Tom Phillips

I had an unnerving experience while reading Caitlin Moran’s Times column today about the internet and free culture – namely, I thought she was wrong. Now, obviously, Caitlin Moran isn’t allowed to be wrong about things. It upsets the natural order; it’s like the world has been thrown off its axis. Up is down, black is white, cats are marrying dogs, Toploader were a good band. And so on.

The thrust of the article is the pretty widespread belief that the internet has, in effect, deranged us: it’s led us to expect everything for free, to the point where we refuse to pay for the art and the journalism we used to pay for; and that by letting ourselves become freeloaders, we’re screwing ourselves and our future, because the only people who’ll be left doing art and journalism will be those from wealthy enough backgrounds that they don’t need to worry about being paid. Because, as she says,

…there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and there’s no such thing as a free internet. I liked the old system we used to have – where, if you wanted something, you paid for it.

Now: I am a huge, huge fan of people who create things earning a living from it. I am also a huge, huge fan of giving my money to people who create things I like, or to the corporations that enable them to create – as evidenced by the fact that I’ve spent most of today trying to do just that, even though ITUNES IS A COMPLETE DICK that keeps moaning on about “unkown errors” when ALL I WANT TO DO IS WATCH THE AVENGERS. If I’d pirated it, I’d be on the post-credits sequence by now, but I won’t do that because I believe Joss Whedon deserves nice things in his life. And, crucially, I’m not alone in this – the claim that the internet is busily laying waste the creative industries doesn’t really hold true.

In the article, Caitlin says that “the music industry has shrunk 40 per cent since 1999″, which is something of a zombie statistic. As far as I can tell, it’s traced back to a mis-labeled chart from a report by analysts Bain & Co (Mitt Romney’s old stomping ground). Actually, that’s not the global music industry turnover – it’s the US recorded music industry turnover (as the corrected report now makes clear). Yes, revenues from recorded music alone have declined by about that much, in the US and the UK alike, albeit from a historically unnatural peak – but the music industry as a whole is actually doing pretty bloody well. The industry has only collapsed if you only look at one single form of revenue stream, for the large record companies that were traditionally the gatekeepers for the whole music industry, but aren’t any more.

The idea that, because of the internet, people just want stuff for free and won’t pay for it is simply wrong; as Mike Masnick’s The Sky Is Rising study points out, US household expenditure on entertainment grew by 15% as a proportion of income between 2000 and 2008. The number of actual transactions in the recorded music industry has almost doubled since 2000. People are buying cheaper recorded music, certainly, but it’s hardly evidence that the population has developed a sudden allergy to the act of paying. Despite piracy, the film industry is growing – worldwide box office rose from $26billion in 2006 to $32billion in 2010. Despite piracy, the games industry is exploding – the amount we’ve spent on gaming around the world has more than tripled in the past decade . We haven’t turned into a society of cheapskates – we’re sluicing our money at an ever-increasing rate towards creators.

That’s not to suggest everything’s peachy. Some particular businesses and business models (often based on a historically temporary and somewhat artificial scarcity) have been screwed hard by the newly negligible costs of replicating and transmitting information, and that’s been traumatic for large numbers of people affected by it. But blaming it on people becoming “freeloaders” is not just over-simplifying the issue, it’s untrue and unfair.

The idea that the internet is a big, confusing magnet messing with our moral compass also comes up when she discusses punishing pirates – but again, I’m not sure it’s a fair charge:

When the Government proposed prosecuting illegal downloading, and punishing it with internet disconnection, a lobbying group called FAC (Featured Artists Coalition) campaigned against it – “It would reduce the civil liberties of every one of us in the country.”

But how? How is not having access to the internet, because you have committed a crime there, any different to not having access to, say, a library, because you committed a crime there? The internet isn’t a necessity. It’s wholly thrilling and brilliant and useful – most of the time, I’d rather spend an afternoon there than, say, Bath – but it’s not a right to be able to use it.

Because, for pedantic starters, it isn’t a crime. Because the internet is increasingly central not just to where we have fun, but to where we do all the tedious, necessary bits of our lives – it’s where we work, we bank, we pay our bills, we stay informed. It’s where we live. Because the level of intrusion and surveillance of everybody’s private actions in order to detect supposed pirates, and the knock-on effect for other individuals and businesses, was out of proportion to the problem. Because the standard of proof, and the quality of evidence, involved in “convicting” people for it would not have met any of the standards we demand for just punishment to be served. Because this was an actual policy, not a metaphor, and policy-by-metaphor is a terrible idea. Those who opposed it, by-and-large, weren’t objecting to the metaphor; they were objecting to the actual details of what it meant in the real world, because those are the bits that actually cause harm.

A lot of the article echoes something that Moran said during her book launch at the Bloomsbury Theatre a week or so ago, about her support for The Times’ paywall – helpfully transcribed by my friend Kat. Now, personally, I’m happy to pay The Times a fair amount every month to scramble over their wall, and I have done from the start (after all, that’s how I read the article in the first place). I’m also glad that different news organisations are experimenting with different approaches to not going massively bankrupt. Try ALL the business models!

