Trendsurfing: Personal offshoring (The Times)

By David Rowan

This week's Trendsurfing has been outsourced to India. While I'm sipping margaritas on a Mexican beach, your delicately crafted column is being hand-assembled in a Bangalore sweatshop. Naturally, I'm paying the Indians a fraction of what The Times pays me - but that's the beauty of today's flattened global marketplace. Outsource your work to some cheaper sucker overseas, and suddenly you'll find yourself quids in.

That's the fantasy - though not, I should assure the editor, one that's quite ready for showtime. It does, though, reflect a rather exciting new trend in the "offshoring" economy. Offshoring, in business jargon, is the migration of jobs to lower-cost places overseas - say, the Hyderabad call centre pretending to be your local bank. Now, thanks to broadband internet, it's not just big business that gets to go global. All of a sudden, you and I too can offshore our smaller personal tasks to eager workers toiling thousands of miles away.

The trend is known as "personal offshoring", and it promises to save you money wherever a service can be delivered digitally - from online homework tutoring for your kids, to a new logo for the family business. If you need a website built, for instance, you can list your requirements at a specialist online marketplace such as RentACoder.com. Programmers from Estonia or Pakistan will compete to offer you the cheapest deal - invariably a fraction of the UK going rate.

This price gap has caused quite a stir among techies in higher-priced Western countries, and not simply because they can hear their jobs being sucked overseas. The more entrepreneurial among them have actually spotted a sneaky income-boosting opportunity. Last year, in a now famous posting on the Slashdot bulletin board, a software developer known only as Nonac confessed that, unbeknown to his employer, he had hired a developer in India for $12,000 to do a job that he himself was being paid $67,000 for. "He is happy to have the work; I am happy that I only have to work about 90 minutes per day," Nonac wrote. "Now I'm considering getting a second job and doing the same thing. The extra money would be nice, but that could push my workday over five hours."

The account may have been apocryphal - it certainly sparked a row among fellow coders over ethics - but it captured the spirit of possibility. It really does make financial sense now to delegate personal or professional tasks to suppliers in Gujarat or Gdansk. There are offshoring exchanges, such as OffshoreXperts.com, to delegate tasks ranging from landscape design to party organising. Or simply use your imagination: Ben Trowbridge, who consults on offshoring, was asked by an American psychologist to find shrinks in India to make follow-up phone calls to his patients. Hey, who's to know that the doctor is 8,000 miles away?

Educational tuition is the next growth area, with Indian companies such as Career Launcher and Educomp Datamatics competing to offer one-to-one "live" homework help over the web. As you've guessed, an offshore tutor costs a fraction of the face-to-face rate. It's a start - but does anyone in Karnataka fancy babysitting the kids by webcam this weekend? There's a pound an hour in it. Maybe two, if you can also come up with next Saturday's column ...

(The Times Magazine, July 30 2005)

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Evening Standard: What the Polanski libel verdict means for Vanity Fair

By David Rowan

AS GRAYDON Carter and his new wife flew back to New York last night - first class, naturally - their post-wedding party at St James's Palace was not the only memory to accompany them. For the guests mixing in the Ambassadors' Court - among them Bella Freud and Anjelica Huston - the filmmaker Roman Polanski had become the unintended focus of attention. At one stage, Carter himself even declared: "I love Roman."

Physically, of course, Polanski remained in Paris, from where his videolink evidence had dragged Carter's magazine, Vanity Fair, to a libel defeat which may cost Condé Nast £1.5 million. Yet the unspoken question among the guests was how far the verdict would damage Carter himself - an editor whose empire, built on "people, personalities, power and politics", reflects more than anything his own forceful personality.

The Vanity Fair article in question, published in July 2002, had falsely claimed that Polanski had set out to seduce an attractive model in a restaurant on the way to his wife's funeral 33 years earlier. In court, the magazine accepted that it had mistaken the encounter's timing, as well as the woman's nationality. Although its source, the editor Lewis Lapham, recalled that Polanski had touched the woman's leg and promised: "I can put you in the movies", it could not prove this to the jury's satisfaction. Nor did it even call evidence from the woman, Beatte Telle, who last weekend stated in The Mail on Sunday that Polanski neither touched nor spoke to her.

Carter, 56, a Canadian college dropout who replaced Tina Brown as editor in 1992, has undoubtedly made a commercial success of Vanity Fair. It is now Condé Nast's most profitable title - US advertising revenue last year was $253 million, its best ever, while circulation remains buoyant at 1,181,000 in the US and 93,000 in the UK. Editorially, too, its scoops punch their weight, most recently the July issue's revelation that Mark Felt was Watergate's "Deep Throat".

As an editor, Carter has charmed A-list celebrities with energetic flattery and compulsive networking, with Robert De Niro, Tom Ford and Martin Scorsese among the guests when he made Anna Scott, a British PR almost 20 years his junior, his third wife in Connecticut last May. His second wife, with whom he has four children, left him five years ago amid rumours of his infidelity. To New York's more cynical media gossips, Carter's error has been to believe that he, too, is a celebrity who can make his own rules - controversially taking payments for suggesting film ideas to his Hollywood friends, and using Vanity Fair's staff to help write his book, What We've Lost, and organise his wedding.

