The Daily Novel

Americans are now in bed, even those on the west coast. I woke early, prompted by a need to discover what the Pennsylvanians did yesterday. First stop was the one man blog, the Drudge Report, since I knew he would have waited up for a clear result, even if the east coast newspapers had gone to bed. The essential message is blazoned in red bang in the middle of his opening screen. Clinton 55 per cent, Obama 45 per cent. And on top left Matt Drudge has a link to Fox News, which leads with a claim from Hillary Clinton that the tide is now turning in her favour. Here are Fox’s first two paragraphs:

Hillary Clinton declared the “tide is turning” Tuesday after scoring a critical victory in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, pushing the race ever forward to the nine remaining contests.

With 98 percent of precincts reporting, Clinton had 55 percent and Barack Obama had 45 percent, a comfortable enough margin to deny critics their demand that she quit the race.

 Next stop the Wall St Journal, which did have a reporter still awake at 12.58 AM, Eastern Standard Time. They give the precise figures, which are Clinton 54.8 per cent, Obama 45.2 per cent, a lead of 9.6 per cent. Their comment is rather different:

Clinton kept her presidential candidacy alive with a decisive victory in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary, but she failed to get the blowout she needed to derail front-runner Obama even after a bruising contest.

The truth is probably in between. The dominant view was that to regain the initiative Hillary Clinton had to do at least as well as her 11 per cent victory in the neighbouring state of Ohio. She was expected to win Pennsylvania, the Deerhunter state, which has a large number of white working class voters whose lives have been blighted by the decline of the old manufacturing industries. So she hardly turned the tide. But Obama’s claim last night that ‘he had closed the gap’ sounds distinctly hollow. Although he is now virtually certain to end up with more than half of the pledged delegates, he has not yet got sufficient votes to win the nomination outright. And the unpledged delegates, mostly senior Democrats, have the right to change their votes right up to the convention at the end of August.

The big question is what enabled Hillary Clinton to shorten Obama’s lead at the last big fence in this race. As America voted yesterday the media was highlighting a television interview, in which Hillary Clinton, said she would use nuclear weapons to strike against Iran, if Iran attacked Israel. Maybe that brought out a lot of voters worried about national security.

But only maybe. Not a few Americans are as worried as people this side of the pond about such inflammatory statements, which make Clinton sound more hawkish than John McCain, and quite as sabre rattling as George W Bush.

 Breakfast on the prom, where my tranquillity was invaded by a large group with hard hats on. That part of the season which brings large groups of school children and university students. Mostly as part of geography or geology classes, for the beach is rich in fossils providing the evidence to support the theories of Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins. But sometimes English and art classes; there is no better place on the British coast to inspire the young imagination to paint or write a poem.

This morning’s group appeared to range in ages from about 14 to 22, some too young for university, others too old for school. In fact they were a school party, but from Munster on the border of Germany and the Netherlands. The Germans take their education seriously. Staying at school til 22 and completing an undergraduate degree at 30 is not uncommon.

Their subject was civil engineering. So I wish them well. My grandchildren will have need of them, to stop the cliffs around here falling into the sea and to combat the results of global warming.

That New York Times article on the possibility of death by blogging also pointed out that the effects on your wealth can be just as bad as the effects on your health. They instanced cases of bloggers being paid as little as $10 a post and young people slaving away day and night for blogging companies and taking home $1,000 a month.

But Jeff Javis of City University (New York, no relation of City University, London) reckons his blog, Buzzmachine.com, is putting millions of dollars into his bank account.  The ad income from the blog, which he has been running since 2003, amounts to a total of $13,855, which his healthy profit considering the blog cost in hosting is only $327 a year. But hardly enough to live on. Nevertheless he decided to take the plunge and give up his well-paid day job as President of an online division of Conde Nast. And now he is back on a six figure income and and expects to have several million dollars in his bank account in five years time.

According to Jarvis the blog got him his job at the City University of New York and a contract to write a regular column for The Guardian, both of which pay real money, but not up to the level of a Conde Nast President. But it also led to companies paying him to come in and teach their executives how to blog. Then came a book contract which emerged from an idea that began in his blog which doubled his consulting income.

Jarvis wrote it should take only about two minutes to teach how to blog. That statement reminded me of Jeremy Paxman telling the City University, London that it only takes three weeks to learn the essentials of journalism. Both Jarvis and Paxman were speaking truth. But it does not follow that journalism students are wasting their time spending a year in a university or that that the executives Jarvis teaches are wasting the hours he spends with them.

