Two quick reading links for the weekend. Both of these excellent pieces would fall into the category of “explainers” but do it so well that the explanation rises to the level of useful originality.

• David Gardner’s analysis for the FT of the very dangerous context for the decision by the US to arm the Syrian rebels – or at least to try to arm only some of them. Gardner concentrates on the centuries-old Sunni vs Shia warfare as the driver of events but concludes that outside intervention is preferable to none.
• Steve Richards dissection for The Guardian of the electoral gloom affecting both major British political parties. He is surely right that this pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Cool illustration too.

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Times Prince William story today

The Times reports today (£) that Britain’s future king Prince William has Indian DNA. It’s an intriguing story, but there are a couple of things about its presentation which are peculiar. Not to say troubling.

They were spotted immediately by Alex Hern, a New Statesman blogger and an ex-science editor of The Times, Mark Henderson. Given that this story is linked to a special offer on DNA analysis available to Times+ subscribers, which came first – the offer or the story? Linking the two undermines the credibility and prominent positioning of the story. The firm behind the offer (BritainsDNA) features with suspicious prominence in the narrative.

A second, wider question is begged: given how easy it is to get DNA and to analyse it, can any of this data be considered private? Some of the questions are explored here. I can see that The Times might well argue that the DNA of an heir to the throne is a matter of public interest: the accompanying editorial (£) simply takes that for granted before going on to argue for the benefits of DNA testing for medical and general knowledge. But to pretend that there is no ethical issue at all insults the intelligence of the paper’s readers.

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We all suspect that people read less on the web than they pretend. Not least because if you blog, you can read the analytics and discover that very few people ever turn the page.

I’ve always wanted to see how few people actually reach the end of even short posts and stories. Now someone’s actually using software which does that and more. It’s all explained in this story by Slate’s technology writer, Farhad Manjoo. At some length.

On the face of it, this skipping, hopping, snacking pattern of reading is discouraging if you write stuff in the hope that people will read it. But I suspect that this is a transitional phase and that these habits may change over time. Each new communications technology which increases the amount of information in circulation creates a temporary explosion of stuff to consume which is chaotic and which splits attention into small fragments. Then, we master the new flow and settle down to slower, calmer absorption of what we want and need to know.

It’s easy to exaggerate how much printed news content people actually read. Yes, the minutes logged as newspaper reading are much higher than on screens. A person reading a paper for 20 or 30 minutes will probably reach the end of at least one piece of several hundred words. But how many people read past the first two paragraphs of a printed news story or feature? The more information in circulation, the more we switch off if we suspect we know what’s coming in the rest of the piece. Formulaic journalism now dies quicker on any platform. There was an editor of the New York Times three or four back who is said to have never quite recovered from being told by market researchers that in the category of the paper’s most loyal readers, no more than 10% of those read past page 4.

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Or at least it was new to me when I heard this yesterday. News reporters in “legacy” media who are besieged by predictions that technology is eating their livelihood can be forgiven for being sceptical about techno-hype which lauds new gizmos for being ingenious without actually asking if they do anything useful.

Here’s a smartphone app that might help solve a problem which has been faced by anyone who has ever been parachuted into an unfamiliar area on a breaking story. How do you find people with knowledgeable opinions on the event/issue/disaster, and find them quickly?

I heard about this at the World Editors Forum from Justin Arenstein, who instanced the use of layar.com to find quotable people with the example of reporters arriving in a small South African town to report the failure of the local authority to keep the public water supply flowing. Layar, a Dutch startup which is in the “augmented reality” (or AR) business, overlays extra information on what your smartphone sees and is often used by travellers to discover more information about, say, a building. The bit that caught my attention is called “Tweeps Around”.

With the app turned on, you can walk down the street or scan a room and your phone will find people who have been tweeting. It will, Justin said, locate the phone of the tweeter within a distance of three or four feet – easily accurate enough for a knock on the door and request for an opinion. The sending of a Twitter message in the first place, a public act, eliminates any concern that they’re going to object to at least being asked to expand on their tweet.

It’s not a magic bullet: the competitive edge evaporates if everyone does it. Carelessly used or overused, it would be liable to bias reporters to quoting people who are mouthy self-publicists at the expense of people who might actually know.

