Oh Lord, who's really in charge?

What a wonderful sitcom the Lords' communications committee has become as editor after editor is brought before them to justify who really wears the trousers on their papers.

Editorships are priveleged and powerful positions often steeped in legend, even if often of our own making, and it spoils the image to find they're often just people like the rest of us who do as they're told.

Whatever Rebekkah Wade says about Murdoch or Andrew Neil says about the Barclay Brothers, I'd personally save a bit of taxpayers dosh and retire them to the country with a handful of biogs.

I'd recommend Piers Morgan's The Insider (Murdoch), Max Hastings' Editor (Black) for starters. Brian MacArthur's Today and the Newspaper Revolution (Shah) was pretty insightful too. There's a few on Maxwell but, trust me when I say at least one is only useful for resting your cocoa mugs as you read into the night.

Ron Hunt: telling it straight

I was sad to hear of the death of Ron Hunt, the editor who defied the NUJ for six months by bringing out Kettering's Evening Telegraph on his own in the bad old days of the late seventies.

I spent a little under a year there as a district reporter, a short while after the braziers had cooled - and after the mutton-chopped one had kindly let me choose my patch.

It was a toss up between Corby, a town reborn on the back of a thriving steelworks, a union hotbed and rampaging Scots who'd followed the work south, or Rushden, a dead-on-its-feet old boot-and-shoe town where "bugger all happens outside the Lions Club AGM".

I chose the Cobblers over the Gorbals because I reckoned its sleepiness was a front for the sort of salacious exclusives I'd been flogging to the red tops on my last paper. I came away with my six-quid-a-week better contract thinking Ron must be dead chuffed to have snared such a high-flyer and wondering how long he could hang on to him before Larry Lamb or Derek Jameson finally snapped him up.

A few weeks later, my old boss rang to see how I was getting on. I left out the bits about the pensioners' bring-and-buy and the guest speaker at the Probus Club and gushed on about the mole I was cultivating deep inside Thrapston Councl.

He said Ron would be delighted. He'd rung him for a reference, said he thought I was a cocky little t**t but would have to do because the strike had put a lot of good people off and he was desperate.

I did get a few exclusives, even though my other mole at Irthlingborogh Women Against Nuclear Proliferation never delivered and did get snapped up after eight months ... by the rival freesheet.

Hey-ho, onwards and downwards ...

It must be true. It's in the papers

Wires are always getting crossed between departments. It's embarrassing when you splash on Takeover deal imminent and the City desk runs a diary piece scotching rumours. But in the terrace talk and training ground whispers that is modern-day sports reporing, it's easy for the same desk to score an own goal.

Today's Metro (Page 67) has Alan Shearer experincing Shear Heartache "with [ex-Fulham nanager Chris] Coleman set to be King Kev's No.2

Turn two pages and Coleman looks to have ruled himself out of the running and Shearer, clearly a master of his own destiny, appears far from heartbroken when he make it clear: I don't know whether I want to be a number two.

Hardly singing from the same team sheet.

The truth is out there somewhere

Regular readers will know I'm always urging rookie reporters to dump from Big Brother and watch DVDs of Lou Grant. Well, I've more essential viewing for those with the stomach for it: Jeremy Kyle.

Not because it'll harden them up to vox pops on dodgy estates but for the sheer plausibility exhibited almost daily by the most accomplished liars.

The pick of them came on Thursday when a somewhat tasty geezer whose fibs had been rumbled by a lie detector the previous week, flatly and animatedly refused to admit he'd spent the night with his mistress or tried repeatedly to phone her before the next show so they could get their stories straight to avoid further embarrassment.

He stuck to his guns, even when his pal in the audience, albeit thick as a brickie's buttie, inadvertently shopped him. And when the mistress produced her phone to reveal nine missed calls from him, he still protested his innocence and insisted everyone was "'avin a larf".

Now that’s a reality show. And one that every rookie would do well to watch once in a while, if only to reaffirm what every old hand on the news desk will tell them: people lie their pants off, sometimes ever so convincingly, whenever it suits them to do so.

