Good techniques, leaders or institutions?

Books about getting public services to run well for the average person are little fun to read – which is a crying shame since the issue is of fundamental importance to almost all citizens.

Arguably, it was Gerald Caiden who first made administrative reform sexy – in the late 1960s

Because it’s an issue which has been central to my work, as academic, politician and then as consultant, for the past 50 years, I’ve had to wade through thousands of books and article on the subject since then – most of them academic. A few only have given real pleasure – those written by people such as Chris Hood, Chris Pollitt and B Guy Peters – exposing the nonsenses of the fashion for New Public Management (NPM) which started around 1990.

Most of the writing is spoiled by the appalling academic tic of backing up every statement, in almost every line, with named references (in brackets) linked to long bibliographic lists. And academics have to demonstrate their cleverness – so the articles and books consist of long descriptions of innovations – with results difficult to measure but almost certainly with little real impact…  

 

You might think that the net result of this torrent of negative academic coverage would have discouraged innovators in government – but, hey, there are reputations and careers to be made out of the change process. And staff turnover is such that the disappointing results which eventually come in can be blamed on others

 

Managers first started to make an appearance in government in the 1970s – they were the magicians supposed to turn dross into gold. I confess that I was an early enthusiast for “corporate management” which is indeed still alive and well in the continued reference to managerial silos which are to be slain…..John Stewart of the INLOGOV institute of the University of Birmingham was the guru who inspired a whole generation of local senior officials to think more creatively about this and indeed led me, in the mid 1970s, to help set up in Europe’s largest Region two new types of structure – area committees and scrutiny groups of middle-level officials and politicians  

But it was the Department of Government at Harvard University under the leadership of Mark Moore which began to show what it was possible to do at a more local level…His “Creating Public Value” (1995) celebrated the energy and creativity which good public managers brought to state bodies at both the national and local levels. By then, however, the formulaic NPM had got its grip and Moore, despite teaming up with Stewart and producing a second book, remained a lone voice – with his message that people (rather than techniques) made the difference. 

In recent years Ive noticed a little ripple of interesting titles about more creative ways of working – such as Frederic Laloux’s “Reinventing Organisations” (2014),  Jorrit de Jong’s (of the Kafka Brigade fame) “Dealing with Dysfunction” (2014), Hilary Cottam’s “Radical Help” (2018)  culminating in Strategies for Governing (2019) by Alasdair Roberts 

But it’s only in recent weeks that I’ve realised that Mark Moore’s influence has inspired a few Europeans (particularly from the Netherlands) who have been producing a series of books on good practice in public management – of both the “heroes” and “institutions” (of integrity) sort as they are called in the recent Guardians of Public Value – how public organization become and remain institutions (2021) ed A Boi, L Harty and P t’Hart This seems to take inspiration also from Hugh Heclo whose “On Thinking Institutionally” I wrote about some years ago 

At this stage I would normally conclude with a “resource” of relevant titles – but I realise that this can look a bit off-putting…..so those interested can ask me for the list (or I’ll add it later)

 

James Burnham has the last laugh

One of the central issues bothering the elite a century ago was that of how “the masses” might be “controlled” in the “new age of democracy”….Writers such as Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion 1922) and Ortego y Gasset (Revolt of the Masses 1930) conjured up frightening narratives about the dangers of the great unwashed masses. Lippmann’s full book can be read here…

The scintillating prose of Joseph Schumpeter’s (1883-1950) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1943) was a favourite of mine at University – with his theory of the “circulation of the elites” reassuring the elites of the post-war period that all would be well…. 

Of course the rebellious 60s got them worried – but a combination of the Trilateral Commission’s 1975 report on The Crisis of Democracy and, as Perry Anderson has recently and very usefully reminded us, the European Commission soon saw the plebs off...... 

But the populism evident since the start of the new millennium has sparked new anxieties about the masses amongst the liberal elites – and indeed raised the question anew as to whether capitalism is consistent with democracy…

One guy whose words are worth reading on that question is SM Wolin – whose book on the history of political thought - Politics and Vision - held me spellbound in the 1960s. In his 90s he produced this great critique of the US system – Democracy Inc – managed democracy and the specter of inverted totalitarianism (2008). And this is an interesting recent article, Why Elites always Rule which reminds the new generation of the significance of Pareto’s work….. 

