What is ‘crowdfunding’? It’s when the money for a project is sourced from a wide base of people paying a relatively small amount, rather than a handful of investors who pay a lot more.

In a financially turbulent period for media, where the high cost of investigative journalism is becoming prohibitive for even the bigger news producers, Cohn’s model is one of the few ways that time-consuming, challenging journalism is being funded in the Bay Area. Spot.Us allows ordinary people to put their money towards information they value, and illuminate it for for the rest of their community.

We spoke with Cohn about the origins, finances and ideologies of Spot.Us, and how its revolutionary model fits into the rest the US media landscape.

Bad Idea: How did Spot.Us come about?

David Cohn: It was a confluence of things. I was the research assistant for a guy called Jeff Howe, who coined the phrase ‘crowdsourcing’– and in journalism, when you coin a phrase, you get a book deal, so I was his research assistant. I was researching the chapter on crowdfunding, things like kiva.org [an online microloans organisation] and I was thinking: can some of these same principles be applied to journalism?

The other part came out of being a freelancer. I was a freelance journalist for a while, and I really had the sense that the system by which freelancers work is somewhat antiquated. When they do freelancing it’s not that different from before the internet. Before, they would send snail mail to an editor, and the editor would decide whether or not they’re going to publish it. Now, they’re sending email, but other than that, it’s pretty much the same; it’s a one-to-one communication. And I wanted to see a system where freelancers could work in a much better market.

BI: How does the story-generation process work?

DC: All stories start with a pitch. It can be from an independent reporter, a news organisation, or from Spot.Us itself. If there’s an independent reporter working on it, then we’ll try and find a news organisation who’ll work with us [to publish the story]; if the pitch has come from a news organisation or from Spot.Us, then we’ll try and assign a reporter to it. Then we raise some money around it, and the reporter goes out and starts reporting. Then when they come back, if we’re not already working with a news organisation we’ll try to set up first publishing rights; if we’re able to, then the money goes back to the original donors so they can reinvest. Then we publish the story and have a beer.

BI: How have news organisations reacted to the idea?

DC: It goes back and forth – some news organisations are really easy to work with, and some still aren’t quite sure how to engage with other organisations. For example, working with Santa Cruz Weekly was really simple – they got the concept straightaway. Other organisations require seven meetings just to explain the concept to all the decision makers, then they decide whether or not to do it, then they decide who should be the one to engage with us… it’s three months of bureaucracy for something that should take two weeks. With the right news organisation we can fund a story in two or three weeks. So some news organisations are not necessarily beating down our door, because they’re not really equipped to work with other people. Other news organisations are.

BI: Is it the case that the larger the news organisation, the more bureaucratic it is?

DC: The larger as news organisation is, the harder it is to work with them, but then again I was surprised as all hell when I approached The New York Times for a story. Granted we met in person, but I just had one meeting with one key decision maker. The New York Times: you think they’d be the hardest to try and work with, but kudos to them – they were the lightest on their feet in terms of organisations we’ve worked with.

BI: Spot.us is obviously a reaction to the current state of investigative journalism – just how bad is it at the moment in the States?

DC: It’s definitely more bleak than it used to be. They don’t have the same resources to do investigations that they used to. I don’t think they’ve lost the will completely, I just think it’s becoming harder and harder for them.

Investigative journalism is always a loss leader – there is no way to make a profit off investigative reporting from advertising. That never happened, even in the past. But because classifieds were so robust, they could spend money on investigative reporting, and that was considered good for your brand. Now, since they don’t have the same profits from classifieds, are you going to dedicate your money to something that was making you money in the past, or are you going to go with the thing that never made you money? They’ll go with the thing that makes them money, even at the expense of their brand. Nobody likes it, but they accept it.

BI: Is Spot.us managing to make enough money?

DC: It depends. It’s enough to do what we want – nobody enters journalism because of money.

It’s important to know that we’re an experiment, and in transition – we’re still figuring out what this marketplace looks like, so it’s something that we’re evolving as we go. Non-profit journalism is making a rise in America, and that might be because we’re in this transition period. But investigative journalism might stay non-profit for a long time – either we’re in a period of transition, or a period of [permanent] change. Investigative journalism may never be supported by classified advertising ever again.