But I can think of times in my reporting life when it would have been very handy. A proportion of new technology offers you stuff you don’t need or want. That seems to me to be something genuinely useful. I’d be fascinated to hear from anyone who has actually used Layar to do this. Arenstein told me later that he knew “hardly anybody” who had used the app this way for journalism.

Update 3/6/13: Two useful observations came when I tweeted this post. Marc Blanc-Settle said that the app Banjo might to do the same thing. Iain Martin rightly said that the usefulness of the Layar app would depend on how many tweeps allowed Twitter to show their geo-location.

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I’m in Thailand (at the World Editors Forum) and the news is full of protest all over the world: Bangkok itself, Turkey and in the unpredictable places where the ladies of Femen pop up and take off their clothes.

Protest needs innovation as much as any department of life and perhaps it needs it more than most because protest goes nowhere if it isn’t noticed and doesn’t spread. Innovation is deviation and new protesters must find new and original ways to imprint a message instantly in as many minds as possible, preferably without words. It must be an image delivered instantaneously because protest can be snuffed out fast and because there is anyway so much else competing for peoples’ attention. Compelling visual wit is harder than it appears.

The examples above represent a remarkable cluster of originality in this specialised global competition. In Turkey, they wave beercans to protest against new restrictions on alcolhol. Much better, a hundred or so people held a kiss protest at a subway station in Ankara to make fun of the increase in rules on public behaviour.

Here in Thailand, demonstrators have reached back into an example distant in both geography and time. Political movements in Thailand have long been signalled by colour (yellow vs red mostly) but yesterday, the anti-goverment crowd wore Guy Fawkes masks and the (equally peaceful) counter-demo wore red masks. Needless to say, young Thai activists have not been reading books about 17th century British history. They picked up the cue from the 2005 film V for Vendetta in which people march on the parliament in London wearing the masks. (The use of these masks isn’t confined to Thailand and didn’t start here – examples here – but looks especially odd so far from its origins).

Although the people who wear the Fawkes masks and pepper government Facebook sites with pictures of them are formally objecting to the government, I guess that the choice of symbol also an oblique swipe at the monarchy and its political role. Legal penalties for lèse-majesté are so heavy that argument on the subject is often oblique (see here (£) for recent cases).

Perhaps most extraordinary – and certainly most dangerous – are the highly mobile women on Femen who strip off to reveal slogans on their bodies. To do this in a country like Tunisia (their latest target) requires nerve, to which they add creative flair in their ability to get a message across in a way so provocative and annoying to the authorities they’re trying to ridicule that it can’t be smothered.

Do people who later succeed in advertising start as street politicians? I can’t think of examples but it wouldn’t be surprising.

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When I began this blog in 2010, at weekends I would occasionally do a post on a few pieces I’d read that I liked, good journalism well-written (and often contra-suggestive). These posts consistently received the lowest hit rates of anything I wrote.

I guess the reason was that people read blogs less at weekends, the posts didn’t contain strong opinion and you have to click links to see what I’m talking about (and you impatient lot don’t seem to like doing that). But I’m going to go back to doing it occasionally. Despite the endless threnodies for the End of Journalism As We Know It, there’s a lot of very good writing out there; sometimes I want to explain why in more than the 140 characters of a tweet.

The more writing there is being done, the harder it is to catch the good stuff. The quantity of words in circulation has increased by a colossal order of magnitude; the day is exactly the same length as it always was. The depth and quality that is present in the writing generated by the internet’s indiscriminate output is the subject of this excellent essay in optimism by Robert Cottrell, founder of thebrowser.com, who reads and selects long-form writing so that you don’t have to. He has better qualifications to judge the true noise-to-signal ratio of writing on the internet in English than most.