Carter has a reputation for sailing close to the wind, often embarrassing Condé Nast in the process. Last winter, for instance, he commissioned a detailed investigation by Michael Wolff on the scandal surrounding Kimberly Quinn, whose husband Stephen is publisher of Vanity Fair's sister title, British Vogue. The article has not yet appeared. Carter's power is such that his judgment is rarely questioned openly within the company, and Si Newhouse, its owner, has so far indulged his occasional awkward appearances in the gossip columns. Last Friday's courtroom humiliation, however, may prove more difficult for Newhouse to understand if questions are asked about Carter's determination not to settle out of court when he knew his hand was weak.

"Internally, the blame will fall on the head of the 'research department', what we'd call the fact-checkers," believes Toby Young, the former Vanity Fair writer whose falling-out with Carter won him a book contract. That department, some 20 strong, failed to contact Beatte Telle before the 2002 article appeared. For all the magazine's "amour propre" about its accuracy, the internal system has evident flaws, Young says. "If a 'fact' has appeared in a British newspaper and you can provide a copy, I discoveredit would be considered well and truly checked. So if I wanted to include some dubious 'fact' in a Vanity Fair piece, I'd first of all work it into a piece in a British paper."

In fact, the erroneous paragraph in question emanated from Lewis Lapham, now editor of Harper's, a highbrow New York magazine, whose memory of the encounter with Polanski appears to have failed him when quoted by Vanity Fair's reporter. The magazine also relied on the recollection of Telle's dining partner, Edward Perlberg.

WERE 33-year-old memories, reported second-hand, strong enough evidence on which to base a defence? "The article was relying on the two people who were there," David Hooper, Vanity Fair's solicitor, points out. "If you need to rely on first-hand accounts, many books or newspaper articles could never be written."

There is some dispute as to whether Polanski was offered a chance to respond before the accusation was printed. According to Vanity Fair, the relevant section was faxed twice to Polanski's agent over three days after a phone call was made to confirm the number. He did not respond. It has fax return sheets to back this up. Polanski's team says it did not receive the piece.

"If an agent chooses not to comment, the understanding in America is that the person concerned does not want to comment," says Hooper. "Polanski couldn't conceivably bring an action under US law. What's so unsatisfactory is this was an article about a man who had not set foot in this country for 27 years, an entirely American story, in a magazine the bulk of whose circulation is in the US. Yet he managed to bring it into English jurisdiction where it's judged by different standards. As Graydon Carter said, it's an outrageous state of affairs."

The magazine is also aggrieved that Polanski was able to give evidence by videolink from Paris. This made cross-examination more difficult, Hooper says, and meant that the jury could not see his face after he had completed his evidence. It was "morally outrageous" that evidence should be heard in this way. Hooper is also concerned that foreign litigants will be encouraged to "forum shop" and bring London libel actions from overseas.

Yet for all its moral outrage, Vanity Fair did make some fundamental errors of fact which undermined its case. "We conceded two years ago that the meeting must have taken place after the funeral, not before," says Henry Porter, its London editor. "We're happy to admit our errors - and mistaking [Telle's] nationality is honestly not that bad a mistake. But we are absolutely certain [the conversation] happened a matter of weeks afterwards."

So why did the magazine refuse to settle before the matter reached court? "We fight all our cases if we're sure of them, and we trust our witnesses," Porter says. "We didn't 'insist' that this go to court, but offered to publish a letter by Mr Polanski. He wanted it to go to court. And if you believe you're right, you have to fight."

Other commentators have taken a far more critical line against Carter's failure to back down. Duncan Campbell, in yesterday's Guardian, denounced his presumption "to peddle inaccurate gossip [to provide] tittle-tattle for the entertainment of the latte-drinking classes". Henry Porter's response to Campbell is succinct: "What a pompous ass. What possible business is it of his to lecture us about whether we should be in court when he didn't even bother to turn up?"

Temperatures evidently remain high at Condé Nast. The question now is how far the Polanski case will have damaged Vanity Fair's reputation - and with it that of the star editor who has come to define an era of celebrity journalism.

(Evening Standard, July 27 2005)

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Trendsurfing: Urban gaming (The Times)

By David Rowan

Dice games and computer consoles have their charms. But how about using an entire city as one gigantic game board? Over the past year or two, cityscapes from Bristol to Brooklyn have become vast unofficial playgrounds for a series of imaginative outdoor challenges. Some of these games use the city grid for playing Pac-Man, the Eighties video game, on a human scale; others reward the first person to solve a trail of location-based clues. What they have in common is an urge to combine zippy new technologies with real-life social interaction.

The phenomenon has picked up the label "urban gaming", although you will also hear it called "location-based gaming" or "outdoor mixed-reality gaming". At first, the creative drive came from academics and artists, but corporate marketing departments are now sponsoring what they hope will be the next buzz on the streets.

