Nicholas Nassem Taleb, author of The Black Swan, does not read newspapers. Rightly he considers that most of them are full of junk press releases and what amounts, especially to a someone who used to be a trader, to very old news. I have finally reached the stage where I think that reading newspapers and even listening to the news on the radio leaves me feeling less informed than before I started. I don't even read the Sunday papers, the FT Weekend or The Economist - not since I realised they were being written about a parallel universe.
When I was a teenager, I read Motoring News for the reports of Grand Prix races - no multi-billion dollar Formula One TV coverage in those days - Model Cars and Model Car and Track both about slot car racing (yes really), and for a while I read Melody Maker until the NME became the only music paper anyone needed to read. The Financial Times was irrelevant and Private Eye was incomprehensible. (Try making sense of Le Canard Enchaine and you'll get the feeling.)
Now I read Private Eye and Art Monthly regularly and Vanity Fair, Tatler or Esquire or some other such life-style magazine every now and then. Put Kate Moss on the cover and I'm going to buy it. On some kind of whim, I've just taken out a subscription to the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, which at £39 including membership of the BSPS itself, is a pretty good deal. If you're into the philosophy of science. I gave up on Sight and Sound a long time ago: if I read any movie magazine at all, it's Little White Lies, the house magazine of the Curzon Cinemas. I don't read book reviews, I prefer to browse, and I can do that because my local bookshops are Foyles and Blackwells. Every now and then I sample a music magazine, but mostly I rely on Last FM or Amazon reviews to point me in an interesting direction. If I hear about a band, I'll look them up on You Tube first, then I might buy the CD or download. If I really need a movie review, I'll read Roger Ebert. There's a reason he's a millionaire. I buy 'zines to cover the fringe stuff, and I can do that because I have the newsagents of Soho on my doorstep.
It's all interesting but like the mainstream media, but it's the sparkle on the waves. It's not the currents and it's not the tides. The rubbish on the streets of Naples, to take a current story, isn't about trash bags not being collected, it's about the grip of the Camorra on the government of Campania. That story doesn't get covered, but Berlusconi's posturings do. On the other hand that story has been running for decades. The mainstream media doesn't describe the currents and tides that make the stories break on our beaches. Recent historians prefer froth to trend as well: the shelves are currently groaning under the weight of books about Britain in the twentieth century, each volume covering a decade in hundreds of pages of detail that make less sense that a Jackson Pollock.
The tides and currents are made by demographics, criminal organisations, industry and legislation, not by culture and certainly not by party political maeouverings. Businesses have a strong interest in keeping what they are doing quiet: if I was a doing to the British economy what a modern CEO does every month, I would hide behind commercial confidentiality and a harum of hard-faced blonde PR's too. I don't have the time or resources to investigate it. I don't know who is supposed to be: not journalists and judging by what gets circulated by The Bank's Economics department, not the research departments of large companies either. I don't know where you find the serious stuff. I have a suspicion that it isn't on the Internet and it costs fairly serious money. Actually I have a suspicion that it doesn't actually exist.
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