News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising.
Reuven Frank, former head of NBC News, quoted in the Economist, 21 January 2006
Footnote: Bill Thompson points out that the quote was attributed many years ago to Lord Northcliffe, a famous British newspaper proprietor. And then, of course, there’s Evelyn Waugh’s definition in Scoop:
News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that, it’s dead.
As regular readers will recall, I’ve thought from the outset that David Cameron’s ascendancy spelled big trouble for New Labour if they continue with the plan of anointing Gordon Brown as Tony Blair’s successor. Last week’s catastrophic by-election defeat in Dunfermline has really underlined that. Andrew Rawnsley writes about the fallout in today’s Observer…
The difference on this occasion is that bad news for Blair is not good news for Brown. It has been repeatedly said that the byelection was in the Chancellor’s backyard. Actually, it is more like his living room. The Chancellor’s Scottish home is in the seat. If he ever has a problem which needs the attention of his constituency MP, he will now have to ring a Lib Dem to help sort it out. The Chancellor regards himself as the king of Scottish politics. His repeated interventions in the byelection were an investment of his personal political capital.
It is going too far to say that this was a referendum on Gordon Brown, but it has to be wounding. Worse, it raises the question that he most dreads: if he cannot secure a Labour victory in his native fiefdom, how attractive will Prime Minister Brown be to the rest of the United Kingdom? If he can’t woo them in Fife, what are his prospects of swinging it in southern England?
As I said, boredom is the problem. The British electorate has a longish attention span, but Labour are reaching the end of it. If they plump for Brown, they are doomed. Must see if I can put some money on this hunch.
This morning’s Observer column…
If Google, eBay and two leading venture-capital firms have put £12m into Fon, they must think it’s a viable proposition. Maybe it is, but there are some tiresome details to be sorted first. To take just one obvious problem, Fon aspires to operate over a wide range of legal jurisdictions, each of which has its own ideas about this stuff. As I understand British law, for example, it is legal for me to share my wireless bandwidth with a neighbour, but it would be illegal for me to charge him a fee for the service. And I don’t know what the fine print of the agreement with my ISP says about sharing the connection. My guess is that it prohibits it, and I’m sure most ISPs will take a similar view.
Truly, the road to world domination is paved with petty niggles. Besides, as one wag put it last week, if you can do it with Wi-Fi, why can’t we do it with bathrooms. I’m thinking of setting up Pee.com. Subscribers can use bathrooms all over the world. Slogan: never pay to use a public toilet again. Wonder if Google would invest?