Goliath and the Stars of David

There's nothing better than watching a little guy with a cause punching above his weight, be it at the foot of a beanstalk, on the set of a kung fu film or in the third round of the FA Cup.

Readers of the JC, whose purse strings I now hold, know the feeling well, having seen their favourite Sabbath distraction feed the national media major exclusives three weeks running; from leaked emails at Clarence House to David Abraham's philosophy of giving to the £2 million-a-year Prudential boss who broke his nose during a Sunday football spat.

None of them came easy. The first was classic use of contacts, the second, days of persistence and refusal to take no for an answer and the third a result of tracking down 22 men in shorts and half a dozen in suits, all of whom were one way or another sworn to secrecy.

It's always good to do. Better by far to do it against the odds. And somehow satisfying that it all emanated from the last remaining national newspaper office in EC4.

In text advertising? In your dreams . . .

The newspapers experimenting with in-text advertising are deluding themselves if they think there is any merit in allowing companies to sponsor words in stories.

There is not and it pains me to think they are people out there daft enough to think there is.

Sky Sports, Dennis Publishing and the Telegraph have decided to let advertisers choose words that relate to their products, highlight them in text and link through to an annoying - and in terms of any sort of editorial credibility, damaging - pop-up ad.

As the Guardian have clearly realised, this is a massive abuse of readers' trust and the thin end of a very dangerous wedge and, wisely, passed. But in America, Vibrant Media claim they are delivering these ads to 110 million web users a month on nearly 3,000 sites, many oif them owned by papers such as The Indianapolis Star, The Arizona Republic, and the Reno Gazette-Journal.

I've encountered these in several previous lives and, once upset my commercial team by calling a meeting with Vibrant to a premature close with the words: "You're having a laugh."

This is intelligent technology used in a very unintellident way. It has bags of potential within advertising features and, used internally, the coding can open up all sorts of possibilities. But at the moment it is a loose cannon. It short-changes readers and is prone to farcical error.

My last contact with this was a discussion involving an ad campaign for BP and the prospect of them sponsoring words such as oil and emission. I was minded to be more civil this time and suggested that, even if I did lose my marbles and cave in, it would do the sponsor few favours to have their smiley pop-ups linked to words that usually make the news pages via stories involving sea birds killed by spillages or suicides involving exhaust pipes and lengths of hose.

On a lighter note, one motoring magazine editor told me he'd shamefully trialled it to find the sponsored word tyre successfully ignited a pop-up for remoulds. But the word rubber gave readers sex dolls.

When it finally dawned on the Sun

Not that it's any of my business, but I was just a tad depressed that Rebekah Wade wrote to her staff to ask them to get behind plans to embrace the web and publish on a “truly global scale”.

It's 2007, 13 years since newspapers began to embrace a medium their kids already had and, more significantly for her, more than two years since Rupert Murdoch told editors exactly that.

The Sun has had a very successful site for a long time. Its use of images has, ahem, made it very clickable but, more importantly, they've had a clever editor in Pete Picton who knew all about recreating and enhancing a successful brand online.

A few years ago, Wade blamed the success of Sun Online for the drop in her paper's circulation. Picton was quizzed on this during a panel discussion at an AOP event shortly afterwards and diplomatically sidestepped. But we all knew it was nonsense. Web hits were growing, print sales were falling and the relationship between the two in terms of cause and effect were limited.

Even so, the Sun apart, this does paint a time capsule picture of journalism as a whole and one which rings true.

For too long, too many senior journalists dismissed the Web as they would an advertising supplement, embraced it when the penny dropped that their futures depended on it and are chasing the game in understanding the logistics of how it works.

Blogger blags his way into the NUJ

The NUJ's acceptance of Endgadget blogger Conrad Quilty Harper as a member marks a significant milestone in its history. They've always had strict rules about who qualifies, traditionally judging applications on the percentage of their earnings from actual journalism to root out the village correspondents and pamphleteers.

It shows how far the union and the media have come but begs the question, notwithstanding the NUJ's resistance to many things new media - and taking into account its membership has seen better days - why on earth would he want to join a union in the first place?