We have a couple of different sources of revenue. When people donate they are encouraged, but not required to donate 10% more to the operation of the site, and the majority of people do that, so that gives us a little bit of money. The 10% is almost enough to fund our hosting costs and other miscellaneous costs, so I feel pretty good about that. So as we expand to other cities, that too will expand.

There are other possible revenue streams, like advertising – I’m not against advertising on an ideological level or anything, so we might use that. Right now, the amount that we can make is so little that it’s not really worth it, but again if we expand it might make sense. We could also become a wire service, and syndicate our content.

BI: So Spot.Us is just one part of a larger revenue model?

DC: It is not the revenue stream. It’s naïve to think there’s any single revenue stream that’s going to replace what was a single revenue stream. Before, you had classified and advertising that paid for everything, because there was a monopoly on distribution. Now, the distribution is itself distributed, anyone can distribute, so the revenue streams are going to be distributed too.

I never try to sell Spot.us as something that will fund an entire news organisation, or fund an entire person’s career. We are ourselves going to be distributed, we’re raising money for all kinds of news organisations. I think that this kind of community-funded reporting could support anywhere from 5% to 30% of a news organisation’s revenue stream once it’s mature, but it’ll never support an entire news organisation.

BI: What with your crowdfunding business model, it seems like crowdsourcing would be a natural fit. Would you consider working on creating stories with the Spot.Us community?

DC: That’s possible. Essentially Spot.Us is trying to find out how to distribute the financial load of journalism, but we are going to try and branch out a little bit in the future at how to distribute the workload.

BI: A potential flaw with crowdfunded investigative journalism is that you have to announce what you want to write about before investigating it. Is that a significant weakness?

DC: It’s a weakness in that a lot of people have this concern, but I think it’s an antiquated concern if I’m honest. I guess there are some instances where you don’t want to broadcast, if it’s going to hurt a source – if you’re investigating the Mafia, you don’t want to put that on Spot.Us.

But the concern is often about scoops, and competition: “I don’t want another journalist to do this story first”. But scoops have the half-life of a link, which is very short, and in fact, by proclaiming the space and putting the pitch up there, you’ve already scooped everybody – you can elbow out that space. Even if people do similar articles you can link to it, incorporate that and call it ‘back reporting’ – they’ve done some of your research.

I think it’s naïve to think that stories are one-offs and the first person to do it is the only person who gets to do it right and everybody else sucks. And even if that is the case, you should put your pitch up as soon as possible, so if someone else does it you can point to it and say I knew this was going to happen and I’m working on it as well, and I’m going to do an even better job because you’ve already done some of it.

I think scoops have actually damaged journalism. Part of the reason why journalism is where it is, is because it created a sense of competition among journalists, which was good a long time ago but now, we have the ability to work with each other so easily, and we’re not using it because of this striving for scoops.

BI: So is there still an old-school approach to news in some newsrooms, that also manifests itself, for example, in a distrust of blogs?

DC: Some do still have that approach. Blogging is a content management system, not a type of reporting – you can’t say that’s ‘just a blog’, that’s like saying that’s just a piece of paper. What Spot.Us is doing is already way out there, and if they don’t understand what’s happening with blogging, they definitely aren’t going to understand Spot.Us. I also tend now to pick and choose my battles – it might not be worth it to try and engage with those news organisations.

But I think there is a lot of innovation in news organisations. I think we’re working out what the next model is going to be, and I think we need 10,000 startups, right? But I think news organisations are part of those startups, they’re trying to reinvent themselves too.

BI: A lot of the success of Spot.Us rests on whether the donors trust in journalists. Do you feel like you’re fostering enough of that trust?

DC: I think in journalism trust is always an issue, whether you’re trusting the organisation or you’re trusting the writer. Increasingly it’s going to be about trusting the writer; individual journalists are going to have their own independent careers, and people are going to like and dislike individual reporters just as much as they would have in the past liked or disliked news organisations. There’s a lot of trust in the writers, and usually with a pitch, a certain percentage of the donors know and like the reporter already. They already have a relationship.

BI: Do readers value investigative journalism enough, to pay for something that doesn’t directly affect them?

DC: That’s the million-dollar question – whether or not the public will view journalism as a civic duty that is worthy of their donation. We try and make it fun – you get to pick where your money is going to go, you can pick your cause. But in the end I don’t have a definitive answer to that – it’s what we’re trying to find out.

