Brainstorm in a Teacup

I give up Twitter. You win

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 0:22:34 UTC

I'm pretty sure there's more to being a journalist than having a Twitter account (like curiosity, a good memory, a thick skin, strong liver etc) but if it's not a sufficient condition it's certainly a necessary one, judging by the almighty Twitter wank-fest that's been going on in tech and online journalism circles for the last several months.

According to the new orthodoxy, if you're not a Twitterer you may as well be locked in a sensory deprivation chamber, so cut off are you from the world. You certainly don't deserve to call yourself a journalist.

This is, of course, bollocks of the highest order. But I've finally given in and signed up, if only so I can deride it from a position of authority. The straw that broke the camel's back was Stephen Fry talking about it on Jonathon Ross the other night. I mean, if General Melchett is doing it I must be way behind the curve, right?

The same thing happened with Facebook a few years ago. I couldn't for the life of me understand why people would want to join the wretched thing, but there came a point where I didn't really have a choice. So now I have a Facebook page, and I log in every two or three months to delete all the invitations to install a magic 8 ball on my profile or join a knitting club or talk to someone I haven't seen for 15 years, or whatever the fuck else people do on there.

Yes, I'm a bit of a misanthrope when it comes to casual online acquaintances. But I know I'm not alone.

Twitter is like Facebook on crack. You know the people who update their Facebook status 40 times a day? That's basically all it is. It is, in fairness, a rather excellent concept, and like its devotees claim has the capacity to revolutionise the way information is transmitted. In theory it's rather beautiful - reliable sources of information gain followers, information gets shared rapidly with the people to whom it is of interest, and rumours are overtaken by facts, like some giant self-repairing neural network in which we're all nodes.

But it freaks me out. I opened my account this afternoon, and within a quarter of an hour had my first follower, Bridget. Thinking this rather odd, I said so (with Twitter, of course). Soon enough, she stopped following me.

Have I offended the poor woman? Are there some rules of Twitter etiquette that I've broken? The truth, of course, is that I don't particularly care. But I do find it rather interesting.

Since then I've acquired three more followers. One, Guardian Tech, is one that I'm following. I'm following it because it's a news source. But why is it following me? Is it doing so because that's what you're supposed to do in Twitterland?

Because if so, perhaps I should start following Mihai from Bucharest and Scott, who presumably saw me on the list of Journalism.co.uk followers. But why would I want to track the lives of people I don't know (especially since Mihai doesn't appear to speak English)? Scott is a journalist and a fan of Firefly and Tolkien, according to his bio - in other words, we'd probably get on quite well. But the whole notion of choosing to observe strangers' lives from a distance (none of Bridget, Mihai, Scott or GT have said hello - it's strictly a one-way thing) is one that strikes me as fundamentally weird.

Twittering is not the same as blogging. I'm quite happy to type away into the void here - it's my space, and I don't particularly care if no-one reads these pages. The whole 'following' thing is what makes Twitter so different. Next time I update my status on Twitter, three people will read it - Mihai, Scott, and whoever controls the GT account. Will that change what I choose to write, knowing that I'm addressing three specific people? I imagine it will.

Resolutions

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 0:20:41 UTC

Happy new year. Mine was spent washing out the vomit bucket that Emma, my partner, kept filling up. Other than that it was a pleasant affair, at a friend's flat in London - we drank to excess, muddled through a couple of verses of Auld Lang Syne, and watched the fireworks on the telly.

So now it's resolution time. I tend not to bother making resolutions - it's not so much that I can't fulfil them as that by February I can't remember what they were.

This year I have a plan. I'm going to announce my resolutions here, on Brainstorm. Not only will I have a permanent record, but having them displayed publicly might shame me into carrying them out.

1. Swim

I used to swim all the bloody time. I love swimming. Em often likens me to a penguin - graceful in water, a malco-ordinated fool on land. And yet these days I never do it, and it shows - my body is in a wretched state.

This is partly because my job leaves precious little time for it, and partly because of the year I've had. About six months ago I started showing symptoms of wheat intolerance or coeliac disease, and started on an exclusion diet which left me underweight and lethargic.

It now looks like I've got IBS, which is much less serious, but I still only have a fraction of the strength or energy I once did. A new year is as good a reason as any to stop feeling self-pity and start fixing myself.

For once I've actually started as I mean to go on - I've just come back from the pool. It was great. Though you can tell when it's the school holidays - the water tastes saltier than usual. Unpleasant but true.

2. Be more grateful for my job

I consider it to be one of my strengths that I'm never really satisfied with how things are, either in my own life or the world at large. That's not the same thing as not being happy, just a recognition that things can always be better. Without it there can be no ambition, or drive to improve things and solve problems, which to my mind is a far sorrier way to live even if it does imply perfect contentment.