In 1941 James Burnham produced his magisterial “The Managerial Revolution” against which George Orwell wrote in 1946 a devastating essay Second thoughts on James Burnham. Orwell clearly had some agreement with Burnham about the oligarchic direction in which political forces were pushing society and faulted Burnham more for his fatalistic assessment of the probability of Nazi success.

Not so well known was Burnham’s next book The Machiavellians – defenders of freedom (1943)  which examined the work of such theorists as Mosca, Pareto and Sorel

And also forgotten is a book he produced in 1964 - by which time he had turned from the fiery radical and "friend" of Trotsky to a full-blown liberal - Suicide of the West 

That sort of title has become a fairly common theme this past decade or so. In these myopic times, a bit of respect for long-dead writers is overdue!  

A New Class War??

I’ve been looking for some time for a book which does justice to our fall from innocence in the 1970s. I start from JK Galbraith’s concept of “countervailing power” which sustained the post-war period in western development. This was the theory that the corporate, union and social power held each other, for a “glorious 30 years”, in a certain balance until 1980 – with results good for everyone.

That balance was destroyed by something we too easily try to explain away by the use of the meaningless phrase “neoliberalism”. I’m familiar with the various efforts a range of social scientists have made to put meat on that particular bone – such as Philip Mirowski, Vivian Schmidt and, more recently, Quinn Slobodian. But, for my money “Licence to be Bad; how economics corrupted us” by Jonathan Aldred (2019) offers the most readable explanation of how we have all succumbed in the past 40 years to a new highly individualistic and greedy virus…..

The question which has been gnawing at me since the start of the new millennium is what can be done to put a new system of countervailing power in place…..????

Until now, few books dared raise or pursue that question, But Michael Lind’s The New Class War – saving democracy from the new managerial elite (2020) offers to do precisely that……

It starts powerfully – 

Demagogic populism is a symptom. Technocratic neoliberalism is the disease. Democratic pluralism is the cure.

before reminding us that -

In the 19^th and early twentieth centuries, five major schools of thought debated the future of industrial society: liberalism, producerism, socialism, corporatism, and pluralism (p39) 

……Producerism is the belief that the economy should be structured by the state to maximize the numbers of selfemployed family farmers, artisans, and small shopkeepers in society. The moral ideal of this school is the selfsufficient citizen of a republic with a small-producer majority whose economic independence means that they cannot be intimidated or blackmailed by wealthy elites. In the form of Jeffersonian agrarianism, producerism has a rich history in the United States. The rise of mass production in the economy, and the shift from a majority made up of farm owners and farm workers to urban wage earners, rendered the producerist ideal irrelevant in the modern industrialized West. While small-producerism still has appeal to romantics on both the left and the right, it is and will remain anachronistic, and having criticized it elsewhere, I will not discuss it in this book.4

….. A fourth philosophy, opposed to free market liberalism and state socialism alike, envisioned a harmonious society of state-supervised but largely self-governing “corporations,” by which was meant entire economic sectors, not individual firms, rather like medieval guilds.6 This tradition influenced Catholic social thought, as expressed in the papal encyclicals Rerum novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo anno (1931). For the French sociologist Émile Durkheim and others in the secular French republican solidarist tradition, the organization of labor and business could be an antidote to “anomie,” a phrase Durkheim devised to describe the isolation and disorientation of many individuals in urban industrial societies.7 The same term, “corporatism,” is often used for both democratic and dictatorial versions of this political tradition

….. The view of society as a community of self-organized and self-governing communities, under the supervision of a democratic government, is best described as “pluralism,” the term used by the English pluralists of the early twentieth century, like Neville Figgis, F. W. Maitland, G. D. H. Cole, and Harold Laski, and by their late-twentieth century heirs, including Paul Hirst and David Marquand. 

And then goes on to argue that – 

Only a new democratic pluralism that compels managerial elites to share power with the multiracial, religiously pluralistic working class in the economy, politics, and the culture can end the cycle of oscillation between oppressive technocracy and destructive populism.

