A licence fee for newspapers?

Very interesting piece by Peter Preston, former editor of The Guardian, about the possibility of traditional news-gathering being paid for by a "licence fee" paid by web users. I don't think it will happen because the one thing government's not going to do is propose further taxation for anything like this. However what's clear is that the current situation where newspapers are giving their stuff away for free can't sustain much longer. The boss of the Mirror Group, Sly Bailey, made this clear on Friday.

Local papers are folding already. The next to go will be national titles. Even if they do what the digital zealots advise and migrate all their content to the web, they will only make a tiny fraction of what they make by selling ink on paper. They won't be able to sustain their operations on this revenue and so they will sink. This is something that's becoming more widely accepted with each passing day.

What intrigues me about Preston's piece is his observation that the further the BBC strays from its traditional role of providing news and entertainment on radio and TV and the increasing strain it is forced to take as the nation's primary news provider, the greater will be the pressure on the old understanding that underpinned the licence fee. And what are they going to do for content every day when they can't read out The Sun and The Times?

The aliens that are eating Florida

If you only read one long article this week, make it Burkhard Bilger's jaw-dropping "Swamp Things" in the current issue of the New Yorker. It's about how Florida accidentally became home to thousands of non-indigenous "exotic" creatures. Many started off as domestic pets and were let go when they got too big. Others were smuggled into the state to cater to a novelty-obsessed local market. Some were displaced many miles during Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
The outcome is that since 1994 the Florida Everglades have been home to a growing population of Burmese pythons. They were a few inches long when they were bought as pets. They can now grow to twenty feet and are almost-impossible to capture. They reckon that there could be 140,000 Burmese Pythons in the Everglades. This would be disturbing enough on its own but the last section of the article is about the arrival of the Nile Monitor. This six foot lizard, which is described as "omnicarnivorous", can out-run a man and is known to hunt in packs. Thanks to the canals linking the swamp with the town they have taken up residence on the lawns of a suburban community called Cape Coral.

It's a brilliant feature. The line that stays with you is a quote from one zoologist commenting on this alien invasion: "it's time to stop studying these things and start killing them".

What *really* killed Maxim

A few years ago Maxim was one of the most successful magazines in the world. Now it's closing. The decline of the so-called "lad's mag" – a sniffy name invented by the posher men's titles, who know their readers are no older or wealthier but are in the business of selling luxury advertising – is not down to a sea change in society. It's down to Photoshop.

It's years since any of the pictures in any of these magazines had even the faintest erotic charge. All the girls have got the same straight hair, the same make-up and the same pouty lips, appear to have been photographed in the same un-specific context and, where the thighs have been slimmed, the spots excised and the eyes whitened, are eventually bathed in that same Venusian sheen that leaves them looking as alluring as a pair of cable-knit tights. It's as if the advent of hyper-real cartoons like Tank Girl and movies like Toy Story encouraged the editors to grope towards an archetypal amazon. This seems to fly in the face of the fact that men are pathetically grateful for whatever they can get. That applies no less in their fantasies than it does in their real lives.

When the history of the men's magazine boom of the last twenty years is written people will go looking for the images to place alongside the tennis player scratching her backside, Farrah Fawcett Majors' incandescent smile, Alberto Vargas's forgetful blondes or Adam Hersh's lesbian kiss in the gallery of male fantasy. They'll find very few candidates.

