The Times: Five blogs to log

FIVE BLOGS WORTH READING

1 www.boingboing.net Originally an offbeat print magazine, it has four main contributors whose chief interests are technology, bizarre news from around the world and other "wonderful things".

2 www.bookslut.com/blog Jessa Crispin monitors the literary world from Austin, Texas, alerting book-lovers to the latest hot debates, interviews, reviews and news.

3 www.buzzmachine.com Jeff Jarvis, the editor of Entertainment Weekly, is quick to pick up on showbiz buzz, but has lately been tracking weblog culture in Iraq and Iran. Unlike most bloggers, he can actually write.

4 www.metafilter.com Any of the 171,151 members can nominate a link, but only those voted good enough by the others make it to the front page.

5 www.slashdot.org The techies' ultimate blog, it specialises in "news for nerds", mostly IT and science. Its readership is such that a single entry can make or break a product release.

(The Times, June 30 2003)

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Evening Standard: Profile - Tony Stephens, agent to David Beckham

By David Rowan

HE is the power-agent behind David Beckham's deal with Real Madrid and has made millions shaping the careers of other top players including Michael Owen and Alan Shearer. Yet you will never have seen him interviewed, his stock press photo is two decades old, and only a handful of trusted sports writers have their calls returned. In an industry full of wide boys, how has Tony Stephens remained such a shadowy figure?

As the deal-maker responsible for "all football and commercial aspects" of Beckham's life, Stephens has been the key player in the labyrinthine negotiations over Beckham's move. Alex Ferguson, Manchester United's manager, fell out spectacularly with the England captain last February, blood having spilled on the changing-room floor. Both club and player began to consider the possibility of a parting of the ways.

United talked about offering Beckham a new contract, but also liked the idea of cashing in on their greatest asset. Neither side wanted to be seen as the instigator of the split. Stephens had begun secret discussions with Madrid back in April, yet his judicious spinning has conveyed the impression - rightly or wrongly - that it was United and the intemperate Ferguson who forced Beckham out.

What, though, of the man himself ? As marketing director of the SFX Sports agency, Stephens is Beckham's day-today contact point, working with up to 15 rights negotiators, marketing executives and lawyers to control everything from his Brylcreem endorsements to his Marks & Spencer clothes.

As a licensed agent, Stephens represents everything that Ferguson detests - one of the egotistical "rats" determined to overprice the talent. Yet from his office in Hockley Heath, Solihull, he keeps a determinedly low profile.

All SFX will say about him personally is that he is 55, and married with two adult daughters. Those who have negotiated with him say he is "shrewd", " meticulous to the point of obsession" and "secretive". Determined to master every detail of a contract, and "phenomenally controlling", he is known as ruthless. Rival agent Mel Stein was said to be furious when, off work with illness, he learned that his client Alan Shearer had acceded to an offer for Stephens to represent him.

Yet in a world notorious for bungs, Stephens has a reputation for straight dealing and honesty. Even his rivals respect him. "Good luck to him," says Phil Smith of First Artist. "He keeps himself to himself and lets his players do the talking. If you want a small but high-profile client base, that's the way to do it."

It was Beckham's father Ted who put him in touch with Stephens seven years ago. But the relationship may have been the result of an accident: the agent Eric Hall also claims to have received a call from Ted, but he lost his number and never called back. Beckham signed to Stephens in a meeting at Manchester airport in August 1996. Stephens drove to Alex Ferguson's house to break the news, but the encounter was acrimonious, according to Ferguson's biographer, Michael Crick.

"Ferguson went mental, he was raging," a source told Crick. "He started effing and blinding and chased him down the drive ... 'How dare you come to my f***ing house? Get the f*** out of here.'" The next day, Ferguson called Beckham into his office and, according to accounts, told him to ask his new agent to arrange a transfer. Beckham replied: "Okay, going then." Stephens has been a local radio commentator, a computer salesman and commercial manager of Aston Villa, but it was while marketing director of Wembley Stadium, from 1986, that he became an agent. Tony Stephens Associates initially represented David Platt in sponsorship deals. Shearer, Dwight Yorke, Beckham and Michael Owen followed.