Do you live in the Bay Area and have a pitch to send David? Email him at david@spot.us, or visit www.spot.us for more information on donations and pitches.

Illustration: Vaughan Ward

Hall was perhaps a little rattled by the media coverage of all of this when it came out last week, and so now, according to the New York Times, he’s trying to spin off Phibro away from Citigroup and all its attendant taxpayer interest; as the NY Times says, he’s “wary of publicity and worried that he will become the next marquee villain of the financial collapse”, and would have to go and seek refuge with some tax-dodging racing drivers a la Fred Goodwin.

He also obviously wants to go work somewhere where a £60m bonus is perhaps gawped at jealously, but that won’t have people smashing up your house – if Phibro escaped Citigroup it would also escape ruthless public scrutiny, and Hall could go back to quietly making loads of money and spending it on German castles and Julian Schnabels.

Or maybe he’s just letting this news trickle out to scare Citigroup into paying him his bonus and keeping his talent. But a publicity-shy figure like Hall, content to make loads of money as a non-exec rather than head for the prestige of a board position, would surely not be content even if he did get his bonus – he’d still have years of treading on eggshells as Citi sheds its government stake. But how will he persuade Citi to part with Phibro, one of the only revenue-generating parts of their operation at the moment? To get rid of the company to show everyone that it doesn’t agree with paying massive bonuses would be Citigroup cutting off its nose to spite its face, and would be ultimately to the detriment of the very taxpayers it’s trying to appease.

Though if they kept Phibro but lost Hall to a more private one, it’s a moot point as to whether it would carry on continuing to make the kind of successful hedges that Hall has overseen. If he does leave though, Hall will be a high-profile example of a growing type – the guy who doesn’t care about the state finding himself in a structure in thrall to the taxpayer, and who doesn’t like it one bit.

This illuminating New York Times piece tells how American network NBC is running exclusively talk shows throughout primetime this autumn, instead of shows like 30 Rock, The Office and Law and Order. Starting with Jay Leno, his giant-chinned form will morph ever more youthful mild comedians, with Conan, then Jimmy Fallon, and finally Carson Daly. Man, that’s a lot of topical humour. Getting these guys a house band and a sycophantic audience is much cheaper than the cast, crew, sets and writers of a drama, hence their proliferation during an advertising crisis. But what’s worrying is this line of the article:

“…NBC’s promise that Mr. Leno’s show would be ‘advertiser-friendly,’ offering sponsors opportunities like commercials delivered by Mr. Leno and the inclusion of brands in skits.”

Sounds hilarious. And I’m not sure you’ll be able to hear the name of the sponsor through Leno’s tightly gritted teeth. But if it does turn out to be actually funny, will anyone care? And could Leno and co even get comic mileage out of turning this “skitvertising” on its head, and mock the fact they’re having to be salesmen? The audience laughs, the product may be ridiculed but the derision sort of makes it cool – everyone wins. Well, whether or not this best case scenario manifests itself, it looks like this is going to be the outcome of an industry unwilling or unable to innovate itself out of an advertising-funded model.

The US newspaper business is in dire straits. Recent death rattles have included Sam Zell’s Tribune group filing for bankruptcy protection and its LA Times title whoring itself ever more shamelessly to advertisers; the Boston Globe, who is owned by the same company that own the New York Times, is scraping together its existence – its unions have just approved cost-cutting measures, like pay cuts and the scrapping of lifetime job guarantees to try and make enough savings to warrant the paper’s ongoing existence.

Now the WSJ is poised to try and fill the gaps in content created by these cost-cutting papers: “We’re going to move in on each of the big cities”, said managing editor Robert Thomson. The paper currently allows free access to certain articles, but has a subscription plan for its premium financial content as well as a fair chunk of its other stories. Now it’s looking to make that more sophisticated, and allow, for instance, a reader interested in today’s Clearnet bid to buy just that story without having to fork out for a whole subscription. They’re also going to create premium subscriptions for their truly niche, high-quality business content, in areas like “energy, commodities, wealth management”.

