I reproduce without much need for comment a short exchange which occurred in the evidence given yesterday by Adam Boulton, political editor of Sky News, to the Leveson Inquiry. Other things which Boulton said may have generated more headline attention, but his clear-headed analysis here is more useful than hundreds of other such dialogues in explaining (while not excusing) the events which gave rise to the Inquiry in the first place. The questions were being put by one of the Inquiry counsel, David Barr, who starts by referrring to Boulton’s evidence statement.

Q. Moving to the fourth point: “Rather than just report news, even if sensational or controversial, the new technique is commentary on the news being as, if not more, important than the news itself.” I think that runs into an allegation that there’s been a confusion of news and comment. Do you think there’s been a lack of attention paid by the print media to separating news from comment sufficiently?

A. I think there has been an inevitable process whereby, because primary information has been conveyed electronically, print media have been forced, to a certain extent, into a secondary market of comment and disclosure. For example, when there were regular Prime Ministerial monthly news conferences, they were things that television, both rolling news and news bulletins, used quite extensively. They were largely overlooked by many of the newspapers because they felt that that material had already been on the record elsewhere. Therefore I think there was a natural tendency to look for secondary matters or controversy, but I — you know, I think that’s a product of what I believe you’re calling the elephant in the room, the competitive pressures which are threatening the viability of the print media.

LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: That’s presumably got worse, not merely because of the Internet, the elephant in the room, but also as, for example, government departments put more material out electronically themselves.

A. Exactly.

LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: It’s all very well handing out a press release to the journalists in the room, but if they can press a button and send it to every journalist in the country, then you need something different. I’d not really thought about it.

A. The point is they don’t even send it to every journalist in the country; they send it to every member of the public.

LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Yes.

A. So if you like, the traditional way that a lot of people started out in the print media of sort of rewriting press releases and making a phone call, you can’t do that any more because it’s already out there.

LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: So it’s critical that the press look for some other way of adding value to the story.

A. Exactly, yes. And that — I think in some areas, perhaps some pertinent to this Inquiry, that’s led to a degree of desperation in the pursuit of getting something different.

LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: That’s interesting.

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Teachers (and I’m one) have a habit, which understandably annoys many people who wrestle with practical problems, of posing questions to which they don’t have an answer. When I’m in this mood with an audience or class, I tend to put a questions about bundles.

Newspapers, many news websites, magazines, radio and television programmes are bundles of stuff. While this may be justified as making content more attractive and useful (variety, serendipitous discovery of the unexpected), bundles are really made by economic imperatives. A mixture of news and features collects together enough attractions to persuade someone to buy a newspaper; the newspaper sells the attention thus secured to advertisers who buy space alongside the content. In theory, the bundle’s total income exceeds its outgoings in a web of cross-subsidy. Magazines and commercial broadcast channels operate variants on this model.

But what happens, my irritating question goes, if an irresistible force blows the bundle apart? What happens if the readers or audience sees no logic in consuming journalism packaged in bundles? Social media, search engines and the internet don’t naturally see things in bundles. Bundles are by definition ambiguous compromises. Web search abhors ambiguity.

For a year or two, this uncomfortable thought has been pushed aside by more immediate, and slightly more palatable, issues. Can newspaper paywalls be made to work? (Has the New York Times discovered the secret sauce/holy grail/formula for eternal life?) Is the iPad the answer to struggling publishers’ prayers? But underlying fundamentals have a way of coming back to the surface.

As I say, I don’t have the answer. But of this I am sure: news publishers who don’t stare hard at this most important dilemma and experiment with answers are the ones most likely to fail. In this spirit, have a look at three posts which deal with this in unusually fresh terms.