Another agent, Jon Holmes, whose firm had been bought out by the huge Marquee Group (in turn taken over by SFX), persuaded Stephens to sell too, for a reported $3.5 million.

"His was the one business I wanted to buy," says Holmes, now MD of SFX Sports. "Together we're at the top of our field - which to a major degree is down to his energy and talent, in both senses of the word. To be a successful agent, you need to be a father confessor on occasions, able to empathise with players when necessary, but also able to dispense tough advice they don't want to hear." An ability to handle the media also matters.

MICHAEL Crick's researcher, Alex Millar, was called by Stephens, who had seen a draft of the encounter on Ferguson's drive. "He got very interested, and insisted that Fergie had taken him in for a cup of tea and a chat," Millar says. The denial is in the book, The Boss, although other sources contradict it. Could the agent have been trying to smooth relations for commercial reasons? Stephens is rarely seen on the social circuit. His most public intervention in the past three decades was the publication of The Sunday Footballer, a book about his Sunday league hobby. "He'll keep his head down doing the work - I'll do all the tap-dancing," Holmes explains.

Yet Stephens was not always so quiet. A colleague who worked with him in the Midlands in the 1970s recalls "an amazing self-promoter" who carefully controlled his own image - insisting on being dropped off at the end of his road rather than at his front door. He made a name for himself as a small-time compere, touring workingmen's clubs with sports stars such as Steve Davis to promote Courage beer - claiming to be "twice as funny as David Coleman at a quarter of the price".

"He would certainly get what he wanted," the colleague recalls. "So when he didn't get into the Sandwell team for an It's a Knockout tournament in Belgrade, he hooked up with them anyway and gave himself a PR role, pushing himself right to the front." He would also talk up his relationships with the successful. "He'd talk about something Bryan Robson had said to him, and you'd later find out that this was at a dinner for 200 other people." With a few million in the bank, he no longer needs to promote himself. He even plans a sabbatical this autumn - but don't expect a press conference to announce it.

(Evening Standard, June 25 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - The GameBoy music scene

By David Rowan

HERE'S a test to see how tech-savvy you are. Is the Nintendo GameBoy a) a 14-year-old handheld games console that's now so obsolete as to be naff, or b) the latest in high-fashion portable music players?

Congratulations if you answered b), for the GameBoy is undergoing a remarkable renaissance as a cult music-making machine in nightclubs across Europe. It might seem odd that DJs and techno bands from Sweden to Austria would abandon conventional mixing decks for a hand-sized games console. But that would be to underestimate the hacker community's determination to make consumer appliances do things that their manufacturers never intended. Coders have lately been hacking TiVos to collect e-mail, and Xboxes to run as PCs - so why shouldn't a mini-console be transformed to get 100 clubbers dancing?

The GameBoy music scene owes its popularity to an unauthorised program called Little Sound DJ (www.littlesounddj.com), which turns a toy into a "full fledged music workstation". Johan Kotlinski, a 29-year-old Swedish DJ, wrote the software because it was "fun" and, well, because he could.

Musicians are using it to synthesise a range of electronic sounds in four channels and to sample anything from drumbeats to speech. "You can't imagine that a DJ would get a whole show out of this hand-held box they pull out of a shopping bag," says lektrogirl, a London-based DJ familiar with the scene. "The joy is to take this toy and turn it from a passive consumer device for killing time into something creative."

It has led to a thriving underground culture, with wonderfully named GameBoy bands such as WidgetPhreak, Poodle Scream and the "gameboyzz orchestra project". The music itself is perhaps not something that many Times readers would tap their feet to - the sequences are typically fast, repetitive and rough-edged, although they can certainly get a room moving to a persuasive techno-beat. Sometimes the tracks even have lyrics: one GameBoy anthem from a band called Puss contains the classic couplet: "When we use our cable, everything is stable ..." Beat that, McCartney.

