-
Commuters and newspapers
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…
-
Dan Chambers
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…
-
Changing times
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…
-
The professional shame of journalism
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…