Interview: Claudia Rosencrantz, ITV entertainment (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan


IT WAS the secret transfer deal that caught even his producer unawares. By defecting to ITV this week after 33 years, Michael Parkinson has put a huge hole in BBC1's Saturday night schedule and seriously embarrassed its executives. The channel's controller, Lorraine Heggessey, played down the loss as a chance to bring in "big names from the next generation". But at ITV there is no disguising the glee at another coup at the opposition's expense.

"That's what I'd be saying if I were her," smiles Claudia Rosencrantz, the network's controller of entertainment for the past nine years. "He's been synonymous with a very classy type of programme for the BBC, and it must be disappointing for them."

Rosencrantz, together with Nigel Pickard, ITV's director of programmes, stepped in when Parkinson lost his preferred Saturday slot to football. After his agent called to explain Parkinson's "problem", they conceived a strategy designed to show how far ITV appreciated the needs of its talent.

"We decided we needed to be very secret, but that we were completely committed to him from the moment it was first discussed," she says. "We knew that he'd have to have a good think about it." Indeed, Parkinson signed the contract just half an hour before the press conference to announce it.

Rosencrantz, whose successes include Pop Idol, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? and I'm a Celebrity, ... Get Me Out of Here! says it is not enough simply to sign a highprofile star and presume they will be happy. Having worked briefly at the BBC, she says she can understand why some of its top presenters - including Des Lynam and Barry Norman - have quit amid similar grumblings about the corporation's management.

"The secret of signing talent is to know what you're going to do with them," she says. "It's clear what Michael Parkinson is coming here to do - with the 10pm slot that's right for him and for the show."

Commissioning editors must back their instincts, she says - even if their shows underperform. When BBC pressure to sign an exclusive contract led Ant and Dec to commit to ITV, for instance, Rosencrantz was convinced they should star in a "zoo"format show. After the 2001 show, Slap Bang, delivered poor ratings, she decided that the problem was viewers' lack of familiarity with the pair. To solve it, she put them on Pop Idol and I'm a Celebrity ... - which made them mainstream stars.

Her biggest risk was Millionaire, which sat on her desk for two years before she had a programme director - David Liddiment - who would back her. "We didn't know how many people would phone in, or whether people would win £1 million every night. The first night it hit air, I thought, 'Oh my God! Maybe I'm mad.'" The show's success, which revived ITV's ratings and finances, convinced her to abandon focus groups for her " passionate beliefs". Her guiding principle, she says, is to back shows that will "cater for everyone" - bringing families together to argue about Pop Idol finalists, or to feel " emotionally involved" in new programmes-such as Gordon Ramsay's-Hell's Kitchen.

If there are failures - Reborn in the USA and Survivor received disappointing ratings and critical maulings - she merely blames "media expectations" while celebrating the "risk".

"The public wants to be constantly challenged," she says. "Hell's Kitchen is groundbreaking - we build a restaurant that has to serve 70 covers a night. It's not a game - it's for real."

CRITICS, though, suggest that the channel relies excessively on formatted shows and reworkings of earlier hits. Doesn't Hell's Kitchen, for instance, sound rather like Jamie's Kitchen?

"It is completely different," she insists. "This is about a truly exceptional chef putting his reputation on the line to train people to run a restaurant." Besides, she says, there is no such thing as a new idea in television - "just a modernisation of an idea. Millionaire was just a brilliant new way of putting a quiz show in context.

"Pop Idol and Pop Stars were just a new take on the talent show. I run 500-600 peak-time slots, with everything from Harry Hill's TV Burp to The Impressionable Jon Culshaw. They are not stifling creativity - they are embracing it."

Critics' views count only when they echo the public's, she says. "Look, I get people in the media coming up to me saying, 'I'm embarrassed to admit I love I'm a Celebrity ...'. Why be embarrassed? It's not as if you're saying you're a paedophile."

Still, they may be pleased to know that she has ordered no more reality shows - although Celebrity could last "for as long as we feel we can deliver those personalities viewers want to watch".

A mother of a six-year-old girl - she is married to the actor Daniel Abineri - Rosencrantz, 44, says she lives a quiet, bookish life. How, then, does she know what the typical ITV viewer wants? "I may not move in media circles, but I talk to people all the time," she says. "And I know all about children's TV from my six-year-old. She plays Pop Idol every night - she is Simon Cowell and her toys all have to perform."

Her career began on the picture desks of the Telegraph Magazine and Elle. After meeting then News of the World editor David Montgomery at a party she found herself writing a "What's hot, what's not" column for the paper's magazine. "It was hilarious. The subeditor was Mystic Meg."