Because in journalism, an understanding of the subjects you are mostly writing about and contacts with other people working in the subject area, can get you up the tree rapidly, even if your writing, spelling, etc is not that brilliant. And that line of thinking reminded me of John Gardiner, who was one of the best journalists on the Financial Times, and went on to become the chairman and chief executive of Tesco, until he retired two or three years ago. Probably even richer than Jarvis hopes to become.

I met Gardiner in the 1960s, by which time business journalism was becoming increasing dominated by the university educated and particularly the Oxbridge lot. I remember Gardiner because he had started as an accountant, during which period he had learned skills and acquired contacts which his colleagues fresh from the ivory towers did not have.

He was one half of the Lex column when I first met him. Thanks to his reputation at the Financial Times he was offered an executive job in the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation, which was the Wilson government’s vehicle for restructuring ailing large companies in the British economy without full-scale-Attlee type nationalisation.

While doing that job Gardiner was offered the top job at one of the companies the IRC was trying to resurrect, the old Cammel Laird ship-building company. He took it, whereas most of the business school graduates would not have touched it with a barge pole, since they had learnt that Britain no longer any hope of ever becoming a great shipbuilder even again; the future had already been staked out by the Norwegians and the Japanese.

Nevertheless, he made a success of the job. Which led to him getting the top job at Tesco, a company which could not have more different.

All of this led me to start cogitating on what is learnt in the university of life, as contrasted with what is learnt in universities and the even more unanswerable question of why some people managed to learn in the university of life, while others get crushed.

But fear not I am not going to continue these ramblings. Because beneath Jarvis’s post was anther on how Web Two is changing journalism. That is a subject he really knows about and it has led him to draw maps to illustrate his arguments.

My next blog will be about that. Complete with my own map, maybe.

Just made myself a cup of tea. Emblazoned on the side of the cup, bought for me by one of my daughters, is the message above.

Which reminded me of several scare stories in the last few days suggesting that blogging is so bad for your health, it may be fatal. All based on the sudden death of two oldish people, who happened to be obsessive bloggers. Two personal tragedies, but as one commentator noted, two out of an estimated number of one hundred million bloggers is hardly statisically important. For a deeply serious consideration of the risks, read the New York Times story. Otherwise continue reading this light-hearted comment.

My family gets worried if I stay up half the night blogging, as I sometimes do. But my sleeping habits have always been erratic, and long before blogging began or computters were invented, I would write in the night, first with a fountain pen, later on a typewriter.

Sometimes then, if I did not feel like going to bed, or woke up in the middle of the night, I would play patience. Nowadays I play Hearts on the computer, which is quite as relaxing and much more fun, because I am playing against three personalities invented by the computer, who are better than most human card players.

They are certainly better than me, because Vista keeps a record of your score. And presently I have only won 43 per cent of the games I have played since Vista arrived on my screen in January.

Maybe it is going to kill me. Or maybe I will succomb later today when I have a healthy walk down to the beach, and a taxing walk climb back up the hill.

 Xcity is the annual magazine produced by the magazine students in City University’s Department of Journalism, which circulates to all alumnae and enables them to keep in touch with each other. The Spring 2008 edition deserves one bouquet and one brickbat.

The bouquet goes to Brian Semple, who not only got to interview City University’s new boss but led him to say something controversial. The new vice-Chancellor, Malcolm Gillies, actually has some experience of journalism as a music critic and higher education commentator in his native land for The Australian.

He told Semple:

‘The whole newspaper industry lags behind the advancment of technology appallingly. When I was a music critic I still had to phone my copy in. I could not send it as an email, and that was only 13 years ago.

But a journalism school has to lead the industry. We can’t follow it, we’re training for the next generation.’

 Good for the students. Gillies might not be so pleased since along with the head of the journalism department, Adrian Monck, he is hoping to raise 10 million pounds for new facilities for journalism at City from the British journalism industry, who might not agree that they lag behind the ‘advancment of technology’. Particularly since The Guardian leads the world with its web pages, now reaching a readership of 19 million compared with the 400,000 circulation of the print version. And in the past year The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Financial Times and the Daily Mail, have massively improved their web coverage, by recruiting more staff, some of them from City University. They are competing very effectively with the New York Times and the Washington Post, who have much bigger staffs.

