From a piece I wrote for Comment is free.

The only thing that’s surprising about this [news that teenagers don’t use email] is that people are surprised by it. Most teenagers use technology to communicate with their friends and for that purpose email is, well, too formal. (Apart from anything else, because it’s an asynchronous medium, you don’t know whether someone has read your message.) So kids use synchronous messaging systems such as SMS and social networking tools that provide the required level of immediacy.

But the main reason young people don’t use email is that they haven’t yet joined the world of work. When (or if) they do, a nasty shock awaits them, because organisations are addicted to email. The average employee nowadays receives something like 100 email messages a day and coping with that deluge has become one of the challenges of a working life.

Organisational addiction to email has long since passed the point of dysfunctionality and now borders on the pathological, with employees sending messages to colleagues in nearby cubicles, people covering their backs by cc-ing everyone else and managers carpet-bombing subordinates with attachments. The real problem, in other words, is not that email is dying but that it’s out of control.

Steve Hewlett has a perceptive pieceabout the Leveson inquiry in today’s Guardian.

Leaving aside questions about tabloid techniques and intrusion – which are plainly serious enough in their own right – so much of what we heard last week had rather more to do with fiction than fact. The picture that emerges is of legions of tabloid foot soldiers – reporters, paparazzi and private detectives – prepared to do almost anything to get the “story”. In other words, to gather material to illustrate and support something the desk – the editors back at base – had already decided is true.

Again, there won’t be anyone who has ever worked in journalism who won’t instinctively understand this phenomenon – which, incidentally, is far from being restricted to the tabloids or even to newspapers.

For the working journalist, the world is full of editors and proprietors (not to mention channel controllers and commissioning editors) prepared to settle for nothing less than proof of the correctness of what they thought all along. Journalists also know that the price of failure to deliver what the boss demands can be very high indeed.

Spot on. Which explains why calls for ‘ethical’ standards in British journalism are doomed to fail. Such calls assume that journalism in Britain is a profession (with all that implies in terms of professional standards, etc.) It’s not a profession at all — just a trade grafted onto a ruthlessly competitive industry. In a way the miracle is not that UK tabloid standards are so low, but that the country still has some good journalists who still have some ethical standards.

From a Guardian interview with Umberto Eco:

It is claimed that he called the film of The Name of the Rose a travesty, but that seems unlikely. He says only that a film cannot do everything a book can. “A book like this is a club sandwich, with turkey, salami, tomato, cheese, lettuce. And the movie is obliged to choose only the lettuce or the cheese, eliminating everything else – the theological side, the political side. It’s a nice movie. I was told that a girl entered a bookstore and seeing the books said: ‘Oh, they have already made a book out of it.'” More laughter.