But she was determined to work in television, and won a researcher's job at LWT. The fact that she was committed to jury service when she should have started did not bother her: she simply persuaded the court clerk to give her a short case on the grounds that "it would help me change my life". Rosencrantz, clearly, is not lacking in self-belief.

She has great hopes for Parkinson, even though his BBC ratings were in decline - "purely because they moved him about", she believes. But what if commercial pressures in the newly merged ITV begin to restrict her freedom to take risks?

"It's business as usual as far as I'm concerned, whatever the merger means," she says. "I'm not a very insecure type of person, as you may have gathered."

(Evening Standard, April 28 2004)

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The Times: Tech column - Google under attack/Bluetooth risks

By David Rowan

WHEN NEW programmers start work at Google's headquarters in California, they are reminded of the company's "core" value: "Don't be evil." Lately, though, Google has become the Devil, if critics of its groundbreaking e-mail service are to be believed. G-mail, launched four weeks ago as the world's most convenient free webmail service, now faces legal challenges, a barrage of international privacy complaints, and the disdain of bloggers and tech writers alike.

The jokey April Fool's Day announcement belied the company's deadly serious challenge to Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. G-mail would offer a vast one gigabyte of free storage space, 167 times that of Yahoo! Nor would there be any of those annoying pop-up adverts to fund the service: you would merely see "relevant" text adverts on your G-mail web page, placed there by software that automatically scans e-mails looking for key words.

Suddenly Google was recast as Big Brother, keen to know the contents of the world's digital messages for its own commercial purposes. Last week Liz Figueroa, a California state senator, introduced a law seeking to ban such a service and so protect your "most intimate and private e-mail thoughts"; the civil-rights group Privacy International, meanwhile, filed complaints in 16 countries claiming that G-mail breached everything from confidentiality to data-protection law.

In fact, there is little to worry about in Google's plans to make money from its knowledge of your e-mail correspondences. For years websites have built profiles of users to target them automatically with adverts or (like Amazon) to recommend suitable purchases. The problem lies in Google's casual assumption that it may cross-match your e-mail account with your history of web searches. Each time you visit its website, it places a "cookie" (a line of programming code) inside your computer so as to identify it. If Google knows who you are from your e-mails, think how much more it will learn from your web searches -everything from your health concerns to holiday plans. Imagine how attractive such data could be to identity thieves, government snoopers, even divorce lawyers.

Google says that "no humans" will access your e-mails to sell you things, but its loose privacy policy ensures that it will store them for years, even after you have closed your account -and that it may disclose their content on a simple "governmental request". The company's founders have been taken aback by the controversy that G-mail has generated, and have promised to look again at the terms of use. You might want to make a habit of regularly deleting your Google cookie in your web-browsing program -or, better still, use a separate browser when accessing G-mail, so that your search history remains anonymous.

* IT MIGHT let hackers into some mobile phones, but Bluetooth wireless technology still has its fans. Indeed, if you believe the media, thousands of us are using Bluetooth-enabled handsets to arrange random sexual encounters with strangers. The UK-born phenomenon has its own name, "toothing" (remember "dogging?), and even a salacious online beginner's guide which allows "toothers" to share their experiences, typically on trains or aircraft. Just one spoilsport question: it's certainly a gift of a tale to the hacks in hot pursuit, but hoaxers aside, has anyone yet actually "toothed"?

(The Times, April 27 2004)

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Evening Standard: Profile - Haim Saban

By David Rowan

HE is the secretive Israeli-American billionaire who made a fortune from the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers and co-wrote the Dallas theme tune. But with Haim Saban's emergence in a partnership hoping to buy the Telegraph Group, the papers' journalists are wondering why one of America's leading political donors would want to gain an influential new role in the British press.

Saban's people are eager to play down his role in the joint bid for the papers with the German publisher Axel Springer. His London spokesman points out that the colourful entrepreneur did not even join the Germans' representatives last week for a crucial meeting at Canary Wharf. There has been speculation that Saban's only real interest is in owning the Jerusalem Post. But a source close to the bidding process dismisses the rumour as mere "propaganda".

"If Saban just wanted the Post, he could have had it for $100 million simply by asking Conrad [Black]," the source says. "Why would he have got involved in a deal worth over $1 billion for a product worth $100 million?"

What makes Saban's position intriguing is his formal link with the Springer group, in which he has become a 20 per cent shareholder. "This is a much more serious partnership than previously thought," suggests the source. "He's played it very skilfully."

It remains unclear what the partnership will involve, but there are suggestions that Saban's involvement has been strengthened to minimise tax implications for the Springer group on such an acquisition. Saban is said to have agreed his role personally with Friede Springer, the widow of the group's founder.

