Trendsurfing: Alternate reality gaming (The Times)

By David Rowan

Computer games? So last year. The new buzz surrounds games that draw you in through anonymous phone calls, urban treasure hunts, text messages, coded newspaper ads, TV clips - oh, and a few thousand others over the internet. These "alternate reality" games weave intricate fictional plots to absorb players for weeks or months at a time. And now, all of a sudden, they seem to be hitting the mainstream.

Adrian Hon should know. Hon, 22, spent much of the autumn distracted by I Love Bees, a vast alternate reality game (or ARG) in which players worked together to save 26th-century Earth from aliens. There were clues at the ilovebees.com website, of course, but the plot was also advanced by "real life events" such as staged calls to public payphones. "You were given a phone's GPS location and a prearranged time, and when it rang you'd say a password to move the story forward," Hon explains. "We eventually found our phone on Dean Street in Soho. A dozen people had been turning up every day waiting for that call."

I Love Bees turned out to be an elaborate promotion for Microsoft's Xbox game, Halo 2. But Hon isn't bothered by its underlying commercial goal. "People say, 'Oh, you're being used by marketers,' but does it really matter if a well-written game is designed to sell you something? TV's full of adverts, but you can still enjoy watching ER."

Besides, Hon is betting on ARGs for his own future prosperity. In August, he gave up his neuroscience PhD at Oxford to help set up a London-based business entirely focused on writing these interactive fictions. Its first game, whose sponsor he won't reveal, will go live early next year. It is called Perplex City, and already its website offers tantalising clues to lure prospective players: "My people have lost something whose value to us is immeasurable," pleads a desperate letter from the Perplex City Academy. "There is compelling evidence that an unknown party has taken [it] and concealed it somewhere in your world. The finder will be awarded Perplex City’s highest honour and receive a substantial financial reward ..."

What makes these games so compelling is their many-layered complex plots, which move from e-mail clues to hunts for CDs hidden in library books. Perplex City's teaser campaign even had a teaser campaign of its own. Back in March, a mysterious coded job ad appeared in Marketing Week. "GC'VC MVCZOEBJ Z MLFAUCOCUK BCG OKAC LR JZFC", it stated - which patient readers deciphered to mean "We're creating a completely new type of game". Another encrypted phrase led to a mysterious website for "Project Syzygy", built by Hon. Some presumed it was an MI5 recruitment challenge.

In fact, Hon is a "puppet master" - the gamers' term for those plotting the action. He was first drawn to the genre three years ago, when Steven Spielberg used an alternate reality game to promote his film Artificial Intelligence: AI. Since then, interest has exploded, with dozens of games challenging thousands of simultaneous players across both real and virtual environments. Nor are they just teenagers: a third of I Love Bees' players were over 30.

"It's a new kind of entertainment that's only become possible with today's level of internet and mobile phone penetration," Hon says. "That lets you tell a different type of story that ultimately involves hundreds of thousands of people." Alternate reality gaming, he reflects, "is currently where cinema was in 1903. And in Britain especially, we're about to see it take off."

(The Times, London, November 29 2004)

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Interview: Kevin Marsh, Today programme (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

HE WAS Lord Hutton's uncalled witness. Kevin Marsh, editor of the Today programme, never did get to give his side of the story, damned only by his email of 27 June 2003, condemning Andrew Gilligan's "flawed reporting" and "loose use of language". Yet not only did Hutton condemn Marsh's "defective" editorial processes, he specifically criticised him for not passing his concerns up the managerial chain. It took an internal BBC inquiry, the Neil Report months later, to find the criticisms "unjustified".

Marsh is still stunned that he was never called. "My guess would be that the BBC had a strategy to keep its witness numbers small," he says in a corner of the Today newsroom. "What is harder to understand was that when Hutton came to call extra witnesses, he didn't feel it appropriate to ask me. There's a bit of an irony that one of his conclusions was that serious allegations should be put to the party concerned."

Had he spoken to Marsh, he would have produced "a very much better report". Instead, Marsh hired a lawyer to salvage his reputation. But the BBC's internal verdict persuaded him to drop a legal challenge. "I - not just me actually, the team - were exonerated, confirming that this team was not guilty of shoddy journalism." He never considered resigning. "I knew that I had done everything as diligently as I could, and crucially the team here had as well."

Marsh is no fan of contemporary British journalism, as he made clear in a recent speech to the Society of Editors. "I don't think it's a good place to be, frankly," he said, blaming the press for "conniv[ing] at its own debasement". "Far too many people in the press don't actually know why they're there," he says now. "Pursuit becomes an end in itself. How could anybody with a straight face go to court to win the right to talk about a supermodel's detox programme?"

That would be the Daily Mirror.