So, what does the future hold?

All this talk of the Web 2.0 journalist is causing much disquiet among those who hold the key to its future.

During two lively QandA sessions at Cardiff University yesterday, I was faced four times with questions that, however phrased, boiled down to: "What on earth will employers want from us when we qualify?"

It was no good me reassuring them that their core investigative skills and writing ability would be enough, and that colleges of this quality equip them technically well in the first place, although I do stand by it.

And it didn't help that I predicted yet more redundancies as papers talking up convergence actually converge and work to a business model that gets close to the management ideal of a few multi-skillers doing the job of many - and getting a return on the fortunes they's spent on their infrastructure.

But that's still a way off as it involves a technical interface that publishers are still struggling to get to grips with and a broadcast-style editorial management that is often equally misunderstood.

Anyway, before we get carried away, It's probably worth reiterating that I don't envisage any great sea change in the way these guys will be operating, save for the fact that some of them will be using a bit more kit from time to time than they would have done when the Sun was broadsheet.

(pause here and spare a thought for all those agency hacks of the 70s filing fudges, flongs and snaps, banging off a pic on the court steps, an off-the-cuff page top for the evenings, an overnighter for the mornings, a backgrounder for the Sundays, then dashing to the game and filing updates for local radio live from a phone in the press box)

The real challenge for educators remains in producing reporters who can think on their feet, file quickly, with clarity and authority, ask questions that get answers quickly and develop and maintain contacts that will produce copy to justify a place on an ever emerging plethora of platforms.

As for the technical challenges they're worried about, be they using a microphone or tagging story files for searchability, they'll absorb them before lunch on their induction day. And I speak from years of experience watching interns get to grips with applications it took weeks for the newsroom to grasp.

At the moment many publishers, no matter how they have rearranged their desks, are still operating a two-tier system which distinguishes those who write from those who upload. Because, often, the best uploaders are post-grads who've never seen the inside of a council chamber, let alone doorstepped a minister, and the best writers can't, or won't, lower themselves to filing web-only chunks on a running story, let alone learn how a new CMS works.

So, until the new wave comes through with the attitude and skills to produce well-sourced, old-fashioned exclusives at any time on platforms they see as no more complex than an ipod, we're stuck with newsrooms struggling to make sense of the brave new world.

And it doesn't help that many of the driving forces are so adrift from reality, they are still referring to the crown jewells of their endeavours as "content".

Those who think that's what it is - and defer to it as being "king" - should abdicate.

The rights and wrongs of David Montgomery

David Montgomery is right to criticise pay on regional newspapers. I told my first editor I wanted to learn the trade and was bollocked for using a blue collar word. He left me in no doubt, it was a profession.

That's as maybe but, 30 years on, it's hard to justify paying a daily paper reporter who exposes a paedophile ring in Newcastle or a columnist in Manchester who changes the way a Bill on disability is drafted thousands of pounds less than a graduate who uploads video to a national website.

But he's delusional if he thinks you can dispense with subs and maintain any sort of professional credibilty at the same time.

He's come in for some criticism from subs who, rightly, shudder at the thought of some of the text-speak masquerading as copy going straight into print. But, to be fair, I think he was talking about new, digital platforms.

If so, and he really thinks all subs do is "check things that don't need to be checked", he's completely misunderstood the way stories are presented - and absorbed - online.

Never mind the words, good Web subbing - chunking, linking, classifying, teasing, updating, editing for SEO - will give "content" the "context" it needs to justify publishing in a free-to-air medium struggling to pay for itself.

And no matter hard you try - and all of the big boys are really trying - I've yet to find software to do that.

What surprises me most though is that the Monty I knew spent as brief a time he as could actually writing anything. His ambition was to get into the editors chair as fast as possible - and he chose the fastest route. Subbing.

Heather Mills McCartney and GMTV

Heather Mills McCartney plans to use the European Court of Human Rights to make the press more accountable, she announced this morning during a gripping 10-minute tirade on the GMTV sofa.