Next Saturday, lektrogirl (aka Emma Davidson) is bringing GameBoy music to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, where DJs including Kotlinski will use the hacked consoles to run workshops and a club night. "It's thrilling, when you're told that you can't alter a machine, to turn it into something that's better than its creators intended," says lektrogirl. "And you get loads of credibility with other hackers by using old equipment that people think is naff to pump out kick-ass tunes."

A rather seedy new industry is growing up around the new generation of camera phones being marketed heavily by the telecoms giants: the "adult picture-messaging" website. These sites, not connected to the phone companies, offer for sale "real mobile phone picture messages taken by voyeurs, clubbers, partiers" - for, as one of them candidly states: "The most amazing breakthrough in mobile phones is the new camera facility and colour screens that allow the owner to take snaps wherever they may be." Sports clubs and swimming pools from Bolton to Brisbane have banned the new phones, largely to prevent children being photographed by paedophiles.

Yet all of us face a new potential threat to our privacy. The potential risks of phone voyeurism surfaced last week over an alleged rape in a Brighton pub, which police say was filmed by a camera phone, but there will be thousands of more minor incidents in which these phones are used to film people for the gratification of others. Is it time for "phone voyeurism" to become a criminal offence in its own right?

(The Times, June 24 2003)

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Evening Standard: Harry Potter and the crock of gold

By David Rowan

WHEN Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix finally goes on sale at one minute past midnight on Saturday, it will be the world's biggest ever book launch. With 13 million hardbacks ready to tumble off the world's shelves - backed by a six-month campaign of hype, a £1 million author web chat and unprecedented launch promotions from Times Square to King's Cross station - this will quite simply be a major event in the global economy.

From the book sales to the movie spin-offs and the licensing rights, Harry Potter has made more money than entire countries earn in a year. According to the experts, the trainee wizard is worth at least £7 billion. That is more than twice the GDP of Fiji and Barbados, eight times that of Greenland, more even than Bahrain and Namibia. By Sunday morning, as the latest 255,000-word instalment hits the tills, the Harry Potter economy will be fast approaching that of Madagascar.

But who exactly are the people fortunate enough to be emptying Gringotts Bank? We know, of course, that JK Rowling will this weekend be boosting the £280 million fortune that puts her 11 places higher than the Queen in The Sunday Times Rich List. Her literary agent, Christopher Little, has also made somewhere between £15 and £30 million simply by representing her, and at Bloomsbury Publishing, Nigel Newton and Liz Calder are among the Hogwarts millionaires.

The Harry Potter economy also touches thousands of others whose bank accounts have been boosted by this 200 million book phenomenon.

First, there's just the book. Last year Bloomsbury announced a 19 per cent rise in profits to £11.1 million, much of it from Potter - good news for big shareholders such as Sir Christopher Bland. This time, Scholastic, the US publisher, which has printed 8.5 million copies, expects early sales to be double those of the previous book.

At WH Smith, Britain's biggest bookseller, Graham Edmonds, the man in charge of children's books, has the task of getting the books into 600 stores under secure conditions. "It's off the scale, a phenomenon 10 times bigger than any other product launch - and could possibly be 20 times bigger," he says.

But the real cash is being made by Warner Bros, which makes the films. Studio executives have made hundreds of millions of dollars, with beneficiaries including Chris Columbus, the director, David Heyman, the producer, and everyone else from scriptwriter Steve Kloves to composer John Williams.

"AOL Time Warner is the biggest winner," says Steven Gaydos, executive director of Variety magazine. But how much money is actually at stake? "Assume a production budget of $150 million for each film," he explains. "Then add $60 to $80 million a movie for marketing. Book rights and screenplay would be five per cent of the production budget, but Rowling might be on more - maybe as much as $15 million each time."

Chris Columbus would be on a "phenomenal" deal, including a share of the earnings, but it is rumoured that Daniel Radcliffe is "pretty much replaceable" in Hollywood terms, with barely a couple of million per film.

Then comes the cash the filmmakers have poured into the London economy - "tens of millions" of dollars spent on Soho postproduction houses, not forgetting the reported £20,000 paid for three days' filming inside Australia House (aka Gringotts Bank).