1. For a few years past, Google has been treating the news business with conspicuous gentleness. Top Googlies have toured future-of-journalism events to reassure everyone present that they take the importance of journalism seriously. In the past three weeks, Google’s head of news Richard Gingras, has hardened that stance by unleashing a volley of sceptical warnings – not about journalism as such, but about newspapers. Not least, Gingras took aim at publishers who were distracting themselves from the real issues of survival by imagining that the iPad is just another form of magazine publishing. Good summary here.
2. A week or two ago, I was having an exchange with Steve Buttry about what, in a an age when the tools of journalism are available to most, journalists are actually for. Here’s an entirely different take from a digital native, Stijn Debrouwere, who works in newspapers and who’s been wondering the same thing. He thinks the large area activity covered by the term “journalism” is being nibbled away by an increasingly large and hungry crowd of competitors.
3. The admirable Matthew Ingram of Gigaom (see 1 above) both discusses this and gives plenty of useful links. Journalism may be dying “by a thousand cuts” but points out that “readers aren’t interested in debates about the nature of journalism.”

One last thought. I wrote just now that bundles of news were put together by economics. But bundles are also held together by trust: readers repose trust in the organisation which produces the bundle and trusts the varied output from it. The logic of search engines is to “disambiguate” (and to invent ugly new words). But trust isn’t easily disambiguated. If material is split into fragments, what happens to the trust?

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I’ve been asking and trying to answer this question for some time, since it’s most basic and existential one posed by digital technology which puts the power to publish in the hands of anyone with a smartphone. If journalists can’t answer it, they’re unlikely to find their way out of the troubles generated by the disruption of their business models.

So I perked up when this question was put by Steve Buttry, who works for John Paton’s Digital First company. And I like the image of gatekeepers made redundant by the fact that the fence has been blown away.

Steve has a list of purposes. Journalists are storytellers, watchdogs, fact-checkers, aggregators or curators and they investigate. When I tried answering this question, my list (extended version of the argument here) had four items and overlaps with Steve’s. Distilling down, this is what journalists do:

• Verification
• Sense-making (analysis, interpretation, opinion)
• Eye-witness (still crucial in less open and accountable societies)
• Investigation

All those four activities can be done better by people with experience, practice and skill. And that remains true in a digital era.

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Towards the end of next month, the Leveson Inquiry into the British press will turn from its current, revelatory phase about media relationships with politicians and address again the knotty question of regulating journalism.

The inquiry’s most basic dilemma hasn’t changed: how to prevent and discourage the wrongs which have occurred without tipping over into state control of the news media. When he has grown bored and irritated with an editor waffling vaguely about how things will be improved by a few light adjustments to the present rules, Lord Leveson usually asks one of two questions and sometimes both: what would you actually do? will what you suggest command public confidence? Next month will bring forth a slew of ideas for regulation designed to work better than the much-abused self-regulation of the past. Legal and media experts are busy putting the finishing touches to better mousetraps.

The problems of “toughening” regulation are much greater than supposed, as I’ve argued here (£). Not least because regulation deals with sorting out things that have already gone wrong. What the Leveson Inquiry should also be concentrating on is how to encourage, in the culture of newsrooms, good practice which lowers the odds that bad things will be done. It should also look at whether the issue of regulation isn’t as much a question of legal process as much as one of regulatory machinery. That is to say that contributory factor in the accumulation of problems and resentment has been the cost and delay of taking legal action over libel or invasion of privacy. In this article I suggest that there is a way to interlock the rules of both law and a regulator to create a powerful incentive for journalism to rely less on tricks and illegalities.

If journalists were offered fuller and more consistent public interest defences in both criminal and civil law, those defences could be made available only to news publishers or broadcasters who could demonstrate transparent and enforceable editorial integrity and standards. With that incentive, websites and papers (broadcasters are separately regulated) would need to organise regulation among themselves which would show that they deserved the protection of a public interest defence. Trivial, sloppy or bad journalism which can’t claim a public interest justification gets no protection; better journalism at least has that line of defence available. That strikes me as the best way round the knotty dilemma: incentives not state-backed regulation.