The words we use

For the past thirty years I have lived in countries in which English is not the language of the street – nor that which comes naturally to those I talk with. That quickly makes one very sensitive to the very different meanings words are capable of holding.

Dave Pollard’s latest article is a tough one about “The Illusion of Communication” which he starts thus -

The cognitive linguist George Lakoff describes how our language and our conditioning, from very early in our lives, form our beliefs, hopes and expectations (collectively, our worldviews), and that the way we think is primarily through frames and metaphors (we learn metaphorical thinking at age two). Our worldviews in turn directly affect what we do and don’t do. 

“The theory that communication is embedding thoughts and ideas into language and then transmitting them to another who then assimilates the same thoughts and ideas, simply doesn’t work”, George says. Only if the sender and receiver share worldviews, frames and metaphors will there be understanding, and without understanding there is no communication. And what is not understood — which is everything that doesn’t fit the listener’s worldview and ways of thinking — will simply not be heard. We are also, George asserts, incapable of learning about anything we don’t care about, since we will not even be trying to understand.

Pollard then goes on to explore how few of the messages managers try to communicate in the workplace are actually understood – and that’s when they’re actually speaking the same language!

I know that when I speak at courses and Conferences, I would always track down the interpreters and summarise for them the key messages I was trying to communicate.  

I have always been fond of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets not only for its Zen like sense of time and the puniness of our efforts but for its emphasis on the fragility of words – thus, in “Burnt Norton”

Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

decay with imprecision, will not stay in place

You can read the entire poem here. And East Coker has a section I use a lot – 

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

 Pollard is actually pretty pessimistic about our ability to share our thinking (let alone convince others) - suggesting that poems and pictures have more potential. I totally agree. I generally make sure that my presentations have a poem or a painting….It certainly wakes people up! 

So, best, I think, to be an artist, to use the wiles of song and paint and poetry (full of metaphor and reframing) to slip into the spaces where the listener’s or viewer’s worldview is not locked tight, and to accept that, while your work may transport and even transform them, that will happen in ways you cannot control or even imagine.

And if you are not an artist, and disposed to muddle with the messy imprecision of words, you can only try to throw as many interesting, provocative, imaginative, ideas, possibilities, insights, connections, confirmations, refutations, imaginings, challenges, and stories at your poor, unsuspecting audience (hopefully articulately and fairly and not manipulatively), and see what sticks, what their lifelong conditioning has made them, just now, ready to hear, to entertain, and to admit.

In doing that, you might well change their conditioned beliefs, worldview, and future behaviours. Though of course, that only happened because your conditioned beliefs and worldview necessitated that you try to do so.

When it comes to communication, that’s the best we can do, or hope for. 

Orwell gave us a practical checklist of strategies for avoiding such mindless momentum of thought and the stale writing it produces: 

“A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
- What am I trying to say?
- What words will express it?
- What image or idiom will make it clearer?
- Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even yourself”. 

A year or so ago I stumbled on a useful format to help me present my thoughts more briefly and clearly – viz a table with questions such as what had sparked off the thoughts and what the basic message was which I wanted to leave with the reader.

And an old article on Economical writing shows the way by being divided into 28 sections - each of which is headed by a delightfully short and clear statement or injunction viz 

