Monthly Archives: October 2006

Commuters and newspapers

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Do more people read the Even­ing Stand­ard in Tun­bridge Wells than in Bat­ter­sea? That’s what former Guard­ian journ­al­ist and Bat­ter­sea MP Mar­tin Lin­ton reckons.

What Lin­ton meant by his throwaway com­ment is that it’s read by com­muters. And com­muters, espe­cially rail com­muters, are polit­ical trash. They gen­er­ate their eco­nomic value in a place that gives them no polit­ical voice. They spend most of their money there. But they sleep a train ride away. It’s a meas­ure of how dis­con­nec­ted polit­ics are from people’s lives that these simple facts defy our elect­oral sys­tem and our media. Instead politi­cians roman­ti­cise com­munit­ies and loc­al­it­ies. MPs are more embed­ded in geo­graphy than the Lords they supplanted.

Dan Chambers

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When Chan­nel 5 News launched nearly ten years ago, some of the tur­gid inde­pend­ent films we were obliged to air were pro­duced by a com­pany that spent so little money on them we feared they were filmed, dir­ec­ted and pro­duced by the researcher. Turns out they were. Step for­ward budget TV boy, Dan Cham­bers. Mak­ing low qual­ity tele­vi­sion for next to noth­ing can only take you so far — like the Dir­ector of Pro­grammes office at five. Cham­bers, it turned out, was like­able and witty. But on the mar­gins of Brit­ish tele­vi­sion you need more than Simon Cow­ell hair, and there’s only so much CSI a man can buy. The expens­ive new look for Fifth Gear just wasn’t enough to keep his place at the table. So it’s so long, Longacre. But some­thing tells me we haven’t seen the last of Dan Chambers.

Mean­while the Flextech-isation of five con­tin­ues apace with Lisa Opie join­ing Jane Light­ing. Opie left Flex­tech after hear­ing that famil­iar whist­ling sound of someone com­ing in over your head. But for now there’s five’s mini-multi-channel strategy to be pored over, about as sub­stan­tial and appeal­ing as the broken bis­cuit bot­tom of an iced gem.

Changing times

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Which subscription-based media group is hir­ing, hir­ing, hir­ing? Expand­ing rap­idly across the globe at a time when com­pet­it­ors are lay­ing off and lying low?

The answer of course is Bloomberg, and when your 235,000 sub­scribers are some of the wealth­i­est indi­vidu­als and insti­tu­tions in the world you can afford to be ambitious.

Wan­der­ing round its Lon­don HQ last week, with its nightclub-style secur­ity and office fur­niture homage to Hol­ly­wood sci­ence fic­tion the place con­veyed a very dif­fer­ent mes­sage to the news­rooms I’ve known and loved — affluence!

Bloomberg’s movers and shakers are largely unknown on the Lon­don media scene. Their HQ may be the venue for a big TV News night out, but most Bloomber­gers could pass through any other big news­room with barely a flicker or nod of recognition.

The reason is that Bloomberg grows it own, and that makes it both fright­en­ing and impress­ive in equal pro­por­tions, so pre­pare for both sen­sa­tions, it’s on the move.

It’s been brought to my atten­tion that I referred above to some­thing called the Lon­don media scene. I recog­nize that this is a fig­ment of my imagination.

The professional shame of journalism

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Cur­rently re-reading Primo Levi’s account of his exper­i­ence of Aus­chwitz, The Drowned And The Saved. The pages have yel­lowed since I first read it back in 1987, the year Levi killed himself .

We’re not good at read­ing books by vic­tims. We seem to prefer prot­ag­on­ists, be they vain, wicked or shameless.

In the chapter Shame, he describes his lib­er­a­tion and the ‘oppressed’ look of the Rus­sian sol­diers who dis­covered the camp.

Levi says the Rus­si­ans, like he and his fel­low pris­on­ers, were shamed by their inab­il­ity to pre­vent the appalling crimes that had occurred:


…the shame which the just man exper­i­ences when con­fron­ted by a crime com­mit­ted by another, and he feels remorse because of its exist­ence, because of its hav­ing been irre­voc­ably intro­duced into the world of exist­ing things, and because his will has proven nonex­ist­ent or feeble and was incap­able of put­ting up a good defence.


Post­script: Levi’s glimpse of Rus­sian human­ity is itself a strange con­trast to Ant­ony Beevor’s account of the Red Army in Ber­lin — The Down­fall 1945 where the Sovi­ets are por­trayed as drunken rap­ists in pur­suit of Hitler’s dis­il­lu­sioned mur­der­ers. His­tory and testi­mony sit awk­wardly together.