Telegraph journalists are concerned to know what Saban wants from the titles. They are anxious about his lack of experience in the newspaper industry - and about potential editorial interference by a man who recently identified a "pro-Arab bias" in the British media.

"The problem is that not many people here know much about him," says Charlie Methven, in charge of drawing up the Telegraph journalists' response to the takeover. "Most of the bidders have track records in the business, but Saban doesn't. He obviously wants The Jerusalem Post, but it's not clear which other parts of the empire he'd be interested in."

Saban's interest in the Middle East is well established. He spent $3.3 million creating the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy in Washington, and founded the Saban Institute for the Study of the American Political System at the University of Tel Aviv. His views of British media coverage became clear at the Royal Television Society convention last September, when he berated the BBC and Sky for what he said was hostile reporting from Israel.

Saban - who would not be interviewed for this article - has called himself "someone who has an abiding interest in promoting Arab-Israeli peace and preserving American interests in the Middle East". But even in Israel some see his political involvement, in support of the Labour party, as excessively intrusive.

Before the last Israeli election, he organised a fundraising dinner in Los Angeles for Ehud Barak's campaign, raising a six-figure sum. He has also been a substantial donor to the US Democrat s. A $7 million gift before the 2002 midterm elections was the largest single donation outside a presidential election. Bill Clinton, who calls Saban "my great friend", made him an adviser on trade issues.

FRIENDS insist that Saban's politics would never intrude on his businesses. "He would not get involved in the political coverage in any media that he owns," says Ynon Kreiz, a long-time associate. "He has two set-ups in the US, as an entrepreneur and as a donor to charitable and political causes - the two are completely unrelated."

What makes him tick, associates say, is the entrepreneurial drive that has brought him a fortune estimated by Forbes at $1.7 billion. Born in Alexandria in 1944, he grew up in poverty in Tel Aviv. He moved to Paris in 1975, where he established a business promoting music, and eight years later to Los Angeles, where he set up a venture licensing music for use in television cartoons.

His breakthrough came when he bought the rights to a Japanese show that he licensed as Power Rangers to Rupert Murdoch's Fox Kids Network. But the real money came when he sold his stake in the Fox Family Channel to Disney in 2001 for around $1.5 billion.

"He is smart, hardworking and has terrific people skills," says one colleague. Others say that his brashness, even arrogance, belies a down-to-earth nature. "When invited to speak at the Royal Television Society event in Cambridge last year, the organisers wanted to send a car for him so he wouldn't have to rely on the trains," recalls a British associate. "He brushed the suggestion aside, saying, ' Nonsense, I'm just a cartoon schlepper.' He ended up buying everyone tea at the station kiosk."

Saban and his wife Cheryl, a writer and TV producer, have four children. Beyond that, he is determined to protect his secrecy. "His private life is his private life," says his spokesman, firmly.

What we do know is that Saban is plotting his latest media shopping spree. Last summer he took control of the German pay-TV channel, ProSieben Sat 1. At the Royal Television Society conference he declared that, "under the right circumstances", he would also see buying the ITV network as "a great opportunity". Newspapers, too, have been on his list for a while, as he revealed two years ago in a Washington Post interview.

"My preferences are the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times," he said audaciously. He added that he had already been on the phone to the owner of the Los Angeles Times.

Asked why he wished to acquire a newspaper, Saban addressed the reporter using the affectionate Yiddish term for grandma - "Bubby, I think it's an area where I can bring a lot to the table. I've always had the good fortune of achieving my goals."

(Evening Standard, April 21 2004)

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The Times: Tech column - Children's database/DVD censorship

By David Rowan

IT WAS the failed mortgage application that killed my trust in databases. My credit record was flawless, I thought -until the information-processing company blamed me for a neighbour's missed MasterCard payments. By sending off £2 for a personal credit report, I discovered the shocking fecklessness of a woman I'd previously smiled at in the street. A similar surname had penalised me for her extravagances.

Thanks to the Data Protection Act, I could unravel the error and implore the company to rethink. But what if such a mistake had occurred on one of the many official databases that play an increasingly powerful role in our lives? Inaccurate data stored by the NHS or the Inland Revenue could lose us jobs or blight our reputations. Last week it emerged that the Criminal Records Bureau has falsely accused 193 job applicants of having criminal convictions. An earlier study of the Police National Computer found that 85 per cent of Metropolitan Police records were wrong in some way.

The issue has taken on a new urgency, not simply over calls for a national identity card, but because of government plans to track the nation's children.

Under the Children Bill, now being debated in Parliament, an electronic database will keep a record of every child. The Government, keen to avoid another child-neglect scandal, wants agencies that come in contact with children to use it to "flag up" any concerns. Schools, doctors, the police and private-sector bodies will alert the system to such warning signals as low birth weight, poor exam results and a parent's depression or addiction. Two such "flags" on a child's record may trigger an investigation.

