A long time ago, I wrote the plan to run ITV News in Lon­don (repla­cing LNN), mod­elled on the oper­at­ing struc­ture for Five News. It involved reformat­ting shows and cut­ting staff­ing to the bare min­imum required to get on air.

Noth­ing wrong with that. It was a more effi­cient use of resources.

But it wasn’t really designed to involve the pro­cess you and I would know as journ­al­ism. It was inten­ded to pro­duce a happy sim­u­la­tion of a tele­vi­sion news broad­cast to a stand­ard adequate enough to sat­isfy reg­u­lat­ors. Con­tinue read­ing →

As a class escapee, I’ve always been inter­ested in social mobil­ity. What drives it? Well, here’s an inter­est­ing ana­lysis from the Janu­ary 2009 edi­tion of the Amer­ican Journal of Soci­ology: Micro­class Mobil­ity: Social Repro­duc­tion in Four Coun­tries (sub­scrip­tion). It should interest journ­al­ists and their social-mobility-minded off­spring. Con­tinue read­ing →

There are plenty of oppor­tun­it­ies in this world to die pre­ma­turely in your line of work. But only one — sol­dier­ing — that requires politi­cians or the pub­lic to give that death meaning.

It’s a lousy bar­gain. Par­tic­u­larly when you’re fight­ing minor wars on the fringes of pop­u­lar concern.

Not that sol­diers seem to need it. Most find their own reas­ons. But some of the staff officers, civil ser­vants, and min­is­ters who send them to places where they might be killed or injured find it com­fort­ing that — in the event of death or ser­i­ous injury — they can avoid dis­cus­sion of how, why and to what end, by call­ing the vic­tims ‘her­oes’. Con­tinue read­ing →

Some great pic­tures of City’s new J-School. (Well, I like them…)

Con­tinue read­ing →