David Leigh has had a brainstorm. A remarkably altruistic brainstorm, it has to be said, since it is intended to save the future of the ‘quality newspapers’ and Leigh works for, er, The Guardian.

Leigh is an ‘investigative journalist’. I think that means that when he listens in to other people phones conversations, it’s called ethical hacking ‘in the public interest’. Anyway, he has been turning his mind to the problem of how to get people to pay him for this ethical hacking and other activities that might be termed ‘peeping Tom’ in different circumstances. He’s obviously worried that one day the Guardian might keep all their money in the Cayman Islands and not remit any back to the UK for him, or maybe the bottom will fall out of the classified advertising for Somalian outreach worker’s market.

He seems to be labouring under the illusions that journalists like him ‘make’ something called news. It’s entirely possible that they might ‘make it up’ on occasions, but ‘make’, as in produce? No!

People make news. People falling out of the sky from the wheel compartment of planes flying over South London, people shagging horses in moonlit Yorkshire fields, people getting killed on our behalf in Afghanistan or Manchester, people giving birth to babies with three heads because they once shared a car with a man who had only given up smoking five years ago, people doing all sorts of crazy things, but people. The general public.

Journalists merely report it, or some of it, whatever fits with this week’s keywords. They do so because someone thought to tell them about it in their ivory Canary Wharf towers. Someone e-mailed them, phoned them, tipped them the wink. They are mass broadcasters of gossip. Sure, once they have the wind under their wings, they do some more research, they know their way round Companies House and the BT phone disc that can be reverse searched, but they don’t, absolutely not, make the news.

All the bleating that has gone on over the past few years reflects the fact that they used to have a near monopoly on repeating the news. The arrival of the Internet has meant that the public have a cheap and easy means of broadcasting the news to each other without the intermediary.

Now let us take a look at David Leigh’s brainwave. He wants to tax the Internet. He wants each one of us to pay an extra £2 a month on our broadband bill in order to give him the money to keep the Dead Tree Press alive… apparently we are getting the benefit of his repeating of the news for free. There is many a blogger who would say that actually it is the Dead Tree Press who is getting the benefit of citizen journalists reporting of the news for free but that is another issue.

Taxing the Internet in order to keep the print version of broadcasters going is on a par with wind-up gramophone manufacturers demanding that electricity be taxed on the grounds people are getting their music for ‘free’ from iPods and now wind-up gramophone manufactures are going out of business.

The news wasn’t ‘theirs’ in the first place – it was ours, we made it, we gave our lives for it in some cases.

It has to be a wind-up!

Moggsy October 1, 2012 at 10:27

So this is a first move by the Gaurdian to get in on the same trough as the
Beeb? Birds of a feather?

Caedmon’s
Cat September 27, 2012 at 13:37

If Mr Leigh’s suggestion were to be adopted, then any existing suspicions
that the dead tree press is the handmaiden of the government would be well and
truly confirmed. Take your pick, comrades: Pravda, Isvestya or Argumenty i
Fakty…

rogerh September 26, 2012 at 10:17

I agree Anna the MSM has been semi-corrupted by vested interests. I do
worry about relying on the whistleblower model. Look what happens to
whistleblowers. Worse, it is very easy to track the internet, not many use AES
and anon FTP or secure their computer against the 6am knock. If I wanted to
leak a secret I would not email Anna but might get details to journalists
whose work I trust.

Then there is investigation. If I put in an FOI request I will likely get a
reply ‘p&*s off’, obfuscation and lying is less easy to a heavyweight.
Some consistency and context is needed in a serious FOI trawl. Then there are
contacts. If I were a judge or senior politico I am not likely to leak to a
blog but I might drop hints across a lunch table. All this costs time and
money.

I agree the dead tree press must change and some journos are grossly
overpaid and under-talented but I fear the baby will get thrown out with the
bathwater. Worse, I fear the ‘new media’ will focus on trivia – it pays – and
serious journalism will end up in the skip.