It comes as the New York Times Co.’s chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. hinted a couple of week ago that the NYT might install a micropayment model: ”We continue to take a fresh, hard and deep look at various subscription, purchase and micropayment models”. Ariana Huffington is a fan too – in an interview with German paper Die Welt, she said the following:

“The idea that you can go back to a pre-Internet world where you can create walled gardens around content, and charge for admission, is simply futile. Those who try that are going to fail. Today we live in the linked economy, not a walled-off content economy. The challenge is to find different ways to monetize links among media through advertising or micropayment or whatever, not subscription for exclusive content.”

Well, it’s going to be a bit more sophisticated than that. Micropayments make sense for the WSJ, given their specialised content for specialised readers – you can maximise the profitability of a niche through micropayment, when a businessperson finds they absolutely need its individual bits of information. But a more casual reader will find the barrier of individual payment pretty offputting – a subscription model makes more sense for them, because after one payment they can go back to the browsing style they’re used to.

Micropayment probably needs to be not at the truly micro level of individual stories, but payment for a week’s worth of, say, green tech stories. Bundling a story from elsewhere on the site for free along with the paid package could work well too, both as an incentive to purchase and a means of drawing readers to other parts of the site. The beauty of online means that there is this freedom to offer these different payment structures at once – Huffington et al should be thinking of all of the possible ways to monetise their product.

To recap: Stanford is accused of a) taking personal loans from his company worth $1.6bn (he says they were for company investments), and b) investing clients cash in real estate and private equity ventures instead of the bonds he said he was going to invest it in. Stanford’s also the guy who was bankrolling the blinged-out Twenty20 cricket championships where the winners got $20m, and landing on the Lords crease in a helicopter, the big showoff.

He got nabbed in a civil case by SEC investigators; he hasn’t been charged with any criminal activity, yet. At the moment the SEC are getting Stanny’s second in command, James Davis, to be stool pigeon and help them follow the paper trail, building up enough evidence to indict Stanford. Stanford’s girlfriend’s mum has weighed in and called Davis “evil”.

Stanford’s now fighting back in this latest round of interviews, saying: “The SEC far overreached and basically ruined a multibillion-dollar company…Everybody got paid and everybody got made whole until the SEC came in and shut everything down”. Stanford’s accused of running a Ponzi scheme, where he used new investments to pay off old ones once he wasn’t actually making enough money to pay everyone; he’s saying here that everyone was getting paid just fine.

His story is that he got caught up in the financial crisis just like everyone else, but didn’t have the option of a government bailout. He said that people were taking out cash en masse and he had to stop them after the bank started to run dry, but that all investments were backed with assets – the SEC came in and destroyed the company when it would have survived. He calls them “jerks” who “can’t find their rear end from a hole in a ground”; on CNBC he says they came in to “literally dismember, debowel [sic]” his companies.

He’s hedging his bets though, and saying that if the bank got a bit fraudy, then it’s all Davis’s fault for not informing him about the problems. During the CNBC interview, after referring to himself in the third person, he goes onto this ridiculously unequivocal tack: “I have never done anything, to do anything, to remotely, and I mean remotely, suggest that I would defraud anybody, swindle anybody, or run any kind of Ponzi scheme. Period. The end.” OK, we get it!

Despite the New York Times portraying him as a shaking guilt-ridden neurotic, he seems pretty slick on CNBC, turning the interrogation on interviewer Scott Cohn, (who is pretty much the anti-Paxo), and also playing the “chastened billionaire” role to perfection.

Especially weird is Cohn’s psychotherapy angle (“tell me how that made you feel”) and also when he asks him about whether he was “useful” to the US authorities in the South American countries. “You talking about the CIA?”, asks Stanford, before declining to comment; in the ABC interview, Stanford doesn’t deny that he worked for the CIA, and there’s been debate that a previous SEC investigation was quashed by them. Stanford a spy? WTF? See the whole thing below.

Stanford says he expects to be indicted for something, and so do we – watch this space to see how the inevitable ends up playing out.

Managing director Greg Miall said that forecasts like the ones recently are underestimating the true dearth of ad spending. “The market has come down a lot more than the official WPP and Aegis-type estimates”, he said. “Faced with financial armageddon, we simply cannot sustain our current operations as an independent company”.