Like Barack Obama, Gillies has to learn that speaking off the cuff when journalists are listening does not always convey the message which was intended.

The brickbat is for missing the best news for this year’s edition, which should have been highligted with interviews with the men concerned. In January two ex-City students became national editors, James Harding, class of 1995, at The Times, and John Mullin, class of 1985, at The Independent on Sunday. They follow in the footsteps of Will Lewis, class of 1991, who became editor of The Daily Telegraph last year.

The Xcity listings section, which reports what ex-City University journos are doing now, has James Harding as the Washington bureau chief of the Financial Times,  and John Mullin, as executive editor of The Independent. Which was true last year!

The listings are are an awful sweat to produce, now that there are several thousand ex-students. But that makes it a good learning exercise for students to track down the ‘lost’ students. It is boring work with lots of un-returned phone calls. Just like real journalism. And ex-City students turn to the listings pages first, just as Time Out readers, go right the listings as soon as they buy the paper.

 But the staff and the management need to share the blame with the students in terms of Xcity priorities. The listings section, which now runs to 38 pages, no longer lists the details of the international students, the department’s money spinner, which has been taking eighty students a year for some years now. Including them would require an expensive extra twenty pages. But, in my view, they are worth it. They are, after all the geese who lay the golden eggs, and when they go back home they tell their colleagues and friends how much they gained from their year in London.

Last week’s Media Guardian report on journalism training has sparked a lively debate about whether university courses have biased entry to journalism towards a public school Oxbridge elite. Lis Howell, one of my colleagues at City University’s Department of Journalism replied with some current hard facts from the front line of recruitment for next year. This is what she wrote:

· I read Peter Wilby’s article on a day when I was interviewing candidates for City University’s MA/postgraduate diploma in broadcast journalism.
In the last week we have interviewed 90 applicants for 46 places. The majority have attended state schools. Of the successful candidates approximately 60% are female, over 12% are from visible ethnic minorities, and almost all do extra work in bars, offices and shops in their holidays or at weekends. We also take non-graduates at our discretion and in the past have accepted a psychiatric nurse, an actor and a fashion designer, all in their thirties.
I was unsure what Mr Wilby was advocating. I was the first member of my family to gain a degree. When I tried to become a journalist in 1973 I was rejected by my local paper as “over-educated for a girl” then they relented and offered me “something on the woman’s page”. I didn’t take the job. I finally gained work experience in BBC local radio after joining a queue of women interviewees for receptionist. Take it from me, it was not a character building experience!
I am in no doubt that whatever the flaws in the system today it is fairer than it was, and the students we take at City have a great deal more life experience and good humour than some of the narrow-minded men I worked with in the 70s. Of course I did not have the privilege of working with Mr Wilby, who I’m sure was very fair and decent. With that in mind, I’d like to invite him to meet this year’s cohort here at City. I’m sure he’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Lis Howell, director of broadcasting, City University, London

I can report that, on this score, things have not changed since I began teaching journalism at City University in 1979. The regional newspaper industry at the time was worried that the universities would send them a lot of know-alls, who would scorn coverage of weddings and funerals. And who would not stay working in the provinces because the pay was so low.

When I arrived at City in April 1979 my first job was to help with the recruitment for the next year’s post graduate diploma in journalism. My two full-time colleagues were both Oxbridge graduates. But they came from humble origins and they bent over backwards NOT to favour the Oxbridge public school entrants. So much so that they wanted to turn down the only Oxford graduate that year, whom I thought did have absoluttely the right talent for the journo trade. Happily each of the interviewing panel was allowed one hunch choice for a candidate against the majority vote. So he came, performed fine in the regions; today he is a senior editor at The Financial Times.

I had a similar experience to Lis Howell in my own first job. In 1955 I was turned down, without an interview, by the newspaper in my home town, the Wolverhampton Express & Star. I was accepted, however, by the Investors Chronicle, part of the Financial Times group. This was despite the fact, as I discovered subsequently, that the FT, under Lord Drogheda, had led Fleet Street in hiring bright Oxbridge graduates at a time when most journalists were not university educated. They left school at 14 and went straight on to their local paper. Drogheda with the editor, Gordon Newton, used to go up to Oxbridge in interview possible candidates. Harold Wincott, the editor of the Investors Chronicle, was totally aware of this, but since he was very much his own man, he did not feel bound to follow it.

 So maybe I benefited from not being Oxbridge or public school and from a working class family.