But it can be taken too far. I spent altogether too much time last year wishing that I was doing something more exciting than writing for New Model Adviser. I shouldn't have. NMA is a fine magazine with a healthy community of devoted readers, and I was damn lucky to get it as my first job. It's not All the President's Men or The Insider, but then the fact that those two films were made is a testament to how rare that kind of journalism is.

Instead I should have spent more time thinking about the amount of stuff I was learning, the variety of work I was doing, and the quantity of free booze I was consuming. None of them should be taken for granted.

Anyway, when I go back to work on Monday my job will have changed. I'm no longer on NMA, but will instead be responsible for Citywire's video output across all the different editions of the website. It's a golden opportunity and I have a lot of ideas for the site, more on which at a later date.

3. See people more often

I'm lousy at keeping in touch with people, and last year I was worse than usual. Emma's slightly better, and since most of our friends are mutual I let her arrange my social life, but there's plenty of people I haven't seen in years that I would love to have a beer with.

4. Learn to play the harmonica

I don't know why I have a harmonica. I can't remember ever buying it or being given it. But for whatever reason it's right here in front of me, and I'd love to be able to play it. I pick it up from time to time and stumble through Baa Baa Black Sheep or Mary Had A Little Lamb (sheep-related songs are easy to memorise, you see), but I ain't no Huey Lewis.

On a similar note (pun wholly intended) I've been meaning to relearn to play the trombone. I put it on display in the lounge thinking I'd casually pick it up now and then, but the only time I play it is when people come round, see it, and cajole me into doing so. And it just sounds like a wet out-of-tune fart.

I know that I'm never going to lead my own band on a world tour or provide the rousing counterpoint to Rule Britannia at the Last Night of the Proms, but it would be shame to squander the hours I spent practising as a child. That's not how a youth is supposed to be mis-spent.

5. Blog more

I started this blog on 31 March last year. In the nine months since I have made 29 posts, ranging from the mildly pointless to the utterly banal. That's slightly more than three a month.

Which is pathetic.

You may wonder why I've bothered with even that many, since this is largely an echo chamber - by far my most avid reader is Google's indexing bot. But even for a narcissist like me there is a purpose to this beyond self-publicity. Blogging forces you to sit down and engage with your own thoughts, and I'm a firm believer (though you may find the evidence lacking) that it sharpens writing skills, particularly the ones that wither and die when you spend your working day obeying the 'pyramid rule' and fretting about nut grafs longer than 24 words.

You can be a good writer and a lousy journalist, but I don't believe it's possible to be a good journalist if you're a lousy writer, so those skills are important to nurture.

More generally I'd like to spend more time working on this website - its innards are in need of a spring clean, and I'd like to reacquaint myself with some of the technical stuff behind it (PHP, Javascript, SQL) otherwise learning it in the first place was a waste of time.

So there, I've committed myself.

I invite you to do the same - make your resolutions a matter of public record in the comments below, so you'll be jolted into action when you chance upon this post in a few months. Yes, I'm talking to you, Google-bot.

Tesco Express gets a blue screen of death

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 15:20:39 UTC

Every Windows user has seen a blue screen of death at some point in their lives. Turns out Tesco is a Windows user. Their self service checkouts use XP with a piece of software called NCR Fastlane.

I know this because both checkouts simultaneously crapped out at the Tesco Express beneath where I live just now, while I was buying some sausages.

You quite often see BSoDs on the screens they put in the windows at places like HMV to advertise whatever it is the kids listen to nowadays, often with flustered employees next to them trying to work out how to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete when there's no keyboard.

When will they learn? If it matters, don't use bloody Windows. Do air traffic controllers use XP? (I bloody hope not. Still, better that than Vista.)

Brainstorm in a Teacup is hosted on a Linux server for a reason.

The Downfall of the BNP

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:11:29 UTC

Truly wonderful:

More Downfall mashups here.

The BNP help pay my salary

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:16:40 UTC

Much mirth at Citywire today when we discovered that the leaked BNP list (freely available at Wikileaks) included several IFAs including at least one of our readers.

Someone I've met, in fact - I recently interviewed his boss. He made me a cup of tea. Apparently he's a 'patriot', not a 'racist'.

Anyway, we're taking the highly risky step of exposing them in next week's magazine, which could be interesting. Having stayed semi-conscious through at least some of my media law sessions at journalism school, I'm not entirely convinced we're in the clear, but what thehey - it's a laff, innit?

They include, in addition to the aforementioned individual (who is bald but with a beard, and lists 'motorcycles' among his hobbies - draw your own conclusions), a partner at one of the UK's most distinguished wealth management houses and a senior individual at one of the largest IFA firms.

My favourite theory about the leak is that the BNP are trying to prove they're a serious political force by emulating the government's procedures on data security.