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I listened to a briefing recently by a senior person at BBC News. I heard it on background, so I can’t name the individual but you can take it that this person knows a lot about a newsgathering operation which employs, worldwide, 6000 people. The world’s largest, so far. A few snippets:

• Chinese state broadcasting is set to become the world’s biggest newsgatherer. We don’t know when. In parts of Africa, people don’t see the Chinese as having any agenda or slant. The BBC is sometimes seen as having a post-colonial British agenda.
• In Britain, approval of the BBC diminishes the further you go from London.
• The BBC cuts programme is known as “Delivering Quality First” or “DQF”. In the newsroom this is rendered as “Duck Quick or you’re F*****.”
• We may be cutting back on two on-screen presenters on the news channel but we’re re-appointing political reporters at local radio stations. In local politics coverage, papers are “nowhere”.
• The first five bi-lingual (i.e. not English mother tongue) correspondents reporting across the network are just about to start work.
• The audience is pretty bored with the primary campaign in the US presidential. We kid ourselves about the level of interest. The Radio 4 audience is actually pretty hostile to the US.
• We have a dilemma about local coverage: the BBC Trust stopped plans to do that. We’re not in a good place.
• When the Leveson Inquiry began, the BBC began its own internal investigation. Pretty uncomfortable having your own records gone through. As far as I know, the Daily Mirror haven’t yet done their own inquiry.

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Johnston Press’s new boss Ashley Highfield set off a row which will erupt again and again in the coming years when he announced that the company is turning some its daily local papers into weeklies. Local papers are so long-standing and (mostly) loved that we find clear thinking very hard.

There is no general, worldwide “crisis” of journalism or even of newspapers. Newspapers are declining in North America and Europe but not in South America; they’re doing fine in Asia (numbers here). There are countries where journalists are badly treated and physically under threat, but that’s not new. The convulsions of the phone-hacking scandal are so far confined to Britain.

There is a crisis affecting journalism in the US and Europe, but it is worth being clear-eyed about exactly what it is. It is the ruin of the business model for printed daily papers in which news is cross-subsidised by advertising income which is leveraged on circulation numbers. That way of doing things is in trouble. That decline in circulation and income is a deep, long trend.

The lines on the graphs have been drifting down for years. As one of the analysts at the Enders consultancy pointed out (£) in the wake of Johnston Press cutbacks, the circulations of local papers have been going down for 40 years: this is nothing surprising or new. A graph of the total aggregate circulations of all British national papers across the whole of the 20th century shows that the combined sales peak for all of those papers was in the 1940s (see slide 5 here). The internet may have made the headaches of newspaper publishers much worse, but the rot started well before the web was ever thought of. Finding a new way of financing news matters even more than phone-hacking and the Leveson Inquiry.

One of the most basic foundation ideas of the newspaper was its separation from the state. Free news media choose to live out in the cold of open economies. When the society, economy or technology changes, the media must change. Digital communications alters all three and turns a lot upside down. Information doesn’t require capital to move; news no longer goes one-to-many but one-to-one; printing isn’t required. And so on. The history of news reveals endless experimentation amid chaos and fast-changing conditions. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that news media in Europe and America enjoyed a stable, institutionalised era which gave journalists the impression that secure employment in large organisations was the norm. Historically, it isn’t.

There was a piece last weekend in the Sunday Times magazine (£) which captured the paradox of much gloomy pessimism about newspapers sitting side by side with experimentation. The paper’s writer Tim Rayment assembled many grim statistics recording the falls in circulation, jobs and reach. To illustrate the problems he had gone back to Cleethorpes, the north-eastern town in which he had been a cub reporter. The local paper was having a tough time, to be sure. But Cleethorpes has a new fledgling weekly paper challenging the incumbent and a local news blogger, who annoys and provokes the powers that be in the town. So the risk of decline was there – but so were the seeds of future change. Something is lost in the transition chaos. But new energy is released as well.

Update 23.4.12: (lengthy) defence of the value of local papers via a survey of what the major British owners are up to by the knowledgeable Liz Gerard and interview with me about pressures on local papers on BBC Radio 4′s Broadcasting House yesterday (item starts 32 minutes in).

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The international affairs scholar Walter Laqueur (left) has been asking himself why so many commentators – who might in his view have known better – were proved wrong in assuming that the Egyptian revolutionaries of Tahrir Square would usher in age in Arab countries of democratic tolerance and European rights. Whether or not you accept his view of Egypt, his speculation about why these mistake are made has something interesting to say about crowdsourcing and collective judgement.