Moreover, I’m a journalist, and I very much like getting paid for being a journalist. But the thing is, I’ve never once worked for an organisation that actually charged for its journalism – and yet they still paid me, and they still made money (well, mostly). The news industry’s problems are far more complex than “people stopped paying” and “going free online was a bad idea”, and there’s no simple connection between whether you charge for online content and whether you pay your journalists properly. Much like the discussion of the music industry, it seems to elevate a particular business model to the level of a moral absolute – not simply that it’s wrong to take things for free, but it’s also wrong to give things away for free, even if that’s part of your plan to make money.

And it’s that underlying idea – that not charging for some stuff devalues everything – that brings me back to the part of the article which most niggled away at me. Not so much because it’s factually wrong, but because it seems to express an attitude towards culture that makes me feel itchy:

We think that, as soon as something is on the internet, it turns into something else – that it’s not quite real. Things, somehow, don’t count on the internet.

Take, for instance, a song. When is a song not a song? When it’s on the internet. If a song is on a CD, or vinyl, in a shop, we would not hesitate for a moment to pay for it. Put the selfsame song on the internet, though, and millions of people would be steadfast in their conviction that you can simply take it without paying. It’s still exactly the same song you’d pay for on vinyl – written by the same people, who spent the same hours and same money recording it – but press a button, and it’s yours.

I sort of see the point, but it’s a deeply weird way of expressing it: the idea that things are only things if you have paid for them. It yokes together economic value and cultural value and objecthood and claims that they’re all one and the same thing. More importantly, as an example of how the internet makes us lose our minds and act in uniquely strange and immoral ways, it’s completely off target, because there’s nothing unusual or new about the internet in this respect. We’ve always had songs that we haven’t paid for, and we’ve never thought of them as un-songs because of it. The folk song passed down the generations from mother to daughter: not a song? The nagging chorus drifting over from a neighbour’s radio: not a song? The pissed-up pub closing time singalong of a chart hit from back in the day: not a song? The tune in my head that reminds me of that night when I first met that person: not a song? The things people danced to in fields in the early 90s, because someone had turned up with a soundsystem and someone else had turned up with loads of drugs: you know, I’m pretty sure they were songs. The world is full of songs; they’re in the air, all around us, inside us, and I bloody well am steadfast in my conviction that I can simply take them without paying. Because not everything is a transaction, and a world where everything is turned into a transaction is a smaller and greyer and more bitter world than we deserve.

(For the past few years, some friends and I have run a silly blog called Sexy A-Levels, collating and mocking the pictures used in the British press of attractive young girls jumping in the air to celebrate their A-Level exam results. It’s basically the only kind of picture most papers illustrate these stories with, because non-attractive girls and all boys apparently don’t take exams. Anyway, it’s become quite popular and sort of A Thing on Twitter, and so naturally we decided to stop doing it. Here’s a slightly extended version of the post explaining why, cross-posted here merely for the sake of posterity and completeness and personal archiving and shit. A rewritten and partly expanded version of the below was also published in The Independent’s blogs. Most of these words were written by @JoeTheDough, gentleman of the internet; all the boring bits are my additions.)

Tomorrow, students across England, Wales & Northern Ireland get their A-Level results (Scotland got their results last week, because Scotland). This is our moment. Our Christmas and Chanukah and DFS Sale and Flying Ant Day all rolled into one. Naturally, we’ve been getting asked what we’ve got in store for the site this year. And the answer is… well, we’re basically done here, kids. For all the funtimes it’s provided, we’re stopping. And a nation weeps.

Reasons? HERE ARE REASONS:

1) Our weapons are useless. In the 3 years (4 years? Jesus) we’ve been doing this, we couldn’t help noticing that most media outlets remain totally unchanged in their skeevy coverage. Also, some of them have started being knowing and arch in their skeeviness, because this is clearly a great British tradition to rank alongside the rude seaside postcard. “Look! We’re being ironically appalling. Aren’t we adorable?” Our failure to overturn the entrenched patriarchal edifice of the entire corporate media via the medium of a joke Tumblr is profoundly disheartening to us, in ways we cannot fully express through GIFs.
2) Twitter kind of has it covered. The hashtag #sexyalevels does the job just fine, and over the years has basically come to feel like it’s actually the best way to do this thing.
3) You guys knew this was a joke, right? (Part I) People send us emails and lose their tempers about this. And we kind of get why. And – eh – they’re kind of right. Is there such a thing as “glorifying through contempt”? Because there should be. And this is starting to feel like it.
4) You guys knew this was a joke, right? (Part II) People also link to the site saying things like “lovely knockers on here”, and oh god.
5) This thing has become a feedback loop. Cf. “We’re being ironically appalling”. As Chris Cook noted in the FT last year, this isn’t just something that newspapers do in isolation. The news agencies only submit the kind of pictures they think news publishers want; the photographers only take pictures they think their agencies are looking for; and the more publicity-savvy schools only pick and choose their most “beyootiful girls” to pimp out to the snappers. So it goes, right? Nobody is shocked, shocked by this stuff. But it’s sort of begun to feel like giving it a name and making it a big jolly media in-joke is only reinforcing that – what originated as a piss-take starts to feel like it’s become a pro bono branding exercise for the whole sweaty-palmed business.
6) We are all fabulously important people now. Seriously you guys. We’re like the 1% now and this does not look good on golf club applications.
7) Feminism, amirite? We’re dicking about here, of course, but at the heart of this one-joke website is the tiniest, most serious core of fundamental truth: This weird institutional boner that Fleet Street has for a particular type of soft, young female flesh is something we all pay a subtle psychic toll for. Now you’d be right to point out the psychic toll we pay is vastly smaller than that which we pay for all the other sexist bullshit in the world, and also there’s WARS, but that’s not really the point. It feels all enabley.
8) Dude, aren’t you like, old? Yeah. We are old, old men. One of us – we’re not saying who* – is 36. He has a wife and a son and he moderates a website that collates pictures of 18 year old girls for a joke that even its creators struggle to justify. As the great man once said, it’s no way to run a fucking ballroom.