Executive Drive Time

I used to do a radio programme on GLR. We called one of the regular features Executive Drive Time. Trevor Dann came up with that. The idea was to play driving records for people returning from their places in the country. This morning I've been trying to think of the records that were staples for that slot. These are some of them. There's a Spotify playlist here if you want to hear them.
1. Bob Seger: Roll Me Away.
When music critics use that horrible cliché "wide screen", this is what they're trying to describe. A few years ago I heard Alan Bleasdale on "Desert Island Discs". He picked this record. Said he'd heard it once on the radio while driving into London. I like to think that was me.
2. Freddie King: Going Down.
Texas bluesman King made a few records for Shelter in the early 70s. They were produced by Don Nix and Leon Russell and they're the last great blues albums. Nobody made anything in that idiom that sounded half as good again. There's a very good American comedy series at the moment called "Westbound and Down", which is all about a dumb redneck ball player. This is the theme. Perfect.
3. ZZ Top: Jesus Just Left Chicago.
Always makes me think of the adjective "thixotropic". Don't know why but dear God, what a rhythm section.
4. Ray Charles: Mess Around.
Danny Baker says this is the only record that never lets you down. I'm with him. Nothing illustrates the ecumenical nature of pop music better than this. It's all about a catfish barbecue and yet it was written by the son of the Turkish Ambassador to the United States. This record's out of the house and hot wiring the car while you're still looking for your keys.
5. Richard Thompson: Keep Your Distance.
The great thing about Richard Thompson is that he can sing the worthiest sentiments over the most impious noises. He knows the whereabouts of a chord that absolutely nobody else can strike.
6. Montrose: Rock Candy.
Ted Templeman produced the first Montrose album in the early 70s. He then made the same album with Van Halen who sold millions. All the records made since which purport to be hard rock are essentially pale copies of the first Montrose album. Every time we put this on in the HMV Shop we would sell ten copies.
7. Jan & Dean: Surf City.
The first record I ever danced to. I think the dance was called the Twitch. It was in somebody's living room in the West Riding of Yorkshire. We didn't even know what surfing was but we knew there was two swinging honeys to every guy and all you had to do was just wink your eye.
8. Warren Zevon: Searching For A Heart.
Men driving on their own are prone to maudlin sentimentality. I saw this used in a movie called "Grand Canyon" to underline just such a point. "They say love conquers all, you can't start it like a car, you can't stop it with a gun." Like he said in his last days, "enjoy every sandwich".
9. Bruce Springsteen: Drive All Night.
I once asked listeners to nominate records that they found erotic. The men's suggestions were terrible - a grotesque combination of lewdness and correctness. One woman rang up and suggested this. It's about a man being prepared to drive all night just to buy her some shoes. Not dinner. Not an iPod. Not a new summer outfit. Shoes.

Mummy will not kiss it better

John Gray interviewed in today's Independent:

"Realism is a necessary condition of serious politics and serious policy-making. And realism isn't popular. Because what many people are looking for in politics – including green politics at the moment, is a meaning for their lives. If you say to people: 'We can't move to a world in which we don't have either nuclear or fossil fuels. That's impossible,' they will say, 'That's not impossible, not if we all want it.' But many countries don't want it. Russia's not going to do it. Venezuela's not going to do it. Iran's not going to do it. Their wealth and power depend upon fossil fuel. 'Well, we can do it,' they'll say.

"And when you push it, it comes down to a kind of symbolic expressive function whereby even if the effect of certain policies – like moving towards wind power – is to be forced back to coal, then it doesn't matter, because the purpose of the policy is not actually to effect a real-world change but to keep the spirits up."

Bums on seats

Following the arrest of the Pakistani nationals who entered the UK on student visas they've been talking on the radio about ways of ensuring that only bona fide applicants are accepted by our universities. Unless I was mishearing, somebody was actually suggesting that British academics should go out to Pakistan to interview potential students there. That may or may not be practical. But if they do introduce such a procedure they should prepare themselves for some pressure closer to home from people who wonder why, with the exception of an elite handful of universities and in the case of certain courses, most British students turn up to their first day at university never having been interviewed by anyone at all. When the percentage of 18-year-olds going to university was quite small most students were selected on the basis of grades and at least one interview. Now that we're heading for fifty per cent they don't think that a face-to-face meeting matters at all. Maybe that's one of the reasons a quarter of them don't complete their courses.

She was just seven (teen)

For writers of a very particular age group - let's say anyone currently between 45 and 60 - their first professional meeting with a Beatle is a unique moment. All the writers I know who've had that privilege - and given current circs it's generally with that most reliable trouper, Paul - can remember every last second of it. By the time it makes it to the page they've done their best to conceal their palpitations behind a thin screen of professionalism. What they deliver is affectionate but slightly distanced. What they tell their husband or wife on first returning from the encounter is something else altogether. In the current issue of the New Yorker Nancy Franklin reports on her visit to a Paul McCartney rehearsal. Reading between the lines, she didn't get to meet him. What she writes indicates that it doesn't really matter. The excitement isn't, in the end, anything to do with this 67-year-old chap from London. The excitement is still inside the youngster and that youngster is still inside the adult. What it must be like to be the thin wire upon which that pulse still travels only people like Paul McCartney can know. And there aren't many people like Paul McCartney.