Laqueur begins by going back to another glaring example of over-optimism (which happens to have long fascinated me): inflating the prospects for the integration of Europe and the imminent triumph of the continent’s superior economic and social model. He gives a few examples of overblown hyperbole about how the 21st century would be Europe’s era and asks why the evidence that this might not happen was so often overlooked. This resonated with me since I’ve had experience in the past of trying to persuade American audiences that uniting Europe might not turn out to be as straightforward as many politicians in Europe claimed. I can still remember lecturing at a college in Vermont in 1989 (just weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall as it happened) and telling a sceptical-looking audience that the unification of Europe wasn’t going to be like assembling the united states in America. My audience looked very grumpy and disappointed.

Then Laqueur looks at rosy-eyed predictions about what future elections would bring in Egypt, noting that very few journalists reporting the revolution in Egypt went beyond Cairo (and some never beyond Tahrir Square). A trip outside the capital might have revealed that support for a secular revolution was very limited and that while there might be competition between different variations of Islamic politics, the new Egypt was going not going to be secular and more “western”. The odds, he says, were stacked against a tolerant, plural, secular outcome from the start.

I’m less interested in whether Laqueur’s Egyptian pessimism is correct than in the conclusions he draws about punditry:

“Classical decision theory (that people usually react rationally) seems often to lose out to desirability bias in our thinking about foreign affairs. In the case of Europe, it has meant underrating the power of nationalism and exaggerating the willingness to surrender sovereign rights as well as the general feeling of listlessness that has affected the continent. In the case of developments in the Arab world, it has meant mistaking the dissatisfaction with the status quo for an overwhelming embrace of the universalism of liberty and democracy—as Western observers interpreted the events they witnessed and ignored the strength of the Islamists and of nationalism itself.”

The instinct to be part of a crowd also clouds the judgement: writers think that it is “better to be mistaken in the right company than be prematurely right in the wrong company.”

Crowdsourcing new facts has been shown to be very effective, providing what’s pooled can be properly verified. But crowdsourcing judgements can easily be herd behaviour. A journalist in a crowd should always ask: do I really belong here?

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A headline sparked off by the annual Pew report on the state of news media caught my eye. “Tech companies control the future of news“, said a Forbes blogger John Dube.

This is the kind of headline which is designed to frighten people. Just think, the headline implies: nerds, geeks and new media tycoons messing with news which was once lovingly prepared by noble journalists who have lost control of their business. The news industry, the Pew report says, “finds itself more a follower than leader shaping its business.”

But technology always has shaped news media and journalism and always did. The two are so closely intertwined that it couldn’t be otherwise. If journalists were not so distracted by the distress of watching the business model for printed news crumble before their eyes, they’d remember that technology and the people who make money from innovations often shape, make and lead developments in journalism.

The newspapers which dominated news for at least a century – face it, a pretty good run – took their present form around the middle of the nineteenth century. These developments didn’t depend on somebody having a blueprint for serious daily journalism. They were evolutions driven by the arrival of better newsprint, fast rotary presses and, last of all, “linotype” typesetting machines. Then journalists set about exploiting these new possibilities as best they could. Many editors of local papers were technologists – or, as they said in those days, master printers.

A computer scientist once described “technology” as a term for stuff which didn’t quite work yet. As communication hardware and software evolve in the next few years, two things will happen. Fortunes will be made and some of that money – we should hope – may be invested in the production of good journalism. Secondly, journalists will discover new ways of adding value along new pathways laid by innovators. These things have happened before.

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From time to time the authorities intent on locking up journalists have second thoughts and we should mark it when they do. So it was this week when a Turkish court released Nedim Sener and three other journalists arrested in the Oda TV case connected to the (allegedly enormous) “Ergenekon” conspiracy.

Sener and several colleagues had been held for a year and had been the focus of a noisy international campaign, led outside Turkey by the International Press Institute. It’s easy for organisations like IPI to believe that while it may be their duty to protest and lobby when journalists are put in the slammer because of the opinions they hold, the results of such campaigns tend all the same to be meagre. So celebrations are in order when it seems to work. Sener was arrested a year ago this month, named a Press Freedom Hero by IPI in June 2010 and released nine months later. You can’t prove the causal connection, but….