OK. That’s us nailed to our crosses. And yes, OBVIOUSLY it’s absurdly po-faced and over-the-top to post something like this on a website like this – but, well, there you go. We’re out.

That said, if someone else wants to take up the reins, we’d be happy to let you. Hit us up.

Many thanks for all the links, tweets and submissions over the years. Also, please follow us on our new website, nothingbutgifsoftomdaleysarse.tumblr.com.

@JoeTheDough, @qwghlm and @flashboy

*It’s Joe.

Remember when everybody said “THE FUCKING QUEEN” at the same time? twitter.com/flashboy/statu…

— Tom Phillips (@flashboy) July 27, 2012

This was the best bit of last night though. Such fun reading it in retrospect. twitter.com/JoeTheDough/st…

— Joe Saunders (@JoeTheDough) August 12, 2012

You guys. @qwghlm @flashboy @juniorc0 @simonnricketts twitter.com/kanedr/status/…

— David Kane (@kanedr) August 12, 2012

(Inspired by @orbyn‘s piece here.)

We take a look at the made-up winners and losers under the new budget:

Susan and Barry Hopkins, professional married couple, Ludlow
Susan and Barry are each in work – Barry as a quantity surveyor, Susan as an administrator – and they have three children, a fixed-rate mortgage and a car that really needs to be repaired. Under the budget, they will lose £204 per year, which sadly will pale into insignificance compared to the debts Barry has got into with a Triad gang.

Doris Heppelthwaite, retired, Swansea
Doris is a 67-year-old former nurse who lives in a small, run-down maisonette and keeps three cats. In cold winters, she struggles to both heat her home and feed herself and her cats, and the Chancellor’s raid on pensioners’ income tax allowance would be expected to hit her especially hard. Fortunately, however, the losses from that will be more than offset by her discovery of an enchanted kettle that grants her the magical power to predict the derivatives market, so that’s all right then.

Plonko Sadface, entertainer, Cramlington
Plonko is a 34-year-old self-employed clown from the North-East who makes approximately £19,500 a year from his work in local shopping centres and with educational charities, and who is terrified of sex. He will lose out to the tune of £117 a year under the budget, but the tears he cries that slowly dissolve the tears painted on his face are not over the budget, but over Arthur, and that night five years ago when he could have said something, should have said something, but instead stood silent and petrified, and now they can never be together.

Lord Henry Dashington, industrialist aristocrat, Hampshire
Lord Dashington owns a series of failing manufacturing businesses, which he inherited after his father mysteriously vanished in the Congo, that have been hit hard by both the recession and his apparently dissolute lifestyle. But secretly, Lord Dashington is actually Britain’s greatest crime fighter – taking on the world’s most evil villains from his hi-tech base at Dash Hall, helped by his plucky niece Felicity and autistic savant butler Gerald. The budget’s moves on corporation tax, the 50p income tax rate and the decision to not implement a mansion tax will be of significant help to Lord Dashington – saving him enough money that he will be able to confront his greatest foe yet, the infamous Red Glove and his dreaded Six Fingers Gang, in the thrilling Adventure of the Bamboo Fish. Hurrah!

Jeremy Dysart, businessman, Fort William
Jeremy owns a local fish & chip shop, is an enthusiastic scuba diver and golfer, smokes 20 cigarettes a day, enjoys online gambling and collecting antique Toby jugs, and is an old school classmate of Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander. He will be hit unusually hard by the budget, thanks to its raising of duty on cigarettes and the introduction of a new gaming duty; its imposition of taxes on scuba gear, golf clubs and “jugs or other receptacles that have faces”; its introduction of a “wedgie levy” on 39-year-old men in the Lochaber region; and the unexpected canceling of tax credits for anybody whose name rhymes with “eyes fart”. It is understood that the Lib Dem team under Danny Alexander fought particularly hard for these measures.

Rhahlgur, George Osborne’s former brood nurse
Vast and silent, she lies deep and cold in the darkness.

She is patient, as all her kind are; for a thousand years she has waited here, alone in the void, drawing her faint glimmers of sustenance from the baleful dull-red glow of a long-dead star.

All she has had, for aeons, are her memories. She can still recall the day that George Osborne and his countless nameless siblings clawed their way through her flesh and tasted life for the first time. Then they were things of teeth and scales; she remembers the cold flash of talons and the wordless screeching of a thousand thousand writhing children. That was in the time before they discovered the Dance of Forms, and played their way among the stars, wearing the flesh of lesser beings. Those were the good days.