Adorably, a BNP spokesman said 'It's because we are regarded as a particularly strong threat in the forthcoming European elections in June'.

Some other highlights from the list (randomly selected, since I'm not going to trawl through all 10,000 entries):

Someone called Richard Harris. Err....
A young husband and wife, the former of which has the intriguing email address comeonmyglasses@******.co.uk
Someone whose notes say 'Renewal to be refused'. What sort of person do you have to be in order to be barred from the BNP?
In a similar vein, this bloke was suspended: 'Activist. Membership suspended 20.9.05 (inappropriate tattoo). Suspension lifted 27.09.05'. Seriously, what was that tattoo of? (Office suggestion earlier today: 'One World One Love')
A member whose file features a warning from a BNP activist: 'member describes himself as a witch: potential embarrassment if active'
The owner of a shopfitting and surveying business who has decided against renewing his membership because 'Jehova God only real hope for mankind'
A ham radio enthusiast who also lists playing the keyboard among his interests. One person you really don't want to get stuck in a lift with.
One poor chap whose files notes say "No 'promotional material' requested. Concerned about his job"
A 'holistic therapist': 'Qualifications in reflexology head massage, Swedish massage, aromotherapy, anatomy and physiology. Hobbies: metaphysics, cartoon drawing'
Any number of people who have cancelled memberships due to ill health, i.e. old age, i.e. little old ladies who sit around grumbling about wogs and dagos taking over the country

Ah, bless them. But the truth is I do feel rather ambivalent about this whole episode. I'm a big fan of Wikileaks, but this doesn't feel like the proper way to use it. A lot of its members will be people who joined quite innocently because they were tired of the mainstream parties and genuinely thought the BNP might offer them something different, and have no more antipathy to foreigners than any reasonable person (which is to say enough to find jokes about the French and the Germans funny).

Granted, the vast majority are fuckwits. But by opening those people up to vilification and mob judgment, we've gone further down the slippery slope that the News of the World first pushed us down with its campaign to name and shame paedophiles (which, for those of you with short memories, culminated in an attack on a paediatrician by an illiterate neighbour).

Anyway, enough seriousness. Time to go and chuckle at some LOLGriffins - kind of like a xenophobe's edition of I Can Has Cheezburger. And when you get bored of that go and watch the BNP party political broadcast again.

I just cured breast cancer!

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:15:07 UTC

One of my hobbies is pointing out the things people say that they didn't mean, like when they use the wrong number of negatives in sequence and end up with meaning and intention diametrically opposed. It's irritating pedantry, and I'd probably have more friends if I didn't do it, but I feel compelled to anyway.

Today I sponsored a friend £5 for an event she's doing to raise money for charity. A pole-dance-a-thon, since you ask.

And the email bot at Justgiving.com passed on a note from Against Breast Cancer:

Thank you very much for supporting Against Breast Cancer. With your help we are able to continue our innovative and unique research into the prevention of breast cancer.

Your donation will enable us to achieve our aim to find a vaccine Against Breast Cancer.

My donation! Enable them to find a vaccine! I feel so proud.

Incidentally, these cancer charities really need to pool their resources. The Cancer Vaccine Institute says it is the 'only national charity in the UK exclusively funding research to fight cancer with vaccines and immunotherapy'. Against Breast Cancer would beg to differ. If only they'd share notes with each other and stop trying to find ever more absurd ways to raise funds, they might actually achieve something.

Alanis, meet Beardie

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:54:29 UTC

One of my favourite things is irony. So I'm quite enjoying the fact that I'm sitting on a Virgin train (first class, naturally) next to a sign that says 'Enhanced mobile phone coverage on this train', with logos for Vodafone, T-Mobile, O2 and Orange but not Virgin Mobile.

Clearly even Beardie himself realises that Virgin Mobile just isn't worth the hassle. As a long-suffering customer of the Dyslexic One's cellular subsidiary I can confirm that a signal is pretty hard to get at the best of times.

Someone just phoned me to slag off one of his commercial competitors for a story, and sure enough the line went dead soon after.

But first class is nice. You get a plug point for your laptop, a plane-style music system built into the seat, a free copy of the Evening Standard and a little tray with some cutlery and a teacup. No tea yet, though.

I spoke too soon! A man just came through with a teapot. All is well.

Since you asked, I'm on a train because I'm going to Coventry, and I'm going to Coventry for a work-related conference which will no doubt be a non-stop riot of joy. And no, I wasn't sent to Coventry, I'm going of my own free will. Which is possibly worse.

And I'm in first class because it was the same price as a normal ticket. Citywire aren't quite that extravagant.

Am using one of these fancy newfangled 3G dongles to connect to the Internet. It's really very good. Trying to convince the missus I need one; failing.