• First recommendation is a piece in the current Prospect magazine on Nigel Farage and Ukip by Edward Docx. Millions of words have poured into the media since Britain’s fourth political party scared the other three with a strong performance in recent local elections. This reportage and analysis is one of the most perceptive I’ve read, slicing through a lot of cluttered thinking. As a taster, this is Docx on British bullshit detectors and why Farage connects with voters in ways that neither the Conservative or Labour leaders can:

“It is worth taking a moment to compare this [Farage's] demeanour to that of the other main party leaders. Essentially, Cameron’s problem in public is that he has had to begin from a perceived position of disapproval and embarrassment—about Eton, his aristocratic family connections, the masturbatory glee of the Bullingdon Club and so on. From there he felt it necessary to present another version of himself—the metrosexual, metropolitan, multicultural man—in order to reach out towards the middle ground. Let’s leave aside what may or may not be real in these manoeuvres and observe that there remains for the public an authenticity issue.

Ed Miliband’s difficulty, meanwhile, is a different though cousin one—also expressed in the very visible enactment of unease. Perhaps because he has grown up in tight political circles, it can often feel as though Miliband’s pride, his personal dynamism as a man, is over-invested in the point-scoring of narrow debate; and that he lacks the wider suite of essential character traits required in a convincing leader—not least a tangible and receptive emotional presence that is alive to the heartbeat of all that is happening in the room, the studio, the country. He senses his deficiency, but when he seeks to correct—when he aims for more emotional registers such as passion or conviction—he winds up coming across as a querulous and absurdly het-up head boy.

Now because both Cameron and Miliband—for their different reasons—suffer from this distracting dissonance between public and private personality, neither is able naturally to connect with the public. And yet the characteristic that best defines the British people is that they have the finest bullshit detectors in the world. Go to any gathering in Britain—in a pie factory or in a palace, in Brixton or Brixham—and the one character trait that we most admire and celebrate is a person’s ability to inhabit their character as proudly and directly and amusingly as possible. It’s the contortions we cannot abide.

Doubtless, it’s easier when you’re not in government or opposition; but that’s not the point: the more Cameron and Miliband have to hedge and trim and twist their personalities to appear to be what they are not, the more Farage thrives with the public by being what he is. One of the main reasons for his success is that he enjoys that happy combination of being both an effective communicator and meaning what he says.”

• One of the trickiest things in journalism is to find a way back into an issue which demands attention but isn’t getting it because it has remained unchanged for so long. China’s one-child policy is not new, but this angry piece in The Times (£) by Sarah Vine succeeds in reminding us just what a scale of misery it creates and why politicians shouldn’t keep silent about it.

• I had never heard of the Italian cultural (and moral) revolutionaries called Wu Ming and I read this piece on them by Peter Aspden in the Financial Times with fascination. I have an unprovable feeling they may turn out to be important in the long run. Apart from anything else you will want to know why five Italian intellectuals use a Chinese name. I was caught by the first sentence: “It is a sunny spring morning and I am standing underneath an imposing statue of Neptune in Bologna’s magnificent Piazza Maggiore, waiting for a tap on my shoulder. This is my rendezvous point with Wu Ming 1.”

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I have in recent months been writing a book (yes, it’s about journalism, it’s out in September and you can pre-order) and the experience taught me a lot. I also have a few apologies to make. Here are a few lessons and mea culpas.

• Graham Greene said that writers must have a splinter of ice in their heart. I think he meant this in the strictly literary sense of a writer always having the detachment to remember a scene of passion or misery for later use. I have discovered that anyone writing a book has to be selfish for months on end, excluding most other distractions and duties. Without this ruthlessness, the writing of a book stretches into years and decades. As it is, my wife thinks it may never end. Apologies to all the people, emails and obligations I have dealt with slowly or not at all.
• Despite writing on the screen, I think I may have consumed my own weight in plain A4 paper. With the number of words in a book, there comes a moment where you have to feel it on paper to be able to grasp where everything is and how it reads. This may be terribly old-fashioned, but I still find it easier to correct my own writing in hard copy. Then you find yourself doing it again and again as a new version needs combing and fine-tuning. Here I say sorry to a lot of trees.
• What is about writing which creates a craving for biscuits? I was fairly restrained about the amount of coffee I drank and I did not once, not ever, give way to the temptation to eat jammy rings. But I did eat quite a few other biscuits.
• Human beings are hard-wired to ignore their own experience. I know that I write quickest when I prepare what I’m going to write and prepare it carefully. But I have been trained by experience to write fast if needed. Several times I sat down at the keyboard to make a fast, charging start on a chapter. If I hadn’t figured it out carefully, I lost momentum almost immediately. I have known this for a long time, yet I blithely forget it.
• This was a long, cold winter to be writing and I discovered that your lower half gets colder than your upper half. Your arms and shoulders aren’t doing much exercise when writing, but they’re moving more than your legs; I guess that explains the temperature difference. At one point I was considering long johns. Do professional writers wear them or perhaps tights under their trousers?
• If I wrote books all the time, I suspect I might become a vegetarian. My solitary lunches contained less and less meat as the weeks went on. Unless this was because I was subconsciously afraid I would fall asleep in the afternoon, I cannot explain this trend to meatlessness.
• A non-fiction book writer needs a large floor. By the end I had stacks of paper and books covering a space large enough for two double beds.
• The last paragraph you wrote at the end of the day before always turns out to be rubbish. Sometimes more than needs surgery, but often just that single last paragraph. Don’t ask me why; I don’t know.