But his targets are wider. "Is that news?" he asks, holding up Monday's Sun front page about Sophie Anderton's cocaine habit. "Do I care? With some newspapers, it's impossible to tell the difference between news and entertainment." He was shocked at the Society of Editors meeting when Andy Coulson, the News of the World editor, sang the praises of his new star journalist, recruited from PR. "Somebody has got to start teaching a little about the ethics of journalism," he says in despair.

Marsh, meanwhile, is busy retraining his own staff, as the Neil Report recommended. "I'm doing three-hour workshops where I set them eight or nine difficult posers," he says. "'You've got a bid in for a Cabinet minister on one basis, but a completely different story breaks. What do you do?' Of course, there's no right answer."

Not even John Humphrys and Jim Naughtie are exempt - although their sessions take place over lunch. Still, it is hard to see Humphrys acceding. "John is fantastically receptive," Marsh replies. "He's a huge self-critic. When he feels something hasn't gone so well, he's the first to turn on himself." Humphrys has also famously turned on Marsh - notably over cuts made to his interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury. "He was very angry," Marsh admits. "He felt it was a brilliant interview. And on one level it was, but I felt that if we were going to ask questions about the Iraq war, we should have been more explicit beforehand."

Marsh, who joined in 1978, personifies the BBC's "serious" side, with a reputation among staff as demanding if unadventurous. Now 50, he edited PM and The World at One before succeeding Rod Liddle at Today in 2002. The programme, he insists, has emerged "unwounded" from Hutton - although critics such as Gillian Reynolds claim that it has "gentled down" and lost its edge. "That depends what you want the edge to be," he counters. "If you think Today is about snarling juvenilism, being aggressive for the sake of it, yes, that edge has gone."

This sounds like a dig at Liddle. Marsh's record on investigations - on Shirley Porter, on child welfare - proves that the show still has teeth, he says. "But with me, no investigation gets off the ground until we have a pretty high standard of evidence that it's justifiable."

The programme is often criticised as artificially confrontational. Marsh sees "interrogative, courtroom-style cross-examinations" as an effective way to prise truth out of people in authority, but he recognises that tastes are changing. "I get a sense from some of the witless stuff that's written about the programme that this adversarial tradition possibly isn't there in the public mind any more. It's not artificial if you're brought up in my tradition, but maybe it's not so obvious if you're brought up in the Richard and Judy tradition."

Does Today still matter? Sky News's Adam Boulton blames Marsh for introducing "piffling items" such as whether to put milk first in tea. "They might be trivial, middle class, white, south-eastern things, but items about how we live resonate with people," he replies. "We're still a must-listen for over six million people. And there are millions more whose news agenda the programme sets."

Ah, but didn't Five Live gain at Today's expense in the latest ratings? "How big a surprise is it that the audience dips for the Olympics?" he says. "Get real. They'll come back. That last quarter's figures were still significantly more than that prior to 9/11."

What of the presenters' perceived bias? Some commentators claim that Naughtie favours Labour, and that Humphrys is antiwar. "It's overstated," Marsh says. "Irrespective of what John believes, if he can't handle an interview impartially he should be fired. That's what he's said to me, and I agree."

Marsh claims to be "spoilt for choice" over a successor for Humphrys, though he will offer no clues. He also denies that the women presenters lack the men's authority. "There hasn't been a time when people haven't complained that women presenters were not strong enough, were too shrill. I don't know whether there's something about people's ears not being attuned to it. Sarah Montague and Carolyn Quinn are terrific."

As for that other critical bugbear, Thought for the Day, Marsh says "tinkering" would be a mistake. "When it's good, it can be some of the best stuff you will hear."

The complaints, meanwhile, continue to pour in - in greater numbers than before Hutton, but Marsh credits improved transparency. "And if we do get it wrong, then we really should say, look we're only human."

Still, it must be a relief not to have any more run-ins with Alastair Campbell. "Do you know, I've never had a run-in with Mr Campbell," he says. "He's never actually spoken to me. Still," he reflects, "I think he's been a necessary force, a creation of his times."

It is the detached, objectified view you would expect from a BBC man.

(Evening Standard, November 24, 2004)

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Trendsurfing: Zine retail (The Times)

By David Rowan

You've heard of the magalogue - the glossy magazine as shopping catalogue. But what works for the Hearsts and Conde Nasts won't cut it for the hippest publishers at the cusp of popular culture. Instead, their cult magazines are reinventing themselves as chic real-world stores to sell editorially approved lifestyles directly to readers. And somewhere along the way, the street-cool ethos of the zine has evolved into a lucrative retail format.