Hasbro used an urban game last month to promote a new version of Monopoly, wherein the rent payments on players’ houses and hotels were determined by the movements of 18 London taxis, tracked over the internet via GPS. In the US in spring, phone company Qwest organised a series of ConQwest tournaments, in which school teams competed to find special bar codes hidden around various cities.

Mostly, these games reward problem-solving and thinking on the run; clues are provided via wireless iPaq connections or SMS messages containing GPS coordinates. Sometimes, though, the goal is simply old-fashioned fun. Why else would groups of strangers run around New York playing the roles of Inky, Blinky and the other characters from Pac-Man? Last year, the streets around Washington Square Park formed the grid for PacManhattan, in which one player ran around collecting virtual "dots" while avoiding being eaten by the nasty ghosts. The game, developed at New York University, used mobile phones and wireless internet connections to track players’ movements and broadcast them to a wider audience over the net. Later this year, a National University of Singapore team plan to take the game to the next level, using virtual-reality headsets and goggles so players can see where they are in the grid. Alas, rather than actually eat one another, they merely have to tap each other’s shoulders.

Urban gaming may be a global trend, but a British team of artists can claim credit for popularising it. Blast Theory, based in East London, is behind a series of games that have used 3G phones and webcams to locate players within real-life environments. In one such game, Uncle Roy All Around You, street players in London and West Bromwich, carrying handheld computers, worked with online participants to find postcards hidden around the city and, eventually, the elusive Uncle Roy. Another, I Like Frank, took over the streets of Adelaide. Whether playing on the ground or logging in from around the world, participants, as the artists saw it, were "testing the possibilities of a new hybrid space".

That may over-intellectualise what has fast become an energetic alternative to passive entertainment, in keeping with mobile clubbing, iPod parties and some of the other social-networking trends explored in this slot. Plus, it has one killer advantage over the Xbox: it gets you out of the house ...

(The Times Magazine, July 23 2005)

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Interview: Sarah Joseph, Emel magazine (Evening Standard)

Sarah Joseph edits Britain's only Muslim lifestyle magazine. She says it can help show there is more to Islam than prayer and politics. By David Rowan

IT WAS a busy morning yesterday for Sarah Joseph: tea with Tony Blair, a quick interview for Newsnight, followed by a series of requests from the likes of Five Live. As the editor of a glossy "lifestyle magazine" for British Muslims, Joseph suddenly finds herself in demand to answer that cruellest of questions to emerge in the last fortnight: what might defuse the anger that prompts young Muslims to bomb their fellow countrymen?

Joseph, a busy mother of three, was rather overwhelmed by all the distractions when the Evening Standard caught up with her. She had to dash back to her magazine's east London office before returning to Portcullis House for a meeting, and a snatched sandwich did not figure in her schedule. But then Joseph, 34, is something of a dynamo: already an OBE (for services to "interfaith dialogue"), she lectures across Britain, home educates her nine-, six- and threeyearolds, and is in discussions to organise mainstream distribution for her magazine, Emel.

The Catholic daughter of an accountant and a models' agent - she recalls chasing after Naomi Campbell at 14 with her mother's business card - Joseph "embraced" Islam at 16. Two years after setting up Emel with her husband, a barrister, and £20,000 in funding, she is still to see a profit. Still, what matters to her is having the platform to remind Anglo-Muslims that, as she says in her latest editorial, "We are the West! ... We need to see ourselves and our faith as part of the solution."

She has no wish to excuse, let alone condone, the violence of 7 July. But the resentment that prompted it must, she says, be understood, however uncomfortable that may be for those in power. "You ignore the anger that's on the streets at your peril," she warns. "Unless we give people a means to voice it, we're in danger of failing to take the pressure out of this intense situation."

Partly it is a question of airing "perceived grievances" through the mainstream media, she suggests, such as concerns over Britain's engagement in Iraq. But there is also an urgent need for the wider Islamic community to address disaffected British Muslims directly, she says, reminding Muslims that they "don't have a monopoly on pain, on being treated unjustly". Rather than encourage the faithful to distance themselves from the wider community, they must be brought back into the mainstream. "My identity as a Muslim is strong," she says, "but having a strong religious identity is not contrary to being able to live in a plural, tolerant society."

BUT how far should Anglo-Muslim families be responsible for ensuring that their sons are not being radicalised by extremists? "If your son is voicing extremist views, you have to deal with that," Joseph insists. "You need to get them under a better influence. The community has to start demanding more from its leaders, its mosques. We have got to say, 'Right, enough is enough; I don't want this person teaching our young people any more'. It's about making the voices of sanity, of inclusiveness and tolerance, be heard. The increased involvement of women within our mosques is important, too."

The mainstream media can also play a constructive role. She is concerned that excessive prominence is given to extremists such as Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, who yesterday suggested that voters who re-elected Tony Blair were to blame for the London bombings.

