Went to Oxford last night to hear Glenda Cooper’s excel­lent Guard­ian lec­ture about cov­er­ing dis­asters and the col­lu­sion between journ­al­ists and aid agen­cies, among other things.

Pot­ted ver­sion here. Will post more when it’s all online.

Friends of Anthony Sampson gathered last night to hear the new pro­fessor who has a chair in his name, David Leigh of the Guard­ian. There were over four hun­dred people pack­ing the venue — stand­ing room only — for his inaug­ural lec­ture, The End of the Reporter.

Iron­ic­ally, David doesn’t lec­ture to the masses at all in real life. He runs small work­shops and classes, coach­ing and ment­or­ing a new gen­er­a­tion in the tech­niques of invest­ig­at­ive reporting.

These are valu­able skills, once sus­tained by news­pa­pers and tele­vi­sion com­pan­ies, now — in part — by donors, and not-for-profit insti­tu­tions like universities.

Here is some of what he had to say:

I was quite sur­prised the other day, when tot­ting up the stuff I per­son­ally do in news­pa­pers, to real­ize that the reporter does have a bit of an influ­ence. We wrote about the way that tax-dodgers with private jets can pre­tend to live in Monaco, but still work four days a week in a Lon­don office. (The trick was that, when it’s tot­ting up res­id­ence days, the Inland Rev­enue doesn’t count the day of travel out or the day of travel back. That made sense in the days of steam – but not when you can com­mute to Lon­don in 90 minutes.) The gov­ern­ment now says it will stop up the loophole.

We wrote some rather sav­age art­icles about plans to restrict use of the Free­dom of Inform­a­tion Act. They dropped the plans.

We explained how NHS patient records were going to be put on a national data­base with no right to opt out. The scheme was reformed.

And of course, Rob Evans and I wrote lit­er­ally scores of art­icles detail­ing the cor­rupt influ­ence of the defence ministry’s arms sales depart­ment on bribery over­seas. The gov­ern­ment now says it will shut the depart­ment down.

There’s only one reason why these stor­ies have an effect. I like to think, of course, it’s down to our own extreme per­sonal bril­liance. But it’s not. It’s because a story on the front page of the Guard­ian car­ries clout.

…

And that’s per­haps one of the biggest dangers of the media revolu­tion. When the media frag­ment – as they will – and splinter into a thou­sand web­sites, a thou­sand digital chan­nels – all weak fin­an­cially – then we’ll see a severe reduc­tion in the power of each indi­vidual media out­let. The reporter’s voice will struggle to be heard over the caco­phony of a thou­sand other voices.

And politi­cians will no longer fear us.

If that sounds gloomy, be assured that David is not a doom-monger.

Any­one who has like him, put life and live­li­hood on the line in right­eous pur­suit of journ­al­istic prey, knows that our sec­u­lar priest­hood doesn’t just need a con­greg­a­tion right now — it also needs its rep­res­ent­at­ives to keep the faith.