Magazines seem to be getting especially shafted amid the recession. The Publisher’s Information Bureau announced on Tuesday that the number of magazine advertising pages in the US fell by 26% in the first quarter of this year. Check out their list of publications and their rises or most likely falls in revenue – big titles that are getting hit hard include In Touch (revenue down nearly 50%), New York Magazine (ad pages down nearly 40%), Teen Vogue (ad pages down 41%), Wired (revenue down over 50%, ad pages down a massive 57%.) That said, in their report there were 28 titles that had an increase in the number of advertisements, but in a moment of painful bathos, the title that had the biggest revenue gain year-on-year, Hallmark, has folded recently.

One answer is, as the New York Times suggests, to increase subscription prices, which in America are at crazy prices – you can get Newsweek for 47 cents an issue, for example, or three years of Esquire for $16 (£10.75). Some magazines like The Economist and People are finding that their customers are prepared to pay more than this for a subscription.

You could also get your sorry ad-haemorrhageing ass to the World Magazine Congress next month, a conference featuring the likes of Dylan Jones, Jane Bruton, Conde’s chairman, and the UK MD of Google, all trying to work out what the hell to do when consumers and advertisers alike haven’t got any money to spend. If the printed programme is anything to go by, the best tactic is to sledgehammer the customer with a wave of deranged paper stock: “Some of the innovative methods used in the Congress programme include a triple gate fold cover, thermochromic and ‘Scratch and Sniff’ effects…the programme features a range of tactile and visual enhancements including UV protective coatings, Dayglo florescent inks, cold foil and soft touch effects, pearlescent coatings, hexachrome printing and the use of translucent paper”. My head hurts just imagining it.

The service is known as an API and is common to sites like Google – basically it’s a tailor-made content interface, a rare and ambitious step in the media industry. The Guardian hope to eventually create an ad-network, using their acculmulated intelligence to be reach more eyeballs than the visibility and diversity of news-site would allow. Like all games, more eyeballs mean greater profit.

One half of Open Platform is dubbed Content API, allowing developers access to a vast array of archives, which would permit, for example, the free use of Guardian articles about relevant artist on a museum’s webpages. In addition they offer Datastore, a “collection of important and high quality data sets curated by Guardian journalists.”

It’s not all puppy dogs, confetti, and the beginning of web utopia. Eventually, commercial use of service with be served alongside adverts. The Guardian aren’t purely in it for profit; their composition assures that they don’t intend to seek profit for shareholders benefit. Instead, their motivation is independence and conformity to their trust’s founding values. They can afford to be innovative and take risks in order to lead the way: being courageous, as their values state, is important. Indeed, shareholders “would normally have a heart attack at such a move.”

The New York Times and LA Times have both been flirting with billionaires recently, as they fight for survival; the NYT have had to sell off and lease back parts of their headquarters, landing themselves with a $24m annual rent payment as they try to pay back their Carlos Slim loan. The LA Times may have the best deal, with their potential suitor pointing to the Guardian as an ideal model. “Newspapers ought to be owned by foundations, not look for great financial returns” suggested philanthropist Eli Broad.

This API sees the Guardian setting the pace ahead of competitors like the New York Times who launched a similar but more restrictive service recently, featuring – wow! -a search facility and access to live headlines. The Guardian’s model is different, focused on allowing commercial use of their content and data. The result may be a smart mash-up of data and content, much Guardian branding, and a new revenue streams from which the same water can be continually recycled, reused, and resold.

If content is king, then this is service is a hundred of the king’s best horses, and thousands of his best messengers, sending the Guardian far and wide. A misstep online is unlikely to cost the Guardian much, and should only encourage competitors innovation—the industry sure needs it. With this move, the Guardian redraw of where the boundaries of the newspaper industry lie, using to technology to reach as far as possible. It’s enough to make Conrad Black spit his prison breakfast all over his email-inbox. He would be right to be worried, though he may have to wait until his release in a few years time to see the Guardian’s plans for complete media-domination realised.

This generation is going to be, they say, like a wifi-enabled version of the “Silent Generation”, a term coined by Time magazine to describe people born during the Great Depression. They were characterised by a lack of zeal to accomplish the gung-ho stuff their parents had, stuff that reads like the spines of turn of the century adventure novels: “Few youngsters today want to mine diamonds in South Africa, ranch in Paraguay, climb Mount Everest, find a cure for cancer, sail around the world or build an industrial empire.” The equivalent today would presumably be: “Few youngsters today want to create vast multinational banks in Scotland, found internet companies without a business plan in San Jose, build hubristic new cities in the Gulf, or find a cure for cancer”.