PS: The book’s called Out of Print: Newspapers, Journalism and the Business of News in the Digital Age and I’ll tell you more about it soon.

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I’m not inventing this: Iran really does have a body called the the Supreme Council for Cyberspace. This body with the science-fiction name is wrestling with the dilemma facing dictatorships everywhere.

Even by official estimates, more than half of Iran’s 75m people are net users. At that level, the internet is basic to the functioning of the economy, and that includes trade and contacts outside the country. So the cyberspace councillors can’t just shut down the internet even if they had the technical means to do it.

So they do two things: they slow it down and they try to build infrastructure which they can watch. There’s a tense election coming in June and the authorities have had several years to plan against a repeat of the demonstrations which took them by surprise in 2009. As AFP reports, the authorities in Tehran are suspected of putting the internet in a “coma”. Revealingly, the people who seem to have spotted this first are the DVD pirates who can’t any longer download foreign movies because the system is so slow.

The way that the cyberspace rulers may be managing this is by blocking Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). Iranians who don’t want to be traced accessing sites outside their borders use VPNs to connect to international sites and to disguise where they are. The use of VPNs is illegal on the grounds that they are insecure and may carry material considered depraved, criminal or politically offensive. So the Iranian authorities are building their own VPN for people to use, which internet experts quite reasonably assume will be transparent to the supreme cyber-councillors, not to mention to the security police.

Don’t run away with the idea that the men with their hands on the switches of the Iranian internet are mindless thugs: they have been learning elegance. If you try a blocked site, you get a pretty picture of an ant carrying a leaf up a rope. The caption announces the year “of political and economic epoch”, celebrates the birthday of the prophet’s daughter Fatima and wishes you happy Mothers’ Day and Womens’ Day. (If anyone can send me a link to the picture, I’ll post it but I can’t find a copy of the image which was reproduced in the Jordan Times yesterday – not sure if that’s because of the internet blockade or my ineptitude in search).

I wonder if the authorities think that internet-savvy users are women? Fair to assume that the cyberspace police are men.

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I know that this week’s media debate is going to be all about the pros and cons of real-time news sharing in fast-moving crises like the Boston marathon bombings and subsequent shootouts, but this blog has a little catching up to do. While I have been writing a book, the government, Houses of Lord and Commons and the Hacked Off campaign have managed to make a gigantic dog’s breakfast of the follow-up to the Leveson Inquiry into phone-hacking.

This was pretty much the only subject on which I published during the long winter, so I’ll start by rounding up that stuff. It’s hardly surprising that inventive lawyers intent on intimidation are using Leveson’s recommendations to try to silence newspaper reporting or that the Metropolitan Police, who had a grimly embarrassing time in front of Leveson, are being cautious and unhelpful. What has surprised me is the depth of the legal and political doo-doo into which the government has stepped. In a hurry to get the Leveson Inquiry dealt with before the 2015 election season opens next year, the government tied itself in knots which may take years to unravel. The Royal Charter deal on a new press regulator was a rushed botch.

The largest single dilemma which Leveson plonked in the government’s lap is defining “the press”. Leveson was so heavily preoccupied by the issue of the misuse of power accumulated by the major newspaper groups, that he did not treat this as a central issue. He should have: defining who is to be covered by law or regulation dealing with news publishing is a basic issue in an era when “the press” doesn’t really exist any more. I argue in a TLS review (£) of Leveson and a report from the Columbia Journalism School on “post-industrial journalism” that the Leveson report’s worst flaw was that it was so backward-looking.