Nobody knows anything

I won't pretend to have read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" but I do like his Ten Principles for a Black Swan-proof World. I've got particular sympathy for his point that "complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it". Just as the most important three words in a marriage are "you were right", the most important three words in business are the three you rarely hear - "I don't understand."

The area I work in doesn't have the potential to decimate your pension, even if it's really badly run, but nonetheless in my working life I've seen the media morph from a business whose processes were largely transparent to one that has grown increasingly opaque. For a couple of years after the widespread adoption of what was then known as Desk Top Technology I used to half-heartedly suggest that we set aside one day a year when we would put together a magazine in "the old way", just to reassure ourselves that we still knew how to do it. That seems ridiculous now. But what applies to business practices also applies to business models. For instance, I find it hard to believe that there is anyone at the top of any of our big media organisations who really understands how web advertising and marketing really works. I suspect they're glad that nobody ever asks them.

If Taleb is looking for an eleventh principle, I'd suggest a rather broader point. I use it to bore and occasionally encourage my children. It's this. "Cleverness is overrated."

It's only TV, Parky.

Michael Parkinson: "Jade Goody has her own place in the history of television and, while it’s significant, it’s nothing to be proud of. Her death is as sad as the death of any young person, but it’s not the passing of a martyr or a saint or, God help us, Princess Di. When we clear the media smoke screen from around her death, what we’re left with is a woman who came to represent all that’s paltry and wretched about Britain today. She was brought up on a sink estate, as a child came to know drugs and crime, was barely educated, ignorant and puerile. Then she was projected to celebrity by Big Brother and became a media chattel to be exploited till the day she died.”

Max Clifford rides to her defence: “What Michael forgets to mention is that Jade already has saved countless lives of young women through her battle with cervical cancer. And she has provided the best possible education for her boys and stressed the importance of that.”

What neither the prosecution nor the defence can bring themselves to mention is the fact that Jade Goody was just a TV star. TV stars tend not to be a noble breed. Like all TV stars her fame was, by the standards of the wider world, undeserved. She was as fortunate as the next bozo who woke up to find they were the kind of person the camera happened to like. Along with her producers she arrived at a shorthand version of her actual personality and milked it for all it was worth. Pretty much like Michael Parkinson - a man who has spent forty years in the public eye playing upon his "roots" as if they were a banjo and as far as I can recall not doing or saying much that's been surprising or remarkable - has done. I don't mean that in a bitchy way. It's that very dullness and puppyish willingness to slavishly go along with the expectations of the audience that makes for long careers in TV. You'd have thought he would have known that and kept his counsel.

Belt and braces. Then another belt.

Whether the UK version of Wired will work or not will depend more on the buoyancy of the UK print advertising market and the health of the American parent title than anything else. However, I was intrigued to see that the launch issue comes with a peel-off day-glo orange sticker describing it as "the new magazine about what's next". This suggests that after the usual nervous conversations about what the first cover should look like, what would make the appropriate cover image (looks like Manhattan but it's actually London) and the exact combination of cover lines that position the title - "ideas/technology/culture/business" - with more pointed invitations to read further inside - who could "the genius who killed the economy" possibly be? - and the designer's painstaking efforts to incorporate the announcement "UK launch issue" into the logo so completely that you don't actually notice it, somebody profit-responsible has come in there at the last minute and said "what this needs is a sticker saying what it is".

The great English pursuit

Went for a quick drink after work last night to mark a birthday. It was in a place called Smithy's down an unpromising street near Kings Cross. Everybody's drink was served in a glass bearing the branding of the drink they ordered. Presumably the idea is to carry the messaging of advertising into the retail environment itself, the better to engender loyalty and to ensure that even the drunkest customer approaching the bar ten minutes before closing simply has to thrust the glass forward and say "more of *this*".

I've just finished H.W. Brands' biography of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin spent his life commuting between the American colonies and England and never got over not just the amount the English drank but also the energetic, determined way they went about it. Brands quotes a contemporary account of an evening's entertainment in 18th century England.

"We continued," he says, " drinking like horses, as the vulgar phrase is, and singing till many of us were very drunk, and then we went to dancing and pulling of wigs, caps, and hats; and thus we continued in this frantic manner, behaving more like mad people than they that profess the name of Christians."

I can't get the image of people "drinking like horses" out of my mind.