That's just the spending money. It's what the films earn that would make Gordon Brown's mouth water. "The films are grossing close to $1 billion a picture, so we're up to $3 billion for the first three," says Gaydos. "They probably take another $1 billion each in home entertainment. And then there's licensing." Warner Bros would be getting at least $500 million - and licensees would make another billion or two. Diane Nelson, senior vice-president of marketing at Warner Bros, sees Harry as "a bigger property than anything else we have seen - and we're nowhere near saturation point".

Mattel, just one licensee, says it wants Harry "to become a brand like Barbie", and this week you can buy anything from a £900 Harry Potter bunk-bed to a £100 Lego replica of Hogwarts. The video games firm Electronic Arts says its $1.2 billion revenue, up 48 per cent, was partly driven by Potter games.

There are thousands of other businesses across Britain that are profiting from the Potter effect - it has more than doubled ticket sales at Alnwick Castle, Northumberland, used as the film location for Hogwarts School exteriors; there has been a 30 per cent rise in visitors to Christ Church College, Oxford, whose Great Hall was used for internal Hogwarts scenes; even Potter pilgrimages are made to Goathland station on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, better known to fans as the fictional Hogsmeade station.

Then there is Lucy Mackenzie, 38, from Moray in Scotland, who has multiplied profits 10-fold by making chunky £80 hand-knitted sweaters with a large letter "H" stitched into the front.

And any Muggle could tell you why that makes them special.

(Evening Standard, June 19 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - MPs' weblogs/cyberbeggars/Stasi/Spooks

By David Rowan

A few years ago, while editing a national newspaper's comment page, I cajoled John Redwood, MP, into writing a piece not on a serious issue such as Europe, but about why he enjoyed Britpop. It was a revealing article, which offered a rare glimpse into the private man behind the political posturing, although some reckon his career never really recovered. So I was fascinated over the weekend to read the confessions of a Labour MP, not only about his teenage loyalty to Adam and the Ants, and his recent "overwhelming hangover", but also about how he had apologised for being rude to three Tories. No politician, surely, could survive such openness.

You would be wrong to think so. With perhaps half a million people in the UK sharing their thoughts via personal weblogs, it is remarkable that elected politicians are failing to use the medium to communicate more vital matters with their constituents. They could publish when and what they wanted, offer instant comment on the day's news, and push the issues that concern them. Yet only Tom Watson, MP for West Bromwich East, is currently doing so. His weblog - at www.tom-watson.co.uk - is a role model that his colleagues should emulate. Within five years, he predicts, half of all our MPs will blog.

Watson admits that he's "no tech genius"; he updates his site up to seven times a day with easy-to-use Movable Type software. By sharing both his official duties and his personal thoughts, he is reaching out to journalists, constituents and a wider public. It is, he admits, a political risk to commit to the page; but search engines register weblog entries, and Watson's profile is rising not just on Google, but in the real world. And which MP wouldn't want that?

++++

YOU will, no doubt, be pleased to learn that the Californian student known as Michel, whose GiveBoobs.com website solicited $4,500 (£2,690) for silicone enhancement, last week finally had the operation and is delighted at her "awesome" chest. But with so many cyberbeggars now crowding the market, this looks like another bubble that is ready to burst.

Since Karyn Bosnak famously attracted $13,323 to repay her credit-card debts last summer through SaveKaryn.com, hundreds more panhandlers have tried their luck. But not everyone is winning, as a Wired News survey has found. SaveShane.com, for instance, is stuck at $7.25. What was it that they used to say about "first mover advantage"?

++++

COMPUTER scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin have been busy writing software that could expose some hard truths about the Stasi, the East German secret police. As the Berlin Wall crumbled, agents set about destroying tonnes of incriminating documents, which were cut up and dumped in 16,000 sacks. Their only mistake was to cut the papers neatly into quarters, which the institute is now trying to reassemble. It has taken workers eight years to hand-match pages in the first 300 sacks, but by autumn software will be automating the next 15,700. Memo to MI5: invest in a few shredders.