Instead, they suggest the children will be feeling more civic duty during this recession, pointing to increases in signups to Peace Corps and Teach For America. In the 1930s, young people were taught to be prudent, turning into conformist parents that bred risk-taking offspring. Now, despite a pervasive feeling incubated by the age of credit of being able to have anything, it’s being suggested that this new generation will be equally prudent.

The article comes alongside a wave of warnings about the impact of the recession on The Kids. The Children’s Society warned last month about the psychological impact of a nation of worried parents; sociologists found that “with incomes dropping, parents fought more and drank more, leaving children bewildered and often alone” during the Great Depression. It’s been suggested that this generation will be less entrepreneurial, with a US poll finding that thanks to recession fears, fewer teenagers want to start their own business. And the Local Government Association is warning against a “lost generation” of young people created by the recession, who can’t get work thanks to lack of training and education; unemployment amongst 18-25s was already rocketing even before the recession really started to bite. In America, 2.2m under-30s have lost their jobs since the recession began.

University is probably a good bet right now, insulating oneself from the recession with a womb of skills consolidation, pub golf and bad sex – applications for next year are up 8%. But graduate recruitment is turning into a scrum for positions, and emergency plans are being drawn up to provide graduates with work. And while some go off to try and better themselves, others are sat on the sofa – we’ve seen how video games are surging in popularity as young people have less money to do properly fun stuff, and now an increasingly large proportion of TV audiences are in the 18-24 bracket. 

While it’s heartening to see evidence of the pampered Gen-X “worker” having to do some hard graft rather than lounge in a beanbag discussing last night’s Friends, there’s going to need to be some concerted public works and training programs to help young people get into work in the first place. Paid community service could work, but needs to be alongside education and not be presented, as the Mail inevitably does, as the only thing preventing a wave of violent youth crime.

And what with a global recession pinching hard, we can expect a lot more where that came from. “I don’t think it’s really hit yet”, said Simon Bevan, head of fraud services at BDO, to the FT. “There will be lots of massaging of the books to help people keep their jobs”. Got a failing business? Get your ass down the country club and start securing those investments for your Ponzi scheme!

Meanwhile, our busted chums Raju and Madoff carry on feeling the burn. Raju faces a few more days in jail as his bail hearing has been put back to the 22nd. Though he’s slept on the floor like any other remand prisoner, he’s at least been allowed to move to a more private cell after he became the “topic of discussion amongst other inmates”, which is a rather coy euphemism for what was probably all manner of Winstonian abuse.

Madoff, it emerges, may have never made a single trade with his investors’ money, instead preferring just to keep a hold of it and send them an email detailing where it had supposedly gone. Such purity and simplicity to his fraud! Doesn’t look like there’s going to be much of a pot to go round the hundreds of jewel-pawning investors – only $10m or so from the sale of the hot air that forms his company. He’s also keeping it gangsta and wearing a bulletproof vest, which has prompted a mini wave of fawning over his fashion choices. ABC News: “…wearing a blue bulletproof vest over a dark grey suit with his wavy elegant hair swept back over his collar”; New York Times: “Not only was the disgraced financier wearing a bullet-proof vest, it was color-coordinated with his dark suit”. Clearly taking a leaf from the Cheryl Cole school of image rehabilitation – dress well and sass everyone into submission.

Alexander Lebedev, the hippest oligarch in town, is closing in on the Evening Standard, and possibly the Independent as well, according to the Times, with Tatler editor Geordie Greig lined up to take over from current editor Veronica Wadley,and Lebedev’s underemployed hipster son Evgeny also expected to take some role.

This news comes after his spokesperson Artyom Artyomov  (could Sacha Baron Cohen have a hand in this story??) caused confusion yesterday by telling the Interfax news agency that Lebedev was NOT planning to buy the Standard, but was “still interested in acquiring “quality newspapers confronted by economic problems” and could not rule out buying “an influential foreign publication this year.”

