a personal plea: don't do it, Crispin.
I work in St James's, which is hedge-fund central. If people like Crispin shut up shop, the braying in the bars will cease, the sewing of hand-made shoes will stop, and the area will become like Consett in 1983.
I suppose it could be redeveloped and turned into one of those super-casinos the Government was planning. You wouldn't even have to retrain the workers.
Emma Duncan is deputy editor of The Economist.
Reader views (1)
Whilst it is all very well for newspapers to bemoan the dire state of their financial health, the reason that many turn to the internet for their news, apart from being free, is that there is a much more diverse range of news sources to choose from, and the 'blogosphere' is considerably freer of bias, and in some cases blatant propaganda, than many of the newspapers can be. The way that the media have portrayed and supported the war or terror for example, feeding the fear instead of critically analysing the loss of freedom we have all incurred and the reasons for it, simply because sensationalism sells better than the truth, it causes people to distrust the purveyors of the printing word. News Corp is particularly guilty of this. You see, when you put profit before integrity, eventually people notice and change their behaviour towards you. Why shouldn't news be free? Just because you've done something a certain way for three centuries doesn't mean it's the right way now, does it?
Subscription models may guarantee a revenue stream, but they aren't going to encourage a high throughput of casual surfers, and frankly, there are more than enough opportunities for newspapers to make up for their loss of revenue by putting advertising on their sites, and diversifying into other areas of information provision. Just like the record industry, the printing presses have had their day, but the old guard aren't ready to let go and accept that they need to adapt in order to survive.
- Rob Scott, Sheffield UK, 19/05/2009 03:59
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