++++

IT WAS a smart move by the directors of The Matrix Reloaded to ensure that the computer-hacker storyline was credible enough to gain the geek community's rare approbation. Not so the BBC, whose episode of Spooks last night is being dismissed by a London hacker group as "one of the worst portrayals of 'computer hacking' ever". When a hacker gains control of MI5's "mainframe", an IP address flashes on screen. Some clever coder was bound to trace that IP number, 163.2.100.6, which appears to belong not to MI5 but to the US Navy. Is Greg Dyke trying to tell us who's really running Britain?

(The Times, June 17 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - Fruit-machine odds/iTunes/Fast TCP

By David Rowan

This column has always striven to avoid stereotyping computer geeks as obsessive types who will, for instance, spend hours stuffing coins into pub fruit machines. So let's instead focus on the week's hottest piece of IT research, which has been prompting heated debate on the techies' bulletin boards. It involves emulator programming and microchip analysis to answer that most urgent question of modern science: just how likely are you to win a payout from the local pub's fruit machine?

A bunch of British games enthusiasts decided to find out, by extracting the software that controls a number of popular fruit machines on to a standard desktop PC. Using an emulator - a program that allows the computer to run in the same way as a coin machine, but without the coins - they investigated the sequence of spins that followed various combinations of nudges and gambles on "Higher" or "Lower".

By frequently reloading the computer's memory, they could examine what would have happened if the player had pressed different buttons. The results, they say, prove that the machines are programmed to make you lose whatever choices you make.

"In every possible scenario, the machine has completely predetermined the outcome," say the researchers, whose findings have just been published at the FairPlay Campaign website (www.fairplay-campaign.co.uk), along with some emulators for you to download. "The player's input has no effect whatsoever, except inasmuch as it is possible to collect the winnings before the machine forces you to lose."

When the machine has decided that you are ready to lose, it will return a low number when you press "Higher", and vice versa. It is not a "gamble" at all, the researchers say, but rather "institutionalised corporate robbery". The campaign wants Parliament and the UK Gaming Board to take up the fight for justice, and the matter has apparently reached Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry.

++++

The music industry continues to see lawyers as its best hope against unauthorised file-swapping. Perhaps it should instead offer consumers a cheap, efficient, legal song-downloading service that they would actually use. The strategy has worked brilliantly for Apple since April.

According to a leaked account of a private Apple presentation last Thursday, it has sold 3.5 million songs through its iTunes Music Store in just six weeks. At 99 cents (63p) a song, that suggests the makings of a very healthy business, with independent labels now being targeted to add to the 200,000 tracks available. Nine out of ten sales are to customers who store credit-card details on the site so that they can buy songs with one click, and almost half of the tracks are bought as part of an album. The service is run by editors who care about music and do not appear biased towards the major labels. There is just one problem: unless you are a US-based Mac user with the latest operating system, Apple will not serve you.

Still, there is always Morpheus or KaZaA.

++++

Forget the broadband internet - scientists at the California Institute of Technology have transmitted data hundreds of times faster. Using a system known as Fast TCP, they have achieved speeds of 925 megabits per second between California and Geneva, and 8.6 gigabits using ten simultaneous paths. The process monitors how long data packets take to arrive, and predicts how fast they can be sent without loss of quality. Disney and Microsoft are said to be interested in the prospect of the "five-second movie download", but don't throw away the VCR yet: standard modems will take years to catch up.

(The Times, June 10 2003)

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Evening Standard: Who's profiting from Harry Potter?

By David Rowan

WHEN Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix finally goes on sale at one minute past midnight on Saturday, it will be the world's biggest ever book launch. With 13 million hardbacks ready to tumble off the world's shelves - backed by a six-month campaign of hype, a £1 million author web chat and unprecedented launch promotions from Times Square to King's Cross station - this will quite simply be a major event in the global economy.

