Crop circles - the Woking connection

If you have used the Google search engine today (15.9.09) you may be wondering why the word Google is featured as a series of crop circles. The Guardian has some ideas, suggesting it might be part of a viral marketing campaign.

It also says there's a tweet from Google giving the co-ordinates of Horsell common in Woking, Surrey. This was the spot that H. G. Wells chose as his Martian landing site in War of the Worlds.

Woking has celebrated its literary fame with some Wellsian sculptures in what is otherwise the dreariest of town centres.

The next thing, I suppose, will be to have a brown sign on the M25 pointing to "H. G. Wells country" and an H. G. Wells interpretation centre on Horsell common with sound effects and even more Martian mock ups in situ for those without a scintilla of imagination.

Sadly it was only fiction. It wasn't Martians that destroyed the place but a borough council with all the aesthetic vision and sensitivity of the Vogon Constructor Fleet.

Kick-starting the day the Telegraph way

I'm one of those people who finds it hard to start the day without coming across something that raises my blood-pressure. It is why I read the Daily Telegraph. The FT has plenty of informative articles but it doesn't stir the blood anything like the Telegraph.

Most newspapers are designed to feed the prejudices of their readers. The Telegraph, long known as the Torygraph, concentrates its news coverage on items that will stir the interest of its middle class home counties bedrock. I am middle class and live in the home counties. Yet I must confess that much of the newspaper's coverage makes me heartily sick. It's not the anti-government, anti-Labour stories that get me going , it's the right-wing spin that's applied to every one of them.

Perhaps it has something to do with my northern working class roots, but I have tried hard all my life to adhere to a socialist, liberal ideal (so why are most of my friends Tories? One of life's oddities, I guess). It explains why I objected to a reader's letter yesterday, praising a news story that referred to "firemen" rather than the politically correct (always used in a disparaging sense in Telegraph stories) "firefighters."

I would like to see that reader arguing his point one day as he is hauled out of his burning house by a fire fighting woman who has undergone the same training and passed the same rigorous physical tests as a man. For sure, there are not many of them, but they do exist and for that reason alone, the collective term, firemen, can no longer apply if it is used assumptively.

I understand the reader and I know dozens of people who would nod their heads in agreement with his letter. But that does not mean that they are right.

In today's newspaper I noticed that the story about the nine-year-old girl, Shannon Matthews, missing from her home in Dewsbury, the town I come from, was down to a paragraph on an inside page.

Contrast this with the acres of news coverage on Madeleine McCann. The difference is that the chattering classes who write the columns (all home counties, middle class) in our broadsheets cannot begin to relate to Shannon's council estate upbringing in Dewsbury. Whereas every one of them will have a view on whether it is right to leave sleeping children alone on the kind of holiday that is probably beyond Shannon's dreams.

So why don't I drop the Telegraph and get the Guardian? You must be joking. I don't want a newspaper that treats anglers and shooters like war criminals. The Independent? Too sterile. The Times? I don't like Rupert Murdoch (although he does fish, mostly big game).

The Daily Mail? Apart from the Keith Waterhouse column I wouldn't give it house room. The Daily Express? No redeeming features. The Sun? The Daily Mirror? They serve their readerships but I can't agree with the way they go about finding - or "creating" - news. The Daily Star? Does it still exist?

I am a fan of the Metro because it's free and my children read it. I would always buy an Evening Standard over a handout because it just lasts the journey home from London.

But please don't ask me to change my Telegraph. I hate it and love it in the same breath. I appreciate the way it stands up to big government whatever its hue (although I wish the UK had signed up to the Euro). I love Boris Johnson's deliciously prejudiced and wonderfully written drivel, much of which I support although he would never get my vote. Its sports coverage is superb, although a bit overdone and its quirky blend of eccentricity and Englishness defines the breed for me. I suppose that's it. The Telegraph represents John Major's unchanging England of "warm beer and cricket" and there's something I like about that.

If you find any of this difficult to understand let me invite you to examine your attitudes to the BBC. The Telegraph readers love and loathe the BBC, but from a right-wing perspective. They love the institution and the quality of its output, but they loathe trendy liberals (are there untrendy liberals? Can I be one?) who, as the aforementioned reader stated, would insist on referring to a fireman as a firefighter. We all have our differences. It's what makes the world go round.

Craigslist and Carnegie

Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian was handing out the honours this week at the annual Workworld media awards run by the Work Foundation. The gathering was held at the London Picadilly headquarters of BAFTA (The British Academy of Film and Television Arts).

He showed a few slides beforehand, highlighting the predicament of newspapers. One of the slides featured a picture of Renzo Piano's New York Times Tower, now under construction on 42nd street, New York. When finished the tower will provide office space for 10,000 employees.

The next slide featured the unassuming San Franciso house (pictured here) that Craig Newmark and his 22 employees use to produce Craigslist, the internet advertising phenomenon that Rusbridger fears is "sucking the life out of newspapers" with its free access and free advertising deal for most advertisers.

Craigslist's revenue is drawn from paid for job advertisements in various cities and apartment listings in New York. If you look at the advertising rates (the top rate is $75) and note that the site gets 500,000 new jobs advertised every month, the revenue model begins to make sense.

Everything about Craigslist (apart from the HQ and the number of employees) is big. It gets more than 5 bn page views a month, 10m unique visitors and places more than 10m new classified ads each month.

As Rusbridger pointed out, Piano's crystal tower is "old economy". So is Rusbridger's salary: base pay up 14.7 per cent from £272,000 to £312,000 a year as Private Eye was kind enough to remind us this week. I assume his £175,000 bonus awarded on top of that figure recognises that the declining newspaper circulation might have been much steeper without his efforts.

I have been unable to find a salary figure for Craig Newmark (here is his picture gallery instead), founder of Craiglist, but, since it is a not for profit venture, I doubt that it will be anything like the $210m that Home Depot paid its unsuccessful former chief executive, Bob Nardelli, simply to go away.

Jim Buckmaster, the chief executive of Craigslist, has bemused New York analysts by telling them that the aim of the venture is not to maximise profits but to perform a service. Newmark himself does not seem to be switched on by thoughts of cash mountains. He says in this Wired magazine interview that the only thing he lacks is a private parking space.

This is described as "new economy" thinking today but it's not all new. Traditional old economy entrepreneurs wanted to make money, sure enough, but what got them out of bed each day was the desire to make a product or service ever better.

That should still be the aim of the "stewards" who look after public companies today. Instead too many of them spend most of their waking hours talking to analysts, journalists and investors as they concentrate on the ever more feverish activity of buying and selling companies while feathering their individual nests.

What remains unclear to me, is whether the new economy idealists will continue true to their vision of democratic open-sourced, accessible, enterprise or whether they will sell out to the multi-car owning, multi-home-owning, private-jet, luxury yacht lifestyle of almost every other status-building materialist on the planet.

I don't include Bill Gates in that roll-call. Whatever you may think about Gates' Puget Sound home, he has committed himself to philanthropic and charitable ventures in the spirit of Andrew Carnegie, the 19th century steel baron whose own ideal of capitalist responsibility was outlined in an essay on wealth, popularly described as his "Gospel of Wealth" in the North American Review. Making your money is one thing. Spending it wisely and judiciously is no less difficult.