"He's a pumped-up windbag who should be denied the oxygen of publicity," she says. "Far too much airtime is given to nutcases like him. Where are the 'normal' Muslims in the media? Where are the police officers, nurses, dentists - the aspirational people who make an ordinary Muslim picking up the paper think, 'Look, they made it, I can too'? That's one of the reasons we created Emel. You need to present different faces, that aren't all spouting anti-Western diatribes."

More specifically, Joseph is concerned that The Guardian is employing an acknowledged member of the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which has urged Muslims to kill Jews and calls suicide bombers "martyrs". Dilpazier Aslam reported for the paper on the London bombings and wrote a comment piece suggesting that young British Muslims no longer cared if they "rocked the boat". Aslam's affiliation remained undisclosed until he was outed by a weblog; the paper says it is "keeping the matter under review".

"The Guardian does have egg on its face," Joseph says. "Hizb ut-Tahrir is an extreme group, which I have major issues with. It's trying to put a smiley face on hate-filled rhetoric. We have to be wary of it."

Emel - named to sound like the letters M and L, as in Muslim Life, as well as the Arabic word for "hope" - peppers its food and travel coverage with features on Muslim-inspired inventions and personality profiles. "We created a lifestyle magazine as we felt we had to normalise the image of Muslims," Joseph says. "Murder and mayhem may count as 'news', but we need to show the normality too. That tells mainstream society that we're not so scary after all, and offers role models to Muslims."

YET how can her glossy lifestyle magazine, with a print run of barely 20,000, speak to the backstreet mosques of Leeds? "It's not the answer," she replies. "I'd love to have the money to publish a magazine that addresses youth concerns. But we can show that there's a heritage to draw on. If we say Islam's only about prayer and politics, we make it a dry, theocratic set of rules with no relevance today. But if we can point out to young people that their heritage helped build Europe, we can show them that they are stakeholders in its future. Young people need to hear that."

It's far less useful for organisations such as the BBC to sweat over whether the bombers should be called "terrorists" or not, she suggests. "They try to spread terror. What else are they?"

She is also concerned that some media reporting inadvertently boosts the extremists' cause. "You mustn't give this violence the credence of calling it 'Islamic'," she says. "Labels such as 'Islamic fundamentalist' honour them far too much. You have to point out that their theology is warped."

What of those - such as Melanie Phillips on The Moral Maze last week - who suggest that the Koran actively encourages terror attacks?

"If that's what she says, then Melanie Phillips and al Qaeda are singing from the same hymnsheet and we might as well go home," Joseph replies. "Al Qaeda and its ilk are using Islam and the Koran to legitimate violence with dodgy theology - just as I could quote verses of violence from the Bible."

Joseph speaks with an insider's passion yet is measured and thoughtful, which suggests we will be seeing more of her. But how has she, prominent in her hijab, found the level of anti-Muslim hostility since 7 July?

"Oh, it's nothing like after 9/11, when I was spat at and had drunkards telling me I should be shot," she says. "There's been nothing like that this time. You see, the British have realised there are a small number of baddies in our midst, and that we've got to work together to fight them."

(Evening Standard, July 20 2005)

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Trendsurfing: Exertainment (The Times)

By David Rown

You're going to love the summer's hot new weight-loss programme. All you do is flick on your Xbox, boot up a video game ... and then congratulate yourself on having helped to solve the global obesity crisis. The gaming industry, zapped from all sides for promoting today's sedentary lifestyle, is firing back by repositioning itself as the fitness fan's friend. Squeeze the odd joystick, it's now promising, jiggle about on a motion-sensitive dance-pad, and before long you'll see the pounds miraculously falling away. And all without ever leaving your living-room.

It's a trend known as "exertainment" or "exergaming", and it relies on the growing sophistication of games consoles to test players with physically demanding tasks. By building entertainment challenges around exercise routines, games designers promise to turn PCs and PlayStations into calorie-crunching personal trainers. Their moment arrived at this year's International Consumer Electronics Show, whose most muscular display was a "cardio playzone" packed with fitness-themed games. Now a California school district plans to install exertainment rooms in all its primaries to replace basketball in the daily workout. "One of the things being blamed for child obesity is video games," explains Sue Buster, the district's junior education director. "So this is fighting fire with fire."

It is a challenging logic to grasp, especially with 14 per cent of California's under-12s officially obese, and their British counterparts panting just behind. Can a computer game, even one that forces players to dance on a wired-up floor mat, ever replace an old-fashioned PE lesson?

Well, for all that it seems unlikely, the best of these games do seem to be helping players sweat off the calories. Recent hit games for PlayStation2 and Xbox consoles, for instance, track the energy burned with each virtual golf putt or dance-pad gyration. RedOctane, which makes the dance mats, claims that regular players have lost up to ten stone responding to the computer's demands. As for our oversized, under-exercised children, the medical world has spotted a "powerful new tool" in fighting paediatric obesity. "What is so exciting about exertaintment is it can overcome just about every excuse for not exercising," claims Ernie Medina, a doctor working with the California schools programme. "Playing games, having fun, in a medium they already feel confident about, is a sneaky way to get children to exercise."