Giant Robot, a ten-year-old magazine about Asian pop culture, is now an expanding store chain on America's West Coast. At the main Los Angeles branch, on Sawtelle Boulevard, you can buy watches that announce the time in Japanese, Bruce Lee coinholders, six-inch tall Uglydoll collectable toys - indeed, whatever merchandise wins the quarterly's editorial endorsement. "It's an Asian popular culture store designed to reflect the magazine," explains the publisher, Eric Nakamura. "We've talked about many of the items we carry, and this expands on what we write. And it's working, since other people are now copying us."

Mainstream magazines have already extended into retail: The Economist has its London bookshop, Hustler its Birmingham sex emporium. But today it is the zines, the more streetwise publications, that are taking the lead. Vice, a self-consciously controversial magazine given away in music and fashion shops, has opened stores in New York, LA and Toronto selling "high-tone street clothes". In London, it even plans a pub.

In the meantime, head to Islington to understand the appeal of zine retail. On a quiet back street off the Essex Road, an unmarked warehouse contains Britain's boldest attempt yet to combine publishing and merchandising. Microzine, which opened a year ago, is both a zine-style website and a two-floor retail space where you can buy anything from limited-edition designer trainers to rare sixties furniture. And on a damp Saturday in November, its eclectic stock - from £200 SealKay jeans to a £4,640 Technogym exercise bench - is attracting a steady stream of hipsters.

"We call it a reality magazine," explains Brian Donnellan, Microzine's head of marketing and design. "We get new products in every month or week, so it has a magazine's sense of immediacy, and we try to tell stories about every item - explaining the background to the Philippe Starck Puma trainers or the Mulberry-leather-wrapped Sharp television. You'll also have noticed there's no logo above the door. We wanted finding the store to be part of the journey."

The open-plan shop is laid out to resemble magazine photo-spreads, with a sports corner, a lounge section and a shelf of drinking and gambling products. "The idea is you'll come in for a pair of jeans and walk out with a toaster," Donnellan says. "Magazines like Arena, FHM, GQ and Wallpaper will all recommend products, but you have to go to 10 stores to get them. We wanted to create a one-stop shop where you never know what's coming in next - selling around a lifestyle so you could buy the whole thing." Microzine is now considering launching its own print magazine.

Could Eric Nakamura, at Giant Robot, ever see his retail business overtaking the publishing side? "We are a magazine first and foremost," he says firmly. "To shut down the magazine to concentrate on stores would be ridiculous, like cutting out our heart." Besides, he says, the zine has a few more brand extensions left. "We're opening a restaurant," Nakamura reveals. "I do think having a restaurant somewhat completes the Giant Robot experience ..."

(The Times, London, November 22 2004)

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Interview: Bill Emmott, The Economist (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

IN GLOBAL business, only the numbers matter. So here's some bonus-busting news to cheer capitalism's plutocrats: The Economist, that weekly bible of globalisation, has just passed its first million regular copies. When Bill Emmott became editor in 1993, the self-styled " newspaper" was selling barely half that - yet for the past eight weeks, global circulation has consistently topped a million. As "serious" papers have chased levity, how has The Economist prospered on brashly asserted polemic and unapologetic intellectual rigour?

Emmott has a simple answer. "We've ridden the globalisation trend, and people seem to want to read about international affairs, business and politics in a well-written package that's accessible, lively, but authoritative," he says in his office high above St James's. "There is clearly that appetite in Britain, too. Here we're selling just on 150,000 copies - when I took over it was just under 100,000."

Still, around half of today's circulation is in North America, with most of the rest in continental Europe and Asia. Doesn't that make its British readers a diminishing priority? Not at all, says Emmott, 48, who rose through the ranks via Brussels and Tokyo. They get six pages of UK news, where foreign editions get four. Besides, The Economist is a "global magazine with a British attitude". Independence from America is what counts.

Yet some US commentators attribute the magazine's appeal there to snob value - particularly the "smarty-pants" British tone which led Michael Kinsley to compare it with imported Crabtree & Evelyn soap. "It's hard to explain 450,000 Americans buying into the 'Crabtree & Evelyn' idea," Emmott shoots back. That Britishness, he adds, implies independence of mind, authoritativeness and clarity - rather like the BBC's.

He raised eyebrows in Washington last month by endorsing John Kerry for president - even though George Bush seemed closer to the magazine's free-market ethos. Did he now have any regrets? "No, not at all," he answers. "Election endorsements aren't about backing the winner, they're about taking a reasoned position. We backed Bush in 2000, and also the war in Iraq. But he's handled it incompetently, and with Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib discredited his mission of spreading democracy and the rule of law."

Was The Economist's support for war a mistake? "The war was the right thing to do," Emmott says firmly. "Handling the aftermath incompetently was clearly the wrong thing to do. I still think it could turn out with a stable, democratically run Iraq."