Can you own a river?

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 22:17:27 UTC

I had cause to ponder this question at the weekend as I helped my teenage sister-in-law complete an astonishingly badly thought out GCSE geography coursework assignment.

The task was to stand in a river measuring the width and depth and water velocity and shape of the stones and names of the ducks and whatever other pointless data the examination board (may they fall into a ravine, the cretins) thought relevant.

It wasn't entirely without educational value - ten different points along the river had to be sampled, which was completely unrealistic given how long each took, so the vast majority of students simply won't bother, and will make up the results.

We certainly did. So there was a valuable lesson for all those impressionable young minds - no one will know if you cheat.

But the nearest river runs mostly through privately owned land. To do lip service to the assignment, you have to trespass. That's lesson two - respect for private property is optional. Hardly surprising from the communists who populate our education system, I suppose, but a breathtaking display of social irresponsibility to those of a more rational nature.

Sure enough, when we came to the first suitable point, the fence was mangled and the river bank trampled to mud.

But it did get me thinking: Given that the river will contain different water from one moment to the next, in what sense can someone 'own' it? And if you can't own a river, can you legitimately block access to it with a buffer of private land?

I'm inclined to answer the second question in the negative; that is, you have no right to deny public access to a public good, and so if we were to conclude that the river is owned by everyone (or no one) then you can't build your garden around it and put a 'Ramblers Piss Off' sign on the fence.

And so to the first question. We have to somehow reach a defensible position that you can own the river, otherwise Janet Street-Porter and her fellow kagool-clad seed-munchers will declare the right to invade your home.

The obvious line of argument is that you own the land, and the river only becomes yours by virtue of its having ventured onto it. But by the same logic guests would become possessions.

So we're forced to try another approach: the river is not the water. The river is merely the pattern made by the water - you only own the pattern.

This has the desired effect - you can own the part of the river that flows through your land. But the river, in any meaningful sense, has ceased to exist.

Of course, if you want to get all deep and ponderous and ultra-Platonic about it, the river is just a metaphor for all of reality and nothing ever existed in the first place, property or otherwise. Which might make you feel better if you own stock in Lehman Brothers, but is otherwise a poor foundation for a theory of property rights.

(Those ancient Greek metaphysicists - such anarchists.)

By the same token you would cease to exist as well - now that's what I call an identity crisis.

Dead battery spares me thirty quid

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 22:47:46 UTC

This somewhat disturbing sketch was drawn by Cartoon Dick, a roaming caricaturist at an industry shindig I was at last night.

It could have been less flattering, I suppose. But if my nose was really that big I would topple over.

Anyway. I was cycling from the venue (the ridiculously posh Kensington Roof Gardens, owned by Richard Branson and inhabited by flamingoes) back to the station, trying to navigate London's vortices of one way streets, when I was flagged down by PC Knacker.

Needless to say I wasn't entirely sober, and I assumed he was going to book me for being drunk in charge of a pushbike. But in fact he wanted to tick me off for not having a front light (the battery had died), and throughout our conversation he remained apparently oblivious to the fact that I was breathing rancid alcohol breath all over him.

Did you know that flashing lights are illegal to use (though legal to sell, natch)? Epilepsy, apparently. It turned out to be a good thing the battery was flat, otherwise I'd have got a £30 fine.

Ridiculous, really - flashing lights (which are so much easier for motorists to identify as cyclists) are verboten, but wobbling around pissed on a bike is perfectly acceptable to our friend Knacker.

That wasn't the strangest thing though - when he stopped me the first thing he asked was: 'Do you speak English?'

Further adventures in quangoland: The FSCS bites back

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:42:59 UTC

The discovery last week that bosses of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme were receiving ginormous pay rises - while the people who pay their salaries struggle to make ends meet - had a fairly predictable response when it was reported.

It went in the magazine on Monday and up on the website yesterday (Tuesday), along with a blog entry written by yours truly. The Citywire blogs are an interesting idea - they're like op-eds, only much shorter, and readers can comment on them (and frequently do).

In fact we did away with a letters page in the magazine some time ago in favour of reprinting the most entertaining commentary from our readers on the website. That's how new media we are.

Anyway, as I say, an entirely predictable response - universal condemnation.

The story and blog entry are here:

But you don't have to be a regular reader, or even registered, to leave a remark, meaning we get the very occasional drive-by comment. Such as this gem from the FSCS's chief spokesperson:

I fear you reporter has misread the information he found in our accounts at Companies House and the detailed information we provided to help inform the article, which shows the total increase for the chief executive was 12%. This follows below for the benefit of your readers.... cont. p94

Leaving aside the undignified and unprofessional manner in which he chose to respond (if you have a beef with a report, take it up with the reporter or his editor, don't bitch and moan in a public forum), he hilariously ignored the fact that I'd already included all of his points in the report. And at no point does it occur to him to offer an actual justification for the pay rise his bosses received.

