That missing column

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Readers of Roy Greenslade’s blog will have seen that he’s been wondering why Stephen Glover’s column about the decline of the Daily Telegraph was mysteriously pulled from the Independent.

However, Roy helpfully provides a link to the Google cached version, which reads in part:

With so much happening and going wrong, it may seem perverse to dwell on one subject: The Daily Telegraph. I do not apologise. It is no exaggeration to say that what is happening to that paper is a national tragedy. Yet I do not hear questions in Parliament. The leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition does not seem alarmed. The rest of the media, naturally concerned with their own difficulties, seems hardly to notice as this great national institution is being transformed and eviscerated under our very eyes.

I admit I am biased. The Daily Telegraph was the first newspaper I worked for, and it will always have a special place in my heart. It was the paper of the “small c” conservative classes. Of course it changed over the years, as the country changed, but never precipitately. Its circulation fell a little from its 1970s heyday, but unlike some other titles, it was not locked in some apparently irresistible cycle of decline. Then, in 2004, Sir Frederick and Sir David Barclay bought it as Conrad Black, its previous proprietor – and, in my estimation, a pretty good one – was led off first to court, and then to an American jail.

The Barclay brothers love and revere the Daily Mail. And why not? Even its more knowledgeable critics generally concede that it is the most brilliant paper in Britain. But if there is one Mail, why do we need two – especially as the Telegraph lacks the resources, know-how and inspiration to emulate it? Nonetheless, the Barclays – brilliant businessmen, no doubt, though inexperienced publishers – would not be gainsaid. They recruited a chief executive, Murdoch MacLennan, from the Mail group, where he was an expert on presses. In due course, he hired a gaggle of Mail executives, not all of whom, it should be said, were from the paper’s top drawer.

Since then, we have had purge after purge. The Daily Telegraph and its Sunday sister are in a state of permanent revolution. Dozens of the two paper’s best writers and executives have been pushed out. In the last few weeks, A N Wilson, Craig Brown, Joshua Rozenberg, Sam Leith and Andrew McKie have been sent packing. They were not bit-part players. They were the lifeblood of the paper. Slice by slice, the old Telegraph has been dismembered, and what is being put in its place increasingly resembles a weak imitation of the Daily Mail, which, by the way, has picked up several of the Telegraph’s best writers.

The first rule of newspaper ownership and editing is not to discomfort your core readers. Reach out for new ones, of course, but do not forget those who have loyally stuck by the newspaper. The Daily Telegraph’s readers have not been so much discomfited as shaken about like dice. I am sure that the newspaper’s editor, Will Lewis, is highly gifted, but he would scarcely recognise a habitual Telegraph reader if he bumped into one in full daylight. The newspaper’s much-trumpeted digital activities are all well and good, but they are ancillary to what should be the main point: giving traditional Telegraph readers what they expect and want.

The big mystery, of course, is why the Indie would censor a columnist just for going after a rival paper. Roy thinks there’s a bigger story here and he may well be right. But there’s a slightly dated air about it. In the old pre-Web days of media barons and press power this kind of intrigue was a big deal. But now? I don’t think so. As an ageing print hack, I’m interested in this kind of nonsense. But nobody under 30 gives a damn. Nor should they. That world is dying. People are more interested in whether Steve Jobs is terminally ill than in the spectacle of media moguls fighting like cats in a sack.

US adults and social networking

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A new report from Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project on ‘Adults and Social Network Websites’ looks at how adults use sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. Among the main findings of the report:

  • The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to the Pew Project’s December 2008 tracking survey.
  • While media coverage and policy attention focus heavily on how children and young adults use social network sites, adults still make up the bulk of the users of these websites. Adults make up a larger portion of the US population than teens, which is why the 35% number represents a larger number of users than the 65% of online teens who also use online social networks.
  • Still, younger online adults are much more likely than their older counterparts to use social networks, with 75% of adults 18-24 using these networks, compared to just 7% of adults 65 and older. At its core, use of online social networks is still a phenomenon of the young.
  • Overall, personal use of social networks seems to be more prevalent than professional use of networks, both in the orientation of the networks that adults choose to use as well as the reasons they give for using the applications. Most adults, like teens, are using online social networks to connect with people they already know.
  • When users do use social networks for professional and personal reasons, they will often maintain multiple profiles, generally on different sites.
  • Most, but not all adult social network users are privacy conscious; 60% of adult social network users restrict access to their profiles so that only their friends can see it, and 58% of adult social network users restrict access to certain content within their profile.

    • Praise be!

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    Pardon me while I bask. In an interview with David Hochfelder in 1999 for the IEE History Center*, Paul Baran — the man who first came up with the idea of a packet-switched communications network which led to the ARPANET and, later, the Internet — listed my book as one of the “four best books on the history of the ARPANET and the Internet”. (For the record, the others are: Arthur L Norberg and Judy E. O’Neill, Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986, John Hopkins Press, 1996; George Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines: the Evolution of Global Intelligence, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. 1997; and Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet, MIT Press. 1999.)

    *Paul Baran, Electrical Engineer, an oral history conducted in 1999 by David Hochfelder,
    IEEE History Center, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.

    Thanks to Johnny Ryan for pointing it out.

    Obama’s Wheels

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    Eat your hearts out, petrolheads! Inside story here.

    According to Gizmodo, Obama’s Cadillac has several high tech features, including

    • It can withstand rocket impacts and it’s perfectly sealed against biochemical attacks.

    • Petrol tank: Can withstand a direct hit thanks to a special foam and armor-plating.

