What's more, Evgeny Lebedev sits in the House of Lords. Despite the sanctions following the invasion of Ukraine, Britain is still lousy with Russian oligarchs with a worrying amount of influence.
Well, he didn't buy the Evening Standard on his own, but together with his father. The Independent was bought by his father, who then appointed Evgeny as chairman.
It's Alexander who is the main concern really, but it doesn't seem so easy to separate Alexander from Evgeny.
Also someone who just happens to be rich because daddy is perhaps not worth of a peerage, and not entirely how the system is supposed to work. Unless he actually did anything special, which I don't think he did.
You are getting down voted unfairly I think, the selling of peerages has been a problem for over 100 years [1], it would be entirely reasonable to conclude that this is exactly how the system works.
He got his peerage nomination whilst Dominic Cummings was Johnson's advisor. I am not sure if the fact that Cummings lived in Russia from his graduation till 1997 has had any bearing on this nomination.
> Britain’s spies were not worried too much about the boy, Evgeny, a seemingly self-obsessed featherweight who once, while freelancing for the BBC, asked Alexander Lukashenko, the strongman of Belarus, what he thought about group sex. Their anxiety focussed on the father, a once and maybe current KGB/FSB actor, who helped put Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. All of Evgeny’s money flows from this single fact, that Putin was grateful to his father for his service as a spy and he was rewarded handsomely for it. And Alexander Lebedev still owes fealty to the master of the Kremlin.
> On the face of it, Alexander Lebedev looks like a model anti-Putin oligarch. He’s big mates with Mikhail Gorbachev with whom he part-owned the now closed Novaya Gazeta, the last good newspaper in Russia. He’s a liberal, or poses as such, and, like his son, he’s thick with the luvvies: friends with Kevin Spacey, John Malkovich, Sir Elton John, Ralph Fiennes who plays M in the Bond movies and Hugh Grant.
> No wonder Boris Johnson ignored warnings from MI6 that the Lebedevs were to be avoided. But look into Alexander Lebedev’s past and the story gets dark, very quickly.
I haven’t read the Evening Standard, but last year I subscribed to a daily paper delivery of a different one (the Financial Times).
My thoughts on the content are mixed but generally positive, but for the actual delivery of a daily physical newspaper to my mailbox thing, I really enjoy it. There is something much more real about it as compared to scrolling through endless news articles online or going through yet another email newsletter. If I’m in public at a cafe/on the subway etc. I also feel more present and focused vs. using my phone.
I actually think there may be a revival of print media, especially as the Internet gets increasingly crowded and filled with ads. The newspaper has ads of course but they are considerably less distracting. It will likely be more of a niche high quality product, though.
Well, perhaps there will be a small revival, just as there has been with vinyl and film cameras, however compared to the "mainstream" these will likely be very small.
If anything, I think it's more likely that people will invest their news via new means especially AI platforms.
I use chatgpt's voice to hear the latest news instead of staring at a screen but it's clunky -
1. Waiting for the new voice so that we can speed up cadence and interrupt
2. I would prefer to talk to a news service directly with voice rather than relying on an ai platform to give me the news as I can't beg due the platform won't give me less trustworthy sources etc news corp
Ideally, I could log into Reuters or whatever site I want and talk with it about the news, and the same for anything (recipe sites, Reddit, whatever)
AI voice + video generation is a really cool (probably in a Marshall Mcluhan sense too) and natural extension of the 24/7 CNN type media/news distribution but amongst other things it lacks a major thing that the printed word has -- immutability.
A newspaper is distinct from the radio / nightly news / 24/7 news network type journalism and that key distinction is that once it's in your hands it's yours until you give it up. It's that piece of the past that you can hold in your hands to let you know that the things that you remember actually happened in the way they happened.
There's something magical about these artifacts, the ones you can hold in your hands, look at with your eyes, smell with your noses, and hear with your ears, it's a physical thing that exists irrespective of the whims of some tin-pot dictator. Possessing this kind of artifact gives the bearer some sort of power -- an ability to resist those tin-pot dictators -- and that's why certain kinds of people want to burn them or trick people into stuffing them into a memory hole.
I wonder what we lose forever if we don't have these sort of physical and immutable mediums for communicating ideas, and I hope we can find a way to maintain them. I acknowledge that it may not be feasible to do so on a large scale, but I hope that we can find a way to keep them alive in some local form.
It sounds like What you're after is good quality radio. radio 4's world at one is rather good, and have a nice mix.
The FT prototyped a way to make podcast/article reading interactive. The problem was that we didn't have an LLM to answer the question, so they were stuck on hacking alex's awful API.
The problem with wire services is that they tend to only have light detail. You need a different service for analysis/investigation. (this is different to opinion, which is really just cheap news replacement.)
I'm not quite convinced of how bad it has got. If you listen to only one thing them yes, mistakes will happen.
However I'm fairly close to dutch culture, and the explaining of Gert Wilders wasn't that bad. The first hand reporting of "the youth" seemed to be reasonable from my point of view.
But perhaps thats because I don't use the BBC as my only source? I dunno.
That’s all true, but I do think there is a burgeoning “back to physical things” counterculture. It might take a decade or two to not be an obscure thing, but culture does work in cycles.
A couple of weeks ago I subscribed to a newspaper, and opted for print delivery. (delivered digital every day, of which 4 days are also print).
Wow, do I enjoy it, for all the reasons you mentioned. Just the act of folding the page means a natural break to look around, contributing to the "more present" feeling.
Plus, if I take a break from coding I get to stop looking at a screen. And it's a lot easier to recover where I was, since the text has a connection to a physical location.
My spouse also reads it, and sometimes writes commentary to share with me when I read it later.
Coupled with deleting my Twitter account, having a newspaper subscription has given me a much more mindful relationship with the news. It’s also just some space carved into my day, and as I’ve grown older I’ve realised how much I value these little physical rituals. I still suck at the cryptic crossword though.
They are a great shield from the rest of the people on the Tube. I think of them as portable private spaces for crowded environments. Oh, and you can read them. Also great for wrapping fish and chips in.
That regulation was clearly wasted effort--newspapers disappeared once we got decent mobile internet and the fish now come stuffed with micro plastics. I long for the days when you could get some heavy metal with your chips.
> I never understood the newspaper format. Seems like a paperback would be a better format though I guess that would be a magazine.
Define "better." Newspapers don't need staples, and (at least historically) they could be very large and thick. The non-bound aspect allowed them to be easily split and shared between multiple people.
The folding paper format itself is a little annoying, especially if it’s windy. I probably wouldn’t mind if they used the same paper but had it folded magazine-style, but I suppose there is some historical tradition in not doing so.
Niche print zines and magazines seem to be surviving. Not sure about newspapers. They literally could not give Evening Standard away for free (it was paid for by advertising).
The Financial Times seems to be doing well. But it’s a premium product for an audience with money.
I think they are probably a good model for future newspapers, whereas the evening standard seems to be a general newspaper without much to distinguish it from the competition.
> The Lebedevs also bought the Independent in 2010, and scrapped that paper's print edition entirely six years later.
A Russian intelligence officer owning two major UK newspapers seems like a seriously undercovered story.