What a plonker.

But hey, it's a body whose existence is guaranteed by statute, no matter how badly they fuck up, so what does anyone who works there give a hoot about doing a good job?

Fortunately the readers saw straight through him, perhaps realising that their compulsory levies pay his wage. Since he'd publicly questioned my journalistic integrity, I left a comment of my own (it's generally frowned upon, but a) he was sullying our reputation for accuracy and b) I was chomping at the bit, so I was allowed).

The full report is released tomorrow, and it will be interesting to see what coverage it gets. Through the website system we use at Citywire, which enables you to see which registered users have read a given story, I know that reporters from some of our competitors have read the article (I can't say who without breaking data protection laws), so I'm looking forward to see if they pick it up and if so what angle they take.

Watch this space.

The truth about 21st century journalism, or how to use naked ladies as surfer bait

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 13:34:22 UTC

At work last week we were schooled in 'Writing for the Web' by a chap from new media consultants Sticky Content. Citywire is vastly more popular than its online competitors, but apparently there's still a fair bit of room for improvement.

There are certain differences between writing for print and writing for the web, for two main reasons:

Web readers are different to print readers.
Search.

Though the course gave some useful pointers, it was fairly depressing. I've never been under any illusions about the true nature of the publishing industry - publishers are in the business of selling eyeballs to advertisers, and whatever our delusions of fourth estate grandeur, the stories we hacks produce are merely the maggots on the advertiser's hook.

That being so, aren't we at least writing content that people want to read?

No. Not on the web.

Web readers, you see, aren't interested in reading. They're interesting in accomplishing tasks. My primary task as a writer is to facilitate that in the most efficient manner possible so that they come back the next day and look at more adverts. That means:

Condensing stories into 150-200 words (brevity is good writing discipline, yes, but there's only so much you can strip out of a story before you start losing important details).
Assuming that no-one will finish anything you write, because they're too busy.
Writing stories as a series of bullet points.

My secondary task is to write stories in such a way that people find them accidentally via Google. This means throwing buzzwords around like confetti at a wedding, regardless of how appropriate they are.

As it happens, I have some experience of this. I wrote a short piece of code that analyses requests coming to this site and logging certain bits of data (nothing personally identifying, don't worry). One of those bits of data is the address of the previously visited website, which, if the visitor came via a search engine, means I can work out what they were searching for.

Now, I've previously written about a piece of software called PicLens, and I've also written about a BBC programme featuring glamour model Chelsea White in a post which included the word 'porn'.

Sure enough, the first visitor to this site to come via a search engine was looking for 'piclens porn slideshow'. Come to think of it, it's rather an effective use of PicLens, which converts websites into full-screen slideshows, leaving hands free for other activities.

Other searches leading here have included 'chelsea white page 3 teens', 'chelsea white topless', 'glamour', and 'chelsea white tits'.

Clearly the secret to increasing one's readership is to appeal to the all-important hairy-palmed demographic. It's incredible, really, that people looking for naked ladies would end up here when 99% of the Internet is actual porn.

I'm being facetious, of course - the trick is to write useful or interesting stuff about a topic that the whole world isn't already writing about. For example, someone searching Google to find out who Ross Kemp's nan is smarter than? would see Brainstorm in a Teacup at the top of the list and discover that the answer to their question was me. Task accomplished.

Miracle berries: not good with salad cream

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 9:00:01 UTC

Last night I had the unexpected privilege of testing the new 'miracle berry', which in case you somehow haven't heard of it is a tropical west African fruit which binds to tongue receptors, making sour and bitter food taste sweet.

I was initially underwhelmed – my Guinness still tasted like Guinness. But after a while it kicked in, and having discovered that slices of lemon from a vodka and lemonade tasted like Fruit Pastilles we set about looking for things to try before the effect wore off.

We were in a pub, so being too cheap to buy any food we got to work on the condiments. I can now report that:

HP sauce tastes like treacle
French mustard tastes like... well, I'm still not sure. Baby food?
Malt vinegar still tastes like vinegar. Balsamic vinegar. With a sherry aftertaste.
Salt tastes like feet. Salty feet. I don't recommend it.
Pepper doesn't really taste of anything in particular. Just gritty. Like you're licking the bottom of your shoe.
Ketchup and salad cream are truly vile.

Not the most significant addition to the sum of human knowledge, I grant you, but an entertaining experiment nonetheless.

Are troughing quangocrats arrogant, or just plain dumb?

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 15:54:15 UTC

I got my first exclusive of any real significance on Thursday - one of the financial services quangos is about to release its annual report, and an advance copy I got hold of revealed the directors took home a 51% pay rise.