    • Bodywork: made of dual hardness steel, aluminum, titanium, and ceramics to “break up posible projectiles”.

    • Tyres: Kevlar-reinforced with steel rims underneath so it can run away no matter what.

    • Accessories include: Night vision cameras, pump-action shotguns, tear gas cannons.

    • Comes with bottles of blood compatible with the President’s blood.

    Helpful cutaway diagram here.

    Eight miles per gallon, since you ask. No data on emissions from 6.5 litre diesel engine. Top speed 60mph. Zero to 60 in, er, 15 seconds. This is one the Top Gear headbangers won’t be reviewing.

    The ‘first Facebook arrest’?

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    From The Register.

    A failed safe-cracker has been cuffed after New Zealand police posted CCTV images of an attempted burglary on Facebook.

    CCTV cameras captured the hour-plus attempts of a man who attempted to prise open a safe at the Frankton Arms Tavern in the early hours of Monday morning. The man broke in through the ceiling of the bar before dismally failing to smash open the safe using only an angle grinder and a crowbar. It was hot work and the suspect foolishly took off the balaclava he was wearing, before he spotted the camera.

    He fled soon afterwards, leaving an estimated NZ$20,000 ($11,040) of weekend takings still safely locked in the safe. Local police posted images of the blagger on a crime-fighting page on Facebook, prompting a witness to come forward to name a suspect.

    Images of the break-in were also published through news websites and in newspapers but it was Facebook that did the business. Local police are describing the case as their ‘first Facebook arrest’.

    The Aga Saga

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    Terrific polemic by George Monbiot.

    It would be stupid to claim that environmentalism is never informed by class. Compare, for example, the campaign against patio heaters with the campaign against Agas. Patio heaters are a powerful symbol: heating the atmosphere is not a side-effect, it’s their purpose. But to match the fuel consumption of an Aga, a large domestic patio heater would have to run continuously at maximum output for three months a year. Patio heaters burn liquefied petroleum gas, while most Agas use oil, electricity or coal, which produce more CO2. A large Aga running on coal turns out nine tonnes of carbon dioxide per year: five and a half times the total CO2 production of the average UK home. To match that, the patio heater would have to burn for nine months.

    So where is the campaign against Agas? There isn’t one. I’ve lost count of the number of aspirational middle-class greens I know who own one of these monsters and believe that they are somehow compatible (perhaps because they look good in a country kitchen) with a green lifestyle. The campaign against Agas – which starts here – will divide rich greens down the middle.

    Hmmm… This is tricky. Some of my best friends have Agas. Indeed, I had one myself once. And I don’t know anyone who has a patio heater. Oh dear…

    Googling vs. boiling: the story continues

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    Excellent round-up by Kevin Anderson in the Guardian.

    The tech community has also been quick to point out Google's green efforts, and tech commentator Jeremy Wagstaff highlights a possible conflict of interest for Wissner-Gross. Articles mention that Wissner-Gross has set up CO2stats.com. Wagstaff says that neither the article in the Times (nor another article at BBC News) explain:

    …the website—and Wissner-Gross–directly benefits from this kind of research. C02Stats offers clients plans, ranging from $5 a month to $100, to calculate their websites total energy consumption, make it more energy efficient, and then neutralizes their carbon footprint by buying renewable energy from wind and solar farms.

    Now, it’s pretty typical for news organisations to cover stories like this, and it’s a clever bit of PR. However, not to explain the business model of Wissner-Gross’s website, help put the figures in context and provide motivation for the publication of the figures. Many have asked about the figures methology, and CO2stats.com provides an outline of its method:

    “CO2Stats software continuously scans your website so that it can monitor your site’s energy usage each time someone visits your site. CO2Stats is very smart, and is able to capture a large amount of data about your site’s total energy consumption. For example, it can tell what make and model of computer your visitor is using, what its electrical consumption is, and even what types of fossil fuels are being burned in order to power that computer. Likewise, it is able to detect how much and what type of energy your server is using, and even how much and what type of energy is being used to power the networks that are connecting your visitors’ computers with your servers.

    That raises a question. Is Google responsible for the ineffiency of some computers that people are using to conduct their search?

    The Inner History of Devices

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    Interesting MIT World lecture by Sherry Turkle.

    Contemporary science has done a great disservice to Sigmund Freud, suggests Sherry Turkle, who believes the psychoanalytic tradition can teach us much about the often concealed connections between physical objects and our thoughts and feelings. On the occasion of the publication of her latest book, The Inner History of Devices — the third in a trilogy — Turkle speaks of the importance of technology as a subjective tool, as a window into the soul.

    When she first arrived at MIT, Turkle relates, colleagues viewed devices like their computers as simply instruments for accomplishing work. Turkle set out on her life’s work to demonstrate that technology serves a much greater purpose in our lives. People turn their devices “into beings, which they animate, anthropomorphize.” Her research and writing involves the ways people invest themselves in physical objects, and how those objects “inflect inner life, relationships, carry ideas, sensibilities and memory.”

    Turkle’s latest work, as she describes it, brings together the artful listening of a memoirist, the interpretive skills of a clinician, and the participant observational skills of an ethnographer. Together, these enable her to dig deep into such questions as how cellphones can change people’s sensibilities, what is intimacy without privacy (e.g., texting and Second Life); and how people are starting to add robots as companions to their lives. There is no doubt that technology is “changing our hearts and minds,” and that people increasingly attach “to the inanimate without prejudice.” Whether online or with robotic creatures, “we are lost in cyber intimacies and solitudes, and we often don’t know if we’ve been alone, together, close or distant.”