Saw two documentaries back to back just now on Channel 4. The one was about developing the JSF and the other concerned the Moscow theatre hostage tragedy.

One would be hard-pressed to imagine a greater contrast between the two. The first one was basically a big publicity spot for the US and UK armed forces, full of stock footage, a tantalizingly stupid soundtrack and nothing but praise for the developers of the new multi-role fighters. And it’s going to be a two-parter. Duh.

The second one was far more serious in tone, and was actually very craftily made. The usage of music was perhaps a bit over the top too, as the material itself provided plenty of drama (over 150 people died there). However, the programme did have one major fault: it was completely ahistorical.

I understand the maker’s decision to concentrate on only the minutiae, because the material – video shot by the terrorists, the outside TV cameras and later interviews with survivors – was outstanding. But there was not one mention of why 41 Chechens had decided they were ready to kill hundreds of people, including themselves.

The need for contextualization came clear by the reaction of my flatmate Owen. He hadn’t followed the story when it unfolded and had even less idea about the Chechen-Russian war. In a peculiar way this reminded me of Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down which too presented a tragic struggle without any context.

Well, that and it was stupendously one-sided. And not truthful. But you get the gist of what I’m saying, right?

The subject I’m going to bitc–, err, contemplate on is familiar territory to many and I’m not sure if I can offer anything new. What I can offer, though, is my point of view. See, during my short stay (anything less than a decade is short) in Wales, I’ve come to like British newspapers. Not the dull weekday editions, but the glorious, overflowing weekend lumps of processed pulp. In fact they provide so much reading that it’s interfering with my proper reading, you know, novels and such.

I like to split them down according to sections and sort them into different piles: sport, business, travel first (cos I’m not really interested in them), news pages second, review and magazines last. I just finished with the last Sunday paper and am now slowly moving onto the magazines of which there are approximately half a dozen.

The thing is that you just can’t do this stuff with WWW versions. They’re handy for references because of hyperlinking, most of them are still free (the Times requires a registration), some of them have even more stuff online than in print, they’re searchable etc. But it’s damn near impossible to go through them, from alpha to omega, in an orderly fashion. Plus that usually the web versions aren’t very readable – they still use tables or layers to emulate fixed-size columns, printer-friendly pages don’t have even rudimentary navigation (not to mention pictures) and so on ad nauseam. This is the main reason I haven’t gotten into reading the New York Times or Washington Post regularly. I’ve tried, especially with NYT’s Sunday edition, but it just isn’t working.

So what could be done to solve the problem? Well, a downloadable PDF version might work. After all, most publishing systems are perfectly capable of doing such things, and many even use them as an interface between the DTP system and the press. But then again, PDFs really aren’t suitable for online reading, especially when they’re large – and we’re talking about hundreds of pages of material here.

One might do what Keskisuomalainen is trying and produce an image/text hybrid for online reading. It fulfills some of my conditions: one can browse through it in a linear matter and it’s perfectly readable because the stories are presented in a text-only format. However, you cannot download it, which means that you have to be online, and that can still be an issue unless you’ve got a nice laptop and a nice WLAN set up. And where’s search?

Even if the virtual approach used by KSML was perfected, there’d still be other things that need attending to. For example, the print edition’s page numbers should definitely be cross-referenced with online pages. Think of it as an universal URL (actually I’m quite sure that there are techies out there who’ve deviced a way to assign unique identifiers to newspaper pages… or am I thinking of ISSN?).

For the sake of argument lets assume that all the newspapers finally find a solution that’s both usable and viable. The big question is: how did they achieve the latter? Online publishing has been a bogey man for the traditional media for nearly a decade. No one knows how to make people pay for content unless for niche markets (say, porn and stock market). A complaint heard often enough in all the newspapers around the world is ”if I could choose, I’d only get the news/sports/arts/comics pages”. Well, it could be achieved online. In fact I think it would be reasonable. Adverts could be targeted better, people would have less complaints, (proportionally) more money could be charged for reading just a few pieces of the paper and so on. Of course this all would require people to regard online versions not as a burden but a possibility. And unfortunately the event horizon for this is still quite some time away.

It’s a shame entries cannot be filed into multiple categories in blosxom. Notes like this clearly belong under both internet and media.

Three things caught my eye in the Sunday Times: tobacco companies, competitive workforce and making big losses. And the thing they share? There’s more than meets the eye.