Unfortunate timing, given that hundreds of thousands of public sector workers went on strike last week over their 2.45% offer, while Alistair Darling pleaded with employees not to exacerbate inflation (CPI currently 3.8%, highest in 16 years) by asking for pay rises to maintain their existing quality of life.

Exercise restraint, he said - it's going to be some tough times ahead, and everyone's got to suffer.

Well, not quite everyone, it seems.

Without wanting to scoop myself (is that possible?) - the article won't be published until Monday, and this probably violates my contract, not that it matters given the size of this blog's current readership - here are the facts:

The Financial Services Compensation Scheme - the body which compensates victims of missold mortgage endowment policies and the like - will release its annual report on Thursday.
The board of directors between them got a 51% pay rise - admittedly only one director resigned during the year while two were newly appointed, but it's still at least a 38% rise each on average. (Technically we're talking about 'emoluments', not 'pay', which includes bonuses and allowances - this allows them to claim the figure was lower.)
The chief executive, Loretta Minghella, got a 32% raise, up to combined salary plus bonus of £237,000. (Plus a thirty grand pension contribution, natch.)
Pay for non-executive directors (which is to say most of them) is set by the FSA. Minghella's pay, and that of the other executive directors, is set by their chums on the rest of the board.
Compensation paid out fell from £155 million to £85 million, because of a decline in the number of claims over the years. That is to say, they did less work in 2007/08 than ever before.

None of this should surprise you, of course, and it didn't surprise me. What did surprise me was what happened when I contacted their press office with a number of questions.

First of all, if I was the PR head of a public body that was about to release its annual report, I would have read the damn thing and realised that certain questions were likely to be asked. (Especially since the press office chief used to be a journalist.) Clearly they had anticipated no such thing.

And when a journalist did start asking questions, some of which related to directors' remunerations, I would have gone straight into damage control mode. Instead, they faffed about providing long and detailed answers to my technical queries, completely ignoring the subject that was quite obviously going to be my headline.

Eventually I rang them up - my deadline was approaching - and said that I needed a response on the issue otherwise the story would be, quite straightforwardly, 'FSCS chiefs take 51% pay rise as workload falls'. They told me they had written a quote on behalf of Minghella, but needed her to sign off on it (oh yeah, trade secret - when you see quotes from senior figures in the press, they've almost always been written on their behalf).

So I told them to forget the quote and send me what they had.

Now here's the thing: It's quite possible, as far as I can see, that Minghella and the others deserved the pay jump. They cut management costs, and levies on financial services firms (which is how the scheme is funded - not from the public purse), so you could easily argue that they did a good job. But they didn't offer any such justification whatsoever, and I'm damned if I'm going to make it for them.

Which leads me to one of two conclusions:

They're incompetent, and failed to realise that they look like pigs with their snouts in the trough.
They're so bloody arrogant that they just don't care. After all, if you had a cushy job overseeing a quango that can effectively write cheques for itself (another interesting note - levies were vastly larger than payouts in most industry sub-sectors, generating a large surplus), why would you give a damn what people in the real world think?

Of course, it's not for me to make that judgement. I'm just a reporter.

Things I have learned this week

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:19:05 UTC

I'm holding down the fort on my own this week, as the missus has taken leave of her senses and gone to Cyprus, where it's currently hot enough to melt glass. Which means I'm looking after myself - cooking, cleaning, going to the supermarket and generally trying not to break anything.

So far the flat hasn't burned down. I feel weirdly proud, like a boy who won a goldfish at the village fête and hasn't killed it yet.

Stuff I now know:

If you need to defrost chicken overnight, defrost it in the fridge. That way your kitchen won't smell of warm dead flesh in the morning. Sorta obvious, but hey.
PVC doors expand in the sun, potentially trapping you inside. When you do eventually manage to wrench it open, you may struggle to shut it again until you've spent half an hour on your hands and knees carving grooves for the locking pins out of the doorframe with a blunt Leatherman.
If you're enough of a bourgeois idiot to own a bread maker, read the bloody instructions.
Fruit salad, if left long enough, will eventually ferment, providing a pleasant afterkick which almost compensates for the fact that it's all gone brown and mushy.

More to come, I feel sure. Now I just have to keep the goldfish alive one more week...

Ross Kemp's nan is smarter than me

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 19:24:18 UTC

Because according to the advert, she uses Sky+ to record the snooker and watch it later.

Well we just got Sky+ installed, and I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to make the bloody thing work. I had to trawl through the manual to work out how to record telly and play it back. In fairness, I didn't feel like such a retard when I did finally grasp it - you have to press the green button from the menu, which isn't at all obvious. So Ross Kemp's nan must be some kind of genius. She probably does the crosswords without any help.