Engineer September 26, 2012 at 10:57

Some might argue that there has been a considerable lack of ‘serious
journalism’ for some time. For example, the Lobby – that cabal of hacks that
follow the politicos in the Westminster Village – are generally acknowledged
to have become rather uncritical (notably under the last government) because
if they were, they wouldn’t be fed any tip-bits. Another example is the
upcoming scandal of the nation’s energy policy (or rather, lack of one), the
investigation of which only Christopher Booker seems to have followed with
any rigour whatever. The rest just spout the line of ‘need more renewables’
without bothering to check if they are actually capable of doing the job
(they aren’t). This latter example may seem boring and trivial, but won’t be
when lights start going out because we haven’t bothered building any power
stations that actually produce much power for about two decades.

minktulip
September 26, 2012 at 12:01

Journalists are easy prey for a determined political class. Campbell,
Blair et al showed that very well. I think that Blair may have learnt
quite a lot from Oz Prime Minister Paul Keating, who had a technique
called the “drip”: docile journalists get enough info’ to sell their
papers. Those journalists interested in the truth are starved out. A kind
of natural selection designed to produce poltroons. FOI is a wonderful
idea and could really lead to something; it is, naturally, about the only
thing Blair has ever sincerely admitted to be a mistake.

rogerh September 26, 2012 at 07:18

Well, the bloggers do a good job of chewing the fat but (with respect) they
seldom find out anything new. We commenters tend to go over the same ground –
useless govt etc etc week after week. Then take a look for blogs that tell the
truth about the NHS, Whitehall, Local Councils, MoD, the Police, the Secret
Squirrels, the judiciary – there are none or they disappear PDQ. Serious
digging takes time and tenacity and integrity and some skill and dare I say –
money. So I do feel there is a need for some professional nosy-parkers who are
paid to find out – a sort of Private Eye of the Internet. Quite how to
organise this in the blog-o-sphere I am not sure – Wikileaks started well but
could not survive its internal and external threats. Quis Custodiet?

Anna
Raccoon September 26, 2012 at
07:27

I disagree Roger,

All stories start with someone intimately involved with the people
concerned. They bring it to the attention of a journalist. Journalists don’t
have some second sight to know what is going on in Wiltshire or Glasgow.
They are a broadcasting service. Same as the Internet. Unlike the Internet,
they can be remarkably selective as to what they agree to bring to wider
attention.

sackcloth and
ashes September 25, 2012 at 17:10

Oh this is awesome. St David is asking for a subsidy for a newspaper that
pays its editor in chief £500K p/a, and which is basically kept afloat by the
GMG despite its lousy sales figures (see here http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/node/49299 for the full gory
details). My heart bleeds.

minktulip September 25, 2012 at 17:06

This has promise: we can each start our own “quality newspaper” (no
sniggering please) and live off the money collected for us by the state-”the
great fiction”, according to Bastiat, whereby everybody seeks to live at the
expense of everybody else.

Brian September
25, 2012 at 16:55

Why doesn’t the Guardian turn itself into a freesheet like Time Out London
and the Evening Standard and up the advertising rates charged to the BBC et al
by virtue of its increased circulation?

Ted Treen September 26, 2012 at 11:59

If the Grauniad were a free sheet, it would still be overpriced.

LJH September 25, 2012 at 16:37

Oops premature submission, the Tgraph ran with the former story while the
Graun relied on Wikileaks for the latter, simultaneously failing to provide
any balance in its coverage of, at random, Israel, Arab Spring, the corruption
of science by the CAGWarmista.

Mike Spilligan
September 25, 2012 at 16:35

Wasn’t it only last year that Polly T suggested that the way to make
“quality journalism” secure for the future, would be to follow the example of
the BBC TV licence – though the details were lacking, naturally. Did she mean
that we’d have to pay a year’s subscription in advance to, say, The Times or
The Guardian, before being allowed to buy The Sun? No doubt the new suggestion
springs from there being no support for Polly’s idea, because someone actually
thought about it for more than 10 nanoseconds.
The whole thing reminds me
of the canal and barge owners in the early 19th century, who thought that
railways were a good advance, but conditional upon the tracks being laid only
alongside canals so that the engines could pull the barges.

Jabba the Cat September 26, 2012 at 10:24

“Did she mean that we’d have to pay a year’s subscription in advance to,
say, The Times…”

Funny you should mention the Times and subscriptions, because I recently
phoned the Times to cancel my subscription, after about three months on and
off, mostly off, usage, because I came to the conclusion it was a waste of
my money. Once connected to a muppet in their customer services, I was
haughtily informed that my ‘trial’ period had passed and I was contractually
bound for twelve months of payments before I could cancel. I promptly told
this muppet to Foxtrot Oscar and stick the contract where the sun does not
shine, phoned the bank and told them to stop the direct debit. Case closed,
other than I got a letter from the subscriptions department a week later
telling me they could not effect the next direct debit because of an error
of information in my bank details etc.