It certainly seems to have made a difference to Sener’s time in jail. IPI director Alison Bethel Mackenzie said yesterday that Sener and his wife “today mentioned over and over and over again the impact of the letters that poured in from all over the world from IPI members and supporters, as well as the letters that were sent on behalf of the IPI board of directors and, separately, from the World Press Freedom Heroes. He also said that he had heard that board members sent letters to Turkish embassies in their home countries. He was very moved by that.”

The Ergenekon conspiracy trials are likely to run for years. Sener and three others are due back in court in June; six more defendants, mostly journalists, are still in custody (a taste of the arguments generated here) . Hundreds of people have been arrested for what is routinely described as a “conspiracy” to bring down the governing Justice and Development (AK) party led by prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. I am not an expert on Turkey and no doubt there are no doubt parts of this complex story that I’m liable to misunderstand. But when I see a government arresting hundreds of people and constantly enlarging the scope of what cannot possibly have been any kind of efficient “conspiracy” – simply because the numbers claimed are so large – a warning light goes off in my head. Isn’t the alleged existence of this vast, all-connected conspiracy a bit too convenient to be plausible? (It predates Sener’s arrest and centres on the murder of Sener’s friend Hrant Dink, but there’s an excellent essay by British Turkey expert Maureen Freely on the complex politics of journalism and free expression in the country’s “embattled half-democracy”.)

Writing from Britain, where six more people were arrested this morning by police investigating phone interception, corruption and computer hacking, I can hardly pretend that journalists never commit crimes. But we think better of governments and laws which are reluctant to to lock them up before any charge is proved. Because otherwise one is tempted to think that the government may be hoping to stifle not criminals but critics. There are around a hundred Turkish journalists in prison. Is it really likely that they have all committed offences which any society would consider criminal? No, I don’t think so either.

(Declaration: I’m a member of the IPI board).

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Occasionally, you are woken up by a collection of facts which you ought to have known but which reveal that you’ve been asleep. So it was this week when I dropped into a seminar on the transparency of the British court system.

Justice isn’t as open and visible as we might think. In fact the extent to which we don’t know what is happening in courts – particularly magistrates courts – up and down the country is shocking. The reason that this has got as bad as it has isn’t exactly down to the secretiveness or obstruction of the people who run the courts, although they aren’t going to win any awards for openess any time soon.

The problem lies in the decline of local papers. Some local papers have closed and any websites trying to replace them are not likely to have the resources to report courts day in, day out. But most local papers have survived by endlessly slimming down their newsrooms and the amount of news they print.

In the early 1970s, when I worked as a local reporter in the city of York, the evening paper there sent one (and often two) reporters to the magistrates court every working day to the end of the session. I remember writing up, sometimes in a single paragraph for the dullest, every case that was heard. Most of this material, parochial as it can seem, made it into the paper. That paper, the Evening Press, carried enough news every day for it truly to claim that it was the “paper of record” for that city of around 100,000 people.

There may be some papers still filling that role. But the hollowing out of the strength of most regional papers means that courts aren’t being reported; justice isn’t being seen to be done. A series of speakers stood up at this week’s seminar to point out that this bad situation is made worse by the refusal of the authorities to make obvious moves which would alleviate the lack of coverage, such as posting basic information about cases online.

A couple of people are trying to gather more information and trying to do something about this. One of them is the King’s Cross activist and blogger Will Perrin, whose observations and Transparency Charter are here.

Update 2/3/12: City University grad student Jamie Thunder tells me the cheering news that the Evening Press in York still has a reporter specialising in reporting local courts.

Update 6/3/12: Excellent summary of the issue here by Meeja Law blogger Judith Townend. Audio and slides from the talks here, including a link to Adam Wagner’s human rights law blog which makes the connection to the new row over government proposals for secret trials.

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Buried on page 11 of this week’s Spectator was eloquent evidence of a slow but inexorable shift with large consequences: the transfer of power and influence from printed newspapers to digital publishing.

Oh that, you may say. Old news. Isn’t that already blindingly obvious? Doesn’t this blog go on about just that all the time?

Yes, but that doesn’t mean that everyone sees it. Big, slow changes are hard to trace and measure when you’re living in the middle of them. And newspapers still have a central role, clout and readers. But have a look at Charles Moore’s short note about the importance of Conservative Home and its owner, the Tory peer Michael Ashcroft. Moore describes Ashcroft as on his way to being “the Beaverbrook of the internet age.”