Fitness-based games aren't exactly new: if you had a Nintendo Entertainment System back in 1988, you could have bought a Powerpad attachment on which to dance around awkwardly during your aerobics routine. What's changed is the technology's speed, complexity, visual quality – and price. Ten years ago, a Time Ryder computerised exercise bike, with video-game controls built into the handlebars, would have cost almost £4,000. Today, a fraction of that sum will buy you a dozen bestselling electronic fitness systems - from Kilowatt Sport's Powergrid Fitness track, which forces you to flex a range of muscles in response to screen commands, to Electric Spin's Golf LaunchPad, which you plug into your PlayStation2 and then, with your own clubs, take on the world's toughest courses. You can even avoid the bracing walk around 18 holes.

It does all sound rather exhausting, what with all those buttons to press and cables to unwind. Me, I'm sticking to chairobics, lounging on a sofa raising and lowering heavy glasses of pinot noir. If you could see how red-faced a three-hour training session left me, you'd be in awe.

(The Times Magazine, July 16 2005)

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Interview: Jeremy Deedes, The Sportsman (Evening Standard)

Jeremy Deedes, the Telegraph Group's former chief executive, says his new paper for gamblers can succeed - and he's betting his own money that it will. By David Rowan

WHEN Jeremy Deedes was last in the headlines, he had just been dragged out of retirement to oversee the sale of the Telegraph Group to the Barclay brothers. A year on, the quiet life following his racehorses is again proving elusive: this time, Deedes has quit his second stab at retirement to launch The Sportsman, an ambitious new seven-day sports paper. The Deedes genes - his father William is still reporting at 92 - clearly won't tolerate inactivity.

"I just know how exciting these adventures are," Deedes Jr, 61, explains jovially in the conservatory of his comfortable Berkshire village house, full of delicately inlaid furniture he made himself. "Coming off the golf course on Monday, I discovered I had 38 new phone messages." Besides, he adds grinning, "I think Mrs Deedes probably thinks she's seen quite enough of me hanging around the house."

For all the pleasantries, The Sportsman is a brutally bold attempt to shake up the daily sports-paper market. Trinity Mirror's sports titles, predominantly The Racing Post, made £18 million profit last year, an extraordinary margin of 37 per cent. Deedes's paper, aimed at a younger demographic, will also include up to 70 pages of racing in 128 tabloid pages. But there, he insists, the similarities end.

"This will not be a replica of The Racing Post," he insists. "Yes, we'll carry the race card and the form, but we're focusing on the explosion of sports betting outside of racing and the online casinos. The more we talked to bookmakers, the clearer it became that their major frustration was the lack of an all-embracing conduit to reach this new generation of betters."

The paper is the idea of Charlie Methven, a 29-year-old former Daily Telegraph journalist who took redundancy last year. Methven, who will be publisher and editor-in-chief once £12 million has been raised, has recruited Deedes to chair the operation, as well as Max Aitken, great-grandson of the former Express proprietor Lord Beaverbrook, to run the business side.

"A groom working on a stud farm in Suffolk, I'd suggest, might find that our publication won't be for him," Methven explains. "Equally, a City trader who plays the spreads and enjoys perming a bet on Premiership games, I'd like to think we were for him and not The Racing Post."

Yet this is not the only new sports paper rumoured to be in planning. Last week, Private Eye suggested that Simon Kelner, editor of The Independent, and Tristan Davies, of The Independent on Sunday, may be developing "a national sports newspaper along the lines of l'Equipe" - speculation which Kelner dismissed last night as having "no truth in it whatsoever".

"One is constantly hearing rumours about people who come up with flashbulb ideas to launch a new sports paper," Methven sighs. "But I don't know of any plans to launch a daily gambling newspaper."

Deedes, former managing editor of the Evening Standard and Today, and editorial director and MD at the Telegraph Group, says that the first issue should appear by mid-spring 2006, well in time for the World Cup in June. With his own money at stake and seed investment from Ben and Zac Goldsmith, he is now leading a tour of City firms to raise the bulk of the £12 million.

"We're at the early stages," he admits, "but I'm very encouraged by the noises we're hearing. We're not there, of course; but we've got a first-draft business plan, a structure of the staffing, even a flatplan. We'll be producing our first dummies in the next five or six weeks."

It is intended to be profitable at a circulation of 40,000 - "a conservat ive estimate", Deedes points out, and roughly half that of The Racing Post.

The big question is whether potential investors will write the cheques to back up their positive murmurings. Stephen Glover, the former Independent on Sunday editor, has spent well over a year trying to raise £15 million to launch an "upmarket" daily newspaper, with evidently only limited success. Won't Deedes meet the same impasse?

"I've read [Glover's] business plan, it's very well done, but if any institution had asked me whether my instincts were that 100,000 people at the top of the demographic scale were interested in that sort of newspaper, I'd have struggled to say yes," he repl ies. " It's a market extremely well catered for." This market, by contrast, is growing fast yet under-served.

