Hari's hairy moment

Well Twitter is quite a-flutter at the moment with the news that Johann Hari is evil - the epitome of a charlatan journalist destroying a noble profession with his corner-cutting ways.

What was his crime? Well he admitted to swapping quotes from interviews he had carried out for quotes from his interviewee's own writings if they covered the same topic but were 'more coherent'.

Cue huge wailing and gnashing of teeth followed by thousands (possibly even millions now) of tweets under the tag #interviewsbyhari. For a more detailed look at the issue, the whole thing has been Storified by the consistently excellent @newsmary.

From my somewhat sarcastic tone thus, far you might think that I am about to spring to his defense.

But no. Alas Johann cannot come to me for support for I am disappointed by this. I am, as ever, frustrated by the way Twitter leaps from moral outrage to moral outrage. And I know that a huge per centage of journos jumping on the Johann-bashing wagon have committed far worse sins, but I am nevertheless disappointed.

You see, Hari has risen to the top of his profession in my eyes. He has carte blanche to interview policy makers, entertainment goliaths, literary legends et al and to do so at his leisure.

I use his articles as examples of exemplary practice when teaching my students. I marvel at his incisive interview technique and the skillful way he weaves the narrative into his work.

But now I know that the narrative and the quoted word are not woven. They are cut out and stuck together.

It reminds me of when I was a teenager and I desperately wanted that Nike sweatshirt but couldn't afford it. So I bought a pair of sweatbands, unpicked the logo and glued it on a sweatshirt from the market. It fooled everyone for a day, maybe even a week but then the glue started to fail and looked a bit naff. Once everyone knew what I had done of course I wasn't the cool kid with the Nike gear or even this kid with the plain sweatshirt. No, I was the sad case deserving of pity.

Hari has fooled us into believing he is an interviewer extraordinaire. But now we know that he has not coaxed those opinions, that explanation or those illustrations. He has just glued them on and now it's starting to peel.

Jon Ronson - he of superb journalism - has come in to defend Hari, saying:

I've no idea what Johann Hari has been accused of. Just that he's been
accused of something. In general, he's stunningly brilliant.

And I agree but now the Nike logo has lifted and the glue is flaking down his chest he is in danger of becoming a figure of fun. I'll leave the last word to @alexwalters who wrote the most incisive Tweet about the whole thing:

Hari stared at me, a tired look in his eye. "None of my interviewees have ever said they had been misquoted," he sighed.

Paywalls and me

So Murdoch is going to charge for the Times and the Sunday Times and now we know how.

Same week we found that out that the Johnston Press experiment had been a spectacular failure - although real figures have not been published.

Of course, it isn't really a surprise that Johnston's experiment failed when you consider the titles they decided to experiment with and the fact that that regional media has already lost so much ground to other (free) outlets such as hyperlocal sites, blogs etc et.

But what about Murdoch's experiment? I think most people expect it to fail and fail in a pretty high-profile way.

But perhaps we first need to define what success would be.

I suspect that Murdoch will not mind losing 90 per cent of his unique users if his profits increase by even just one per cent.

However, to the Guardian it is all about reaching as many people as possible but in 08/09 lost a reported £36.8m and has now had to sell off the Manchester Evening News in a bid to prevent further massive losses to the group.

It's going to be an interesting 12 months - short term I can't see the paywall working because of the number of options we have. And of course, the BBC is, and probably always will be, a free option.

I am glad someone has gone for it though even if has to be Murdoch. There is so much emotion around this - even the term Paywall is highly charged. It's not a term you use for anything else and I have never heard Rusbridger and co demand an end to the news vendor's 'Paywall' as I hand over my £1 for the Guardian.

Longer term, finding a way of getting readers to pay for online news as they have for printed news is a workable way of ensure the industry remains strong and democratic. We might lose a few publications along the way but I the industry is a bit flabby and losing some titles may even help in the long term.

It's a shame that any attempt to discuss the BBC's role in the future of the media and its role in society and democracy is beset with squawks from the left about 'clipping the wings of public service broadcasting' and screams from the right about unfair competition.

The truth is somewhere in between but we need to debate it and debate it like adults at some point rather than sounding like Cameron and Brown on PMQs otherwise I fear for the future of online news.

Questions which need answering:

1) Is the licence fee really paying for online? If so then how so when it is has hardly changed since online and digital tv spread the BBC's resources even more thinly.

2) How much commercial work is the BBC doing abroad and how much is that dictating programme making and web development in the UK?

If the answers are yes and not much then I vote for the BBC to stay as is but I remain a sceptic until these things are proven.

Still, as it happens I don't even read the Times anyway so it won't bother me too much right now but let's see what Lebdev does to the Indie.

Last time I spoke to Simon Kelner he said they were considering introducing an honesty box for online payment. That would be interesting to see in action in the UK but it failed in Miami.