First off there’s the tobacco debacle. The Times Money section informs us that smart funds favour smaller businesses such as Signet, the jeweller, and American firms such as Altria, which makes Marlboro cigarettes. Now, while almost any company causes detriment to someone, tobacco manufacturers are one of the few in my opinion legit targets for whatever shit throwing and general mayhem is possible.

I mean, surely no-one can anymore can that they aim to do anything but money, caring as little as is possible (or less) about human lives, and especially the length and quality of it? Remember what inspired the movie Insider, how they claimed that prematurely dying smokers actually save the state’s money, or what has been done to the Finnish press by the pro-tobacco lobby? And here’s a (supposedly) qualified journalist in a quality paper giving advice to people to indirectly invest in tobacco. Come on, dear reporter Alicia Wyllie, you’re making it too easy.

On to the next target. Naturally I knew that the Times leans to the right, but I was still a tad baffled when I read David Smith’s article headlined A cure for poor UK productivity. That the UK’s competitiveness isn’t up to par was, by the way, determined by a 50,000 pound study. But then again, that’s consultation. (Netherlands, USA and France came out on top, while the UK still managed to beat Sweden, Finland and Japan.) However, the gist of my unhappiness lies within a single sentence. I quote: Britain can no longer keep living off the Thatcher reforms that gave us low taxation and regulation, and flexible, largely de-unionised, job markets. How much more bleeding obvious can you get without saying ”it’s a good thing we spared the buggers’ lives so they can work their asses off for our good”?

Onto my final issue. (Oh boy, do I have issues today.) The paper has devoted an entire page for an interview with Ray Webster, the chief executive of Easyjet. Even though this interview is inside the business section, it could just as well be in lifestyle. First of all, the story is full of sycophanting. There’s no confronting. Second, it’s one-sided. Even though they touch on the subject of Ryanair quite a few times, no effort is made to get even the tiniest soundbite from the Irish. You could argue that interviews are supposed to concentrate on one person, and you might have a point. However this theory is sort of debunked by the fact that Mr Andrew Davidson has included quotes from Mr Webster’s No 2 (anyone referred to by that name twice in one article might want to consider some serious career moves).

Then there’s the abysmal reasoning. Easyjet lost £46.9 million over the last six months. So what does the acute reporter do? Naturally he goes on to discuss the perks: And now he is here with a nice house in London’s Hampstead and a silver Porsche GT3 ordered to replace his old silver Porsche – showing that no-frills doesn’t have to extend to the complete lifestyle. Note the cute allusion to Easyjet, the no-frills airline. Imaginative. Then think of £46.9 million in six months. And what kind of a headline is Steady hand keeps Easyjet aloft in no-frills dogfight? Cos I mean, like, duh, come on, £46.9 million in six months. See what I’m getting at?

I’ve mentioned the journalists’ names here because I believe that they are more responsible for their copy than their editors (and I’m trying really really hard to believe in journalistic freedom on the independent level). In all of these cases the tone of the whole piece reflects the same skewed way of thought, which means that a) the reporter isn’t making just some innocent Freudian slip but believes in what s/he is doing or b) the editors are bastards who’ve completely mutilated the copy.

Courtesy of the Guardian. First an article titled Give six monkeys a computer, and what do you get? Certainly not the Bard. I quote: The monkeys aren’t reducible to a random process. They get bored and they shit on the keyboard rather than type. So there.

Then some armchair psychology. The name of the game is football and the name of the story is Eminem tops league of inspirational music for footballers. Now, let’s make it clear that I enjoy the would-be controversy Mr. Mathers is always trying to rouse, but when some ManU music psychologist tells us that Some players will be motivated by […] cutting lyrics that are often themed around reclaiming pride and self-confidence in the face of difficult circumstances one is tempted to add, or about killing your wife, flippin’ your momma the bird, rapin’ women who’ve passed out, or generally just bein’ an asshole.

On a second thought, that does fit the generic footballer’s profile rather well, doesn’t it?

British journalism has features I’m not quite comfortable with. Take, for example, the tendency to diss competing news sources. Now that is nothing we all hadn’t seen before. Many columnists spend their lives bitching about how stupid other people and therefore also other journalists are. It is at times irritating and at times entertaining. All in all, good clean wholesome fun.