But what's to stop Trinity Mirror fighting dirty to kill The Sportsman at birth? "I'm sure they will defend their position, but I really believe we can coexist," Deedes replies calmly. "Its title tells you what it is - until a few years ago, horse and greyhound racing were the core of the betting business, but the advent of the internet and other sports betting have revolutionised the industry."

Even if the Post were to widen its editorial remit to spike The Sportsman's guns, it will always be perceived as the racing paper. "Some of us have had experiences of trying to change people's perceptions of established newspapers," he adds, referring to The Daily Telegraph's battles to attract younger readers. "The trouble is that perceptions lag behind reality for a long time."

A price war, he warns his prospective rivals, will serve neither party's interests. "I know a bit about price wars too, and the only person who benefits is the reader, who simply gets the product cheaper. Would the benefits from the additional advertising outweigh what was being sacrificed in the cover price? If I were in Trinity Mirror's shoes, I would struggle to make the sums add up." Trinity Mirror will say only: "We wouldn't comment on other people's launches."

Other editors have questioned whether Deedes's plans for a daily print publication - possibly using the Telegraph's presses - make economic sense, with more and more betting now online. "We will have both print and website, with interactive betting, but there's still an appetite for a print version," he replies. "You can't take the screen with you when you go racing."

IF THE money does come through, the consortium will certainly have a chairman committed to the subject matter. "I've always been interested in gambling, especially in my youth," Deedes admits. "My best win was when I persuaded the Evening Standard, back in the Sixties, to let me play in the first world poker championships at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes. We had a huge Fleet Street school down there, and I played the other journalists. There was a moment at 3am when I held every traveller's cheque of every journalist covering the event." He stayed in the hotel for two weeks, and still came home with a profit.

But then two years ago, he continues, he had his "worst disaster ever". "On the final day of the [golf] Open, I backed Thomas Bjorn for £40 each way at 100-1. He looked an absolute cert until he failed to get out of the bunker on the 16th."

The Sportsman, he admits, will be his biggest gamble yet. "Everyone in Fleet Street gets a bit excited about a new publication, but I'm sure if you ring Sporting Index they'll give you a spread on how long it's likely to last," he says. "I'm betting my own money on this one. And what we've got to make certain is that we don't get into the bunker on the 16th, let alone fail to get out again."

(Evening Standard, July 13 2005)

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The Times Comment page: Tom, three questions for you

Tom Cruise should be facing robust media interrogation about Scientology, but there is craven silence. By David Rowan


Article here

(The Times, Comment page, July 12 2005)

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Trendsurfing: Corporate drumming (The Times)

By David Rowan

Heard the latest business news? It goes boom-ba-da-boom-ba-da-boom. Across corporate Britain, trend-aware senior executives are switching off their BlackBerrys to hammer out primal African drumbeats. Step inside a conference centre, and you're increasingly likely to hear tribal chieftains from Shell or Coca-Cola drumming for hours with their underlings, in rhythmic pursuit of today's hottest management fad.

Over the past year or two, some of our biggest employers have embraced goatskin-tapping sessions as a tool for boosting morale. From Oracle to Orange, Pfizer to the Foreign Office, the demand for percussion workshops has even spurred an entirely novel class of business consultant. Armed with hundreds of African djembe drums, these "facilitators" are turning company awaydays into high-decibel exercises in group therapy.

For the consultants who lead the sessions, business is literally booming. "Our turnover doubled in the year to 2003, and has more than doubled again in the year after that," according to Doug Manuel, who runs Sewa Beats, one of the bigger UK corporate-drumming agencies. Manuel runs workshops for the likes of Marks & Spencer and Oracle, and a couple of weeks ago was called in to drum harmony into a Royal & SunAlliance bash in Leicester. "There were two departments that weren't working particularly well together, so we taught each of them some things musically that only made sense when put together," he explains proudly. "After a debriefing from their HR people, they all left feeling pretty close."

Still, painful truths must occasionally be learnt. "With another client, the guy meant to be leading the music over-delegated to such an extent that he totally messed up the rhythm," Manuel recalls solemnly. "The lesson that group drew was that the more you complicate things, the more your strategy has to be absolutely right."

The suits seem to be lapping up these theories. Kraft Europe credits a drum workshop with "re-energising" staff and cutting stress; T-Mobile sees them as a way to "break down barriers" between managers and workers. Toyota was so excited that it built a dedicated drumming room in its Californian HQ. "I'll never forget the spirit that came alive inside me," explains Ron Johnson, the Toyota manager who became the company's leading drum-therapy evangelist. "In a matter of moments, perfect strangers came together in synchronistic rhythm to share a common vision."

You don't have to buy the management speak to sense a business opportunity here. Chief Suleman Chebe, originally from Ghana, has found himself a cosy new niche working as "senior rhythm consultant" out of Glasgow for a company called Drumming Up Business. Such is demand that his recent clients include Strathclyde Police, the National Trust of Scotland and even the Cabinet Office.