She will not be affected by the budget, for she is a horror older than time itself, and she was not in the 50p tax band.

Of late, she has grown used to waiting; biding her time since she sent George Osborne and his terrible multitude of brothers howling across the wastes of space, seeking new sustenance. She knows that soon he will sing the song; the old nightmare song that summons his kin from across the stars, and that on the day that dread song is sung they shall be together again, as they were always intended to be, and that the ancient stars will burn anew, and the suffering will be reborn, and – at last – they shall feast once more.

Being a massively over-long Storify of a Twitter discussion about the death of the printed Encyclopaedia Britannica, and why it wasn’t necessarily Wikipedia’s fault.

Sky News has, by common acclaim, just shot itself painfully in the foot by effectively banning its staff from using Twitter in most of the important ways that Twitter is used. As reported by The Guardian’s Josh Halliday, the new rules say, in short: Do not retweet any non-Sky News account – not journalists from rival organisations, and not members of the public; do not tweet news without passing it to the news-desk first; and do not tweet about topics that aren’t part of your beat or a story you are working on. In other words… er, don’t use Twitter.

(It’s worth noting that Josh tweeted virtually all the key details of his story in advance of it being published – presumably without running his tweets past Alan Rusbridger first – and yet still managed to file and publish quicker than anyone else. And in doing so, you have to suspect, made it far more likely the Guardian’s story would become the canonical telling of the tale once it was published.)

The reaction of Twitter users to this has been neatly Storified by Elena Zak – a concise summary would probably be “WT actual F?”. It’s reminiscent of the kerfuffle that broke out last year when Associated Press told its reporters not to tweet breaking news, because they were scooping the wire. While I broadly agree with the slightly incredulous reaction of Anthony De Rosa from their rivals Reuters, you could at least see AP’s point – they have clients who pay a lot of money for the privilege of getting AP’s scoops first, and getting them accurately. If they can just follow AP’s staffers on Twitter, bang goes the business model.

Like AP, but in different ways, Sky News is all about the scoops and the breaking news – far more so, even, than directly competing news channels. For such a prominent channel, it has relatively few viewers – around 0.6% of total viewing, less than Channel 4+1, CBBC, Dave or Yesterday, for example. But what it does have is a high percentage of viewers in lots of important places. Anywhere where breaking news is vital (like, say, every newsroom in the country) is likely to have Sky News on its TVs. With the best will in the world, they’re not there for its analysis or its coverage of under-reported topics – they’re there to find out about news a few minutes ahead of anywhere else. The old joke that you watch Sky News to find out what’s breaking, and then turn over to the BBC to find out if it’s actually true, is terribly unfair to the journalists behind Sky’s editorial and fact-checking processes – but it is also a fairly accurate description of how a lot of people behave.

So it’s not entirely unreasonable that Sky might want to control its journalists’ Twitter output in some way. At the time of writing, neither Sky nor any of their journalists have commented on the new rules, so there’s still a lot of ambiguity over how they will be applied. With that in mind, here’s five things I think Sky News could do that would downgrade its approach from “brain-fryingly incomprehensible” to “mildly baffling”:

1. Clarify what accounts will be affected
The Guardian story says that the new rules apply to “professional accounts” – and thus, presumably, not to personal accounts (and it’s hard to see how Sky could expect to police that). But Sky really need to clarify this further; on Twitter, that distinction isn’t a black-and-white issue. Does it just mean to accounts that explicitly have the Sky branding – e.g. with “Sky” in the username, or the Sky logo in the avatar or background? Does it mean anybody who openly identifies themselves as a Sky News employee? Does it mean anybody who could be identified as a Sky News employee, even if they don’t explicitly say it? This matters – Sky’s Neal Mann, aka @fieldproducer, is a big figure in the UK journotwittosphere, to the extent that a hefty proportion of the reactions to this news were essentially wondering if a Neal Mann-shaped hole had just been left in the wall of Sky’s HQ. His account falls into the second category – it’s clearly a part professional, part personal account, where he explicitly identifies himself as a Sky employee, but without any Sky branding. Does he have to follow the rules? What about the large percentage of Sky staffers who are freelancers (as sometime Sky freelancer Dave Lee asked)?

I expect Sky will clarify the rules to say that it only applies to explicitly Sky-branded accounts (and that Sky reporters will be given a chance to change their accounts to remove the Sky branding if they wish to carry on tweeting as before). Anything else would be needlessly draconian, and would completely miss the positive effect that staff personal accounts have on humanising an organisation.

2. Have it only apply to breaking news
Given that the rationale for this move has to lie with the importance of both getting scoops, and fact-checking news, Sky would do well to explicitly restrict it to that area. There’s a fair argument for making sure that news coming from Sky-branded Twitter accounts has gone through the same editorial checks that news coming from any other Sky-branded news platform would do. Likewise, it makes a certain kind of sense to stop reporters on official Sky accounts from straying into news areas that aren’t their beat, just as you wouldn’t expect your chief football writer to file a 1200-word review of the Lana Del Rey album* in lieu of a match report from the Reebok Stadium. But it makes no sense to apply it to anything else – if a Sky News journalist wants to retweet another journalist’s interesting analysis, or a good joke, or a link to the genuinely brilliant Rats In Hats Tumblr, then why on earth stop them? Once again, humanising = good.

