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The squirrel is reading the Financial Times.
He is a grey squirrel and therefore the enemy of most Today listeners. A 78/22 split on the last count though there is evidence that a disaffected MEP massaged the number of emails coming into the programme on this matter by urging Greysceptics to make sure their voice was heard above that of the Rederalists but that鈥檚 democracy for you and it鈥檚 unlikely to have changed the result.
The squirrel has been making a nest in an unreachable corner of an unreachable balcony and in fact it looks more like a burrow because he has piled torn and chewed strips of the Dailies Mail and Express stolen from adjoining houses (and to be honest building low-rise affordable housing for rodents is about all they鈥檙e good for) into a small hump and into it he鈥檚 dug a squirrel sized hole.
But now he has stopped tearing papers into strips and is reading the Financial Times and he likes the Lex column especially and will be very disappointed if the former Editor of that newspaper 鈥 Andrew Gowers 鈥 is right and the idea of news printed on paper has had its day because he has valued the paper part of the newspaper enterprise for some time and now it is clear he also values the news printed on it or at least witty financial columns.
He will read some headlines from here in Davos 鈥 where the world鈥檚 great, good and rich are talking to one another again 鈥 but he will not get the flavour of it because it is Angela Merkel鈥檚 call for globalisation to be let rip or Pervez Musharref鈥檚 account of his government鈥檚 struggle with last year鈥檚 earthquake that make the front pages not the hundreds of lunches, dinners seminars and small meetings that go on all the time.
The squirrel would have been most interested in one of the discussions over dinner on Wednesday evening because it was about the future of news or as he would see it the future of cheap building materials and witty financial columns.
This is important. Journalism is going through the biggest upheaval since the invention of the printing press and many journalists are asking what is journalism and it is not a silly question. How people get trusted information to make decisions about how they鈥檙e governed and how they live their lives is the central question of any democracy.
But the squirrel would have been upset because the debate is also about how information is 鈥渕onetised鈥 鈥 and if it鈥檚 鈥渕onetised鈥 what is it that people will pay for and will they carry on paying for that sort of journalism that journalists think is precious and get very precious about because there is the frightening possibility that discerning citizens might look at the array of information in front of them on the internet much of which they themselves give freely and decide that the arch ramblings of columnists and editorial writers aren鈥檛 worth a penny.
Wednesday鈥檚 discussion unsurprisingly became two discussions 鈥 one about value and the other about values with the great and the good of the American press warning about the Walmartisation of newspapers overlooking the obvious fact that the hundreds of millions of people who shop at Walmart quite like the goods and prices they find there while the great and the good of the European press wondered about trust and asked searching questions like 鈥渨hat is news ?鈥, 鈥渨hy are we here ?鈥 and 鈥渨hat will the squirrel make of this ?鈥
And this is the right question because you will know what the squirrel makes of it because all you have to do is look at which newspapers he rips into long strips and which ones he rips into long witty articles to save and read later which is what journalists and newspaper owners should really be worried about.
Because that is what the internet is really doing to newspapers and to radio programmes for that matter and while it鈥檚 right that newspaper owners and publishers that have to make a profit will be in a bit of a funk about where the money is going to come from for their information when there鈥檚 so much that鈥檚 free out there on the internet the biggest headache for those journalists precious about what is precious which is mostly themselves is that squirrels and readers given the choice might think they are not.
Since the invention of the newspaper journalists have scribbled on the back of adverts for a living and it has been a grubby trade with no entry qualification no professional status and to all intents and purposes no regulation. Newspaper owners have gathered bundles of this stuff together and sold it as a package for a few pence and some have done well and some have been torn into strips by squirrels.
Now all this is changed by search engines and the little orange button that most of you will not even have noticed on your computer screens both of which tear online newspapers up not into small strips but into individual pieces by individual writers.
And the internet being what it is you can tell straight away who鈥檚 valued and who鈥檚 just precious so that no longer can columnists write 1200 words which will be hidden deep in section 13 where it will be read only by blood relatives and insomniacs in the knowledge that people will pay for the paper but if asked would not pay for their column and would rather read a blogger instead.
Wouldn鈥檛 you be worried ? In the meantime we are trying to get the squirrel to listen to Today but every time we do there鈥檚 another piece about culling.
Kevin
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