The supreme self- belief of Economist style suggests little scope for admitting mistakes. So is he ever wrong? "Of course we get things wrong," he replies, before reflecting for a moment. "We got oil prices spectacularly wrong at one point. We said the world was drowning in oil, then $10 a barrel, and explored the possibility it might move to $5. Within a few weeks it was $30." He pauses again. "I think another thing I got wrong was to endorse John Major again in 1997. I think that was a bad judgment."

What of the magazine's confident assertion two summers ago that the property market was about to crash, taking 30 per cent off UK house values? That hasn't happened. "Not yet," he answers. "Look, with markets you can take a view on whether a trend is unsustainable, but getting the timing right is completely different. We said that the Japanese market was going to crash, and people rightly said, 'Ah, but it's grown by another 30 per cent'. But it did eventually crash. The same with the dotcom bubble."

He never seeks to influence policymakers or institutions - that, he says, would be arrogant. "People buy The Economist crucially for its good information and good analytical writing, not because they want to hear Bill Emmott's opinion," he says. Nor does he accept critiques of its "lofty" tone. "You've found two or three cuttings in 20 years," he says somewhat disarmingly. "The fact that readers keep buying us must suggest that they like it."

EMMOTT'S journalists, too, show a remarkable loyalty. Of 72 staff writers, 70 per cent have bought shares in the company. One senior journalist says Emmott wields power "like a liberal Pope in a modernised Vatican". "He gives the department heads a lot of autonomy, and there are no bollockings or lost tempers. But every now and then he'll decide enough's enough, and you'll learn from a memo that somebody's out."

But while the paper's line is forged by collective debate - all staff can attend editorial meetings - Emmott has the final word. That much is clear from the number of times he says "I" and quickly corrects it to "we". "You've got to have somebody making decisions," he explains, "but I do need the support of the staff."

Wouldn't bylines help readers decide which journalists they trusted? "I think it's unlikely we'll change that," he says. "Not having bylines differentiates The Economist, and in this increasingly commoditised media world, being different is an advantage. And the journalists like the fact that it's quite a cooperative publication."

The real tension concerns the parent group's enthusiasm for "brand extension". "We should concentrate on what we do best," one staffer complains to the Standard, "rather than this great agglomeration of conferences, magazines and the Intelligence Unit that aren't always terribly profitable or terribly good."

Emmott, to his credit, has a reputation among staff for reining in the "lunacies" of the wider group. He quickly pulled the plug on an unsuccessful foray into Economist TV, and fought against a huge web expansion when Pearson (its part-owner) was throwing tens of millions of pounds at FT.com. As for the magazine, he is averse to "radical" changes, beyond finding a " sparklier" voice for some of its writing.

A new publisher may have his own ideas. The retiring one, David Hanger, has enjoyed a first-class lifestyle at the company's expense, an indulgence forgiven by his ability to bring in lucrative deals. His successor, Andrew Rashbass, seen as more cerebral, is expected to shake up the commercial departments. Yet journalists are wondering whether Rashbass can thin out the "tall rugger-buggers with big expense accounts", as they are known dismissively among editorial staff, without losing the valuable luxury-goods advertising. Emmott claims to be unbothered by the uncertainty. "I don't report to the publisher. We have a pretty separate existence."

Besides, he has the rest of the world to worry about. Actually, apart from nuclear terrorism ("a real worry"), Emmott is relentlessly upbeat. "The economic growth of China, India and other developing countries is fantastic," he says. "It's lifting millions out of poverty."

And, perhaps, offering The Economist its next million readers.

(Evening Standard, November 17, 2004)

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Trendsurfing: Ebay drop-shops (The Times)

By David Rowan

You're nobody in Hollywood if you have time to use eBay. That's why Amy Weintraub is building a local retail chain that will do everything for you. Walk into her Beverly Boulevard store, between La Brea and Fairfax, and the 48-year-old former video producer will photograph your unwanted goods, list them on the auction site, answer any e-mailed questions, and then pack and mail them off to the highest bidder. Then all you need do is wait for your cheque - without ever having to touch a computer.

Today has been typically frantic, with 30 items ready for listing by 5pm. "I've got in five collectable Barbies today, some mink, and a really cool 1940s rotating barber's pole that will fetch around $300," Weintraub explains busily between customers. "The hard part is having to turn down two out of every five items as you know they won't sell. People round here take it very personally - so we try to do it gently, making it very clear it's the item we're rejecting, not the person."

Drive around Los Angeles these days, and you can't miss this new retail phenomenon. From Santa Monica to Pasadena, bricks-and-mortar stores devoted to selling other people's stuff on eBay are opening quicker than you can place an online bid. These eBay "drop shops", with names such as AuctionWagon and AuctionDrop, want a slice of an online marketplace which sold an extraordinary $24 billion of goods last year. Those sorts of numbers mean that Amy Weintraub - who bought the LA franchise rights from a chain called iSold It - is not bothered by the competition. By charging sellers 30 per cent commission, she believes, she can take her current two stores profitably up to 20.