Anyway, now that I know how to record stuff, I've suddenly remembered why I didn't really want to in the first place - telly is shit. Right now out of about 4,600 channels the most appealing options are Extraordinary Humans: Speedeaters, Who Dares Sings!, and Most Shocking Stopped By The Law. Really, why bother?

And another thing, Sky+: if I can't watch a channel because I haven't subscribed, grey it out in the menu or something. For god's sake, don't let me record Wild Hogs and only tell me afterwards that I need to pay an extra £20 a month for a minimum 12 month contract period if I want to watch the bloody thing.

It almost makes you want to go outside and have a life.

UPDATE: I take it all back. Short Circuit 2 is on the sci-fi channel. It's the bit where Johnny 5's getting destroyed by men with axes, so he commandeers a remote control airplane and uses it as a weapon. Awesome. And it's got David St. Hubbins from This is Spinal Tap, and a bloke doing an Indian accent that would be banned on grounds of racism today. What more do you want?

Still alive

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:17:59 UTC

Brainstorm Towers is back on the air. Yeah, baby.

Just to backtrack a few weeks: Emma (the missus) and myself have, at long last, taken the plunge into adulthood and bought ourselves a flat. Gulp.

All is going well so far, for the most part, but until today we were cut off from teh internets, hence the lack of activity here. It was terrible, like not having fire or wheels or shoes. Anyway, after three visits from BT we're finally online, so over the coming days I'll endeavour to make up for lost time, and alleviate your Brainstorm withdrawal syndrome.

But for now, have patience. I have several hundred emails to sort through. Mostly from bad spellers making impolite suggestions about my girth, mind you, plus the occasional exiled Nigerian millionaire, but I try to respond to all my fans.

Until then, adieu.

Why the Copenhagen Consensus will achieve nothing

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 21:59:56 UTC

The job, since you ask, is going swimmingly, though the learning curve often seems near-vertical. I'm the 'green' correspondent at New Model Adviser, which in investment circles has a fairly broad definition. Green investors are those who take into account the social return on their investments as well as the financial return, which can mean anything from boycotting Heckler & Koch to investing in companies that turn cow shit into electricity.

So I'm writing stories like:

(You can see more here if you really want.)

Green consumerism has been fashionable for a while now, and the corporate world has cottoned on to the PR value of greenwash (with the occasional honourable exception). The UK investment community, I'm reliably informed, has been lagging behind for some time, though just about everyone I speak to is convinced that it's going to take off in a big way over the coming years.

(Recently there's been an explosion of funds which invest in companies combating climate change, for example. Though it's not hard to find people who expect a stock market bubble in green tech – last week I interviewed a stockbroker who lost millions in the dotcom crash and says he can see another one coming.)

Part of my job involves getting to know people in the industry socially. I was expecting that many, if not most, of the fund managers and advisers who specialise in green (or SRI – sustainable and responsible investment – as it's generally known) to not really give a toss about global warming and overflowing landfills once you had an honest chat with them over a beer. I was expecting them to be savvy businesspeople who had spotted a bandwagon and jumped on it before everyone else did.

Boy, was I wrong. These people love this stuff. They really buy into the whole 'green agenda', and they come over all evangelistic at the slightest provocation. At first, this made me cringe slightly – those of you who know me are aware of the depths of my contempt for sanctimonious soap-dodging environmentalists, and the hypocrisy of those in business and politics who have become subservient, more often than not through their own volition, to a religion more viral and lucrative than Catholicism.

But I've come to realise that my beliefs on climate change – that improvements in technology (in energy, transport, materials, agriculture and so on) will solve our problems before they manifest themselves, and that pouring money at low-value solutions will merely retard our technological development in the long term – depend on these people. They're the ones helping to make it possible to improve solar panel efficiency and sustainable biofuels production, and they're the ones who are channelling developed world capital into developing world infrastructure projects (unlike government aid projects, which instead gild the palaces of African kleptocrats).

At the end of the day, however, investors expect to make money, which is why I'm only mildly enthusiastic about the results, released last week, of the 2008 Copenhagen Consensus. The Consensus, headed by controversial gay vegetarian Danish economist Bjørn Lomborg, is a project to prioritise the world's challenges by solvability. Which is to say that if you quantify the benefits of following particular policies to deal with climate change, or water scarcity, or access to education, we should follow the policies that deliver the best value.

(Non-economists, like me, struggle with the notion that you can quantify benefits such as longer lifespans or gender equality in terms of dollars, but assuming that you can, the Consensus' findings should be of interest to everyone. The media, however, has been almost silent. But I digress.)

Anyway, it turns out that supplying children in developing nations with Vitamin A and Zinc would cost $60m a year, yielding a benefit of $1bn a year – a benefit cost ratio (BCR) of 17. Mitigating climate change has a BCR of 0.9 – i.e., you get out less than you put in, having put in a shitload of finite resources.