3. Get serious about giving credit
Regrettably, Sky already has a bit of a dodgy reputation when it comes to crediting the work of other journalists, thanks to their habit of having ticker items (and, indeed, tweets) prominently ascribe news that was already broken by someone else to “Sky sources”. In their defence, they say people have misunderstood what they mean by this: it’s not that they’re claiming to have broken the news, just that they’re saying they have independently confirmed it with their own sources. Which is fine, as far as it goes, even if it doesn’t quite match up to how many other organisations use that form of words. But the “no retweets of rivals journalists” policy pushes it into a territory where, once again, it might start to look like an organisation that’s trying to mislead its audience about how many stories it breaks compared to its rivals. It may seem like a small thing – journalists fretting over bruised egos at not getting credit, added to the Twitterati’s mad obsession with getting a tweet out seconds before someone else – but if they want to avoid accusations of dishonesty, Sky will need to work out robust and transparent ways of clearly acknowledging that a scoop isn’t theirs.

4. Acknowledge that exceptions must be allowed
During the UK riots in August last year, Sky News’s journalists were extremely prominent on Twitter, helping to report, fact-check and amplify useful (indeed, potentially life-saving) information. They were outstanding, and I suspect they did a huge amount to improve the reputation of the station in the minds of a lot of people. The Guardian’s Reading The Riots analysis of how Twitter was used during the unrest showed how professional journalists – both breaking news and retweeting others – played an important role in stopping false rumours from spreading and getting good information to those who needed it (it’s worth noting that at least four Sky News journalists, as well as a several centrally-controlled Sky accounts, were among the most retweeted users during that time). There are times when the public service aspect of journalism – even in news organisations that don’t have an explicit public service remit – has to take precedence over everything else. And there are times when a story gets too large, and too important, for any organisation to pretend its coverage can be comprehensive. These rules would utterly crush the potential for them to do that again.

5. Trust your journalists
Ultimately, a lot of this kind of palaver – micro-managing your employees’ social media accounts – comes down to how much you trust your staff. If you don’t think you can trust them not to tweet unverified information, or to produce interesting output related to their beat, then these kind of rules make sense. If you don’t think they can understand the norms and practises of social media, then you don’t let them try (it’s notable that Mann, Sky’s Digital News Editor and one of the UK’s top experts on the intersection of news and social media, said that he “didn’t take part in the discussions” that led to the policy). But I honestly don’t think Sky’s journalists are deserving of that lack of trust, and I don’t think this will magically make them better reporters, or Sky a better news channel. I think Sky’s staff are smart, talented and professional, and Sky should be celebrating that fact, rather than trying to hide them away behind a mountain of managerial dictats.

If Sky clarify those points and apply the guidelines as liberally as possible, then the new policy might at least make some sort of coherent sense – even if many would still see it as narrow-minded, short-sighted and rather Cnutish. But if they go in the opposite direction… well, that sound you hear is a thousand social media gurus preparing ten thousand slides for a hundred thousand presentations with Sky as their number one example of “old media not getting it”. And I think that’s a fate we all want to avoid.

*Though why you’d need 1200 words to say “it’s crap”, I’m not sure.

Update: Oh dear. Now the BBC’s getting roughly the same stick that Sky got, prompted by another Guardian story titled “Don’t break stories on Twitter, BBC journalists told”. I think this criticism is likely mistaken, though. It’s based around this blogpost written by Chris Hamilton, BBC News’ s social media editor, clearly in response to the Sky brouhaha. The key line that everyone seems to be picking up on is the final one:

“…we’ve been clear that our first priority remains ensuring that important information reaches BBC colleagues, and thus all our audiences, as quickly as possible – and certainly not after it reaches Twitter.”

But in interpreting this, everybody seems to be completely ignoring the directly preceding line:

“We’re fortunate to have a technology that allows our journalists to transmit text simultaneously to our newsroom systems and to their own Twitter accounts.”

I’m honestly not sure how you go from “the BBC have developed technology specifically to allow their reporters to break news on Twitter while keeping the newsdesk informed” to “don’t break stories on Twitter, BBC journalists told” – it doesn’t seem to me like there’s any ambiguity there. It’s just flat-out misleading. Chris Hamilton made this clear himself, in a slightly world-weary tweet:

@darrenwaters @stuartdhughes I’m not sure the 2nd last par of my blog could be much clearer, but i will be clarifying things

— Chris Hamilton (@chrishams) February 8, 2012

Of course, there’s still an argument to be made that even simultaneously filing to Twitter and your newsdesk is now unnecessarily restrictive. But I think of all news organisations, the BBC is clearly the one where keeping your colleagues updated through centrally controlled mechanisms is of the most obvious importance. Even on large national newspapers, you can reasonably use Twitter as an ad hoc internal comms tool – teams are small enough for pretty much everybody to follow each other, and you only need to co-ordinate news awareness across a relatively limited number of platforms. The BBC, meanwhile, has several national TV stations, a global TV station, quite a few national radio stations, 48 regional and local radio stations, a global radio station broadcasting in 27 languages to several hundred million listeners, a website available in 32 different language editions… all run by a constantly shifting workforce thousands of staffers, casuals and freelancers. Oh, and a statutory duty to not mislead people. When news breaks, you really need to be able to let everybody know in a predictable and controllable way…

This video, “A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work”, is getting passed around a lot right now. From the description: “Technology codes our minds, changes our OS. Apple products have done this extensively. The video shows how magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives. It shows real life clip of a 1-year old, growing among touch screens and print. And how the latter becomes irrelevant. Medium is message. Humble tribute to Steve Jobs, by the most important person : a baby.”

