How Journalism Works

I'd better declare my interest at the beginning...

Some time ago, when I was writing a music column for an evening paper, I received an advance copy of Waterloo by Abba. This was prior to their Eurovision appearance and I had no idea who they were. My review simply stated that this was without doubt a number one hit record. 

The rest is history... two master composers, two great singers, a band that rivalled the Beatles in producing pop music with universal appeal. What's not to like?

Abba's recent return has been a general cause of excitement. But today the Telegraph carries a piece by someone called Ed Power, basically using several hundred words to sneer at Abba for saying they won't be doing any more after their comeback album and ongoing hi-tech London stage show.

Ed Power suggests that this may be because their new music isn't very good – and that's why they are not contemplating doing proper concerts. The more likely reason why two divorced couples in their seventies (who now have completely different lives) might not want to go out on the road together seems to have escaped Ed Power. As has the fact that they possibly have nothing left to prove.

Strangely, exactly two weeks ago, someone called Ed Power wrote a lengthy positive puff piece for the new Abba show and album in the Telegraph.

What happened in between? Abba gave an exclusive interview to the Guardian... 

An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – 0 Out of 1010

Could the 1010 Labs story get any worse?

Of course it could. After chasing them with emails and phone calls, they finally sent me my test result... but they managed to send me my Day 2 test result for the second time, rather than the result of my Day 8 test, for which I had been waiting a week.

After yet another email to them, pointing out the uselessness of what they had just sent me, I finally got the Day 8 result... on day 16 of my 10-day quarantine.

It was negative – which was just as well, since I had given up waiting for it and returned to "normal" life.

It seems I am far from alone in my dissatisfaction with 1010 Labs.

The Telegraph reports: "Ninety-five per cent of its reviews on Trustpilot were rated 'bad', with one customer saying they were still waiting for their test result after two weeks. 'I am appalled that operators like this end up on a Government website, with the appearance of being recommended,' they said."

Absolutely. And we're paying large amounts of money for this shambles.

Final Edition

The Independent is dead. Long live The Independent online?

The Independent was launched as a radical, politically independent newspaper in the UK in 1986. That it survived for 30 years – and through many years of its imminent demise being forecast – is quite an achievement.

The current proprietor has portrayed its demise as part of a pioneering leap forward into the new world of online publishing. Newspaper journalists, on the whole, see it as a deeply sad bereavement.

Dumbing down appears to be the way ahead online – a glance at the Daily Mail online, The Telegraph online, and even The Independent online or the BBC online should make that fairly clear.

Lists, trivia and a paucity of in-depth coverage seem to be what is required. And in the case of the Mail Online, prurient droolings over female 'celebrities' showing their tits and arses. This is the new journalism.

I am glad to say that I freelanced at The Independent for several years in the 1990s, and also again over the past three years. With grateful thanks to fate, I will be in its office on the night we put together its last edition, and say goodbye to a journalistic era that began with idealism and ended with pragmatism – and a sense of dread.