"LA is quite a service town," Weintraub explains. "Why do people employ maids and not clean their houses themselves? We're getting busy people who will pay for that service. And our reputation as a power-seller means they can feel good about doing business through us."

These drop-shops have now started arriving in Britain. SellStuffEasy, based in Dalston, East London, recently sold a £7,000 fitted kitchen, and has since been offering a Liebherr fridge freezer and a Miele dishwasher (both seeking offers over 99p when we last checked). More ambitiously, Auctioning4U, which opened its first shop last January in Hammersmith, West London, was this week due to open its third, in Kew Gardens. "We've got one coming in North London by the end of the year, and we plan to open one a month after that," explains Christian Braun, 36, the venture capitalist behind the chain. "This business doesn't work unless you have 30 or 40 stores."

Braun's conviction that there is a market stems from personal experience. "My wife and I cleared our house, and offered around 200 items on eBay, everything from an Enya CD to an African mask," he says. "It was very painful - you have to reply to e-mails all day, count the pieces in your jigsaw puzzles, then wrap everything. We worked out that it took two-and-a-half hours per item. If you don't value your time, that's fine."

Auctioning4U's selling point, he says, is his team's specialist knowledge that has brought in £330 for a Vivienne Westwood jacket and £1,400 for a 1938 bottle of whisky. Still, the 33 per cent commission seems steep. Doesn't that limit the business's appeal? "Absolutely not," Braun insists. "People come to us because they're time poor or don't have a PC. Or maybe they don't want the world to know that they're selling."

Does somebody want to tell Cherie Booth?

(The Times, London, November 15 2004)

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Interview: Kevin Lygo, Channel 4 (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

HE DISMISSES his critics as "the grumpy old men". Yet former executives are asking whether Channel 4 has lost its way as a public service broadcaster. Does Kevin Lygo, as they suggest, lack a strategic vision beyond chasing ratings? With Andy Duncan, a former marketer, as chief executive, and the entrepreneur Luke Johnson as chairman, it has been left to Lygo, previously at Five, to put the case for Channel 4's " distinctive" programmes. Its public service remit requires the channel to "innovate and experiment".

Why, then, are so many of its former bosses - from Sir Jeremy Isaacs to Lygo's immediate predecessor, Tim Gardam - complaining about its reliance on Big Brother and makeover shows to hook younger viewers?

If the onslaught has wounded him, Lygo, 47, is careful not to show it.

Indeed, a year after becoming Channel 4's director of television, he seems to relish the role of school troublemaker. "We're 10 per cent of people's television viewing, but we make far more than 10 per cent of the noise and column inches," he says with a mischievous smile. "The reason some grumpy old men occasionally get agitated about Channel 4 is that people care so deeply about it."

Anyone who questions what Lygo's channel is "for" is simply not watching: his " strategic vision" is spelt out, unchanged, in the station's remit and on every night's schedules.

"The 'point' of Channel 4 is as a public service broadcaster, the proper alternative to the BBC, at a time when ITV and Five are sliding away from their public service obligations," he says. "Reality TV? We brought it to you. This new formatted modern documentary? It came from Channel 4. We tend to do things first, and every broadcaster immediately copies us. We can, as a public service provider, be edgier, more controversial, more opinionated than the BBC."

Some senior independent programme-makers worry that this "edginess" is simply about ratings - and that C4 no longer has a distinct identity.

Newspaper critics point to the sex-and-reality bias in the winter schedules, the first to bear Lygo's stamp. As well as the debut of the newly acquired Simpsons, highlights include Diary of a Porn Virgin, The Curse of Debbie Does Dallas, and a reality show called Playing It Straight, in which "one beautiful girl looking for love" has to guess which of the male contestants are gay but pretending not to be.

Anthony Smith, a founding Channel 4 board member, has called the station "tawdry and repetitive".

"This look back at the glorious past just doesn't hold any water," Lygo replies with a weary sigh.

"What is missing from the 'old days' that people actually want? When Jeremy [Isaacs] was here, snooker filled hours of the schedule. Today, it's a richer, more varied channel. But we still strive to have many programmes that you feel could only be Channel 4."

Such as? "I think Green Wing, actually," he says. "I don't see anybody else attempting an hour-long hybrid comedy, between narrative and sketch. I'm not sure anyone else would have done Shameless.

Bear in mind that we must fund ourselves, so we must strive for a balance between public service and shows that will get us an audience."

What of the obsession with sex? "Channel 4 has always been obsessed with sex, because humans are obsessed with sex," Lygo says. "We're not going to do soft porn - it's about finding new ways of talking about sex which engages with an audience that isn't just there for titillation."