I pick this example of because it is hard to imagine a magazine less likely to fall for hype based on a techno-fad than the Spectator. The same applies to Moore, who as a political commentator is interested in power and its use. What he is observing here is a redistribution of political influence caused by the technological revolution of the last fifteen years. Old powers will wane; new ones will use the opportunities to rise. Digital is transformative and not adaptive change.

The internet’s first effect on news publishing was proliferation and fragmentation, a massive acceleration of the multiplication of channels which had begun with the growth of radio, cable and satellite television. Millions of blogs, living or dying on peer-to-peer networks. The second effect reverses the first: peoples’ choices, regulation and mergers and acquisitions consolidate the new market into larger and lesser players. Ashcroft’s rise as a player in the digital publishing market is one signal of this second phase.

Incidentally, if you want a clear, witty and accessible introduction to this history and the dilemmas it poses, read “From Gutenberg To Zuckerberg: What You Really Need To Know About the Internet” by John Naughton. I can’t recommend it too highly.

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I drew attention a week or two back to the unsavoury campaign of intimidation being waged by President Rafael Correa of Ecuador against journalists whose reporting and opinions he doesn’t like.

As a president with five years in post after his three predecessors were ejected without a voter ever being consulted, Correa has some success to his credit. But it seems to be going to his head. He has just won court judgements which fine two journalists a million dollars each for insulting the dignity of both the presidency and the country. The case details are laid out here. One of the journalists, Juan Carlos Calderón, described the judgement as “disproportionate, absurd and irrational”.

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I drew attention yesterday to two changes of editors, one in India and one in Hong Kong, which I thought important. One conclusion I drew was almost certainly wrong.

In the case of the new editor of the South China Morning Post, I thought that the tone of the commentary I read on Wang Xiangwei was overwrought. It seemed to be assumed that because he was born on the mainland, he would be the creature of the regime in Beijing. But I was writing from superficial knowledge and I sent a link to a journalist friend in Hong Kong. He rapidly corrected my opinion. He is pessimistic about what will now happen, even if the state’s influence over the paper takes the form of a slow squeeze rather than any sudden stifling.

My friend wrote:

“I think you underestimate the ruthlessness and determination of the Communist Party and its United Front Department to influence and manipulate the media in HK. It is not using the Propaganda Department and (powers of) confiscation as it does in the mainland, but the ‘capitalist’ means, like takeovers, mergers, pressure and lobbying.

“Mr Wang is a Jilin provincial delegate of the CCPPC and almost certainly a member of the Communist Party. During his years at the Post, he has got rid of staff – foreign, HK or mainlander – who challenged him and wrote stories that do not conform to his views of news. Do you expect him to have the objectivity and open-mindedness we wish from such an editor? Many Chinese believe that the Communists have no right to rule China. It is views like this that must at all costs be
kept out of the paper.

“The CEO of the SCMP is Sally Kuok, the daughter of Robert Kuok. She is well educated but knows little of HK, China, journalism or the East Asian economy. Those who work for her says that she cannot tolerate the slightest challenge, like many children of the very rich. Her father and his companies have enormous business interests in the mainland. He is like many tycoons in HK who put these interests ahead of what we could consider freedom of reporting.

“As I understand it, the dynamics work like this. Miss Kuok, who has never lived in the mainland and understands very little about it, meets officials of the Chinese government here and in China. She is ill at ease and not sure what to say. Mr Wang Xiangwei is with her; he says to her (in English) that he understands how to deal with the officials. The officials are charming to them both and praise Mr Wang. She thinks: ‘with him in charge, my heart is at ease. The paper will not upset anyone in Beijing and the business interests of all the Kuok empire will be protected. Mr Wang knows what is allowed and what is not allowed.’

“Despite having lived in HK on and off for many years, Mr Wang does not speak Cantonese. His instincts are not those of a HK editor. One day recently, all the HK Chinese-language papers led with a tape on the Net of a Beijing University professor calling HK people ‘dogs’. Many HK people call mainlanders who come here ‘locusts’ because they buy properties and occupy maternity beds that should go to local mothers. That day the SCMP did not have this as its lead story. A HK editor would never have made that mistake.”