Give us a wave, love

I've blogged in the past about the occasions I found myself being waved at in a very personal way by both Bill Clinton and H.M. The Queen. Michelle Obama turned up to visit the secondary school round the corner from the office just now. A crowd of people gathered from Chapel Market. This is not a section of the public best known for its interest in the Special Relationship. All they wanted to do was catch a glimpse. But when the motorcade of identical black vehicles drew up their windows were all blacked-out, meaning not only did people not see anything, they couldn't even tell that they were waving at the right vehicle. People moved away with a peculiarly flat feeling.
If Her Maj can make herself visible to all the citizenry, gunmen and all, I don't see why the wife of the President can't do the same. After all, as Mick Jagger says, all you've got to do is give them a glimmer.

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner

Matthew d'Ancona's programme on Radio Four about the nature of Britishness was interesting – if not quite as enthralling as The Men Who Fell To Earth, a brilliant documentary about military parachuting that came later this morning – but the more I'm asked whether I feel British or English or European the more I think of myself as a citizen of another nation altogether – London.

I was born in Yorkshire but I've lived in London since 1968. My children have all been born and brought up in London. They think of themselves as Londoners and so do I. It's not that strange now, is it? Before there was a place called Italy people called themselves Florentines or Neopolitans. I wonder whether the world's going back that way.

In the time I've lived in the city London has undergone a historic transformation. One third of the people living in London were born overseas. Just think about that. One third *born* overseas. That's not counting the number of people whose immediate forebears came from overseas or the people, like me, who were born elsewhere in the UK. That doesn't disturb me at at all. In fact I think it's reason for rejoicing. This must mean that we are heading for the almost unique situation of living in a city populated by families who all somehow chose to be here.

I don't make any claim for London as some sort of rainbow community and, like all Londoners, I am sufficiently aware of its shortcomings to raise my eyes to heaven when a provincial visitor squashed into a tube carriage exclaims "Gosh, I couldn't do this every day!" but I identify with the place increasingly strongly. On 7/7 my dominant emotion, apart from compassion for the dead and maimed, was outrage that a bunch of misanthropic twats from mono-cultural streets in Leeds should let off bombs on tube carriages and buses in London, a place they knew nothing about. If they had done they would have known it was the one place on earth apart from New York where they were most likely to have slaughtered a representative sampling of the population of the earth.

Prudence, meet Frugality

I've been reading a biography of Benjamin Franklin. In 1775 the American colonies had defied the British government and were embarked on a war with the foremost military power in the world. It was more likely to go wrong than otherwise. On one side was the prospect of defeat and ruin. On the other was the prospect of risking ruin in the process of avoiding defeat. Franklin wrote the following in a letter to his son.

For my own Part tho I am for the most prudent Parsimony of the public Treasury am not terrified by the Expense of this War should it continue ever so long. A little more Frugality or a little more Industry in Individuals will with Ease defray it. Suppose it a 100,000 a month or 1,200,000 a year. If 500,000 Families will each spend a Shilling a Week less or earn a Shilling a Week more or if they will spend Sixpence a Week less and earn Sixpence a Week more they may pay the whole Sum without otherwise feeling it. Forbearing to drink Tea saves three fourths of the money and 500,000 Women doing each Threepence Worth of Spinning or Knitting in a Week will pay the rest. I wish nevertheless most earnestly for Peace this war being a truly unnatural and mischievous one but we have nothing to expect from Submission but Slavery and Contempt. I am ever Your affectionate Father BF

Nothing about quantitative easing there.

I know it's only a film but...

In my ceaseless quest to stay abreast of the latest things happening in movies, last night I watched a film called "The Devil Wears Prada", which purports to be set in the world of high-end magazines. I know it's an eclair of a film but nonetheless I have to take issue with:
* the notion that anyone would get an interview for a job at a top magazine without having at least heard of it
* the idea that the editor arrives at the office after everyone else
* the wholly misleading hint that there are any magazine writers as implausibly handsome and poised as Simon Baker
* the fiction that the person designing the jacket for the new Harry Potter book gets the manuscript as well - oh, and copies it as a favour
* having made a success of her job the heroine leaves for - just hold my sides a second - a newspaper.

What it costs at "the pictures"

The Young Victoria is as good as a film about people writing letters to each other can be. Even if it were Citizen Kane I'd be spending most of its running time thinking about how much I'd just shelled out for four adults (two of them being sixteen) to get in.
I know these are West End prices but still. God knows what it would have cost if I'd taken the "premium" option.