But what is this thing with putting down people who read other papers? Exhibit A: Spouting off enough cynical leftisms to give the average Daily Mail reader an aneurysm, writes Niall Doherty in The Fly, a free pop magazine. This sort of stereotyping is quite common. ”People who read tabloids are scum” vs. ”only upper-class gits bother with the broadsheets”. Somehow it still doesn’t feel very insulting, possibly because I’m prone to doing the same thing myself, especially with ”women’s magazines”.

Exhibit B: I wonder how many Guardian readers are aware of where their icon stood on this matter, writes Andrew Sullivan in the Sunday Times. This commentary, in turn, left me baffled. If, as is often touted, UK is one of the few countries where there’s actual day-to-day competition between newspapers (see for example an article in the last issue of the Independent on Sunday), why does a writer go to such lengths to make sure no Guardian reader will want to switch papers? Why doesn’t he target the editors or the published, but the reader? Looks like bad thinking to me.

And why is it that that one sentence felt so insulting to me. Aha, says the clever reader, it is obviously because you think of yourself as a Guardian reader who idolizes Hillary Clinton! Well, might be. Another matter altogether is that Mr. Sullivan actually makes a classic mistake in his argument, the so-called ”all animals are dogs” fallacy. People who read the Guardian very likely include some who do indeed idolize Ms. C. and did not know what she was up to. That doesn’t mean, however, that every reader thought the same.

I know I’m nitpicking again, but tell me this: how can someone write an opening sentence like Like many people, this column is tiring? Just wondering.

Three Sunday broadsheets: The Observer (ie. The Guardian), The Independent on Sunday (ie. The Independent) and The Sunday Times (ie. The… oh you got the idea already?). The price: £3.90. The processed pulp: 306 broadsheet-sized pages in 16 (!) sections, 136 tabloid-sized pages in five sections and 424 magazine-sized pages.

In approximate broadsheet terms that sums up to 374 pages, over 100 pages more than in the three Saturday papers. The combined total of these six titles bought over just two days is over 650 broadsheet pages, or three weeks worth of regional Finnish weekday newspapers. So if you wondered why I’m writing this so late, there’s your explanation.

Also, my back hurts.

That’s the combined price of the three Saturday broadsheets I bought today, The Guardian, The Independent and The Times. For that price, you get 182 broadsheet pages in over half a dozen sections, 196 pages in tabloid pull-outs and 396 pages in the weekend magazines. Oh, and a promotional DVD. Assuming a broadsheet page is twice the size of a tabloid one and that a magazine page is approximately 2/3 of a tabloid page, the grand total is nearly 300 broadsheet pages. That’s about ten times the amount of a Finnish weekday broadsheet.

So logically I would need to spend a week and a half reading these. But unfortunately that isn’t possible, because the Sunday papers are even bigger. How big? Find out tomorrow.

I know it’s sort of unfair to get hung on single sentences, but I can’t help it. So here’s some more quality journalism for you to enjoy. All of them are courtesy of The Sunday Times Magazine, Feb 16 2003.

First a story about a ”great art collector” Arthur Acton, whose wife presumably did something, too. Well… Hortense was best known for the excellent martini cocktails she served after afternoon tea (p. 40). I guess it’s better to be remembered somehow than not at all.

Then, in the same story, Mr. Acton’s son demonstrates how life isn’t just roses: Harold often grumbled about the pressure of royal visits (p. 43). Doesn’t everybody feel that once in a while?

Moving on from upper-class gits to reporter’s arrogance. In a story about mail order wives, reporter Lauren St John displays her razor-shard people skills when describing one of her interviewees: A radiantly fit but otherwise unremarkable 46-year-old (p. 60). And there’s more! A moment later there’s this peculiar sentence: He thought she was gorgeous, she thought he was ”fantastic”. Please tell me why only one of the adjectives has been surrounded by quotation marks.

Today’s Sunday Times includes an article about the two British suicide bombers. In an otherwise pretty good article, the reporter Nick Fielding slips in an ultra-stereotypic way when describing the other man’s youth: But he also had non-Muslim friends and enjoyed playing football and snooker. As if choice of sports really had anything to do with one’s personality.

Another journalistic blunder was the inclusion of a 1/3 page story about the upcoming Harry Potter game. The article highlights the various obstacles Electronic Arts developers had to overcome in order to make the game work. No wonder she’s the richest person in Britain when she gets this sort of free publicity.