Flair was a short-lived, loss-making, vanity project, meant to showcase the persona Fleur had invented for herself. Media professionals and students have admired it ever since its 12th and last issue appeared on US newsstands in January 1951.

But I’ve been struggling to express why that mission seems such a recurrent trope in history. The use of stories for entertaining and moral purposes is clear as early as Ugaritic, Akkadian and Homeric myths.

The replacement of those myths and parables with ‘real’ stories for the purposes of secular instruction begins with the classical historians. As Thucydides notes (in Hobbes’ translation):

To hear this history rehearsed, for that there be inserted in it no fables, shall be perhaps not delightful. But he that desires to look into the truth of things done, and which (according to the condition of humanity) may be done again, or at least their like, he shall find enough herein to make him think it profitable.

That tradition, that underpins the humanities, the story-ing of the past - a rationalization of our own intuitive method of self-management and self-definition - is under threat as practised in contemporary journalism. Not because stories have ceased to be popular, but journalistic stories have lost out as entertainment to alternative methods of manufacturing stories (e.g. ‘reality’ television), and lost out intellectually because stories no longer capture value.

What do I mean by that? Well, the great intellectual divide of our age is not cultural or religious - it is linguistic. And it’s not a divide between Urdu and Spanish, English or Mandarin, but between all languages and math.

The divide goes beyond C.P. Snow’s idea of the two cultures - the arts and the sciences.

Just a small glance at the impact of mathematization in one minor field of advertising will serve as a reminder.

Math has demonstrated its superiority over verbal reasoning in almost every area of human endeavour, chiefly perhaps because of its reproducibility.

Adorno’s insights into American popular culture were delivered in the opaque, academic German of the Frankfurt School. Lazarsfeld’s insights were delivered in numbers. Polls can ‘concretize’ words by turning questions into percentages. Figures also capture something of the currency of words. But words alone remain salmon slippery.

The inability to express oneself mathematically is as profoundly disabling for anyone wishing to engage with the intellectual challenges of our age, as was the inability to understand Latin in medieval times.

Even then, scholars understood the importance of the new language over the ancient. As one of the most important intellectual figures of the fourteenth century, Thomas Bradwardine, wrote: “Mathematics is the revelatrix of truth, has brought to life every hidden secret, and carries the key to all subtle letters.”

But Bradwardine’s enthusiasm for mathematizing theology revolutionized worldly, rather than religious understanding.
In our time the revolution in knowledge is coming through data and the means of interpreting it and modelling it. People who are able to engage with that revolution are more generally, and more consistently valued than those able to deploy verbal dexterity.

The idea of hidden information revealed as morally transforming or cleansing remains the popular - indeed the mythologized - journalistic standby (see the Telegraph and MPs’ expenses). A revelation, appealing to intuitive moral feelings, remains a powerful journalistic trope. But not a consistently valuable one.

In Bradwardine’s time the idea of revelation through direct acquaintance with a hidden text - the Bible - inspired John Wyclif, who thought that salvation lay in such knowledge. The result of his work? An eventual ubiquity of Bibles, rather than mass moral transformation.

Journalism today, if it wants to pursue value (economic or intellectual), has to give up the two sides of revelation - showy glamour and moral appeal - in favour of generating and presenting mathematized knowledge. Sounds boring. But so too does most of what we don’t understand…

In a penthouse apartment on the right side of town, a 28‐54 year old man called Dan tried to control his breathing. Someone or something was moving about downstairs. He listened intently. There it was again. In the inky dark, the sound had real cut‐through compared to the thousands of messages he was bombarded with through multiple channels each day.

My favourite bit?

Dan looked around for a weapon. There was nothing heavy but he found his 5.2 megapixel mobile phone in the hall. Even if he couldn’t stop the intruder he could at least create a piece of content to upload and share with his friends online.

In the new role I’ll be removing my commentary hat and travelling a lot more, so the blog will probably fall into abeyance - it’s been suffering from neglect of late.

I’ve had a great four years at City, with terrific and talented colleagues and even more terrific and talented students.

There’s been a lot of change: new people, new programmes, and fantastic facilities for the new Graduate School of Journalism. With the paint dry and the official opening scheduled for June 17, now seems as good a time as any for someone new to take journalism at City onwards and upwards.

Lis Howell is kindly taking the helm as interim whilst the post is advertised.

So if you’d like to lead the world’s greatest journalism school…there’s an opening.

Is he merely playing to the gallery? Or is he providing the intellectual justification for future action? Or am I simply indulging my journalistic passion for over-interpretation?

Nothing wrong with that. It was a more efficient use of resources.

But it wasn’t really designed to involve the process you and I would know as journalism. It was intended to produce a happy simulation of a television news broadcast to a standard adequate enough to satisfy regulators.

Five News shared resources - as did the new ITV London when it started - with the rest of ITN. The biggest and most expensive of these resources were the satellite trucks and needless to say, the deployment of said trucks went to the people paying the most money - ITV’s national news and Channel 4 News.

The editorial decision-making process played second-fiddle to the negotiation and horse-trading around satellite dishes, technicians’ overtime and working hours without which stories and guests (even cheaper!) couldn’t make it on air.