She's been so abused by the press since her split with Paul she has contemplated suicide and even handed a dossier of evidence to a pal to make public in the event of a death threat against her being carried out.

She revealed this to a clearly embarrassed Fiona Phillips who struggled to introduce "balance" by hinting that some of the attention may have been down to her. But She swept it aside, producing scrapbooks the size of windows, strong anecdotal evidence and the kind of controlled emotion and salient detail, the most seasoned interviewer would be pleased to extract.

She rebuffed allegations about killing a neighbour's dog, demanding millions in her divorce settlement, citing 4,400 'abusive artciles', rubbishing claims about her glamour-model past and citing uncomfortable truths in the Tabloid anticents from Hillsborough to Diana to the McCanns.

Phillips shuffled a lot, clearly under pressure to shut her up, not because much of it was uncomfortable lisening, but they needed an ad break.

Mills closed by predicting the press will now have more of a go at her for speaking out and she may well be right. But if she performs like this. certainly in PR terms, she'll make a formidable opponent. And I'll bet hits to Enough is Enough campaign , go through the roof as a result.

I did wonder when the GMTV site, would bother to mention it. It took three hours. Not exactly a breaking news operation, but the videos were well worth a look, until they mysteriously disappeared from view again.

Odd. This'll be all over the nationals tomorrow.

Fleet Street and memory lanes

I was chuffed to bits to get a mention in Patrick Stoddart's speech at the recent Echo and Post reunion in Hemel Hempstead.

Why? Not because I was a star feature writer being courted by Fleet Street like him, but it was where I got my first break in newspapers - as a tea boy.

Yes, I made tea, fetched expenses, ran copy to the composing room and generally ran errands for most of the big names who gathered at Hemel Hempstead football club for what was a decent hours of nostalgia. I once even washed the news editor's car, made the odd trip to the dry cleaners and even played in goal for the work's team.

It was the politically-incorrect seventies and I had the sort of haircut you see on old match of the day clips. Some of the subs took the piss out of my tie-dye T-shirt, Mike Ryder (chief sub) got my name wrong for about nine months and Eric Harris (sports desk) never referred to me as anything other than the "curly-headed twat".

I once nearly stopped the paper coming out when one of the print unions threatened to strike because I swept up cat droppings in the loading bay in breach of some demarkation and was "caught" returning a dustpan to a maintenance locker.

Like I said, this was the seventies. I briefly joined Natsopa to appease the militants baying for blood. Just as well because a week later, I was passing the composing room when I spotted a strip of headline (waxed bromide to anyone under 50) that had come away from a page and was lying sticky-side up on the floor.

The page had been 'rolled' and was ready for plating so I, helpfully, stuck it back at the top of the page - just as the FoC rounded the corner and threatened to convene, there and then, in the car park.

Another time, the chief reporter asked me to fetch a back copy so he could complete a backgrounder. It was urgent, he was on deadline so I legged to stores where an old tosser called Arthur, who sat among six months' worth in a wooden hut, steadfastly refused to part with anything until he'd had his tea break.

Great days for a young blood watching and waiting for his chance.

But it does seem I'm not the only one who's moved on.

To be a star you need star quality

Janet Street Porter bent a few ears with a rant about the freak show that the X-Factor has become, slagging off judges who spend fortunes on facelifts and hours in make-up before humiliating poor, talentless and massively overweight contestants.

She’s dead right. The conveyer belt that allowed poor Emma Chawner to get through four off-screen auditions before being put in the stocks that is prime time entertainment was designed to feed our insatiable (check the ratings) appetite for seeing lesser mortals treated with ridicule and contempt.

And there was mileage in this story. The Sun got to say 'Fat's yer lot', TV-am had the entire family on the couch (a feat in itself) and Street Porter got to atone for all her involvement in reality shows.

But while all this was going on, one of the best talents ever to have emerged from such TV auditions was treating a few thousand of us to a concert at the Albert Hall in aid, not vanity, but of people close to her heart whose plight deserves far more attention than any wannabe pop star.