From the book sales to the movie spin-offs and the licensing rights, Harry Potter has made more money than entire countries earn in a year. According to the experts, the trainee wizard is worth at least £7 billion. That is more than twice the GDP of Fiji and Barbados, eight times that of Greenland, more even than Bahrain and Namibia. By Sunday morning, as the latest 255,000-word instalment hits the tills, the Harry Potter economy will be fast approaching that of Madagascar.

But who exactly are the people fortunate enough to be emptying Gringotts Bank? We know, of course, that JK Rowling will this weekend be boosting the £280 million fortune that puts her 11 places higher than the Queen in The Sunday Times Rich List. Her literary agent, Christopher Little, has also made somewhere between £15 and £30 million simply by representing her, and at Bloomsbury Publishing, Nigel Newton and Liz Calder are among the Hogwarts millionaires.

The Harry Potter economy also touches thousands of others whose bank accounts have been boosted by this 200 million book phenomenon. First, there's just the book. Last year Bloomsbury announced a 19 per cent rise in profits to £11.1 million, much of it from Potter - good news for big shareholders such as Sir Christopher Bland. This time, Scholastic, the US publisher, which has printed 8.5 million copies, expects early sales to be double those of the previous book.

At WH Smith, Britain's biggest bookseller, Graham Edmonds, the man in charge of children's books, has the task of getting the books into 600 stores under secure conditions. "It's off the scale, a phenomenon 10 times bigger than any other product launch - and could possibly be 20 times bigger," he says.

But the real cash is being made by Warner Bros, which makes the films. Studio executives have made hundreds of millions of dollars, with beneficiaries including Chris Columbus, the director, David Heyman, the producer, and everyone else from scriptwriter Steve Kloves to composer John Williams.

"AOL Time Warner is the biggest winner," says Steven Gaydos, executive director of Variety magazine. But how much money is actually at stake? "Assume a production budget of $150 million for each film," he explains. "Then add $60 to $80 million a movie for marketing. Book rights and screenplay would be five per cent of the production budget, but Rowling might be on more - maybe as much as $15 million each time." Chris Columbus would be on a "phenomenal" deal, including a share of the earnings, but it is rumoured that Daniel Radcliffe is "pretty much replaceable" in Hollywood terms, with barely a couple of million per film.

Then comes the cash the filmmakers have poured into the London economy - "tens of millions" of dollars spent on Soho postproduction houses, not forgetting the reported £20,000 paid for three days' filming inside Australia House (aka Gringotts Bank).

That's just the spending money. It's what the films earn that would make Gordon Brown's mouth water. "The films are grossing close to $1 billion a picture, so we're up to $3 billion for the first three," says Gaydos. "They probably take another $1 billion each in home entertainment. And then there's licensing." Warner Bros would be getting at least $500 million - and licensees would make another billion or two.

Diane Nelson, senior vice-president of marketing at Warner Bros, sees Harry as "a bigger property than anything else we have seen - and we're nowhere near saturation point".

Mattel, just one licensee, says it wants Harry "to become a brand like Barbie", and this week you can buy anything from a £900 Harry Potter bunk-bed to a £100 Lego replica of Hogwarts. The video games firm Electronic Arts says its $1.2 billion revenue, up 48 per cent, was partly driven by Potter games.

THERE are thousands of other businesses across Britain that are profiting from the Potter effect - it has more than doubled ticket sales at Alnwick Castle, Northumberland, used as the film location for Hogwarts School exteriors; there has been a 30 per cent rise in visitors to Christ Church College, Oxford, whose Great Hall was used for internal Hogwarts scenes; even Potter pilgrimages are made to Goathland station on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, better known to fans as the fictional Hogsmeade station.

Then there is Lucy Mackenzie, 38, from Moray in Scotland, who has multiplied profits 10-fold by making chunky £80 hand-knitted sweaters with a large letter "H" stitched into the front. And any Muggle could tell you why that makes them special.