The author (McCloskey)'s injunction	What I think (s)he Means
“Writing is the economist’s craft”	Most economists are so focused on the message that they forget they are engaged in communications – which implies a reader
“Writing is thinking”	Most writing is thinking aloud…trying to clarify one’s own confusions….to be ready for an audience, it needs to go through about a dozen drafts
“Rules can help, but bad rules hurt”	A lot of books have been written about how to improve one’s writing style – some of them downright silly
“Be Thou clear”	Clarity is not the same as precision – and requires a lot of experiment and effort. Indeed I would rephrase the adage as “Strive to be Clear”
“The detailed rules are numerous”	“most advice about writing is actually about rewriting”!
“You too can be fluent”	Contains some lovely advice about the process of composing and transposing one’s thoughts and words
“You will need tools, tax deductible”	On the importance of words
“Keep your spirits up, forge ahead etc”	We’ve got to get the words flowing on the paper….don’t be a perfectionist….it’s just a first draft…many more to go!
“Speak to an audience of human beings”	Probably the most important point….who is the paper for? Imagine a typical reader!
“Avoid boilerplate”	Don’t use clichés or chunks of text everyone thinks thei understand
“Control your tone”	You can (and probably should) be conversational – but if you want to be taken seriously don’t joke around
“Paragraphs should have points”	Readers hate to see several pages of only text. Break it up when you sense you’re moving to a new point
“Use tables and graphics – and make them readable”	For me, crucial
“Footnotes are nests for pedants”	Love it!
“Make your writing cohere”	Very interesting section with points I had never come across before
“Use your ear”	A sentence consists of a subject, verb and object, We often overburden with qualifying clauses.
“Avoid elegant variation”	Clumsy way of saying we should not use a lot of adjectives or adverbs to say the same thing
“Check and tighten; rearrange and fit”	Priceless advice….we should be doing this all the time
“Rhetorical questions?”	Interesting question
“Use verbs, active ones”	Some good points made
“Avoid words that bad writers use”	Some very useful examples given
“Be concrete”	Great example of circumlocution
“Be plain”	Cut out the flowery language
“Avoid cheap typotricks”	Don’t use acronyms
“Avoid this, that, these, those”	Useful point
“Above all, look at your words”	Words so easily take over our thoughts. Be suspicious of the words that come initially to mind ….

 

A Life in Reform

 Books about management are big business. The Management section of any bookshop is therefore a big one – with what used to be a clear divide between textbooks (for the many students of the subject) and the more practical no-nonsense books written by business leaders/heroes That line began to blur a bit in the 1990s – with academics such as Rosabeth Kanter and Peter Senge, for example, producing best-sellers about the latest "best practice".

At about the same time, the field of New Public Management (NPM) began to make its mark – building on the success of David Osborne’s “Reinventing Government” (1992). By the new millennium, the shelves were groaning under the weight of the academic books appearing on the subject.

What, however, was most curious was the absence of titles from those with the practical experience of managing state bodies. And this despite the best intentions of someone like Mark Moore whose “Creating Public Value” (1995) celebrated the energy and creativity which good public managers brought to state bodies at both the national and local levels. 

Perhaps such people are simply too busy – or contractually prevented from sharing their insights? Only one other academic, as far as I’m aware, has tried to encourage public managers to speak out – and that is the late lamented Chris Pollitt whose The Essential Public Manager” was published in 2003. 

It’s this imbalance in the literature which has encouraged me these past few years to try to put a book together about my fairly unusual experience of administrative reform in some dozen countries - which I had been calling “How did Admin Reform get to be so Sexy?” but which is currently running with a new title “Change for the Better? - a life in reform”. I've been working on it fairly feverishly for the past week - and hope to put it up shortly on this site.....

It has an unusual structure - in that the two opening chapters were actually penned some 20 and 10 years ago respectively; and most of the others are based on posts from this blog – each prefaced by a short introduction. In this I follow the example of two writers I’ve long admired – Robert Chambers, whose Ideas for Development consists of essays he has written over a 30 years period – each with an introduction indicating the circumstances in which it was penned and how his thinking has changed. Roger Harrison, an organisational consultant who developed with Charles Handy the famous idea of ”Gods of Management”, did the same,

For me, too many books pretend to an authority and precision which life simply doesn’t have .....

What is “proper journalism”?

The “Breaking News” book by the former editor of “The Guardian”, Alan Rusbridger, contrasts the two worlds of what he calls the “legacy media” with that of the social…… and raises many profound issues for us as global citizens – eg

- can anyone really understand what’s going on in the world?

- do we not just see what we are looking for?

- did the legacy media not deserve some of the kickback – given its hectoring “top-down” tone?

- can we sustain the prejudice that the social media is sheer distraction? Rusbridger suggests that the new Twitter thread suggests otherwise….

- how can the legacy media fight back? 

