A provincial hack's commonplace book
was on a Transpeak bus from Nottingham to Cromford this morning:
UNIVERSITY OF DERBY
HIGH PEAK COLLEGE
Please note that smoking of any substance is not allowed on College Transport.
For better reasons to visit Cromford, see under Scarthin Books.
at least for me, is the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association's National Recording Project. You probably knew about it; it's been there for years, by the looks of things. It's a geographically arranged list of most of the public sculpture in "65% of the UK". It's wonderful. Best of all, many of the entries have photographs, so if you want to know what a real tourist trap looks like (description) or how all seaside railings should be (description), you can.
is a sentence in most of the initial reports of the John Reid picoscandal, which presumably spawned from PA. It concerns Mr Reid's first wife, Cathy:
She died in 1998, and the couple had two sons.
How "and"? I didn't need that mental image. Neither do you.
Combine the New York Times approach to sourcing and balance, a Finnish heavy-metal Eurovision entry, and a sense of humour, and on a good day you might get an sentence like this:
Some Finns say that Lordi is right at home and that the band's use of flaming dragon-encrusted swords and exploding baby dolls expresses the warrior spirit of the Vikings.
Paul Isaacs has a new blog. With embarrassing speed, it will be better than this one. But I told you first.
"I was to find that residing in a suburb adds a thrill and a zest to life. It is an experience in having no traditions to live up to." - early resident of Northwood Hills, on the Metropolitan line, quoted from another source (which probably quotes him from another source) in Christian Wolmar, The Subterranean Railway.
[The Subterranean Railway, by Christian Wolmar, London, 2004. A good compromise between geekery and cheery anecdotage, with a surprising narrative drive. A bit of sentence editing would have helped, however.]
The reason this blog has been dead again, I would like to pretend, is that I've been reading The History of The Times 1785-1841, and had vague things to say about it that seemed to require finishing it first, even though the system of cross-referencing in the text suggests that no one was ever meant to read it through. And it was heavy, and took up my book-carrying space, and got in the way of anything else. But now I'm free. Ha! And I can put over my crackpot theory about London in the late 18th Century as a model of our future media. Your turn to suffer now.
The first thing to say about The History of The Times 1785-1841 is that it's a monument to The Times in 1935, when it was "written, printed and published at the office of The Times, Printing House Square". It's anonymous and authoritative-sounding, handed down like the most elevated class of leading article. It's tremendously dignified in appearance, displaying the then-really-new Times New Roman to lapidary effect. At the same time, it's a gallery of show-off presswork, stuffed with tipped-in portraits and actual-size fold-out reproductions of documents leaked to the editor. Imagine the world's starchiest pop-up book. And it issues from an office that had come to see itself as eternal: scraps against long-forgotten gossip sheets (the True Sun, anyone? The World?) are covered with warm partisanship for the home side.
The second and bigger thing is that it argues, to this ignoramus convincingly, that all this imperturbable, ultraprofessional smugness, along with most of the other qualities that bloggers now denominate "mainstream media", descend from two men: John Walter II and Thomas Barnes.
Walter inherited from his father (John Walter I, oddly enough) a paper that was first meant to demonstrate a printing gimmick, and continued because it continued. The tax regime on newspapers was then, The Times argues, designed to stop you operating a mass-circulation daily, or any daily at all without accepting bribes. Paper was stamped and taxed. Advertising was stamped and taxed. Payments from political operators, and the "suppression" and "contradiction" fees journalists could extract by public blackmail, were available on relatively advantageous terms. Walter II stepped steadily out of these customary practices, and then bought the first steam-powered presses, which allowed him to produce enough papers quickly and cheaply for the bribeless office to pay.
An obviously bribe-free paper, among obviously bribed ones, is a powerful thing. It became a shockingly powerful one in the control of Thomas Barnes, its first proper editor, a crony of radical poets who became for thirty-odd years a Times-only man. He built up the reporting staff, fighting the Post Office to free his foreign correspondence, cultivating sources all over Britain, and extracting tip-offs from the great. He used all this to present a front of omniscience and infallibility. He took anonymity as far as he could. The first time his name appeared in his paper was a death notice:
On the 7th inst., at his house in Soho-square, Thomas Barnes, Esq., in the 56th year of his age.
And his paper's defensive approach to the apology makes today's Fleet Street look craven. We know the names of his Parliamentary staff because when the Irish leader Daniel O'Connell accused them of misquoting him, they published a signed letter in the paper declaring they would not report another word of his until he had apologised for the slur on their honour.
His opinion-writing was louder and ruder than today's Times would contemplate. One reform-era leader responds to a particularly outrageous suggestion (another slur on the honour of the paper) by a quarter-inch of blank space, and then:
We leave a space vacant, as the author of Tristram Shandy says, "for the reader to swear in, any oath he is accustomed to," only hoping it is an innocent one.
The leaders are composed on a principle of finding out what public opinion is - among the small middle-class then allowed to be the public - and then leading it by advocating a popular position as forcefully as possible. The readers of today's tabloids might recognise the approach, and the ruthless willingness to switch sides.
And that's the most important tradition, right there. Thomas Barnes shafted powerful sources. He would take information and even opinion steers from the likes of Henry Brougham - but when he concluded that Brougham could no longer carry the credit of his readers, he said so plainly. He had the power to get away with it.
What worries me most about the decline of the press, apart from the chance that I will have to find a proper job, is that soon we will have no journalists powerful enough to fuck over the influential; and that control of information is not going out to a more democratic world of volunteers and citizen investigators - great as they often are at mining data already in the public domain - but back to its previous owners, the great and the good and their small vindictive functionaries. Even Jeff Jarvis occasionally has such thoughts, on his way to something more uplifting.
Brougham had a press agent called Le Marchant. He doesn't make the index of The History of The Times. But until the Great Shafting, he is as much cited as a determinant of what appears in The Times as anyone apart from Barnes. His time is returning.