Still, it will not be quite so easy to ignore that sector of public opinion if the channel wins public funding to fill its projected £100 million annual funding gap, announced last week by Barry Cox, its deputy chairman. Would a publicly funded Channel 4 survive the level of scrutiny that the BBC attracts? Lygo will not be drawn on Cox's proposal, but stresses that it would mean help with transmitters rather than programming cash.

He sees very real commercial threats - from advertisers moving to new digital channels, and a new public service broadcaster proposed by Ofcom. But he is adamant that privatisation is off the agenda.

"It's anathema. Andy Duncan is a very public service-driven sort of a guy.

That's why we're going to open More 4 next year, a channel that's public service through and through." What about the proposed merger with Five?

"We're looking at a whole rang e of options to future-proof us, all sorts of alliances and strategies. It may be that we do a number of things - with the BBC, with Five. We're a long way off from doing a deal, put it like that. But though the future's tricky, the present is very strong indeed. We've just had our best year ever in terms of primetime ratings, a more upmarket and younger audience than ever."

As for Big Brother, the touchstone for many of the grumpy old men, don't expect it to end any time soon. "It's still a wonderful programme, entertaining, illuminating and revealing. Most of the criticisms are unfounded - Jeremy Isaacs had never seen a frame of it, nor had John Humphrys. It's a generational thing - like parents in the 1950s saying, 'Oh my God, you daren't show Elvis from the waist down, the girls will go mad …'" ISN'T the channel devising evermore confrontational situations in order to boost ratings? "We're not," he responds. "I'll be the first to say it got slightly ugly in there on day 21 this year. But we headed off a fight, and it was more gentle than anything you'd see on any high street on a Friday night.

And it's complete nonsense to think we're sitting here thinking of ways to get people to shag. There is absolutely no desire whatsoever to have people having sex on Big Brother."

Meanwhile, he needs to turn his £450 million budget to finding the next Friends or Sex and the City. "It's going to be tough," he admits. "But I honestly believe it's a good thing, as it forces you to make more of your own. Let's develop more, spend more, and go for it. Because when you get one that works, a Green Wing or a Peter Kay, it's just marvellous. The whole channel is lifted."

(Evening Standard, November 10, 2004)

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Trendsurfing: Podcasting (The Times)

By David Rowan

Tired of the Today programme? Bored with bland FM music stations? Frank Edward Nora may have the answer. Nora's quirky radio talk show launched barely two weeks ago, but already it is attracting fan mail from Alaska to Singapore. Each Sunday, Nora, 37, locks himself in his New Jersey apartment and records what he calls "two hours of pleasantly inane ramblings". But it is what happens next that promises a grassroots media revolution.

Nora is one of a fast-growing band of "podcasters" -- mostly amateur programme-makers whose radio shows are designed to be heard on iPods and other MP3 players. Since September, when new software called iPodder first allowed listeners to download their favourite shows automatically, hundreds of new advertisement-free radio channels have emerged in cyberspace. "They're downloaded while you sleep, so when you grab your iPod the next morning, your favourite shows are there to listen on your way to work," explains an excited Nora, an advertising executive by day. ""With conventional internet radio, you'd need to stay near your PC. The beauty of this is it's portable."

This week, for his show, Nora interviewed a man who has visited 4,000 Starbucks, reviewed an ear-cleaning product, and shared his "prophetic dreams" of zombies raiding his apartment (two weeks later, his listeners learned, an actual burglary did occur). His audience is tiny by conventional standards -- 130 downloads last week, 200 this week -- but this, he stresses, is just the start. There may be 4 million iPods out there, but soon there will be hard disks on hundreds of millions of phones -- each a potential storage device for the latest episodes. "What is so great is you can talk about whatever's on your mind, without having to satisfy some great commercial entity," explains Nora, whose shows appear at theovernightscape.com. "And a lot of the guy-in-a-basement programmes are so much more compelling that mainstream radio."

Adam Curry, a former MTV video-jockey, is credited with launching this home-made radio boom. Curry, himself a podcaster, is the man behind iPodder, whose ease of use is the key to the medium's rapid growth. You simply download the software at iPodder.org and decide which audio feeds to subscribe to, which are stored automatically on your iPod when you next sync.

This is different, by the way, from iPod pirate radio, which involves turning the player into a low-power FM transmitter; for that, you need a gadget called an iTrip. It is officially illegal in Britan -- but let's leave that one for another Trendsurf. As for podcasts, there are already specialist programmes dedicated to board games, film reviews and sex education. Public radio stations are podcasting; so too are obsessive fans of football chants and embarrassing song covers (William Shatner's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds is a particular hit at Coverville).

The medium's novelty can lead to a certain introversion: the big issue at Not Work Safe Radio this week is "podsterbation", the use of entire shows to comment on rival podcasts. The unprofessional nature of programmes, too, is provoking concern: Jimbob at Whole Wheat Radio last week moaned that podcasting was attracting "every sick sleazy greasy-haired evengelist and sliderule-pocket-protected geek", all pumping out "a pile of steaming doo-doo".