By 2017 the “legacy media” had developed an understandable obsession with the GAFAT companies – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter – which, in their view, were working to different rules on a hopelessly tilted playing field.

The old-media view was simple: the “Gafaters” stole their content; built an audience around it; sold that audience to advertisers; gave almost nothing in return; took virtually no responsibility for the content they hosted; got a free pass on the regulations that burdened traditional media; and – to cap it all – paid virtually no tax. 

It was all, in other words, deeply unfair. But, however unjust, many companies felt they had no choice but to play by the new rules. A Reuters Institute report in late 2017 discovered fatalism within newsrooms and management. Social media was, they nearly all agreed, a vital bridge to the next generation of audiences. As the platforms grew, so legacy media – which could never dream of rivalling the Gafaters for scale – would weaken.

The number one aim of the legacy media was to get Facebook to admit it was a publisher, not just a pipe down which content flowed. That meant they would have to face the same responsibilities – and costs and regulation – as others. To the Daily Mail, Facebook was a 

‘deeply tarnished, filth-peddling, taxdodging, pusillanimous, terror-abetting behemoth which targets the vulnerable with bile and hatred’.

 Not all the traditional players would use such language. But, as unease grew over the extent to which Facebook’s laissez-faire processes were being manipulated to dark ends, there was something of a broader backlash against companies which were seen as greedy, out of control, arrogant and destructive of social and democratic fabrics.

There were demands that the GAFAT giants should do more to support old-fashioned journalism. But Zuckenburg turned the question around. ‘This journalism you think we should be supporting, what does it look like?’ 

It was a genuine enquiry, and the glances among his colleagues suggested it was one they had been grappling with themselves. If you think we should be sharing our revenues in the cause of some kind of public benefit, how do you define that benefit? 

For all its mildness and politeness, it was the deadliest and most profound question. “What is journalism? Who gets to do it? Do you all agree on a core set of standards and ethics and methods? Do you all agree on a common concept of public interest? Do you want us to support the gutter press? Or just local news or investigative news? Help us understand”.

There were senior figures within both Facebook and Google who were very troubled by aspects of the information chaos they had partly enabled, and who valued some – but not all – of the things that the old information order produced. They felt most traditional news executives didn’t understand algorithms. Some of them would privately admit they didn’t understand journalism.  

Try drawing a map of things we call ‘news’. There is straight news and adversarial news; subjective news and objective news. There is news as public service and news as entertainment. There is exclusive news and commodity news. There are investigations; there are campaigns and there is advocacy. There is breaking news and there is slow, considered news. There is analysis, or news with context; explanatory news. There is news as activism. There is opinion dressed up as news; there’s eyewitness news; firstperson news; or scoops of interpretation. There may even be sponsored news or advertising dressed up to look like news.

The potential of Twitter?

Like most grumpy old men, I have a stock response whenever I hear talk of Twitter….It’s one of the things which has poisoned our exchanges. It invites abuse. But Rusbridger points to the use of the “thread” by specialists as demonstrating the potential offered by the social media

In the binary argument over journalism in a digital world it became an article of faith to some that the internet was largely dross. You needed professionals to bring you reliable information because only they could be trusted [insert brain surgeon comparison]. Twitter – with its restrictive character limit – was widely held up as a place of simplicities, hatred and ignorance. All that was true, but only partly.

If, as a journalist, that’s all you chose to believe then you were blind to how Twitter was also a place of expertise, intelligent debate and genuine dialogue.

At first, they were constricted by the format. But then came the invention of a new format: the thread – a sequence of tweets making an argument or advancing a proposition. Suddenly the straitjacket of 140 or 280 characters melted away.

In the right hands the thread is a fascinating new form. Over many tweets a writer can develop quite a sophisticated argument. Each tweet can be accompanied by a screenshot or link to supporting evidence. Each tweet can be individually commented on or shared. 

The truth is that it is difficult to map the new eco-system of information in a neat way with – at different ends of a spectrum – ‘proper’ mainstream media and ‘other stuff’. Much of the information being produced by nonprofessionals is just as reliable, informative and useful as that produced by journalists. Vice versa, some information produced ‘professionally’ is weak, unreliable, unethical . . . and even untruthful. You could call it ‘fake’. 