A national children's database has troubling implications, and not just for those people who are haunted for life by mistakes or unsubstantiated rumour. A few days ago a conference at the London School of Economics heard from children's rights campaigners and a Barnardo's representative that such a database may increase children's risk of abuse. There are no clear limits on who will have access to the data; and if the system were hacked it could, in the words of one speaker, become a "paedophile's address book".

Ministers are often dazzled by technology, without considering its practical limitations, and "information-sharing" is Whitehall's latest panacea. But before we let millions of strangers map out our children's lives electronically, we ought to know how their personal data will be safeguarded. Once the computer decides what sort of person your child is, the label is likely to stick.

+++

SHOULD the "orgasm" scene have been cut from When Harry Met Sally? What about an affectionate hug by two men in the film Big Daddy? A prurient new DVD player just released by RCA is enraging leading Hollywood directors. It incorporates ClearPlay software that cuts out everything from "crude sexual content" to "vain references" to God. ClearPlay says its technology is "about choice". But what about the directors' choice of how their movies should be edited? Good luck to Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and other directors in their court battle to stop such nannyism. No one has to watch their films -so why should the law let DVD content-filters rewrite them?

(The Times, April 20 2004)

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Evening Standard: Analysis - The new 'celeb mag' boom

By David Rowan

GOOD news for fans of celebrity gossip: your reading list is about to get even longer. Just in case Heat, Now and New! were leaving you hungry - not to mention Hello! and OK! - the publishing industry is about to saturate the newsstands with yet more celebrity glossies.

In the past few days, Celebrity Homes, published by Merricks Media in Bath, and a "younger" spin-off of Now have joined an increasingly brutal battle for the showbiz-obsessed reader, and next month IPC launches yet another magazine exposing how the stars live "off the red carpet and behind closed doors". With circulation already falling among some of the market leaders, is this publishing bubble about to burst? "I don't think so," says Sarah Fisher, publishing director of Now, which last week added TeenNow to a portfolio that also includes Now Celebrity Hair. "There seems to be an insatiable desire for all things celeb, and people are interested in every angle. Apparently we're not yet at saturation point." To test the thesis, Now's publisher, IPC, is about to launch Celebrity Living, in which stars such as Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston let you "share the look of their home" and Nicole Appleton shows you how to host a dinner party. "We see Celebrity Living as a homes title, but instead of using real people's homes, like Ideal Homes, we're featuring those of celebrities," explains Tammy Butt, the launch editor.

"Our target readers are 25- to 35-year-olds buying their first homes, who have been brought up on Heat and Glamour. The stars are slightly bored with bog-standard interviews about their sex lives or their latest movies, and they're actually quite proud of their homes. And the reader gets something they haven't read before." The magazine was initially going to be tested as a one-off, but since the rival Celebrity Homes hit the newsstands on 25 March, IPC has confirmed that it will be published monthly at £1.80. Lynnette Peck, a former GMTV beauty correspondent who edits Celebrity Homes (initially priced at £2), is clearly relishing the battle ahead.

"We're the first celebrity title to launch in the homes sector, and IPC is two months behind us," she says. With a print run of 250,000, her title, she claims, is the biggest homes launch in five years.

Peck's first issue offers such insights as the contents of Gail Hipgrave's (formerly Porter's) by David Rowan 'I'd be very surprised if Celebrity Homes is still around in a year' bathroom cabinet, Anna Ryder-Richardson's "interpretation" of the Beckham residence, and the revelation that top hairdresser Trevor Sorbie spends £600 a month on flowers which he devotes his Saturday mornings to arranging.

These are hardly the talkingpoint insights of a Beckham text message or an OK! wedding buy-up - so why does Peck think there is room for her magazine? "We did research among women aged 25 to 45, the 'celebrity generation'," she says. "They've grown up with celebrities and look to them for guidance on everything from what clothes to wear to what lipstick.

We're bringing together our two national obsessions - celebrities and property." But it will be market forces that determine whether there is room for yet more celebrity titles. The circulation of Now, the market leader, fell by six per cent to 592,000 in the year to December; Hello! was down to 350,000, and OK! to 571,000.

Heat, at 567,000, seems to have peaked, and its owner, Emap, says it expects sales to settle at around 500,000. And even though recent launches such as New!, Star and Closer have a combined circulation approaching a million, there is evidence that many of these are second or third purchases from a relatively fixed number of people - helped by give-aways, price cuts, and what Emap calls a newsstand "war of attrition".