Co-incidentally, Dermot Murnaghan, now presenting the news on Sky Television, was writing in Monday’s Guardian about how he first made it into journalism. He does not refer to the Wilby article. But he does say he was ‘lucky’ enough to get on City University’s post-graduate course. What he does not know is how lucky he was. Because my colleagues on the interviewing panel wanted to turn him down, on the grounds that he was an eternal student type; he was then in his fourth year struggling to write up his Ph D.

I was able to argue successfully that he was also a lad from a humble background with a gift for words and the nouse to make a good journalist. By the time he arrived he was heavily in debt and was about the most shabby dresser on the course. When it was time for him to go on his first work placement at the Coventry Evening Telegraph, I told him he must wear a suit. ‘I don’t have one.’ he replied. ‘Then, borrow one.’ I said.

He did. And today he is able to buy his own and is one of the snappiest dressers in the trade.

But to return to the debate about class and bias on journalism entry. In journalism, who you know is as important as what you know. So for entirely practical reasons journalism benefits from have a wide variety of applicants, including some from the elite, who can help their colleagues in acquiring contacts amongst the powerful. The same applies to ethnic groups.

And journalism courses are good places to enlarge your contacts. I am sure that is one reason why Salam Pax, the Baghdad blogger, is on this year’s MA in International Journalism at City University, London. He has already demonstrated that he can make it in journalism. He will learn something in the classroom that is useful but the big gain will the be the additions to his contact book and the chance he has to talk to London journalists.

According to a story in The Guardian the usual assumptions about age do not apply to the McCain family. They speed up as they get older. McCain, 71, says his mother, Roberta, was stopped speeding in Arizona at 112 mph. And they also gain in determination. Roberta was denied a rental car in Paris four years ago on the grounds that she was too old.

So she bought one and continued her holiday in France. Then she shipped it back stateside and drove it three thousand miles coast to coast just to show them Frenchies.

Barack Obama, 17,  is going to have to use all his formidable brain to think of an answer to that one. 

The mighty nature God must have been looking over my shoulder while I wrote the previous blog. She drummed on the roof of my bungalow half an hour after I had finished with some of his hail stones. And, as if to demonstrate her, super-human powers, she kept the sun shining, melting the stones as they hit the roof.

Not only that she messed around with my computer connections to try and stop me posting the story to the web. The screen told me that the computer could not find a connection to the internet.

I checked all the connections at the computer. All firm and fast. I got up the carpet to check the connection to the wire that leads to the socket in the hall. Equally firm and fast. I tried a phone in the last link before my computer. It worked OK.

So by now I decided that it must be the wicked Lord of Sky, Rupert Murdoch. The Sky server must be down, breaking under the load of serving the millions of customers who have signed up for its seductive package, thereby swelling the profits of Murdoch plc.

I was about to ring the Sky help line, when I remembered the First Law of Computing.

‘If a program stops working, and you cannot find the cause, turn everything off at the mains. Count from one to ten. Then restart the computer.’

This law has no basis in science that I know of. It derives from ‘trial and error’. Based on my own experience on the humble Amstrad PCW, which was the greatest achievment of Alan Sugar, and was the first personal computer that enabled the poorest Brits, not only to replace their typewriiters but to get on to the net. What a shame he now barks at people on the telly instructing them on how to make as much money as possible.

Many computer techies I have known also subscribe to this law. It seems to work just as well in the age of Vista, Google, and MySpace as it did in the days of CPM and the Amstrad PCW.

So if you get an error message on your computer. Remember the First Law. And remember the God of Trial and Error.

Test your eyesight. Can you spot Portland Bill?

This life-long townie is filled with wonder at his first spring on

Nature is also the Great Painter, who paints a different picture for us every day, no, every hour. Presently the skyscape is crowed with a mixture of dark grey rain clouds and billowing white clouds. The sea is a light green, merging into a band of dark grey in front of Chesil

Only three weeks ago, the Great Conductor, summoned her most powerful player, to perform a mighty crescendo, which rained the car park at Charmouth, with pebbles, driftwood and assorted plastic bottles and boxes. This morning she is playing the slow movement. Yesterday’s chilly and gusty wind has been displaced by a gentle breeze. The sun has already demonstrated that even in Britain in April it can raise the temperature to a level warm enough even for Americans reared in centrally heated homes. But the sun has not had it all his own way. There have been light refreshing showers to quench the thirst of all the players in the orchestra as they emerge from hibernation.