On the eve of Donald Trump taking office, the respected NYU media academic Jay Rosen published a bleak blog post titled ‘Winter is Coming’ in which he argued that ‘so many things are happening to disarm and disable serious journalism . . . at the darkest time in American history since WW1’.

- He began with an ever-more severe economic crisis for news combined with the lowest levels of trust in news media in living memory, citing the First World War as a time of particular censorship and suppression of dissent.

- He added in a ‘broken and outdated’ model for political journalism (based on ‘access’ or ‘inside’ reporting which misses broader connections with the public).

- Then came a lack of diversity in newsrooms; weak leadership and ‘thin institutional structures’ in the American press. The mistrust of the media was mirrored by low levels of trust in most institutions and their leaders – the very people journalists were writing about.

- Then came an organised movement on the political right to discredit mainstream journalism and the increasingly dim prospect that there was even a fact-based debate to which journalists could usefully contribute. Media companies increasingly subordinated news and political debate to entertainment values; while finally, Facebook was slowly taking charge of the day-to-day relationship with users of the news system. 

Those who enjoyed “Breaking News” will find News – and How to Use (2020) an even more interesting read. It’s presented as an alphabetic glossary

In the interests of balance, I should draw readers’ attention to a critical assessment of the newspaper Capitalism’s Conscience – 200 years of the Guardian  ed D Freedman (2021)

Breaking News – the remaking of journalism and why it matters now

The media used to be described as one of the key features of democracy – for its ability to hold power to scrutiny. So much so it was actually called The Fourth Estate – with the Church, nobility and commoners being the first three and the earliest use of the term in a book by Thomas Carlyle in 1787: 

"Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all." 

How quickly things have changed – with the mainstream media now dismissed as “fake news” - and social media being most people's first "go to" source of news.

I’ve just put down a superbly-written story of the challenges faced by Alan Rusbridger as editor ofthe UK’s most honourable newspaper - The Guardian - during his stint at the helm from 1995 to 2015. It’s in a 2018 book whose title I've reproduced to head this post. 

The challenges it explores include - 

- Dramatically declining advertising revenues – as experienced by all print media

- A more demanding and interactive readership

- of not only global digital and print editions but of a weekend title, The Observer – requiring three separate teams

- law suits, the most famous of which was conducted by a Minister of the Crown. Jonathan Aitken

- government pressures (the Britain media enjoys no protection such as the US Second Amendment)

- the infamous phone hacking perpetrated on both the public and major political figures by the Murdoch Empire and other “Tabloids” who pour their poison on British society

- the Wikipedia leaks in which The Guardian played a central part (with Der Spiegel and the New York Post)

- the Snowden revelations 

It reads like a political thriller - and should be read by everyone these days

I hadn’t realized, for example, that The Guardian was one of the first English-speaking newspapers to experiment, in the early years of the internet, with more interactive methods of reaching readers. Nor that it had received global awards for its various innovations…

The book gives a very strong sense of what it was like to live during this period of powerful technical change. 

Too many of the books we read are written in confident tones as if the future was knowable. Uncertainty is the name of the game – with experiments being one of the most useful ways of proceeding……This is how Rusbridger describes the situation as he felt it 15 years ago -

So this was what we thought we knew around the middle of 2006.

·         Newspapers were going to find their traditional revenues – particularly in classified advertising and, probably, in cover price – eaten into over coming years.

·         Many newspaper managements would naturally respond by cutting costs. At the same time they would need to invest significantly in the digital future against the day when new technologies might determine future reading habits; and when significant amounts of advertising might well migrate to the internet.

·         None of this would happen smoothly. There would be profound jolts along the way. We – and others – could expect to lose lots of money in the coming • • • • • years if we had any chance of making the transition.

·         In a rapidly converged world, newspapers would have to ask themselves whether they remained a purely text medium. And they were going to have to face the fact that younger readers, especially, were questioning previously accepted notions of journalistic authority.

·         We would have to get used to the idea that audiences were fragmenting and that many people were increasingly finding non-conventional news sources a valuable addition, if not a ready substitute, for mainstream media.