"We're inevitably reaching saturation," insists Louise Matthews, managing director of Emap's Heat and Closer. "The readerships might still show growth, but the profitability of a lot of these titles is in decline." Hello!, in particular, is extremely vulnerable, she says.

IT'S been hit in circulation share dramatically, and now it's having a hard time in terms of ad share and volume of yield," she adds.

"And Now is under fire from every direction - its profitability is going south, and the fact that it had to offer so many issues at 50p in the last ABC period suggests it will do anything to hang on to circulation." IPC, in response, claims that Emap has sustained Heat and Closer only by spending £30 million on marketing in the past four years.

Matthews says that the new titles have arrived too late. "I'd be very surprised if Celebrity Homes is still around in a year," she says.

"As for IPC's Celebrity Living, I hear it has Lenny Kravitz on the first cover. Now, tell me, who's interested a) in Lenny Kravitz, and b) in his home? Women are more sophisticated than these magazines think - they might want to know the celebrity gossip, but they are not going to want to do up their house like theirs." Hello! certainly looks vulnerable, particularly when faced with Richard Desmond's three-pronged assault from OK!, New! and Star, which share content and aggressively discount to build market share. But Sally Cartwright, Hello!'s publishing director, laughs off suggestions that the original celebrity magazine's days are numbered.

"We are less profitable than we were, but that's a long way for questioning our viability," she says. "We still get a good return on our advertising and still deliver the best [readership] profile. Just look at our parent organisation, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year and remains extremely profitable. There will always be demand for a 'respectable' celebrity title." The "celebrity accessory" type of magazine, Cartwright insists, will die out long before the more upmarket titles. "I know how very difficult it is to get access to quality celebrities," she says. "It's easy if you want the C-list, but major stars are expensive. I have nothing against Trevor Sorbie, but I question how much appetite there is to discover his lifestyle." Over at IPC, Tammy Butt is not so sure. "Five years ago you had to be a movie star, but now a reality TV loser can sell a magazine," she says. "Heat has been very good at opening up that pool of celebrities.

People have been saying the bubble was about to burst since Heat was selling 400,000 a couple of years ago - and look at it now. If anything, the market is still growing." Will the inevitable result be, as Media Week joked this week, a glossy magazine called Celebrity Dog Kennels, featuring exclusive access to Geri Halliwell's pampered pooch? "The pet market is vast," Butt says with a smile. "You never know."

(Evening Standard, April 14 2004)

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Interview: Bob Phillis, Guardian Media Group (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

ANN Widdecombe might want to be on standby in Farringdon Road tomorrow. With the March newspaper circulation figures out, Guardian executives may have particular reason to consult their new no-nonsense agony aunt.

What, for instance, should they do about the knotty problem of lost readers, with full-price sales down 10.5 per cent in the year to February - the sharpest fall in Fleet Street? And how, if Alan Rusbridger refuses to go tabloid, will the paper he edits see off the revived compact Independent, up by 20 per cent over the same period and, for the first time in a decade, "within sight" of profit? Such questions have provoked intense debate at The Guardian, as some younger executives, in particular, argue that a failure to reformat the paper marks the greatest crisis of Rusbridger's nine-year reign.

The numbers, certainly, appear ominous: as The Guardian's sales fell to 352,005 last month (369,726 including give-aways), The Independent was up to 222,799 (256,378 in total) from barely 185,000 a year earlier.

The compact Times, meanwhile, had slowed its own annual fall to three per cent, while even the rudderless Telegraph announced plans for an £8 million tabloid launch. If not a crisis, the trend is at least a worry. So if Rusbridger's mind is made up, what does the chief executive think? Bob Phillis, head of the Guardian Media Group (GMG), effectively controls The Guardian as a business. Although not a conventional "proprietor" - GMG, owned by the Scott Trust, is there to preserve its newspapers' financial and editorial independence - Rusbridger needs Phillis's support to get the big cheques signed.

Indeed, Phillis recently spent £593 million to take full control of the Auto Trader empire. So is it true, as some on The Guardian are suggesting, that Phillis is not entirely persuaded by its editor's lack of action? "Not true," he says firmly. "I can assure you that I was not pushing for the tabloid, never have been. Because Alan has very cogently argued that it would put too much at risk in terms of what we are as a newspaper. We're not just going to take a back seat. But we came to the carefully considered conclusion that tabloid wasn't the format which allowed us to continue with those standards."

IT WAS only natural, he says, for "a healthy difference of views" to emerge among the staff. This was, after all, a different kind of newspaper: one whose editor had emailed them all to solicit their views (resulting is a 60:40 split against going tabloid). "There are differences," Phillis says. "But how many newspapers would bother to consult like that?" There are, however, some secret plans afoot to reformat the paper the Guardian way. "Of course we're going to do something," Phillis says.