On mornings like this I can understand why people like Tony Blair and George W Bush and all those fundamentalist Muslims, believe that all these wonders must have been created and orchestrated by an all powerful God or Allah. And I lose patience with Richard Dawkins, who I think gets near to making science into an all powerful God.

I wish Dawkins would take more account of the kind of truths discovered by great artists and poets.

I am content with William Wordsworth who urged us all to get out and let nature be our teacher. That leads me to respect the findings of Charles Darwin and his successors, including Richard Dawkins. How could I not respect their findings, because the evidence for those findings is all there in the fossils of Charmouth

But I wish Dawkins and his ilk had more respect for the things in nature, and in human nature, which are not yet explained by science.

To a talk in the village hall this evening by Peter Press on the history of Charmouth, which to most visitors is a place they can stay by the seaside, if they cannot get into Lyme Regis, where they can pose their wives on the Cobb to the background which became an iconic image when Meryl Steep, let her hair blow in the wind in the French Lieutentant’s Woman.

But, as I discovered this evening, history started before Hollywood. And when theRomans marched into Britain just over two thousand years ago, they did not even notice Lyme Regis, (which got the Regis bit of its name because a later ruler of England, a German immigrant, liked to holiday there.)

The road they built goes from Winchester, past Thomas Hardy’s birthplace, near Dorchester, and within a whisker of my bungalow, to link up with the Fosse Way, which reaches the sea at Axmouth, then a viable port. As I write I can hear the tramp of Ceasar’s soldiers, pacing a route which in part follows that of the present A35. They marched on regardless of the local sniper fire. And they were probably moving nearly as fast as the twenty-first century holiday makers, driving their cars which are capable of doing twice the legal speed limit, but reduced to a crawl, because where they are going is where thousands of other people want to go; once, the season starts.

In the Doomesday Book, which was the survey conducted by England’s next conqueror in 1066, so that he could collect his taxes efficiently, Charmouth is recorded as a thriving little agricultural community. It earned its bread from tilling the soil, and its soil was richer than that at Lyme, two miles away. In those days the tourist industry was not a major factor in the economy.

In the hall tonight there was still some pride in that heritage. And in the Cistercian monks who nourished it, long after the solidiers had departed. They were devoted to their God in the Sky, but when that God talked to them, he told them to take of their cassacks and do some hard work, to set an example to their flock, rather than pontificating about how they should live their lives.

But of course the Romans did conquer England, even though it took a later continental army to force the English to measure in centimeters. And William did win the battle of Hastings; King Harold is dead, not gathering a resistance army in Argentina.

They certainly won the battles, just as surely as George W Bush scored with his recent surge. But history tells that the English, after they had licked the wounds of defeat, went on to establish British rule over countries that Ceasar and William the Conqueror did not know existed.

But that was quite some time ago. And today’s reality, is the ‘natives’ are governing themselves. Including Robert Mughabe, who came to power, with the support of the majority of the his own people in what was then known as Southern Rhodesia, a country named after Cecil Rhodes, who captured chunks of Africa for the British Crown and for British capitalism.

And, in whose honour, legions of Americans come to Oxford to study as Rhodes scholars.

Mughabe won his particular war. But he has not been able to manage the peace. His poor are amongst the poorest of the world. Many of them don’t have enough to eat, let alone the economic power to get fat and unhealthy on the junk food of American capitalism.

One of the placards held up by Mughabe’ s marchers after the election, whose results we still do not know, was something like, ‘We will never be a colony again.’. That is the spirit with which those who risked their lives to fight with Mughabe in the bush were imbued.

But that was twenty-eight years ago. The younger generation want him to move on to the challenges of today. Mughabe has not made the transition from ‘freedom fighter’ to ruler, that has been made by Saint Nelson Mandela and, less successfully, by Fidel Castro.

It tookk a few hundred years after the Roman and French invasions for the English to move to ‘democracy’.  Time is truncated in the modern era, but change takes time. Anything that the west says about Mughabe is suspect. It smacks of the old British colonialism or of the American neo-colonialism of George W Bush. We need to stand back.

And hope that the other new leaders of Africa will be able to persuade Mughabe that now he has won he needs to start thinking about how to govern. How to give his people enough to eat. And also how to give them as good an education as they might get if they won one of those much coveted Rhodes scholarships at Oxford.