Yet ... can we really take seriously a conference centre packed, typically, with white males of a certain age pounding out their corporate mating calls? Won't this trend prove rather embarrassing for them, once the photos leak on to the company intranet? "It's easy to knock it," admits Doug Manuel. "But everyone has a heartbeat, and once a rhythm gets going, it gets in your bones. You can't help but join in."

(The Times Magazine, July 9 2005)

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Interview: Sir Christopher Meyer, PCC chairman (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

Sir Christopher Meyer, KCMG, former ambassador to Washington and Bonn, is the consummate career diplomat. So when he takes on the Archbishop of Canterbury in defence of Britain's newspapers, one imagines that Meyer, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, knows exactly how many feathers he will be ruffling.

He is not, he stresses in his office behind Fleet Street, giving the PCC's "formal" response to Rowan Williams' recent speech denouncing journalism's "lethally damaging" practices. But Meyer - "as a punter, a reader" - thinks Williams has got his facts wrong. "I don't agree with him," he says firmly. "I didn't find the speech particularly easy to understand, and I wasn't quite clear what he was getting at. He used a curious phrase about the purpose of media being 'to nourish the common good'. Great phrase, but it begs a thousand questions."

In two years chairing print journalism's self-regulation body, Meyer, 61, has become used to deflecting critical barbs, ranging from sneers about his "cosy editors' club" to Parliamentary attempts to overturn its limited powers. So he is unlikely to flinch when the head of the Anglican Church offers his views. "In the debate about the role of media, it's important not to get into a
situation where you, anyone, has a view of the 'common good' or what should be a 'newspaper of record'," he says pointedly. "That's a disguise for trying to impose a particular view. I mean, this is democracy; let a thousand opinions bloom."

Nor does Meyer have much time for Jon Snow's defence of Williams on this page last week, in which the Channel 4 News presenter condemned the "manifestly absurd fiction" of "unaccountable" editors judging each other at the PCC. "There is a certain snobbery in television, a de haut en bas about the writing press," Meyer retorts. "TV people quite commonly haven't a clue about how the PCC works. All this crap about sitting in judgment... for Christ's sake, that's just not true. Newspapers report" - he bangs the table - "and they opine. Channel 4 News sits in judgment every evening. A little bit of research by some of our critics would be a very good corrective."

Today, the PCC offers some facts to challenge its critics' assertions, in the form of its latest annual review. Last year, the commission attracted 3,618 complaints, not all falling within its remit; of the 900 it ruled on, just eight were formally upheld and required in-paper adjudications. The stark disparity results from its preference for negotiated, informal settlements: in complaints where accuracy was at issue, 327 out of 333 possible breaches of the PCC code were settled by mutual agreement. "These figures are a clear riposte to those who believe that there should be a legally enforceable right of reply," Meyer writes in the introduction. "There is simply no need for one."

That remains a contentious assertion. Last February, Peter Bradley, a Labour MP, introduced a private members' bill demanding a statutory body that would force newspapers to correct significant errors. The bill failed, but Bradley's argument that PCC complaints were "futile" attracted cross-party support and that of the NUJ. "It was a pitiful debate, and Bradley, who got his statistics completely wrong, was firmly whacked on the head by the government minister," Meyer says dismissively. "He missed a crucial point - that the original Calcutt investigation into press regulation decided that we should seek to resolve complaints between plaintiff and editor." Business, in fact, has been "booming" since Meyer took over, largely because the PCC "effectively addresses" concerns about accuracy or intimidation.

Yet if it is so effective, why have the Barclay brothers chosen to bypass the PCC in pursuing The Times in a French court? "Heresy, my dear boy," Meyer deflects playfully. "If you're an aggrieved reader, you should have a choice. You can write to the editor or perhaps an ombudsman, always a good thing. There's the PCC , which doesn't cost you anything or need a lawyer, and can resolve complaints in under six weeks. Or you can go to law. But if you do, it's going to cost, it will be much slower than here, and, if a privacy issue, ironically, you'll have your entire private life turned inside out. Naomi Campbell and Catherine Zeta Jones attract the headlines, but meanwhile we're quietly dealing with hundreds of cases."

It's hardly a vote of confidence, though, given that the Barclays' papers are signed up to the PPC code? "Such a tendentious, nasty question," Meyer replies, rather more aggressive now. "It's one egregious example. It doesn't bother me in the least if the Barclay brothers choose not to come here. Whether they should be going to a French jurisdiction - that's a matter of controversy."

A persistent criticism is that the commission is toothless, unable to award damages or costs or to issue injunctions. That's why Naomi Campbell took her privacy case against the Mirror straight to law. "Yes, David, and if people want those things, don't come to us. But how long has she been in the courts now? Three years? In which time we've learned just about everything about her condition. When people say we're toothless - such a cliche, so boring - they do not understand that a system of fines would be unworkable. You'd be lucky to resolve a case in a year. The one thing editors loathe is having to stick a negative adjudication into their newspaper, which basically says you screwed up."