Thrashing round trying to define internet sites and blogs which are “news-related” and suchlike won’t work for anyone except lawyers who can spend happy years in court fighting over definitions. In this BBC explainer there is a nice little film by Newsnight’s David Grossman trying to explain the new law as it relates to online publishers. The Department of Culture Media and Sport have produced a colourful new diagram to help publishers work out if they’re covered by the new law. Here’s Patrick Smith of MediaBriefing picking holes.

The government seems frightened of open public debate about issues such as “public interest”. The reporting of the Leveson Report when it came out late last year was shoddy and partial. The negotiations leading up to the Royal Charter were opaque. The legislation is whistling through the Commons. Debate hasn’t happened. Opportunities to find better ways have been missed. And Leveson was a great chance to improve law and regulation of the news media, as I tried to explain in this lecture at Gresham College. Pity it was missed.

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This blog is currently taking an enforced holiday which I have not spent eating Christmas pudding but mostly writing a book. More on that another day when I resurface.

For the time being I will simply wish all my readers a happy new year and post this video of a panel discussion held at the Battle of Ideas conference in London not long before the Leveson Inquiry produced its report, which is still being energetically debated. The panellists are Christina Patterson, Ray Snoddy, Mick Hume and me.

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I’m sorry to see James Harding shoved out of the editor’s chair at The Times. He had made mistakes, but he had also done the paper (for which I worked) a lot of good.

The instant speculation about why he was dumped tells you a good deal about the way journalists think about their business. Some, noting rightly that coverage of News International and phone-hacking had been good after an initial stumble, thought that this robust editing had annoyed News Corporation’s boss Rupert Murdoch. If this was any problem at all, it would have rated as an irritant. Likewise I can’t think that Harding’s failure to buy the CD containing details of MPs’ expenses, when offered it before the Daily Telegraph, would have done for him.

Journalists find it hard to confront the unpalatable truth that the present and the future cannot resemble the past. The reasons are economics and nothing to do with politics or proprietorial power. In a phase of rapid change driven by technology and money, a large part of an editor’s job now is to help to find a business model. The Times hasn’t got one.

In this, The Times is not alone: the Guardian searches for the same thing. When the Sunday Times made profits which covered the losses of The Times, the weak market position of the latter title didn’t matter much to a company making plenty of money from three of its (then) four papers. Around ten years ago, The Sunday Times stopped covering the losses of The Times. These financial agonies lie at the root of all that is happening.

The current “solution” appears to be to cut the costs of both titles by having them share more. The websites, separated at great cost and effort only four years ago, are to be merged again. If this goes beyond sharing a website and looks more like a merged, 7-day paper, two conditions at least need to be met. One editor has to go or be demoted. The government has to be persuaded to alter the undertaking given at the Times of the paper’s purchase that they would be kept separate.

Harding seems to have lost any battles he had been fighting on this front. Given the grief which News International have been happy to give David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt with the release of emails and texts to the Leveson Inquiry, the sympathy of the government can’t be taken for granted.

One last observation on merging papers: it’s more than a matter of logistics, “workflow” and desk geography. Newsrooms have distinct cultures and the staffs of The Times and the Sunday Times have been antagonistic for decades. I have known two periods when the respective editors were barely on speaking terms. If a union is the plan, this may not be a marriage made in heaven.

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This is a rapid gut and comment on the Leveson report executive summary released today. The complexity of his regulation-legislation solution seems to have masked the genuine severity of his audit of what some newspapers have been doing.

No report on the press would be complete without a quotation from Thomas Jefferson and Lord Justice Leveson obliges on page 4: “Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.” The next fifteen pages demonstrate exactly the opposite.