Could he possibly mean the New York Times or even another flailing giant of the American newspaper world? Er… that is to say, all of them. 

Lebedev, who Forbes estimated was worth US $3.1 billion in May 2008 can definitely afford to take over a major player, although he told the Telegraph in December 2008 that he had lost two-thirds of his wealth as a result of the financial crisis – a potential exaggeration that should be taken with a great shovelful of salt.

However, Artymov’s comments were a likely ruse to smoke out Lord Rothermere, as the chairman of the Daily Mail Group (who own Associated Newspapers and thus the Standard) is believed to be wary of becoming the first major British newspaper proprietor to sell out to an ex-KGB spook. For their part, the British press have already nicknamed Lebedev “The Spy Who Came in for the Gold”.

Current speculation has it that Lebedev will purchase the Standard for a mere £1, on account of the paper’s ongoing losses, which are said to be approximately £10 million a year. 

The government will no doubt be concerned about an ex-KGB man controlling one of the UK’s most influential papers, but Lebedev has claimed he has no interest in exerting editorial control.

Could his interest in the Standard be purely benign?

In his Interfax statement Artymov said Lebedev “… deems it extremely important to provide financial protection to free and independent mass media in Russia and abroad” and there’s a good chance this might be true. Novaya Gazeta, the Russian newspaper he part owns, is well respected for its independence, and also for being the home of the hugely respected journalist Anna Politkovskaya, whose weekly reports were often critical of the Russian government and its role in the Chechen conflict.

(Politskovaya was assassinated in October 7, 2006 in the elevator of her apartment building with many suspecting the hand of the Russian state; in 2001 Politskovaya had been subjected to a mock execution in Chechnya by a lieutenant colonel of the FSB, Russia’s federal security force).

Recently the Standard’s reputation has taken a dive, particularly during the London Mayoral election in summer 2008, when the paper’s bias towards Boris Johnson and against his rival Ken Livingstone – although Livingstone admittedly had some previous with the paper – was laughable, and also a clear conflict of interest: Associated Newspaper’s exclusive distribution contract with Transport for London, which gives their profitable free newspaper Metro exclusive distribution at London Underground stations, was up for review in 2010 by the incoming Mayor. In addition, Evening Standard editor Veronica Wadley was formerly a colleague and friend of Johnson’s from their time at the Daily Telegraph.

Lebedev is unlikely to drive through such a brazen, one-eyed political agenda at the Standard, if only because the British commentariat will be watching him so closely. He might even raise standards – and who would argue if London’s most famous newspaper ended up employing more Anna Politskovayas and less Laura Tophams in the future? 

Moray MacLennan, CEO of M&C Saatchi and president of the Institute that made the report, said “the best we could hope for is that the decline will bottom out in the autumn”. I’m not sure the New York Times can wait that long, Mor!

Some numbers: it’s the fifth quarter of decline in ad spending, and there is a “sharp acceleration in the overall rate of decline”; 45% of respondents are setting 2009 budgets below those for 2008; television and print advertising fell by a third (a third!); spending on PR, event sponsorship and market research down by nearly a third; just 4% of companies saw an improvement in their financial prospects; even internet ad spending fell drastically; and GDP decline is “gathering pace”. “Pessimists exceeded optimists to the greatest extent in the survey’s history by a wide margin”, spake the report. 

Playing these trends out in real time is Mecom, the UK-based European newspaper group, who announced yesterday that they’re selling off their German titles. The company, whose shares fell 94% in the last year, has a net debt of €650m, and needs the cash from the sale to fend off a breach in banking covenants. Analysts suggest that they got a good deal, but when you’re a media organisation living hand-to-mouth by selling off your assets, you know you’re still a bit shafted. It’s looking like the media landscape is going to be unrecognisable in just a few months. Take it away, Nelson:

A short extract: 

“Now I’m back in my own house in Dublin, uncorking some nice wine, ready for the vinegar it can turn to when families and friends overindulge, as I am about to. Right by the hole-in-the-wall cellar, I look up to see a vision in yellow: a painting Frank sent to me after I sang “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” with him on the 1993 “Duets” album. One from his own hand. A mad yellow canvas of violent concentric circles gyrating across a desert plain. Francis Albert Sinatra, painter, modernista.”

R.I.P. NYT, 2009.