To which, might I humbly point out: IT’S A BABY. I’m not sure it tells us much about the nature of user interfaces because IT’S A BABY and it DOESN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT MAGAZINES ARE. It also doesn’t understand what an iPad is, or what a user interface is, because it’s a one year old baby and it doesn’t even understand what itself is. Babies aren’t “digital natives” (and by the way oh god stop calling your daughter that), because they aren’t even themselves-natives yet. I know it was kind of cute when Clay Shirky said that thing about the four-year-old looking for the mouse on a television and videos of babies always seem really meaningful and stuff, but ultimately what we’re dealing with here is a thought process that’s going “OOH LOOK SHINY THING want milk now OOH LOOK SHINY THING let’s see if I can break it WANT MILK also I have done a poo.” Babies don’t offer much insight into the functionality of information transmission mediums because fundamentally, brilliant as they are in many ways, BABIES ARE IDIOTS. In fact, if you’ve ever tried to give a baby a present of any kind, you’ll realise that to them an iPad is a broken Box That The iPad Came In, because it’s harder to make it part of a tower you can knock over and Daddy gets nervous when you try. At the most basic level, to a baby, everything that isn’t Mum is broken. An iPad is a Mum that doesn’t work. A Samsung Galaxy Tab is a Mum that doesn’t work. A magazine is a Mum that doesn’t work. Dad is a Mum that doesn’t work. Because, as I might have mentioned, it’s a BABY.

Also the video actually seems to show that the baby can’t operate the iPad at all in a meaningful way, but giggles when shiny thing does whooshy bright light stuff, while she’s already getting the hang of the page-turning interface of the magazines pretty well.

So the other weekend, I took part along with m’colleague Chris in NomNomNom ’11 – a kind of Mastercheffy cooking contest for bloggers. It was, as always, huge fun (also as always, I didn’t win.) I was hoping to write up my full experience, but unfortunately I find myself in a field in Derbyshire with only my phone to blog from. As such, this is a bit truncated… but it does give you probably the most requested recipe I cooked on the day, for Billionaire’s Shortbread.

Billionaire’s Shortbread is like Millionaire’s Shortbread, except MUCH MORE CLASSY. By which I mean it’s got peanuts in it, and is decorated with gold dust. Peanuts, of course, are noted for their exclusivity and connotations of a luxury jet-set lifestyle. Note: the alternative name for this recipe, which it was given on the day, is “Posh Snickers”.

Billionaire’s Shortbread

For the shortbread
Ingredients:
250g Plain Flour
75g Caster Sugar
185g Butter

Mix the ingredients up in a big bowl until you’re got a nice, smooth, malleable gloop that – assuming you’ve measured all the things right – should be substantial enough that you can pick it up and shape it without it trying to escape.

Stick this into a pre-greased cake tin, or similar receptacle – you’ll want something roughly a foot square. Ish. Slap it about a bit until it’s roughly flat and evenly distributed across the tin. Whack this into an oven pre-heated to 180°C for around twenty minutes (until the surface starts to turn golden), then once it’s done, allow it to cool and harden. Because you’re probably impatient, “allow it to cool” means “stick it in the fridge”.

For those of you who like to keep up with such things, this is what’s technically known as a “buttery biscuit base”.

For the peanut butter layer
Ingredients:
A jar of crunchy peanut butter

Scoop about half the peanut butter into a bowl, and stick it in the microwave on a medium heat until it’s a bit runnier than it normally is.

Once your buttery biscuit base is cool and solid enough that you can do things to it, slop your slightly melty peanut butter all over it and spread it out evenly.

This is definitely the easiest step of the recipe, which given that the rest are also very easy is saying something. Also, you’ve got half a jar of peanut butter left over. Bonus.

For the caramel layer
Ingredients:
40g Butter
50g Light Muscavado Sugar
400g Condensed Milk
1 tsp Cornflour
Large handful of salted peanuts

First, pummel the crap out of your peanuts with a pestle & mortar (or other peanut-destroying device), until your large handful of peanuts becomes a large handful of small peanut fragments. Retain your fragments in a bowl for later.

Splodge the butter, sugar and condensed milk into a saucepan, and stir constantly over a medium heat for some time until it starts to thicken. At this point, carry on stirring over a medium heat for longer than you might think. Basically, the point is it needs to be really rather thick – if it’s too runny, it’ll RUIN EVERYTHING. Once you’re convinced it’s really quite thick (little bits will probably have started caramelising), stir in the cornflour for added thickening, then stir in the peanut fragments.

Spread all this lot over your buttery biscuit base and peanut layer, then “allow it to cool” (stick it in the fridge) again.