Patti Boulaye won the 70s equivalent, New Faces, scoring the highest marks in the history of the series and went on to enjoy a fabulous career doing everything from Carmen Jones to having her own Channel Four show.

But in the two years I’ve known her, she’s hardly sung a note. The voice I’ve heard recently has often been one of near-exhaustion as she takes five minutes away from her relentless toil, raising money for her Aids charity Support for Africa from her Buckinghamshire home. She’s called in favours from showbiz mates, spent hours on the phone, on the road and at her computer doing what most high-profile benefactors would hire legions of staff to do – and built health centres in her native Nigeria and surrounding countries that have saved countless lives.

And all the time her career has been on hold. In fact, when she is asked to sing, she invariably waives the fee in return for a donation. When John Major rang and asked her to appear at an event he was organising, she agreed to sing for free in return for his name as patron; something of little benefit to her but massive benefit to the charity.

Rarely have I met such a driven individual. I’ve often wondered how she found time to sleep, let alone rehearse, but on Sunday she took a break from the office, slipped into something snazzy, lined up alongside the likes of Boney M, the New Seekers and Peter Sarstedt – and blew them off the stage.

Her voice was as powerful and pure as the time in the nineties when she became, in producer Simon Callow’s words, the best Carmen Jones ever. Now, she assures me, she plans to take a break from fundraising and get back in front of a microphone.

I hope so but I’ll believe it when I see (or should I say hear) it. In the meantime, if we really have to endure more TV auditions to find the likes of the next Patti, or Lennie Henry or Les Dennis, may I suggest we spare the no-hopers the heartbreak and cut to a shortlist of one: her daughter, Aret.

I didn’t even know she was a singer until this week, but having taken one of the country’s most prestigious venues by storm, I do now.

Judges take note.

Where there's a Will, there's a way

Glad for the chance to help out my old pal, Will Lewis, yesterday.

The energetic Telegraph editor-in-chief was due to speak at the end of Tuesday's Independent Publisher's Forum conference when he got the wrong train and found himself in Peterborough - instead of Grantham 30-odd miles away where delegates were awaiting his keynote address.

As the final business session ended, organisers made a frantic series of calls, to be assured that, as far as Victoria Plaza was concerned, he had boarded the train from London.

But as it came and went and the hapless driver laid on to collect him reported no sign of him or his sidekick, they decided to wind up the conference and let delegates dash for trains of their own.

Faced with the prospect of the great man arriving to an empty room, I discreetly got a message to Victoria that the audience were being told of the mishap and urged to make their way home. Some did, slipping out of side doors as votes of thanks were taken.

Quick as a flash, his wide-awake PA rang my mobile with the news that he was "literally minutes away", having just dived into a cab and Yours Truly had to break the news that the event was "literally breaking up". Anyway, (just for old times. Call me nostalgic)I poked my head back into the room like some apologetic Best Man and caught the eye of the podium.

Seconds later, most of the room sat itself down again, tactfully spreading out this time, and I returned to my seat eagerly waiting to find out what had happenned behind the scenes at the Telegraph since I cleared my desk.

And Will was back where he's most comfortable (in the hub) - and, er, spoke.

Who's World Cup is it anyway?

The lunatics are attempting another coup on the asylum as a sporting body once again gets too far up itself and tries to tell newspapers what they can and can't print.

A few years ago it was FIFA who made a half-arsed attempt to put time constraints on when pictures could be published on websites and limits on the number that could be used.

Then the football leagues insisted they'd only let newspapers into games if they signed up to licensing rules, which included a two-hour delay on pictures being published and a cut of the lolly from fantasy competitions.

Now the rubgy world cup organisers have joined them in cuckoo land with their own accreditation rules. They've produced 18 pages of Ts and Cs insisting, among a host of other things, that "only five images can be used per half", none can be transmitted via mobile phones. And that Rugby World Cup Ltd can use for free any images taken by any accredited photographers.

The Newspaper Publlishers Association are making all the right noises and could hit back by blocking out sponsors names on hoardings and shirts. But it's tit for tat.