Leveson does not think much of the “culture” of the press (as his terms of reference called it). Indeed it seems unlikely that he would even think the word “culture” the appropriate one. He is outraged not just by bad behaviour but by what he seems to think was a lack of any moral sense: “There have been too many times when, chasing the story, parts of the press have acted as it its own code, which it wrote, simply did not exist.” Note the “which it wrote” dig at hypocrisy. (para 7)

He makes a nod to the fact that the press does hold its own powers to account, citing (para 10) both the Guardian’s investigation of the News of the World and the ITV and BBC Panorama’s investigation of Jimmy Savile. He acknowledges (para 18) that commercial changes have increased pressures on newspapers “to find different ways to add value” (without accepting this as an excuse for anything at all).

Leveson is particularly severe on the press’s failure to inquire into phone-hacking when it was first revealed in 2006. “…the press did nothing to investigate itself or to expose conduct which, if it had involved the Government, Parliament, any other national institution…, would have been the subject of the most intense spotlight that journalists could bring to bear on it.” (para 23) That hypocrisy theme again.

Phone-hacking was sufficiently widespread to justify a “reconsideration of the corporate governance surrounding the way in which newspapers operate.”. (para 31)

The fact that someone is a celebrity doesn’t licence any invasion of their privacy or that of their families. “Their families, including their children, are pursued and important personal moments are destroyed. Where there is a genuine public interets in what they are doing, that is one thing; too often, there is not.” (para 33)

What went wrong at the News of the World went wider: “a failure of systems of management and compliance.” And in the newsroom: “It was said that the News of the World had “lost its way” in relation to phone-hacking; its casual attitude to privacy and the lip service it paid to consent demonstrated a far more general loss of direction.” (para 36) I would translate this as Leveson’s message to Rupert Murdoch: please don’t tell me that phone-hacking was a surprising aberration or a one-off – it was wired into the culture.

Law and regulation

Leveson is also rough with the Press Complaints Commission: “proved itself to be aligned with the interests of the press”…”not monitored press compliance with the Code “…the statistics which it has published lack transparency.” (paras 44-6)

Leveson then proposes a new independent regulator, less open to influence by editors and publishers that would both promote high standards and run a fast arbitration system. Papers reluctant to either join or pay for this new body would face financial penalties in court cases. To “give effect the incentives I have outlined”, the new system would have to recognised and validated in a new law. If the industry fails “to rise to this challenge” then Ofcom, the broadcast and telecom regulator, would step in as a backstop.The summary I’ve read does not make clear who is going to judge whether the challenge has been met or how this decision will be made.

I’ve argued here more than once that it would be better to do this without legislation. But is fair to say that these proposals are probably the least worst version of “statutory underpinning”. Now the political battle begins.

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With Lord Leveson’s inquiry into the British press now due to report on November 29th, Press Gazette has kindly posted a version of an argument I made to the inquiry and wherever else I’ve been able to find an outlet for it since.

If Leveson proposes a new form of independent regulation for the press founded in statute (something which all previous versions of self-regulation have avoided), there will be an almighty fuss. But the proposal is liable to founder not because of the volume of complaint but because of the problems intrinsic to the plan: issues of definition, compulsion and funding.

There’s a better way. Use law as an incentive towards transparency and self-regulation. Strengthen and clarify privacy law, build strong and consistent public interest defences into laws which impact journalism and allow courts to take editorial integrity and standards into account when cases come to court. Within that framework, self-regulation would be worth doing and worth doing well.

That’s a bald summary. I saw an ad in the Daily Mail today from the Free Speech Network objecting to the possibility of the press being “shackled”, showing six newspaper front pages and asking if these stories would have appeared under “state regulation”. (The stories shown are the Mail’s front pages on the men alleged to have killed Stephen Lawrence, A Telegraph splash on MPs’ expenses, The Sun front page on Andrew Mitchell calling policemen “plebs”, a Times investigation on celebrity tax avoiders, the Daily Mirror on John Prescott’s affair with his secretary and a Guardian front page on phone-hacking.)

The Free Speech Network campaign suffers from overstatement and an inability to face the actual consequences of journalism’s mistakes and cruelties. Very few people, if any, would support any scheme which made such stories impossible. But I note in passing that under my proposal, all those stories would have run as originally published.

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I am a regular reader of Frederic Filloux’s weekly commentary on media, The Monday Note. I cannot recommend it too highly for its trenchant originality.

Triggered by a new wave of complaint about Google in Europe, today’s note looks at Google’s interest in legacy news media. Why, Filloux asks, has Google maintained Google News for so long when it makes no money and when news sites are so relatively insignificant as sources in Google’s gigantic search business?