(Evening Standard, June 9 2003)

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Interview: Kate Adie, BBC correspondent (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

FIRST, a few corrections. Kate Adie did not, as previously reported, criticise BBC bosses for favouring women presenters "with cute faces and cute bottoms and nothing else in between"; her remark was "taken out of context". Nor did she criticise "macho" coverage of the Iraq war ("bad reporting"), have soldiers in the Gulf War hunt for her pearl earrings in the sand (a "ridiculous fiction"), or threaten to sue Downing Street after a spokesman blamed her for disclosing the Prime Minister's travel plans.

She certainly did not tell Irish radio recently that the Pentagon considered firing on independent journalists in Iraq ("rubbish, badly transcribed"), and has "no recollection" of a reported £125,000 libel win after a Sunday newspaper questioned her reputation. And despite the reports, she did not leave the BBC because she had been "sidelined". Is that clear? An interview with Kate Adie, until recently the BBC's chief news correspondent, is rather like an oral examination in which digressions from the set text meet a reprimand or a stern pause.

Her recently published autobiography is a lively, witty account of how her determined professionalism brought her extraordinary scoops and popular acclaim (as well as four stray bullets). The publisher had explained that she did not want the interview to focus on the BBC, which was fine; having admired her principled interventions in journalistic debates, and her courage under fire, I was hoping that Adie's new-found freedom would let her address whatever issues mattered to her now.

It soon becomes clear that she wants to stick to bland generalisations - the older profile of US broadcasters, the unreliable internet. Whenever prompted to discuss more specific journalistic issues that clearly bother her - round-the-clock war reporting, or news-as-entertainment - she chooses to deflect and criticise the questions rather than engage with them. It is a
belittling experience, considering my genuine curiosity and a deliberate avoidance of her well-guarded private life.

What, for instance, does she make of recent war coverage? "I'm not going to judge these things," she says coldly. "It's far too early to call." What, then, of the practice of "embedding" reporters among troops? "I think it's not an issue. It's been done so many times before." She did, though, make a speech in which she suggested that coverage was quite "macho"... "No, that was bad reporting. I was actually talking in a much more generalised sense about the language and images used to describe women connected with war. Somebody omitted that."

She writes in the book of her concerns that news is "increasingly selected not for its significance, but for its interest". So does she worry that foreign stories are slipping down the broadcasting agenda? "You really ought to go and talk to the editors about that," she says impatiently. "I have nothing to do with the selection of stories. I'm the reporter." And so on. Had I unwittingly offended?

"I just stick to the facts," she writes at the end of the book, which takes us from her comfortable Sunderland childhood to her early days at Radio Durham, and then from her big break, happening to be on duty during the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege, to the series of foreign wars that have made her "the squaddies' favourite". Adie has chosen to reveal little about herself. Her most emotive recollection concerns a "next-ofkin" form she had to complete before the first Gulf War. "I realised, for the first time, that I had no close relatives," she writes. She left the form blank.

Adie, 57, now freelances for the BBC, presenting programmes such as From Our Own Correspondent, as well as lecturing and completing a second book about women in uniform. She is sharp, energetic, and has a wonderfully infections laugh. Today she is wearing an elegant sleeveless blue dress and a thin veneer of patience.

DID it upset her, I ask, that some reviewers had suggested that she had little hinterland beyond the BBC? "I wrote in the book very specifically what I wanted to write about, period, and left it at that," she says. "If you don't think it's sufficient, that's that. It's what I wanted to say." I try again. Had she expected the rather personalised responses to the book? "I didn't know what to expect," she says, followed by a nine-second pause. Understandably, I suggest, she wanted to guard her privacy from tabloids that have long seen her as a target - in one case, sending a correspondent simply to report on Adie's battlefield movements. There is another six second pause. "I ... I don't sit there and speculate. I'm not that sort of person. It wastes time, actually." She breaks into a sudden laugh.

She realises that she was part of a "lucky generation" at BBC News. "It wasn't glamorous in my day. In the regions, reporters were seen as such low life that they didn't merit their name in the Radio Times. Now people are interested in being famous. I never gave it a thought."

What does she feel about the growing tendency to portray reporters - most recently, Rageh Omaar - as stars? She sighs. "Ask the BBC."