·         Newspapers had to decide how much they embraced these new forms of discourse and dissemination or whether they stood apart from them. Should we be of the web, or simply on it?

·         Thousands of websites would aggregate what we do, syndicate it, link it, comment on it, sneer at it, mash it up, trash it, monetise it, praise it and attempt to discredit it – in some cases all at once. We were going to have to be more transparent about what we did and earn trust in this new world.

·         But it was hard to see that many would actually go to the risk and the expense of setting up a global network of people whose only aim was to find things out, establish if they’re true, and write about them quickly, accurately and comprehensibly. The blogo-sphere, which was frequently parasitical on the mainstream media it so remorselessly critiqued, couldn’t ever hope to replicate that. That – assuming people remained interested in serious news – should give us a huge advantage. • • • • • •

·         Against that, the digital world could do many things much better than we could currently do – including niche fragmentation, multimedia, voice, diversity, connectivity, range, scale, speed, responsiveness and community.

·         Our cost base was simultaneously our best protection and a mill stone around our necks. Between them the Guardian, Observer and Guardian Unlimited employed well over 600 journalists, more than two dozen of them based around the world. That was half the size of the NYT and a tenth the size of the BBC, but still a significant investment in serious journalism. We could be sunk by our cost base, or it could make what we did difficult for others to replicate.

·         No internet start-up on earth would ever contemplate such an investment in expensive, noncommercially productive people. The Yahoos and Googles of this world were explicit: they had no interest in creating content. They did, however, want to do interesting things with other people’s content. That could be good for us. Or it might not. Google could be our friend or our enemy. Or both.

·         We could not survive into a newspaperless future as a UK-only news company. The audience simply wasn’t rich enough or large enough to support us – and an advertising-supported operation could only work if we could deliver much larger numbers.

·         That meant taking our non-British readers more seriously We would, in particular, have to expand our North American operation. There could be no hope of trying to build a US audience with a paywall.

One of the many things I admired in the book was Rusbridger’s generosity of spirit – evident in his tributes to the support foreign journalists and editors gave in his times of need (in stark contrast to British colleagues); his appreciation of readers’ feedback and loyalty;  and his frequent references to those books and surveys he found helpful.  

Pageants and national values

After the bruising words and events of the past 4 plus years, it was important to see the better side of the United States on display yesterday at the Presidential Inauguration.

The optimism was perhaps a bit forced this time, the usual nationalist note more questionable. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one heckling Biden’s rhetorical flourishes. The colourful figure of young poet Amanda Gorman was a superb counterpoint – almost an ironic comment on that aspect…. 

Such events (and the State of the Union Message) are important opportunities for countries to remind themselves of – if not refresh - their values. An opportunity, however, which most countries flunk.

Take, for example, the glitter and pomp of the British Queen’s Speech marking the start of a parliamentary session - when the UK government’s programme is presented. What we actually see are the ermine robes of Lords and Ladies – reminding us that, although the feudal element of the system may now be gone (if very recently), these Lords and Ladies have been elevated to their position by a thoroughly rotten system of appointments - in the gift of a few people…..And of course it’s actually no longer the only show in town – with the Scottish Government since 1999 presenting its own distinctive programme to Scottish society 

In a few days (January 25^th) we’ll see Scots all over the world coming together to celebrate the Scottish values we’ve long seen as embodied in the life of our national poet, Rabbie Burns. A ploughman and then customs off,icial, Burns wrote in revolutionary times; understood its hypocrisies; and sympathized with its struggles against injustice. Not for nothing did the Russians also take him to their hearts.

It’s puzzling, therefore, that more countries don’t follow suit and have annual celebrations of poets who embody national values such as Shakespeare and Goethe  - or even better for my money, Bert Brecht. 

Governments always find it impossible to distinguish their own short-term political agenda from the deeper issue of national identity – witness the mess Gordon Brown made of the debate about British identity. 

For my money, the only country which has managed to create a mechanism which gives the opportunity for a proper expression of moral values is…..Germany whose apolitical Presidential addresses have, since Richard von Weizsaecker, had great power