In defence of the three day week

In the face of declining revenues, the New York Times has imposed a 5% pay reduction on its staff. In recognition of this they have given them ten extra days off as compensation. I'm sure people will take it. There can't be many other places that Times staffers can go. They aren't the only employer who are introducing some form of reduced working hours. These moves are being presented as desperate measures for desperate times. Maybe they're a harbinger of something more permanent.

Thirty years ago people speculated that the working week would get shorter and everybody would have something called "leisure time". What actually happened was the people with high status jobs devoted more time to work - not because they needed to but because they liked it that way. I think for a lot of people "busy-ness" is a pose. We talk about our increasingly busy lives as if they're a function of the modern consumer society. They're not. Compared to a peasant farmer we're all dossing. If we're so all-fired busy how have we managed to find time to watch TV or play with Google Street View or blog? One of the great achievements of "The Office" was that it hinted that office politics fill the vacuum that used to be occupied by productive work.

The greater truth is we always find time to do the things we want to do. In the current climate a lot of people are going to find that they can do what they have to do in far less time. It won't make anyone richer but it might make us better off. The shorter, more intensive working week may be here to stay.

All TV is kids TV

TV is obsessed with the time constraint. When there isn't one they make one up. When Anekka Rice used to build village halls it was always against some spurious clock. We grew to expect that. Though why in last night's Baroque! From St Peter's To St Paul's Waldemar Januszczak had to pretend that he was going to see how many Wren churches he could get round in fifteen minutes I'm not quite clear. They managed about five before he came puffing back into shot. Now none of the TV crews I've worked with could shoot that many locations in that time so they must have been a particularly swift team. I do hope they weren't indulging in exaggeration. I would have been just as happy if he'd stood there and said "there are twenty Wren churches within a mile of where I've standing". I think I could take that thought on board.

Teach them Betjeman, not Bebo

A friend has just come back from Costa Rica and tells me that if you climb the highest mountain you can see the Pacific in one direction and the Atlantic in the other. That stirring thought stirred something in me; dim memories of the line "upon a peak in Darien" and reading some history about one of the great European explorers who, I learn from a Colombian I recently had dinner with, are known locally as "pirates". When I got home I settled it with the help of Google. The line is Keats:

Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific - and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise -
Silent, upon a peak in Darien

Further reading indicates that it was Balboa, not Cortes, who climbed the peak and first caught sight of the Pacific, a moment in the history of exploration which is staggering and kind of funny at the same time. The poem is "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" which is inspired by a literary experience of looking at the world through fresh eyes.
Nuggets like this, from which the implications glint in lots of different directions, are the things I remember most fondly from my school days when we would get the teacher off the point and it didn't matter whether we were doing history, geography, literature, politics or philosophy. I learned more in those interludes than I did in the regular lessons. It also instilled the only valuable thing an education can instill - curiosity.
My teacher friends all agree that the National Curriculum has made tangents like this impossible. I'm not encouraged by today's announcement that the primary curriculum is to be revised to make pupils familiar with internet tools like Google and Twitter. I have a feeling that tools like these are at their most effective when they're filling the gaps left by traditional education and I find it hard to imagine primary teachers showing an eight-year-old how to use Facebook (which by then will have been supplanted.) Maybe they should take the time they're planning to devote to Twitter and use it to read a poem to them.

It's a press release. It's the opposite of news.

EMI have announced some personnel change at the top of the organisation which involved the elevation of someone called Cory and, more interestingly, this curious statement:

EMI Music CEO, Elio Leoni-Sceti, said: “Cory is a highly talented executive with a passion for music and a unique technology-based skillset. He will help us deliver our goal of leveraging the power of digital across our business, particularly in the key areas of consumer understanding and analytics, content creation and digital marketing in order to strengthen the relationship and interaction between our artists and their fans."

Now I have a degree in bullshit and have worked around the media and music businesses for thirty years and I cannot begin to hazard even the vaguest guess at what he actually means by those words. Then it struck me. It's not supposed to mean anything. It's a bunch of clichés rounded up yesterday by some corporate flack, roughly rearranged so that to a passing space traveller it just about resembles a sentence and then given to the boss to sign. The boss will have said 'you reckon this is OK?' and sent it out to various news oulets who will all have cut and pasted it on to their sites. The people it's really aimed at, the people who work within EMI, will probably be combing it right now for meaningful omissions.