Rusbridger suggested in a recent interview that he favoured a continental shape such as that used by Le Monde. "What he actually said was there was a range of sizes and formats between broadsheet and tabloids," Phillis clarifies: "Whether you are talking about a New York Times or a La Stampa or a Berliner, or any other shape you like. And there are lots of different design treatments. We're just not going to be driven by the shortterm pressures in the market." He accepts that those pressures are currently damaging The Guardian's reach, but suggests that The Independent will lose some established readers when it goes fully tabloid. He also finds it "interesting" to watch The Times contending with two concurrent formats, which he considers not entirely successful.

"You can see differences in the ways the two papers are edited that haven't quite resolved themselves," he says.

Phillis, 58, has made a career of avoiding causing offence while steering large media organisations. A Guardian man since 1997, he was previously a Birtist while deputy director-general at the BBC, and before that a commercial boss unafraid to wield the axe at ITN and the commercial television channels.

He left school at 15, with ambitions to be an architect, but having no A-levels became a printing apprentice before running the company that published TV Times.

Since then, his unadventurous diplomacy has led him to some roles unsuited to more outspoken figures - most recently chairing the review into government communications, hailed as the blueprint to end Whitehall spin.

If he is disappointed with the Government's hedging of many of his proposals, he is careful to hone this in his presentation. He was glad, he says, to see a new Civil Service post responsible for communications-But wasn't Howell James, who was given the role, a professional spin-doctor who worked for John Major and was friendly with Peter Mandelson? Even the Guardian leader on the appointment was headed: "A faint whiff of cronyism".

Phillis the diplomat replies that he is "delighted" with James's appointment. "Yes, he was there in Major's time, but he's done a lot of other things. Frankly, some of the attacks on his personal and private life were despicable: the unwarranted linkage to Peter Mandelson, who some of the media stated was with Howell at his 50th birthday party in Morocco. Quite unsubstantiated." Such falsehoods would not have been acceptable in a "responsible" newspaper such as The Guardian.

WHAT of the group's financial health? The Guardian may be in profit, but its websites are still losing between £1 million and £5 million a year, and The Observer, Phillis accepts, loses "a bob or two" - reportedly up to £10 million a year. But, bar The Sunday Times, all Sunday broadsheets lose money, he stresses.

Does he believe the group's cumulative losses - perhaps £100 million - had made The Observer purchase in 1993 a mistake? "It was before my time," he says, "but there has been a cultural change since then. Saturday and Sunday [papers] have become so similar in terms of the leisuretime read. The focus, I think, is looking at the Saturday and Sunday packages. There is such a weight of newsprint - and a degree of overlap. A lot of the lifestyle-type sections are very similar across both days, and across various publications. We'll be trying to address that problem." This suggests changes that will "redefine the offerings" on both days. But to ensure no one takes any offence, he adds that Roger Alton has done a fine job editing The Observer, and that no question mark hangs over its future.

In an attempt finally to break through the cheerful evasion of controversy, I mischievously draw Phillis's attention to an Observer leader last month headlined: "Time to neuter the fat cats", and a Polly Toynbee column in The Guardian denouncing "fat cat pay [as] the result of greed". How, I ask, do both papers' strident views on such an issue square with his own pay package of £686,000, including pension contributions, and that of Alan Rusbridger totalling £359,000? Phillis's answer, true to the Guardian's ethos, is that he is delighted to face such open scrutiny. "There are," he points out, "no share options or long-term incentive schemes here. If I look around me to people performing similar roles in similar organisations, I don't think I'm out of kilter. As for Alan, I think he is underpaid." Over to you, Ms Toynbee.

(Evening Standard, April 7 2004)

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The Times: Strings attached - The Kabbalah Centre exposed

Strings attached

Its celebrity followers claim the ultra-fashionable Kabbalah Centre has brought them serenity and fulfilment. But others are coming forward to accuse the organisation of emotional manipulation and financial pressure. DAVID ROWAN investigates

[See also the writer's 2002 investigation HERE]

It was the rabbi's sudden demand for £65,000 to "cleanse" her late parents' souls that finally drove Susie to speak out. She had already faced moments of doubt during 13 months as a volunteer member of the London Kabbalah Centre. There was the instruction before a visitors' open day to "work on those not yet ready to buy, and forget those with their wallets already out"; then the intense pressure for her to spend £360 on "holy" books and £900 attending a religious ceremony. But these glancing reservations were far from Susie's mind when she agreed to meet the rabbi for a friendly cappuccino. She had become close to his family through the centre in recent months, often taking his son to the cinema or the zoo, and signing up at his suggestion for more classes. An attractive and financially independent businesswoman in her early thirties, Susie had also confided in him about her unfulfilled spiritual and emotional needs, no doubt partly caused by her parents' early deaths. She had dabbled with Neuro-Linguistic Programming, but now seemed to have found fulfilment - like Madonna and Elizabeth Taylor - in the structured teachings of the Kabbalah Centre.