He thinks that the answer lies in Google’s planned move from being a search engine to being a knowledge engine: the ability to deliver more sophisticated and useful answers than most of us can dream automated search can now deliver. At the heart of that effort is something called Knowledge Graph. And the key to that is the boring-but-important issue of the structure of data. News media connect bits of information to make it knowledge people may want and need.

As Filloux points out, pure-play web news sites are often better at this than the ones built by established mainstream media – despite the fact that the legacy media often hold richer, bigger databases. New media’s data is easier to find because what is stored is better labelled and can be made sense more easily.

Well out of public view, many sizeable news organisations have been struggling quietly with this issue. It holds a clue to a very large change in the basic shape of information media. Printed and broadcast media once produced an ephemeral product which was of passing, temporary interest while curiosity about the contents peaked. People made regular appointments to consume the output. That output was archived, but consulting that store of knowledge was slow and effortful (unless you worked for the news organisation itself and the library of past news was in the building).

Now, all that accumulated information is stacked where anyone online can search it. In effect, news media are shifting from being a rolling, moving sequence of bulletins to becoming mountains or encyclopaedias of data which are added to, little by little, all the time. The whole idea of news has changed as what used to be scarce – timely (mostly) accurate information – is in glut.

Sensing this, news outfits such as major papers have been trying to make their archives searchable, to tag their data and to package it better (example of the New York Times topic pages here). The software and the resources to do this really well have often proved elusive. In short, news media are trying to find out if they can move into the broader knowledge business. Filloux suggests that this may be harder than it looks.

Sound a bit nerdy? Yes. But how data is structured is a pivot of how we acquire and use information in the future.

Update 6/11/12: Malcom Coles, the digital director of Trinity Mirror, shot back at Filloux’s argument defending the ability of legacy media companies to compete in search-engine optimisation. His irritated rant seemed to miss the point that this isn’t just about SEO tricks but about the long-range importance of how organisations structure the data they hold. (Have a look at Trinity Mirror’s 5-year share price here).

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By what seems only to be coincidence, there has been a bundle of rich, informative writing about the India news media in the last month. It seemed a good idea to collect the links in one place – and they turn out to have a common theme.

Exhibit One is the James Cameron lecture by N. Ram, until recently editor of The Hindu. As befits his biography, Ram writes as a newspaperman but his magisterial survey does not neglect the astonishing growth of 24-hour news television in India. I have already posted about this lecture, so I’ll summarise brutally and say that Ram’s underlying message was: because Indian news media is a “growth story”, don’t assume that everything is fine.

Second item is a piece in the New Yorker (£) by long-time media analyst Ken Auletta on the Jain brothers who run Bennett & Coleman, the owners of the immensely successful Times of India. Auletta isn’t the first person to write about the changes which have occurred at the Times of India but he is the first writer to lay out with such clarity and force the truly revolutionary ideas which have altered the group’s papers.

I do not mean “revolutionary” in any romantic sense. The insight on which the Jain brothers based their changes at the Times of India and the Economic Times was simple but turned the world of those newspapers upside down. The idea is shocking to journalists like me, brought up on the assumption that newspapers have a democratic function beyond their existence as businesses. Not so, thought the Jains: we’re not in journalism, we’re selling advertising. And so the journalism was gradually but firmly subordinated to adjusting the newspapers to be platforms collecting readers whose attention could be sold to advertisers. This has been so successful and influential, that the group’s executive no longer feel and need to fudge or obscure what they have been doing.

Third was a piece by John Lloyd of the Reuters Institute in Oxford, which contrasts the extraordinary growth of magazines and news channels with the lack of depth and bite in the journalism. The Indian economy has boomed, but so has corruption. News outlets proliferate, celebrity interviewers grill politicians but the country’s problems are neglected. Lloyd quotes one of India’s most experienced journalist-publishers, T N Ninan, calling this the Indian media’s “Dickensian” era.

Lastly, a long backgrounder to these pieces focussed on the media. This News Statesman essay by William Dalrymple helps to explain the paradox of how this huge state can both be a rising economic power and dysfunctional at one and the same time.

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