Adie rejects newspaper speculation that she left the BBC because she was pushed aside. The reason she made so few reports in her last three years, she says, is "because I've been doing so many other things". Besides, television was changing. "You don't see BBC World, do you?" she asks witheringly. "I wanted to do a bigger range of stuff. It suited me to change, and I am very happy. There's no point sitting like a hedgehog squeaking in front of an enormous steamroller." What of her reported remarks that the BBC bosses were favouring younger faces? "Ask them." Another eight-second pause.

Later, Adie sheds some light on her reluctance to engage with the interview. Evidently deeply suspicious of British newspapers, she seems to misinterpret innocent questions as a ruse to stitch her up.

"You don't give hostages to fortune," she says. Because she deals with "real conflicts", she does not want to find herself portrayed as being vindictive or confrontational towards other journalists. "I see too much of the real thing," she says, "serious things, where life's at stake. I don't want to be involved in endless media gossip."

She then confides an opinion. It concerns the current Iraqi occupation. "People haven't made enough fuss about Baghdad TV not being back on air yet," she says. "You'd have thought it would have been a priority. Interesting times."

(Evening Standard, June 4 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - ID card non-consultation/e-lancers

By David Rowan

Now here's a strange thing. This e-obsessed Government - which wants us to vote electronically and file our taxes online - has decided that internet users' opinions are actually worth 0.02 per cent of those of "ordinary" voters. We know this because, in its public consultation on identity cards, now closed, the Home Office has decided to count more than 5,000 mostly critical e-mailed responses as a single "No" vote.

Last October, the Government announced that two thirds of responses then received under the six-month consultation were in favour of ID cards. This prompted Stand, the non-partisan campaign group behind FaxYourMP.com, to create a web page explaining why it thought the cards were a dangerous idea, and offering to pass on people's thoughts to the Home Office. By the end of January this year, when the consultation ended, 5,029 people had responded. A fellow campaign group, Privacy International, even let people phone in their comments and forwarded the audio files.

Then on April 28, Beverley Hughes, the Minister for Citizenship and Immigration, told Parliament that the "2,000 responses" received during the consultation had been "about two to one in favour of introducing a scheme". The activists at Stand learnt subsequently that every one of its users' views - including those supporting the card - had been rolled into a single vote against it. Danny O'Brien, one of Stand's founders, has just sent Hughes a letter seeking an explanation. "I feel that there were a lot of people involved in the ID card consultation for whom this would be their first experience of contributing directly to a government initiative," he writes.

"To turn to them now and explain that their voice counts for nothing - or 1/5,000th of a voice, whichever is greater - seems to me to convey the exact opposite of what a consultation is meant to achieve."

It is not for this column to enter the political debate over ID cards - the Government evidently has its own fixed view of their value, consultations notwithstanding. All we can do is to point out some of the serious technological questions that have been raised about them. That the enormous national database of personal data required would be a prime target for organised criminals or corrupt insiders, leading to fraud and identity theft. That such a database would inevitably be used by officials for unforeseen purposes, perhaps cross-matched with other databases - your library loans and car movements - to make it easier to monitor you.

Besides, do you really trust the Government to run such a huge IT project, considering its record in this area to date?

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THERE goes the e-lance marketplace. Five years ago, Thomas Malone and Robert Laubacher published an influential Harvard Business Review article called "The dawn of the e-lance economy" that inspired a new industry in which freelance workers would bid for corporate work. The article predicted that "large, permanent corporations" would soon be replaced by "flexible, temporary networks of individuals" who would sell their services electronically in a highly efficient global marketplace.

As with many of 1998's internet predictions, things haven't quite worked out as planned. One of the biggest such networks, Guru.com, has just e-mailed its freelancers to say that it "will no longer be matching talent with employers effective June 30".

Other sites such as ants.com have already gone, and the balance on survivors such as Emoonlighter.com (317,000 freelancers, just 30,000 potential clients) suggests that the outsourcing revolution has stalled. Personal contacts, old boy, are still what count.

(The Times, June 3 2003)

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