Now I love television news, but it’s an impressionistic not an informative medium. Its poetry is images not ad-libbed studio conversations. ITV’s regional news programmes - produced from studio hubs far removed from the politically and geographically diverse areas they serve, and manufactured to a process I had a hand in shaping - have, by force of that process, become hybrid forms of factual entertainment.

And there’s nothing wrong with that either. But in its current emaciated form ITV regional news is not really worth saving as an instrument of ‘public service’ news information. So why have the BBC and ITV signed a memorandum of understanding to share resources?

Well, the BBC is desperate to use partnership as a line of defence against the predations of Channel 4 and others who might question the casuistry that sees its populist and entertaining mainstream TV programmes labelled as ‘public service’. Partnership proposals beats enforced budget cuts. The BBC shows willing. Refusal to partner looks churlish.

But in the case of ITV’s regional news, partnership simply sustains something that neither the market, nor the term ‘public service’ really support.

One BBC regional news head lamented to me recently that no one covered court cases in his area - not the local papers, not ITV, not the agencies - no one. He also pointed out that he could have used his multimedia newsroom to produce hyperlocal sites, and even newspaper copy - but he wasn’t allowed to, because the local newspaper lobby had weighed in to point out that he would drive them out of business.

It’s easy to feel sympathy for both sides. The commercial local news media and the BBC regional journalists who just want to do a better job.

But they’re not really the issue.

The issue is bigger and it affects all of us, not simply journalists. It’s about the collapse of plurality of media provision and how we adjust to that. Because plurality has collapsed.

And the BBC can’t take its place, and the partnerships the BBC offers are simply life support machines for local news companies caught in a downward spiral of cost-cutting, audience decline, and share price collapse.

Allowing the BBC in to hyperlocal would have killed those companies quicker. Partnership will ease their dying. Yet the question of how (or if ) we use public money to inform citizens about the governance and the good times in their localities in a way that isn’t simply puff and spin goes unasked. And the political and popular will to address it is almost entirely absent.

So expect partnerships - or rather forced marriages - with all the happiness associated with relationships born of expediency…

[Thanks to Paul Bradshaw for kicking me to write something. More at the Online Journalism Blog.]

Why are occupations such an important conduit for social reproduction? In all countries, parents accumulate much occupation‐specific capital, identify with their occupation, and accordingly “bring home” their occupation in ways, both direct and indirect, that then make it salient to their children and lead their children to invest in it. It follows that children develop a taste for occupational reproduction, are trained by their parents in occupation‐specific skills, have access to occupational networks that facilitate occupational reproduction, and use those skills and networks to acquire more occupation‐specific training outside the home. If children are risk‐averse and oriented principally to avoiding downward mobility, the safest path to ensuring that objective may well be to use these various occupation‐specific resources on behalf of occupational reproduction. Indeed, even in the absence of any intrinsic interest in occupational reproduction, children may still pursue it because it is the best route to big‐class reproduction (Erikson and Jonsson 1996).

These supply‐side mechanisms, while likely to be important, may be supplemented by additional demand‐side mechanisms. Most notably, employers or training institutions (e.g., professional schools) may sometimes discriminate in favor of workers or students who have parents in their chosen trade or profession, either because such family involvement is presumed to signal underlying skills (statistical discrimination) or because family networks are directly deployed to garner favor or privilege (pure discrimination). In subsequent analyses, it would be useful to examine the role of aspirations, training, networks, and discrimination in furthering microclass inheritance and mobility.

It’s a lousy bargain. Particularly when you’re fighting minor wars on the fringes of popular concern.

Not that soldiers seem to need it. Most find their own reasons. But some of the staff officers, civil servants, and ministers who send them to places where they might be killed or injured find it comforting that - in the event of death or serious injury - they can avoid discussion of how, why and to what end, by calling the victims ‘heroes’.

Even the people who write about soldiers feel obliged to use the same language. And Stephen Grey, in his excellent book on the battle for Musa Qala in Afghanistan - Operation Snakebite - is no exception. (Disclosure: Stephen is an old friend.)

Journalists are unlikely to find themselves accused of heroism. But in case you wondered what lingering benefits journalism might still offer in today’s world, you might want to set Stephen’s book alongside the UK Ministry of Defence’s press release about the same operation, or the Wikipedia article on the battle (for which journalism provides the structure).

Of course, bearing witness to war doesn’t necessarily require you to make sense either of your decision to be there or of the things you see. Reporting is rarely enough to offer context, and the biggest service Stephen performs is one only a book can provide - reflection.

He reflects on his under-reporting of civilian casualties. On the diplomatic and political manoeuvring that underpinned the battle. And on the factors that cause the industrial accidents of war. Lousy kit. Co-ordination cock-ups. And it’s the complexity that make this such a good and satisfying read.

History, of course - even in this early draft - is written by those empowered to write it. An appendix records the names of all the soldiers dead in the course of the operation. The order of battle does not allow for a list of dead Afghans, and for all the complexity of reporting on display, this is not the story of people who, in their own country, drive down a road filled with armed and nervous men and are killed.

But if you want to know why, at that moment, everyone is there - Stephen’s book is a great start.