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I normally rely on Twitter to keep me up to date on developments in journalism round the world but, reliable as this normally is as a quick check on what’s happening, I missed two watershed moments in the east. One retirement and one appointment.

N.Ram

The retirement was of the editor of The Hindu who had always styled himself N. Ram. Narasimhan Ram is 67, so his retirement was hardly a surprise. But he has been so closely identified with The Hindu’s stubborn qualities for so long that it would be natural if readers worried about the future direction of the paper. Dubious as I am about much of its political philosophy (Ram, like many of his generation, flirted with communism when young), The Hindu stands out as a newspaper which cares about quality. I was in India last year when the newspaper began publishing the American diplomatic cables passed to Wikileaks. I can’t share Ram’s reverential attitude to Julian Assange, but his paper’s handling of the Wikileaks material was exemplary both for its journalistic care and political impact. Those disclosures still reverberate in Delhi today.

But The Hindu’s business is under pressure: while India is one of the largest countries in the world where newspaper circulations are still rising, those are not the circulations of the English-language titles but of the Indian-language papers. Business pressures have been part of the complex intrigue which has been played out at the group’s headquarters in Chennai (for a flavour of the passions aroused see here and here). I can’t pretend to explain the ins and outs of this internecine family/corporate struggle. So I hope that Ram has handed over to successors who will preserve his legacy. The Hindu is an important benchmark of what Indian journalists can achieve in print.

Further east, another famous English-language paper has appointed a new editor. The new editor of the South China Morning Post, Wang Xiangwei, is the first mainlander to hold the job. The blogs are alive with speculation that this appointment marks the moment that the Chinese authorities have got this once-respected paper under control. Apple Daily, Hong Kong’s independent Chinese tabloid, said that the SCMP had “gone red”.

That’s possible, and there will be no shortage of armchair critics (many of them journalists who have left the SCMP) waiting to examine with a microscope every editorial move the new editor makes. But judgements about journalistic “independence” can’t be made in China as they might be about papers in Chennai or the Czech Republic. Editors in the People’s Republic navigate and negotiate in a unmarked grey zone which lies between “black” (absolutely forbidden to mention: Tiananmen Square massacre, corruption at the top) and “white” (safely uncontroversial). And one of the SCMP’s missions has always been to explain what is happening in Beijing to Hong Kong. Who’s to say that a mainlander is going to be easier to outmanoeuvre or intimidate than someone from Hong Kong?

Wang Xiangwei has been on the SCMP for a long time. At least some people who have worked with him think he’s serious and smart. A newspaper which has had ten editors in the last eleven years might need someone like that. The test is what the new editor does, not where he was born.

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Rupert Murdoch rarely says or does anything which doesn’t cause dismay somewhere. So it has been with his appearance on Twitter.

The octogenarian’s pithy provocations, unmediated by spin-doctors, have been enough to start yet more worries about the future of journalism. People were apparently in all seriousness sitting around at a seminar in the Columbia Journalism School considering the question of “sources” who “go direct” (to the audience, that is). The language itself is unintentionally revealing: how dare these people cut out the middleman and communicate directly with people? The seminar anxiously wondered if this would be “good for journalism”.

That will depend on how well journalists adapt to a transformative change. On the evidence of that discussion at Columbia, it’s going to end in tears in America. Digital communications allow people to publish to people; the oligarchic power of news publishers and broadcasters holding the technology, capital and licences has begun to dissolve. The value added by people calling themselves journalists changes and evolves every time something big changes in the way we can communicate.

In the beginning, “news” was about getting some basic information quickly to people who wanted to know it. There wasn’t much of it. As the supply increased, the value became making it reliable. Nowadays, with what was once in short supply being in glut, the value lies in extracting useful sense from the rush of data coming past you. For my money, journalists can now add value in four areas: verifying stuff, making sense of it, being eye-witnesses and in the specialist art of investigative reporting (this argument laid out more fully here).

We already knew this. This is like Groundhog Day for the future of journalism debate. Of course, “sources going direct” changes things, likely for the better. Do try to keep up.

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