It really does make you think. For a tiny fraction of the costs that will be imposed on society to combat global warming, in the form of green taxes and misallocated scientific funding and so on, we could easily save millions of lives by handing out a few vitamin pills and condoms and vaccinations.

But it won't happen, because for all the talk of $1bn a year benefits, who actually gets that benefit? Not the people who stump up the $60m. (Except possibly in an indirect sense, years down the line.) People with money will, rightly, continue to invest in solutions that deliver a return to them, which means pouring money into things like wind farms. The irony is that most green technologies only deliver a profit because of subsidies, in the form of tax breaks and feed-in tariffs.

Meanwhile the public and voluntary sectors have their own problems – the only purpose of government aid is as a tool of foreign policy, while even the charities that can make themselves heard above the environmentalist din often succeed only in making matters worse.

Still, I urge you to visit the Copenhagen Consensus website and have a look at the results, and I heartily recommend Lomborg's most recent book, Cool It. Careful though, that knowledge is forbidden.

It's not good to TalkTalk

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 17:29:04 UTC

Well, my naïve assumption that I would have time to blog at the same time as starting a new job and trying to buy a flat was short-lived indeed.

The commute from Brainstorm Towers to my workplace in Vauxhall takes just shy of two hours, which means I'm leaving at around seven in the morning and getting back at eight on those days when there's no after-hours events to attend. (And there's plenty of them; they do corporate hospitality very well in the financial services industry, I have been delighted to discover.)

Still, it's the weekend, and since I don't have a lawn, and agree with Jeremy Clarkson on the subject of car-washing, blogging it is.

Which is made rather difficult by the fact that we've just switched from BT Broadband to TalkTalk. BT's customer service follows the great British tradition of sullenness and ineptitude (remarkable, really, given that it's mostly been outsourced to India), but at least the hardware worked occasionally.

Transport for London scores own goal

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Tue, 06 May 2008 21:05:33 UTC

Having been on the receiving end of TfL's ineptitude more times than I care to remember, I thought it would be wise to subscribe to their email alerts, which tell you if services are delayed or not running for whatever reason (signal failure, police busy executing Brazilians, that sort of thing).

So I did. And it arrived at six this morning. And if you scroll down to the bottom, it includes the latest headlines from BBC News.

Headlines like this:

One in five Tube drivers 'unsafe'
Up to 20% of Tube drivers are sent on retraining courses each year due to unsafe driving, BBC News learns. (more…)

Glorious!

I'm sure there's a sophisticated moral to be drawn from all this, but I'm still too busy chuckling.

All of which is as good an excuse as any to feature the peerless London Underground song:

Richard grows up

richard.a.harris+biatrss@gmail.com — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:24:11 UTC

The day I thought might never come has been and gone.

I, Richard A. Harris, have a job. And a good one too, though to describe it to the uninitiated (and to the initiated too, if I'm honest) without making it sound monumentally dull is desperately hard. So here goes: I'm a reporter for New Model Adviser, a magazine targeted at those independent financial advisers who have made a commitment to professionalising their services by, among other things, pursuing a fee-based business model rather than a commission-based one.

Have I lost you yet?

The magazine is published by Citywire, a smallish Vauxhall-based media company which also caters to investors (personal and professional) and fund managers through the website and through Citywire Funds Insider, a monthly magazine.

I know, I know - I would be unrecognisable to the 16-year-old reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and dreaming of mescaline-fuelled adventures if he could see me getting excited about this. But I am, for several reasons.

First, it seems like a really great company to work for. (But then I would say that about my new employers, wouldn't I?) The people are good, the office is in a good location, and the coffee machine makes good coffee. And the editorial team cleaned up at an awards ceremony last week, and holds the 2005, 2006 and 2007 IMA Team Award for Excellence in Investment Writing, so it's obviously doing something right.

Second, however much you may think the financial pages resemble one of those magic eye pictures that were briefly so fashionable, you can't deny that finance is currently one of the most interesting areas in which to be a journalist - a good number of the past twelve months' front page stories began in the City.

Third, the world of money is something I know shamefully little about. I became a journalist because I liked the idea of learning about stuff for a living, and it would be lame of me to shy away from trying to learn about stuff that seems scary and confusing. So a job like this will do me good. It will keep me on my toes.

All that, and it's about as good a foundation for a journalism career as I could hope for.

So that's it. No more waking up at nine and wondering whether to have a coffee or get straight on with my mid-morning nap. No more days playing through Portal just one more time. No more spending hours in front of the grill building the perfect sandwich because hey, you've got to devote yourself to something. No, it's down to business now.

Ask me in a week if I'm still as enthusiastic.