The centre, based in Los Angeles, has attracted widespread celebrity support in recent years, with new members drawn to the persuasive mystical teachings of its founder, Rabbi Philip Berg. Berg - "the Rav" to his followers - has proved a controversial figure among more conventional rabbis, who question his fundraising methods as well as his teachings, such as his claim that Jews would have survived the Holocaust had they only studied Kabbalah. But for Susie, the London Kabbalah Centre was simply a supportive network that she had allowed to touch ever-larger areas of her life.

So when she met the rabbi on January 26 near the centre's new £3.65 million offices in Stratford Place in the West End of London, she wondered why he seemed unusually serious. "I thought maybe it was because he'd heard some of the questions I'd started asking, such as why, for all its fundraising, the centre was not doing much for the wider community," she recalls. "So I explained that my mother had died of cancer in 1980, and that, though I'm involved with Cancer Research, I'd be willing to participate in community work for the centre in hospitals, or prisons, or with the homeless." According to Susie, the rabbi looked at her and said that there was one thing she could do to honour her parents' memory: she could buy the centre a new Kabbalistic Torah, the sacred scroll containing the five Books of Moses. "He explained that their souls would benefit from the 'light', and my channels would be opened," she says. "He said that I had 'Klippah', which means negative energy that stops the light coming into my life, and that was why I couldn't have a relationship with a man, or have children, and why people in my business were stealing money. There were only three Kabbalistic Torahs in the world, he said, but if I donated money there and then, he would bring one there tomorrow, just for me."

Susie asked the cost, but was initially told that she was not ready to hear "because you focus on the material aspect, not the spiritual". "He said it wasn't about the money, it was about getting closer to the light. Then he said that it would cost $110,000. I smiled, and explained that I didn't have the money. And he said, repeatedly, 'No, I'm sure you have it. Do it for me, do it for your parents.'

"To get out of what was now a very uncomfortable situation, I explained that everything was invested in property. And he replied: 'Then give us a property!'" The rabbi then made another suggestion. "He said, 'I'll let you pay by instalments.' I could write a series of post-dated cheques that his wife would cash each month. When I insisted that the cheques would bounce, he again started to argue quite aggressively that I did have it, and that we should go straight to the centre and sign."

Susie left the café in shock. "I felt as if I'd trusted this person so much," she says now. "It was so unexpected. But then I remembered a friend's warning, that I had dismissed at the time, to 'watch out for the money thing'. I feel abused emotionally and blackmailed in the name of 'light'."

Susie has not returned to the centre, despite receiving follow-up calls about the expected donation. Instead, she took her concerns to the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. As she explained to him, she now believes that she was carefully targeted by the centre as a vulnerable yet potentially high-value donor, and that her trust was gained over months of Kabbalah classes and social events. "They seek out people with an obvious need, for what is clearly a very organised form of selling," she now believes. "You stop seeing your friends, you forget your reality. If someone had been weaker, they'd have given the money."

. . . ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE . . .

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Evening Standard: Profile - Michael Grade

By David Rowan

MICHAEL GRADE'S appointment will be greeted with great relief across the BBC - although not, perhaps, in Mark Byford's office in Broadcasting House.

The cigar-chomping, redbracewearing multimillionaire has the broadcasting experience and the charisma needed to restore the corporation's shattered morale. He might have earned the Daily Mail's disapproval as broadcasting's "pornographer-in-chief ", but Grade is the strong, independent voice that the BBC needs at this crucial stage. When he last applied to be chairman, three years ago, Grade declared that he would not, of course, be asked, as he was "a bit of a strong taste . . . bit too independent". That is why, along with David Dimbleby, he was such a strong internal favourite for the job now.

Veteran Panorama reporter Tom Mangold explained why Grade was the man to save the BBC: "Unusually for a top broadcasting executive, he has always been popular within television, where he is liked for his élan, an indomitable cheerfulness, incurable optimism-and a true passion for television-programmes." More importantly, he will also appoint the director-general who will take the corporation into charter renewal - and who will protect its independence from government bullying.

Grade's £81,000 job will not be easy. As well as repairing relations with the Government, he will also need to reconcile the contradictory roles of his board as both regulator and champion of the BBC's independence. He will do so from a strong position of knowing how to bring out the best in the corporation.