For the chocolate layer
Ingredients:
150g Milk Chocolate
50g Dark Chocolate
Gold Dust (edible type)

Obvious bit: once your caramel later has solidified a bit, melt the chocolate in a bowl in the microwave. If you do this cleverly and just stir it gently, the milk and dark chocolate should make a pretty swirly pattern. Put your melty swirly chocolate over the caramel and spread until it’s even.

Then comes the pointless but fun  tarting-up section. Get a small amount of edible gold dust, and using a very fine sieve, scatter it lightly over the chocolate.

(Edible gold dust note: you know how the phrase “it’s like gold dust” normally denotes that something is very rare and extremely expensive? Turns out you can get small pots of it in Waitrose for under four quid.)

Allow to cool (FRIDGE) again, then serve (ideally) when the chocolate is mostly solid but still slightly gooey. If you’ve done it right, it should have roughly the density of a neutron star, and should be able to give a horse diabetes at fifty paces.

There’s been a bit of a wailing and a gnashing of teeth on the interwebs today about the libel decision handed down yesterday by Justice Tugendhat which found against the Telegraph and Lynn Barber, over a review Barber wrote in 2008 of Dr Sarah Thornton’s book ‘Seven Days in the Art World’. Possibly because of how the case is being reported – for example, the BBC’s report begins with the line “An author has won £65,000 in libel damages over a “spiteful” book review that was written by a journalist for a broadsheet newspaper” – lots of writers appear under the impression that the libel damages (and £65,000 isn’t really that much for a libel case) have been awarded because the judge found that the review was just too nasty.

Obviously, this would be profoundly worrying for anybody in the business of reviewing things, where spitefulness is sometimes, regretfully, a necessary literary tool. And because the judgment itself is a) very long, and b) mostly quite boring, very few people seem to have read the full thing – which would reveal that their concerns are unfounded. In fact, the judgment appears to be entirely fair, and moreover it casts the actions of Lynn Barber and (to a lesser extent) the Telegraph in a very unflattering light.

Mostly to save me trying to make the same point over and over again on Twitter, here’s the three major misconceptions about the case:

1) A review being “spiteful” now places you at risk of a libel action

No, it doesn’t. The libel decision has very little to do with the tone of Barber’s piece, and a lot to do with the fact that it made several highly defamatory – and entirely false – allegations about Dr. Thornton’s work. Tugendhat J is crystal clear about this in paragraph 76 (highlighting mine):

“A reviewer is entitled to be spiteful, so long as she is honest, but if she is spiteful, the court may more readily conclude that misstatements of fact are not honest, since spite or ill will is a motive for dishonesty.”

Good news, reviewers! You can carry on being as spiteful and vitriolic and snarky and pissy as you ever were. The one caveat there (as we’ll see in a bit) is that if you do make some entirely false claims in your review, and if the tone of your piece is extremely spiteful, you might find it a bit harder to claim in court that you made an honest mistake, and that you weren’t attempting to damage the reputation of the person whose work you’re reviewing.

2) All Lynn Barber is guilty of is being forgetful

Nope. Not only does the judge conclude that it’s unlikely Lynn Barber was actually forgetful, but it doesn’t really matter: the crucial question isn’t whether she forgot a key fact, but that she apparently didn’t care (and never bothered to check) whether what she wrote was true or not. Which, when you’re making an extremely damaging claim, is really not on.

The libel claim, which made up for the majority of the damages (there was also a secondary claim of malicious falsehood), was over Barber’s claim that Thornton had falsely said she had interviewed Barber for the book (about her experiences of being a Turner Prize judge). As it happens, Thornton had interviewed Barber for the book; Barber’s claim that she hadn’t (“I gave her an interview? Surely I would have noticed?”) was completely untrue.

In her defence, Barber said she’d simply forgotten that the interview had happened. Indeed, she noted that she’s written before about how poor her memory is, for example in her memoir ‘An Education’. That would seem to be a reasonable thing to say in her defence – but Tugendhat considered this, and found it a poor excuse on two eminently reasonable grounds.

First (and treading carefully here) he found reason to doubt that Barber’s memory was quite as bad as she made out. Not only did he find that her descriptions of her poor memory in An Education to actually be examples of perfectly ordinary memory (in parargraph 92 of the judgment he goes through her examples one by one, dismissing each with a deliciously blunt “That is normal”), but he specifically suggests that she only introduces the idea of poor memory as “a literary device to warn the reader that the memoir does not purport to be completely accurate”.

Moreover, Tugendhat suggests that Barber’s supposed bad memory appears, on the basis of her evidence, to be selective at best – for example, being able to remember clearly an email in the afternoon of one day that supports her case, but not another email that same evening that hinders her case (paragraphs 84 and 85).

