Write on

I went to see a talk by Robert Thompson, the editor of the Times, in eary October at the Ivy restaurant in Covent Garden. The Ivy is the restaurant of choice of C List limpets - mostly those who are famous for being famous - and the odd "celebrity" like Victoria Beckham.

He's a slender, stooped shouldered man of indeterminate age with a melange of machine tooled vowel sounds and vocabularic characteristics that betray a Sydney upbringing and education. The Times is a regular employer of Aussie expats, betraying the proprietor's (as Thompson calls Murdoch) origins and Robert has reached the top of the tree at the world famous daily.

His speech was all about new media and the impact that the internet is having on the newspaper profession - the complexity of making money, the changes to newsroom deadlines, the death of old patterns, the new competitive environment and the changing power structure in news media. He also spoke for a bit about blogs and how the internet was full of a billion blogs, all with a readership of one, ie, the author. The absence of any evidence to the contrary suggests, Hamish, that this blog is a classic example. Still, I intend to persevere and hopefully double or triple that readership this year. At that rate of growth, everyone on the planet will be reading this in.....