As controller of BBC1 from 1984 to 1986, and then director of programmes at BBC TV, he earned a reputation for a popular touch in programming yet also finding space for more "highbrow" areas such as the arts. He also, as Bob Geldof said, had "the bottle" to give over a channel for 24 hours to Live Aid.

It was at Channel 4, where he was chief executive from 1988 to 1997, that he became known for what Norman Tebbit called "dirt, smut and other rubbish". But for all the controversy caused by Eurotrash, The Word and Brass Eye, Grade made the channel financially viable and increased its share of viewers. Indeed, Grade's commercial touch - both in terms of programming, and the money he has made for himself - leads some senior insiders to see him in Greg Dyke's mould.

That will not be good news for a former Birtist such as acting director general Byford, who is hoping to get Dyke's job. Grade learned early that he had to play tough to be accepted. Abandoned by his mother as a baby, he nonetheless had all the advantages of a comfortable showbusiness family: his uncles were Lords Grade and Delfont, not necessarily an advantage when he sought acceptance at the Daily Mirror where he was a trainee.

After a couple of years as a sports columnist, he became a theatrical agent before moving into television at LWT, where he was director of programmes. Much of his drive, he said, came from seeing his father have a stroke when he was 23.

Grade has been married three times. He and his wife Francesca have a four-year-old son, Samuel.

(Evening Standard, April 2 2004)

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The Times: Op-ed - Will my brain freeze as I search for my life in gigabytes?

GOD IS not actually dead - he simply needs a system upgrade to keep up with Google. By David Rowan


Unlike most Californian cults, the one born six years ago in a Menlo Park garage can now justifiably claim to offer its worshippers an unprecedented degree of omniscience. By offering to archive all our e-mails - along with every image, weblog entry, online chat and web page it can find - Google hopes to be the only information source we will ever need. With a share offering looming, and the "search wars" to be won, no wonder it wants to be the ultimate one-stop data store. But have you considered what all this reliance on digital memory is doing to your real one?

Those of us whose short-term memory has been obliterated by data overload are already Googling far too often when we should be thinking. So habituated are we to this ultimate spell-checker, fact-checker, dictionary and news library that a frozen screen heralds all the neural dislocation of temporary Alzheimer's.

Naturally, we will be delighted to accept yesterday's offer from Larry Page, the firm's co-founder, to store up to 500,000 pages of our e-mails free of charge in a Gmail account. After all, if it helps him to accomplish his declared mission of organising all the world's information and making it easily accessible, that is one more reason to switch off our synapses.

We are already facing enough cultural pressure to out-gigabyte each other. Your iPod holds only 20 gigabytes of music? Pah! You will need at least 40 to be au courant these days, even if you cannot quite imagine where you would find 10,000 songs worth carrying around with you.

In fact, the deluge is only growing: according to a recent study by the University of California at Berkeley, the amount of new data stored on paper, film, magnetic and optical media almost doubled between 1999 and 2002. In the latter year, researchers estimated that 18 exabytes of data flowed through digital channels such as television and the net. "Exabytes"? Keep up: each one represents a million terabytes, which in turn comprise a million megabytes. To put it another way, every person in the world generated the equivalent of 30ft of books. How much simpler the world was when we were limited to the typewriter and the Home Service.

BUT even then, some of the world's greatest technology thinkers were giving warning of trouble to come. In 1945, long before the first text message was sent, Vannevar Bush, who ran the US Office of Scientific Research and Development, proposed the Memex as the obvious solution. This would be "a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanised so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility".

Is Google about to become the Memex? It has, you may have noticed, started archiving the texts of books in recent months - but the battle is far from over.

Microsoft, which along with Yahoo! is fighting to become the dominant search engine, has also been experimenting with vast databases that would chronicle your entire digital life. Called MyLifeBits, the project sets out to solve the "giant shoebox problem" of how to organise years of photographs, e-mails, documents and even phone calls.

As Gordon Bell, one of the developers, puts it: "Imagine being able to run a Google-like search on your life." Such a technology, he suggests, is inevitable as digital memory becomes ever cheaper... and human memory no more reliable.

On the techies' bulletin boards last night, not all the buzz concerned the suspicious April 1 timing of Google's announcement about Gmail. There were also questions about the merits of storing all one's personal electronic data in one place. Already we are being tracked as never before by CCTV cameras, mobile phone stations, and even Oyster cards on the Underground. It would certainly help those conducting the fight against terrorism, but do you really want to put ever larger areas of your digital identity into databases owned by a private company?

That was a rhetorical question, by the way. Owing to the 20 gigabyte backlog in my inbox, I'd really rather you didn't e-mail me with your answers.

(The Times, Comment page, April 2, 2004)

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