Frank Nora rejects such disdain as nonsense. "Some of these shows are better than the commercial stations," he says. Besides, his own show recently led to a $500 voiceover job. Although Nora is insistently not podcasting to make money. "It's about being part of a cultural revolution," he says from his improvised studio. "This must be what it felt like to be a hippy in the sixties."

(The Times, London, November 8 2004)

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Interview: Cristina Odone, New Statesman (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

WHEN Cristina Odone suddenly quit this week as the New Statesman's deputy edit o r, Left- wing infighting appeared to have claimed yet another high-profile scalp. She stormed out, reports said, after "a series of rows" with the editor, Peter Wilby - the latest over last week's cover, which brutally depicts Tony Blair as Stalin.

So when Odone indicates that she wishes to spill the beans to the Evening Standard, it is odd that she chooses proprietor Geoffrey Robinson's empty office, just across from Wilby's, as the place to reveal her secrets. Even more surprising are her jovial greetings to Wilby as she passes, and his warm reply that theirs had been "the best working relationship of my life".

This "civil war" at the Staggers, Odone insists, is entirely the Blairites' invention - yet another attempt to undermine Wilby's authority so that he can be replaced by a party loyalist. And that is precisely why she wants to reveal today how "viciously" and "wickedly" the Blairites - from Peter Mandelson to Jackie Ashley and Johann Hari - have acted during her six-andahalf years in the job.

"These people - who I call the 'neo-Left' - are cancerous crusts on the real old-fashioned socialists like Peter [Wilby]," she says with typical directness. "From the moment I arrived here, there were plots to alienate me and Peter, plots to disgrace me in front of Peter, or very real neo-Left plots to take over the magazine."

The real trigger for her departure, she says, was a television offer that she could not refuse - a chance to write and present a Channel 4 series on religion, commissioned for 2005.

"It's about people who fall out of faith, which is something I care about," she says. There are family considerations, too: Odone lives in Chelsea with her husband, Edward Lucas, an Economist journalist, and their 15-month-old daughter, Isabel.

"I want to spend more time with my daughter. The hours here are punishing, and I'd like more time off."

Besides, her Observer and Times pieces pay more than the Statesman's "dismal" rates.

Yes, she and Wilby disagreed about the Stalin image, but they have often had "huge rows" about covers. "That's how Peter and I have always worked," she says. "There have been very few serious disme,"agreements - the 'Kosher Conspiracy' cover was one; there was our leader that went too far after September 11 - but this definitely wasn't. I've lost a lot of Jewish and American friends through the New Statesman, so if I could afford to take a principled stand and walk away from my salary, I would have done so over one of those occasions - not over 'Blair is Stalin'."

Stories of splits, she insists, emanate from Blair's coterie. "The neo-Left can't stand the New Statesman because it is owned and edited by people who are quite oldfashioned Left," she says. "So they unleash a poison that has been very personal. I've been very close to people on the Right - the Catholic Herald [which she edited] was more Right than Left, and I'd worked for The Daily Telegraph. However nasty the Right gets, the Left gets much more wicked."

Its "vicious tribalism", she says, could be terribly destructive. "I found myself reading that staff had a voodoo doll of me, and were sticking pins in it because they hated me.

I've even been wished stomach cancer."

Odone, 43, identifies a number of journalists as having contrived to give her "a very rocky ride".

"I remember Julia Langdon writing that Beatrice and Sidney Webb [the magazine's founders] would have turned in their graves had they seen so many Tories at the New Statesman lunches that I organised," she says. "The neo-Left can't stand anybody who doesn't believe what they believe." She also alleges that two prominent columnists on Leftwing dailies separately offered her former intern up to £1,000 to dish the dirt.

AS FOR John Kampfner, the magazine's current political editor who reportedly covets the top job, she has "read the stories" in newspaper diaries in which he mocks her and Wilby. "What can I say?" Odone replies. "He told me he was mortified by the last piece."

Yet, for all her claims of political conspiracy, could it be that her enemies simply don't like Odone - "this Prada-handbag-carrying, furcoatwearing, naughty, mischievous thing", as she describes herself ?

"I'm sure that they really don't like she replies. "However, I haven't changed as a character. And when I lapped the waters of the Right, doing the same Cristina number and being just as loud, I never encountered this. Yes, I'm abrasive and can get very bad-tempered. But I was accepted, not seen as something different, and therefore suspect."

The tribal nastiness, she claims, starts at the very top. What, the Prime Minister himself is sitting there thinking about ways to destabilise a 24,000-circulation magazine?

"I know it for a fact," Odone replies.