LJH September 25, 2012 at 16:30

People gave up on newspapers a while after journalists gave up on
scepticism and digging for facts, in favour of peddling their smug narratives.
The last two big stories (expenses scandal and data from US govt computers)
landed in their laptops and the Graun didn’t have the wits to run with it so
it was offered to the Torygraph.

microdave September 25, 2012 at 15:11

The rest I can believe, but “People giving birth to babies with three
heads because they once shared a car with a man who had only given up smoking
five years ago”???

Engineer September 25, 2012 at 14:55

Not so much a wind-up, more desperation and a misplaced sense of
self-importance, I think. Almost all the newspapers have shrinking circulation
(The Grauniad has shrunk so much it’s gone from broadsheet to tabloid.)
Despite arranging it’s financial affairs to be as tax-efficient as possible
(offshore trusts based in the Cayman islands), the Graun continues to loose
money hand over fist. Instead of accepting that things have changed in the
‘news market’, and adjusting accordingly, the old sense of entitlement rears
it’s head – “I’m a left-leaning journalist. I DESERVE to be paid £100,000 a
year for writing stuff people don’t want to read.” (We know they don’t want to
read it because far fewer of them are buying the paper.)

Despite dire predictions, I doubt that print newspapers will die off
entirely. They may become more expensive, and change to more opinion and
discussion rather than hard news (which is delivered far quicker by radio, TV
and interweb), but many of us quite enjoy the ritual of scanning the pages and
catching up with the thoughts of our favourite commentators, the cartoons, and
the letters (Telegraph letters are head and shoulders above all others).
Besides, newspaper is a most useful and versatile resource – you can’t light a
bonfire with a blog.

Anna
Raccoon September 25, 2012 at
15:10

“you can’t light a bonfire with a blog”.

Oh, I don’t know, I would say Ms Raccoon has made spirited efforts to set
fire to the blog in the not so recent past. Still picking bits of Scouse out
of my left nostril as it happens…..

Engineer
September 25, 2012 at 16:11

Ah, yes – apologies – fair point. Perhaps I might have chosen a better
example!

Ed P September 25, 2012 at 13:59

I’m looking forward to the Guardian “making news” very soon by closing
down. Only then will Mr. Leigh’s assertion be correct.

ivan September 25, 2012 at 16:46

If it does what will all the limp wrist lefties do?

JuliaM September 25, 2012 at 19:08

Write for the ‘Indy’!

Ted Treen
September 26, 2012 at 11:56

)

right_writes September 25, 2012 at 13:58

As I was saying to my “lady typewriter” as I dictated this comment; “one
day I expect that you will be out of a job”, she replied “it will never
happen, I am the most important part in this wonderful art of writing”.

Note to self…

Must order another case of Madeira.

Who is David Leigh again?

mbarnes September 25, 2012 at 13:54

people shagging horses in moonlit Yorkshire fields…………… really??? Who?
When? Why don’t I know about this? And most importantly: HOW?

Oh my god! I have a terrible image in my head involving Geoffrey Boycott
and Black Beauty – argh

Farenheit211 September 25, 2012 at 14:12

Don’t worry, here’s some mindbleach for you, it’s not Yorkshire, it’s
Blackburn, Lancashire

http://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/news/9806520.Man_charged_with_having_sex_with_horse/?ref=rss

Engineer
September 25, 2012 at 14:37

The real question, surely, and the deciding factor on which the case
must turn, is – did the horse consent?

Robert the
Biker September 25, 2012 at 14:44

She was heard to say Neiiigh so thats pretty non-consensual to me :
)

Mudplugger September 25, 2012 at 16:05

Which ‘triggers’ an equine memory…

There was a young fellow named Morse,
Who fell madly in love
with his horse.
Said his wife, “You rapscallion,
That horse is a
stallion,
This constitutes grounds for divorce.”

Sorry !

Joe Public
September 25, 2012 at 19:14

It uttered “Neigh”

Brian September 25, 2012 at 16:51

A Blackburn man – with a name like two bad Scrabble hands?

robbo September 25, 2012 at 17:14

Perhaps he had a cold !! and felt a little horse, i,ll get my coat