In summation, the judge writes: “Ms Barber wrote in her witness statement in a number of places that she has a notoriously bad memory. In reading the documents and in listening to her oral evidence, I did not see any sign that that was true. On the contrary, her memory of events in 2006, as recounted in the Review, and her memory of events when she gave evidence, seemed to me to be normal or in some respect better than might be expected. I do not accept the accuracy of her statement that her memory is bad.“

And regardless, he secondly notes that it makes very little difference to the judgment whether her memory really is that bad – because if she knew she had a bad memory, then relying on her memory to make as damaging and defamatory claim as sayng that a book’s author lied without checking if it was true is enough to turn the case against her. The defence admitted that Barber had in fact made a mention of having done the interview in her diary (paragraph 28); it would have been the work of minutes to check the facts. Tugendhat writes (paragraph 127): “It is with some hesitation that I reached the conclusion that Ms Barber knew the interview allegation was false at the time she wrote the Review. I have had no hesitation in reaching the alternative conclusion that (if she did not know it was false) she was reckless, that is indifferent as to whether it was true or false.“

3) It was an honest mistake

On the basis of the judgment… er, not so much. In fact, the judgment really is quite brutal about Lynn Barber’s actions, and also shows the Telegraph’s response to an entirely reasonable complaint in a fairly bad light. As noted, Tugendhat repeatedly says that Barber was “indifferent” to whether the claims she had made were true or false (paragraphs 121 through to 127). He says (paragraph 106) that “I found nothing in her demeanour which suggested to me that she cared one way or another whether the interview allegation was true or false. She manifested no sign of caring at all.” That’s a pretty damning indictment of any journalist – a profession in which, you’d hope, caring about whether things are true would be a pretty central character trait.

Furthermore, Barber didn’t respond to emails from Thornton, shortly after the review was published, pointing out the mistake (paragraphs 35, 102); the Telegraph took four months to remove the review from their website, and a further six months to issue an apology (paragraph 187), none of which suggests much in the way of good faith in their approach to the issue. Then the Telegraph, in their first full response to Dr Thornton’s complaints, chose to use the the quite baffling (to me) argument that the 35-40 minute interview hadn’t actually been an interview, because it hadn’t yielded much useful information (paragraph 55, given shortest possible shrift in paragraphs 94 and 95).

I think that for most journalists this will come as quite a surprise: the idea that slightly rubbish interviews retrospectively stop having been interviews at all. I mean, I was quite excited when I got to interview Matt Smith – he’s The Doctor, for goodness sake – even if it was just a 15 minute phoner where he straight-batted everything right back at me. Turns out that, according to the Telegraph’s legal team, I never interviewed him at all, which is definitley some sort of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey shenanigans about which I’m not very happy.

It gets worse for Barber – in papragraph 96, Tugendhat bluntly states that, in her evidence, “she told what is certainly a lie.” As he notes a while later (parargraph 107) “it is a very serious matter for a judge to find that a witness has lied” – but he’s in no doubt that she did, based on what she wrote in her original review.

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In summary: the judge found that Lynn Barber lied in her evidence, didn’t care whether the allegations she made were true or false (when it was easy for her to have checked and found out that they were false), and both she and the Telegraph were slow and obstructive in their response to Dr Thornton’s complaint. The only area where the ‘spitefulness’ (or otherwise) of the review comes into play is that it’s indicative of Barber’s “state of mind” (see paragraph 76, the only time in the entire judgment where spite is mentioned) when writing it; it’s a factor that harms her particular defence, not a cause of action in itself. Spite as a journalistic method lives to fight another day.

While many journalists may be worried about this judgment based on some stray headlines, in actual fact it’s a result that all good journalists should be able to support – even though many of us, myself included, have enjoyed and admired Lynn Barber’s work for many years. Because ultimately it’s about the basics of journalism, our version of “first, do no harm” – “First, don’t say something that isn’t true.”

At work today, I wrote the following review of the new levels of Angry Birds Seasons – an update that celebrates St. Patrick’s Day, following on from previous batches of fresh levels themed around Halloween, Christmas and Valentine’s Day. After a brief discussion with my line manager, we mutually agreed that the piece wasn’t entirely right for the tone of our site.

As such, I’m publishing it here instead.

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Dear Finland,

Ah. We see you’ve updated Angry Birds with some new levels – all in celebration of our patron saint, St. Patrick. That was nice of you! However, one or two quibbles. Now, we might be reading a bit too much into this here, but having had a brief glance at our history books just to remind ourselves, we can’t help but wonder at your decision to depict Irish people as pigs. Thieving pigs, to put not too fine a point on it. Is that possibly, we don’t know, a touch insensitive? A little awkward on the symbolism front? Thieving green pigs in green hats with big red beards, in fact. No. Wait. Thick evil thieving green pigs with stupid beards WHO HABITUALLY STORE LARGE AMOUNTS OF EXPLOSIVES IN THEIR RAMSHACKLE HOUSES.

Jesus, honestly, why didn’t you just superimpose Oliver Cromwell’s face on the Red Bird and have done with it? Look, perhaps we’re getting a little paranoid here – that is probably because we are ALWAYS DRUNK, by the way – but still, we’re picking up a pretty strong ‘the thieving Irish pigs must be destroyed at all costs’ vibe from this thing.

We suppose we should be thankful that we’re just portrayed as stealing eggs. We half expected it to be Lucky Charms.

Still, it’s all just a bit of fun, isn’t it? So, in the spirit of jovial national fraternity, let us simply say: Finland, go fuck yourselves, you reindeer-munching, Renny Harlin-producing, forty-four places below us in the FIFA rankings, haven’t made a decent smartphone in years, can only win Eurovision when dressed as a bat, so boring we had to look you up on Wikipedia to find out enough bloody stereotypes runkkarit.

To be sure.

Lots of love,

Ireland

P.S. Don’t suppose you could lend us some money? We’re a bit short.