"I've heard that, if not from the horse's mouth, then from the horse's sidekick. That's why Peter Mandelson approached Geoffrey, soon after I joined, to buy it."

But surely Blair has bigger things on his mind these days? "I think he cares about it more," she claims.

"Six years ago, we had just started to become a pain in the backside for Blair. We're now a real whistleblower and rabblerouser. He's never forgiven us for printing the leaked advice from the Attorney-General over the war's legality. He knows that Robin Cook and Clare Short turn to us to get their rocks off.

We're seen as very influential by No 10."

This sounds a little self-serving, particularly when Odone dismisses The Spectator - selling 64,000 - as "a completely patchy drawing-room accessory, obviously edited with one eye on other things, and it shows".

The Statesman, she points out, is now comfortably in profit, with rising circulation - and that, she believes, should secure Wilby's position for now.

"Geoffrey would be foolish to get rid of somebody who's got him from red to black and is now lining his pockets," she says. "And nobody who's worked for Peter will say a nasty word about him - apart, I suppose, from Jackie Ashley and possibly Johann Hari ..."

As for Odone's successor, she wants a "feisty woman" to continue her "feminisation" mission. Names being mentioned this week include Deborah Orr, Decca Aitkenhead - and, inevitably, John Kampfner. But Odone, for one, seems genuinely relieved to be escaping the bear pit.

"It's this venomous territorialism you get on the Left," she says, shaking her head disbelievingly. "I've certainly fallen out of love with New Labour.

So, isn't it so ironic," she adds with a grin, "that I'm supposedly walking out because a cover is giving Tony Blair rough treatment?"

And then she gives one of those Cristina Odone giggles that the "neo-Left" never could silence.

(Evening Standard, November 3, 2004)

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Trendsurfing: Scam-baiting (The Times)

By David Rowan

They are the online jungle's low-life - eBay auction scammers, Nigerian advance-fee fraudsters, fake bank website "phishers" trawling for the next sucker. Their lucrative cons play on human greed and naivety, yet they evade detection through the anonymity of the web. By the time their victims know they have been scammed, the bad guys have disappeared. E-mail trails leading to Accra or Algiers aren't much use once your bank account has been emptied.

But what if the fraudsters themselves could be conned? Wouldn't vengeance of a kind lie in publicly humiliating these scammers? As online fraud continues to rise, a new participatory sport is booming on the web. Called "scam baiting", it aims to string the criminals along until their own greed makes them slip up and they themselves give away rather too much. The rest of us, deliciously, get to follow the action in real time.

The results can be hilarious. On websites such as Scamorama and 419 Eater (named for Section 419 of Nigeria's penal code), you can track these reverse scams in intricate detail, from the baiters' first wide-eyed e-mails to their quarries' final humiliation. The goal is not to catch the bad guys, simply to leave [ITAL]them[END ITAL] out of pocket or otherwise embarrassed. So when a Liverpool hairdressing student was recently approached to help loot $12 million from Nigeria, she played her suitor along until he actually sent her $30 to show good faith. Another baiter, agreeing to help smuggle "gold bullion", belatedly insisted on seeing a sample - and was promptly sent five glittering grams.

Scam baiting has even created its own stars. Most famous at the moment is Jeff Harris, who listed his Apple Powerbook for auction on eBay. Harris, in Washington state, was delighted to receive an offer from London for $2,100, until the prospective purchaser asked that the payment be held by a non-eBay escrow service pending delivery. Clicking on to the escrow website convinced Harris that he was facing "your textbook eBay scam". So he pulled a trick of his own, sharing the results on a popular web forum called Something Awful.

He would send a "laptop" to London, but this one would be an old ringbinder with a "keyboard" made from stuck-on letters in combinations such as "LOL" (for "laugh out loud"). Through some deliberately naive emails to the "buyer", Harris elicited a delivery address belonging to the Jean Climax Pro hair-salon-cum-internet-cafe in Colindale, north London. And the clever part? In order to collect the fake laptop, the recipient would have to pay £350 in import duties.

As word of the impending sting spread across the net, Something Awful members went into overdrive - tracking the package's FedEx number in real time, marketing "Jean Climax" t-shirts, and staking out the salon to upload digital images. When the parcel was finally delivered, Something Awful members were present to document the moment when "a guy with an eastern European accent" paid the required fee. "He was opening one of the boxes, there were angry raised voices, and [an onlooker] said something like: 'Is it broken?'," according to one eyewitness. "I don't think he really understood the joke."

"We're just a maildrop," a member of Jean Climax Pro's staff (who would not be named) explained when The Times called. "We really need to look into this - we're not involved in any scams whatsoever." The shop's management may have been entirely unaware of how its address was being used. But thanks to Jeff Harris, its fame now extends far beyond Colindale.

(The Times, London, November 1 2004)

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