The only real response would be to bin all the forms, ignore all official routes, cover games from the stands, cranes or low-flying baloons as necessary and impose the entirely refreshing and justifiable anarchy of the most vitriolic fanzine.

Then we'd have a game.

They need to be told, in the words of the people on the terraces who pay for every Porsche in the car park and every designer shirt on their backs: you're havin' an effin' larf mate.

Racist? Not in the US


Pete Symes has left an interesting comment on my Big Brother race row post below - Emily's out, but it's not black and white. Would I have still been concilliatory had she made am antisemitic comment?

Depends what she said I suppose but he's right to hint at possible double-standards. In the US version, cocktail waitress Amber Siyavus Tomcavage did more than let slip a single word. She let rip with what can only be described as a rant against everything and anything Jewish.

It hacked off the Anti Defamation League when it was shown live in the USBB website and prompted an assurance from CBS that they don't condone such behaviour.

But the tirade was not picked for the edited version of the show that night - and, unlike dippy Emily, motormouth Amber stayed in the show.

Snappy memories

I met a few long-time pals for a pub crawl in EC4 on Friday. We started out in the Harrow off Fleet Street and ended up in the Press Club somewhere down Memory Lane.

Of the group, I was the only one who'd gone 'indoors' to sub, fattened my arse in an editor's chair and joined the suits upstairs, which to traditional ragged-notebook hacks like these, must seriously have nudged me towards the tossersphere.

I was also the last to show; they hadn't exactly been on fruit juice, and proceeded to roll back 30-odd years and take the piss mercilessly.

Now, I'm sure we all put the intro in the last par when we were 19,
stayed for one more over lunchtime and came back to find the jury had delivered and gone but I had to put my hands up when Peter Rose (ex-NoW crime staffer) reminded everyone of the time I tried my hand as a paparazzo.

We were all young bucks on the Herts Headline News Agency, making a name for ourselves among the murders, poisonings and arsons that played out five days a week at St Albans Crown Court.

I'd been covering a rape. It was a trial due to end before the weekend and the Sundays were looking for a picture. Easy peasy. The accused was on bail and always left the building for lunch. All I had to do was snap him as he left.

On this particular day, I'd left a 35mm Practica with the copper on the front desk and run down the stairs at 12.59, a tactical minute before the judge would sniff the decanter and clear the room.

Until then, my photographic training had consisted of scuttling around village streets trying to snap colleagues as they dipped in an out of alleys. I couldn't tell an f-stop from a bus stop but I knew I had to keep the camera steady to shoot a target on the move.

The other thing about shooting thugs is that they rarely pose. Small-time hoods who think they're the Kray twins do. But most of them either take a poke at the lense or leg it.

So I had my chunky-monkey pal Ross Francis stand outside in wait. I then stood behind him, rested the telephoto on his shoulder and held down the shutter, hoping to nab a few frames before the Beast of Borehamwood sussed he was destined for a 25-double on page five and ran for cover.

There was a minor scuffle, and a few snarls, threats and obscenities later, the said perv was, as Mr Rose would have put it, bang to rights. Mr Francis took the camera back to the office, I went back into court and the film was developed. Clear as crystal, I was later told. A result. All we needed was a guilty verdict, a judge prepared to chuck away the key and it'd be money in the bank.

But it wasn’t to be. I rang the office later to plaudits. The pictures were as sharp as the boss's tongue and in the overnight post. I couldn't believe it, I reckoned I'd have been lucky to get one off before his mate in the white suit squared up and blocked my view.

His mate? White suit? You mean, that’s not him? F*** me, it's on its way to the Screws picture desk...

Luckily, Jim Last, the chief reporter had the nous to chase the GPO van from post box to post box all the way back to the sorting office where he begged for it back. They refused, quoting all sorts of rules, but finally agreed to tear it up instead.

And there it lay. On the floor. In shreds.

Just like my pap career.

Blind dates? Don't be daft, we're all watching . . .

My long-term relationship with the Telegraph ended with an amicable parting a year ago as I took my GSOH off in search of a new soulmate.

But anyone looking for a similarly meaningful attachment may well be mightily p****d off if they've used the paper's website to play cupid.