Yet, as he readily admits, this sanction was used just eight times last year. The commission's apparent aversion to stamping down on editors certainly infuriated Fiona Millar, who complained in The Guardian that its "cosy" dealings with the Mail on Sunday led to errors about her going uncorrected. "Fiona Miller was very aggrieved, and I regret that," Meyer replies. "Listen, there are a few people sitting inside the M25 who bang on about self-regulation. They have their own agendas. If we brought in capital punishment for editors instead of an adjudication, that wouldn't be enough for them, even if I personally executed them. But go out into the country at large, nobody ever comes at me on this stuff."

With seven editors out of 18 commissioners, it would arguably breach Clause 1 (Accuracy) to portray the PCC as simply a "cosy editors' club". Yet if it is truly to represent "ordinary people", why are 17 of them white, the other Singapore-born? "Oh, for Pete's sake, I have never heard such an absurd question." By now, any remaining cosiness in the room has evaporated. I suggest that narrow ethnic representation may reinforce unfortunate perceptions of clubbishness. "When I arrived, we had an Indian lady on the commission," he splutters. "We choose on merit. To me, it's irrelevant."

A swift change of subject is in order. In his forthcoming book, a leaked preview of which appeared last week, did he, as Jonathan Powell of No 10 apparently ordered, "get up the arse of the White House and stay there" while Washington ambassador from 1997? "My dear chap, this is an interview about the PPC," he says, suitably jovial once more. "Just wait and see. I haven't even finished it."

Final question. Does Meyer trust what he reads in the popular press? "I know what I'm reading," he replies warily. "I think I read them intelligently." Ah, but with the rare benefit of a Lancing-Peterhouse-FCO education ...

"You have just committed the most appalling Londonophile metropolitan heresy I've heard for a long time," he interrupts, delighted to have scored the final sparring point. "The notion that this is a nation of twits! The one thing I've learned in a peripatetic career is that people spot very rapidly what's crap and what isn't. That's a major misunderstanding."

Though not, thankfully, one yet covered by Sir Christopher's code.

(Evening Standard, July 6 2005)

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Trendsurfing: Promise exchanges (The Times)

By David Rowan

This week, Trendsurfing is committing itself to making the world a better place. There's only one teeny condition: you must do so too, otherwise the deal is off. It's a beguilingly simple moral equation, which, thanks to a wave of internet-based networking clubs, is being tested with a burst of fascinating real-world examples. Whether you're a political activist or a public-spirited fundraiser, online "promise exchanges" are suddenly the fashionable tools for making a difference.

Here's how they work. Let's say you have a goal that can be achieved only collectively - a mass boycott of a rip-off bank, say, or a call for multiple donations to fund obscure medical research. By publicly signing up at sites such as Fundable (www.fundable.org) - with a promise, and sometimes cash - supporters commit themselves only if a specified number of other people do the same. And if they don't, signatories take back not only their original offer, but the satisfaction of having at least tried.

Economists call this conditional commitment an "assurance contract", a concept that political activists in particular have been eagerly embracing via the web. The most ambitious experiment so far is the Free State Project (freestateproject.org), an attempt by American libertarians to build a minimally regulated society in New Hampshire in which to "live free or die". Only when 20,000 supporters have signed the pledge is each of them solemnly obliged to up sticks - enough, the thinking goes, to make Uncle Sam think twice before storming in to re-impose order. Still, last week the revolution remained 13,414 freedom-lovers short of a quorum, which suggests that New England will be spared civil war for a couple of years yet.

In Britain, political activists have taken a rather more sedate approach. Users of PledgeBank (www.pledgebank.com), a promise exchange from the public-spirited geeks behind FaxyourMP.com, seem more concerned with finding lost dogs together and planting trees to offset their personal carbon-dioxide emissions. Still, in its first few weeks, some intriguing early pledges have attracted enough group support to prompt action. Nick Jones, a Manchester United supporter, vowed to boycott each of the team's sponsors while Malcolm Glazer remains in charge, but only if 50 other people would join him. Two weeks before his June deadline, Jones had attracted 170. Other groups of strangers have agreed via PledgeBank to register en masse as bone-marrow donors, clean the River Taff, and, following a pledge by Tom Steinberg, lobby MPs for free wireless internet in the British Library.

"We all know what it is like to feel powerless," explains Steinberg, one of the site's creators. "PledgeBank is about beating that feeling by connecting you with other people who also want to make a change, but who don't want the personal risk of being the only person to turn up to a meeting or the only person to donate £10 to a cause that actually needed £1,000."

Could these sites become the eBays of political dissent? Their potential is already being tested. One PledgeBank user, Phil Booth, has quickly signed up 4,000 opponents of ID cards to promise civil disobedience if the scheme gets off the ground. The commitment comes into force if the total reaches 10,000.

At that point, presumably, the Government will enact a one-mile exclusion zone around every computer in Britain. Personally, I'd protest by streaking down Whitehall - though only if a million of you promised to join me ...

(The Times Magazine, July 2 2005)

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