Editorial Intelligence

When I was invited to blog “Can Cameron Crack It?” I was in two minds over what the organisers meant by ‘crack it’. What I think they meant, was can David Cameron break out of the straightjacket of 31-35% in the polls to win an election. At least I hope it was. With five speakers like Simon Heffer, Peter Kellner, Shami Chakrabarti, Nick Clegg and Ed Vaizey it was a pretty sure bet that there would be a variety of views. And so it proved. Kirsty Lang, who chaired the event, posed the question, what is the centre ground nowadays? The politician who answers this question is the one who will most likely win the next election. Read more…

Techno heads call it shovelware, a derogatory term. It is the practice of uploading newspaper content onto the internet – or, as bloggers would have it, “dumping” content online with little regard to whether it fits there or not. Surely this is uncharitable? Internet availability of newspaper content is a gift: it makes everyone better informed. How dare they denigrate it with their sniffy jargon, I thought to myself when I first heard the term. The critics know where they can stick their shovel. Read more…

If Professor James Woudhuysen – one of the panellists at the NESTA/Editorial Intelligence/Friends Provident and Reuters breakfast debate on ‘Where is Britain’s innovative edge?’ - was Prime Minister, he would, I’d wager, try to solve all of our problems with transport in the UK (at least he’d give it a good try). He shook his head in bafflement and asked why couldn’t the UK use its brainpower and industrial clout to create a first rate transport system (even one as modern as that seen in China) to ensure that most of us get a seat or the London to Liverpool journey does not take five hours to complete. Read more…

That snowy Thursday, the morning of the e.i/FT/City of London/Cass Business School/British American Project discussion “The City versus Wall Street: Who’s Ahead?” my own newspaper, The Independent, had “Spend, Spend, Spend” as its high-drama cover-line. It was a London story, about the extraordinary order of money that was being earned and spent in the capital. There were billionaires, oligarchs and property prices of course. But above all it was about The City and the life that fed on it. City salaries and bonuses – the £4 bn. being handed out this spring – and the success that underwrote them. The success that meant London, on a number of crucial indices, was moving ahead of New York as the world’s No. 1 international financial centre.
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