From memory, what greets users of their dating channel is a neat piece of functionality that allows even the most luddite lonely heart to post their details safe in the knowledge that they'll engaging with other Telegraph types.

What they actually risk is their picture being plastered over large parts of the site for all to see.

They're auto-generated and designed to pop up in the right-hand navigation on stories in sections with a leisurely tone. It's a clever device to drive up page visits but sadly typical of some of the more madcap ones I would, in a previous life, have strangled at birth.

They will undoubtedly increase awareness of an area of the site many core readers will not know about but it shows a worrying lack of insight. This type of service, in the wider context, is all about discretion. This is a world of cosy nicknames, box numbers, neutral venues and discreet introductions. Not one in which singletons stand on tables in crowded bars and shout "I'm free."

And certainly, I can't imagine anyone being too chuffed at posting a photo to an area I'd envisaged to be members only and found it appearing next to the headline Scary Monster.

I'm sure that, if the participants wanted their pictures flyposted on billboards or stuck to telephone boxes,they'd have saved their joining fee and done just that.

I'll give it 48 hours before the penny drops and someone chaperones them away from the public gaze.

Trinity, trains its sights on the future

Trinity Mirror has become the latest publisher to send its journalists back into the classroom to learn how multimedia works.

Spending a week learning how to shoot video certainly has practical merit and the fact that they’re doing it in conjunction with the University of Teesside will benefit a lot of them.

But I was most impressed that Editorial director Neil Benson and head of multimedia Michael Hill are doing the rounds of the papers, giving tips on how to optimise their searching.

So many print journalists still know nothing of CAR or the wonders of what we used to call Deep Web, and many think if Google can’t find it, it doesn’t exist.

Over at Reed Business, meanwhile, I gather staff are being taught the benefits of SEO and encouraged to write for “findability”.

Good stuff, but word reaches me that the company plans to put all new recruits through psychometric tests designed to assess their ability to write online.

Search terms fail me.

TV gives us the press we deserve

Bill Hagerty let his nostalgia run wild with his Inside Story spread in the Independent, recalling six of the best TV media dramas, from Compact (which my mum watched) to Ugly Betty (which my kids watch).

I'd have been peeved if he hadn't included Lou Grant, the news editor I wanted to work for when I was a junior reporter covering Bodmin magistrates and dreaming of covering LA City Hall.

Actually, I secretly modelled myself on Joe Rossi, the Tribune's own Carl Bernstein who drank gallons of coffee, had more snouts than a bacon factory and exposed the crap out of mobsters and politicians on a golfball typewriter.

Hagerty also mentions Drop the Dead Donkey, Hot Metal, and State of Play. But he's left the best ones out, so for the record, there's:

1. Mitch, a grizzled Fleet Street hack played by a post-Sweeney John Thaw in the early eighties. He wore a raincoat, moaned about the world, looked divorced and was convinced life was a cover-up.

Best moment: risking his life to bag a world exclusive and retiring to the Pen and Wallet to be told: 'the printers have walked out again.'

2. Lytton's Diary with sitcom smoothie Peter Bowles; all g and t and cravats and set in the world of the gossip columnist.

Best moment; when it was revealed that behind all the schmoozing was his desire to write a book and that no-one would touch it.

3. Hold The Back Page, which followed sport's Poet laureat, Ken Wordsworth as he left a posh broadsheet to slug it out on a tabloid, pitting himself against a gobshite upstart called Steve Stevens waving a big chequebook and a bigger ego.

It was all about excess. Everyone earned buckets, filed copy from El Vinos and stitched each other up. The opening scene even saw Wordsworth take a 20-yard taxi ride to cross the road to his new job.

It was on during the red top heyday when Kelvin McKenzie's Sun was still rising and no-one questioned expenses.

Best moment; when his paper wanted to sponsor a teenage tennis star they hoped would become Britain's first black 1imbledon winner. They asked their best headline writer to come up with a name that evoked British and winning. He came up with Winston Bingo. When it wasn't erhnic enough, he said Winston Umbingo.