🧨 Guido Fawkes and future of British business media
💰 Announcing the Governor
🇦🇷 Maradona / NFTs
🐏 Derby County Relegated - but my favourite season!?
🗳️ Local elections
🔥 Check this out
Welcome to the 38 new subscribers since our last edition, many as a result of my Twitter thread on SpAd Transfer windows … If you are new here, my name is Jimmy McLoughlin, a former Downing Street adviser turned podcaster. I write this notebook on the most interesting things I have seen on the future of work, jobs, technology and somewhat occasionally politics.
🧨 Guido Fawkes on the future of British Media
Guido Fawkes was one of the first people in Europe to harness the new power of the internet for the media . He founded the blog in 2005 and was the original political blogger and remains the most pre eminent one to this day. Many blogs were swallowed by the traditional media - a path that I believe will happen for podcasts - the similarities between the mediums are striking, low barriers to entry, but actually quite difficult to master the consistent content creation required*
This week, Guido had a post on the state of British broadcast media, looking at new entrants such as GB News and TalkTV. Away from gossip and tittle tattle that are the mainstay of the website, Guido’s rare ‘long reads’ and editorials are always well worth a read.
He was one of the first to see the likelihood of a Conservative/Liberal coalition ahead of the 2010 election, the change coalition and many of Westminster’s media stars, begin their careers there, Juliet Samuel, Alex Wickham, Harry Cole and Tom Harwood to name a few.
The overall thesis in the post is there is too much political content being created, and broadly it is all rather similar sensationalist / gotcha moments. He goes onto say that it will be smaller, more agile and ‘narrowcasters’ that will be more successful and impactful. It chimes with my view that any public facing organisation will have to build its own media platform.
Although a clear stand out exception to gotcha interviews recently has been Sophy Ridge on Sky News, her interview with trans MP, Jamie Wallis was an outstanding masterclass in how gentle and thoughtful questions can provide genuine and revealing answers. It will be interesting to see how Laura Kuenssberg’s show takes over primetime BBC Sunday morning slot in the Autumn. It is certainly a new generation of interviewer taking over from the boomer generation of Paxman / Neil. It reflects the changing nature of society.
What I find slightly frustrating is that the mainstream media’s political interview seem to breed like rabbits, whereas business interviews in the UK seem to having the breeding capacity of Panda’s.
There is an absolute dearth of business and entrepreneurial content covered by the mainstream outlets, Radio 4 dedicates about 15 mins of the 3 hour Today Programme to business, and even that has been scaled back. It does though leave a gap for the likes of Steven Bartlett, Secret Leaders and myself who are valiantly trying to make business & entrepreneurship seem sexy to a new generation.
As Rishi Sunak said when he came on Jimmy’s Jobs earlier in the year, one of the biggest things business can do is to try and create a more ambitious British culture.
After our success of the Sunak interview, we are going to be interviewing more Cabinet Ministers and senior politicians and we’ll continue quizzing them on their specific jobs and how their departments are helping to support jobs of the future.
*There are other occasional outliers such as ConservativeHome that was founded by Tim Montgomerie but is now run as a proper commercial entity by Mark Wallace.
💰 Announcing the Governor of the Bank of England
Oliver Shah in his column this morning said that the Bank of England needs to be ‘less Delphic and more human’ in its communications.
This is always a challenge for politicians and leaders of institutions, particularly when they are dealing with a lot of complicated and inter related factors, always has been and always will be.
How do you make the Bank, a 300 year institution relatable to a new generation, how can they attract new and diverse talent?
Well I am excited to say that Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, will be the opening guest for Season 5 in a few weeks. We know that they are responsible for setting interest rates and keeping inflation low, but there is a lot else that the Bank covers.
In the 45 mins, we covered an extraordinary amount.
how you go about de stabilising another country’s economy.
where he sees jobs of the future coming from
how a 300 year old institution recruits for the future
why he sees a big fintech future in Leeds
what he makes of the future of crypto and whether he owns any
when we’ll see a female governor
how WFH has impacted the economy.
It is an extraordinary interview, sign up to know when it drops / airs / released (apply the term that most fits your generation)
We do have slots available for sponsorship of that particularly episode and in the next issue of the notebook, we’ll delve more into how the podcast makes money. Our new partnerships page is here.
🇦🇷 Maradona shirt and NFTs
There is plenty of people who think that NFTs are over hyped and over valued and now have a great example to back this up - the individual that brought Jack Dorsey’s first tweet as an NFT, has lost $2.9 million in value.
However, in a world of abundance, there can be no doubt that our relationship with art and particularly collectibles is changing, demonstrated by the fact that Diego Maradona’s shirt that he wore for that famous match against England has sold for $8.75 million dollars. A good decision by the player, Steve Hodge who asked him to swap shirts.
In contrast, Geoff Hurst’s England winning shirt sold for £90k in 2000 … you can only imagine the price it would fetch today, probably rivals London property in terms price inflation.
We did an episode with Hugo McDonough on MyNFT.com on the podcast at the end of last year, where we attempted to do an explainer into NFTs.
🐏 Derby County relegated
50 years ago today, Derby were crowned Champions of the whole of England, winning the first division title under Brian Clough, yesterday they were relegated to the third tier for the first time in my lifetime. It brings me sadness to write that, but perhaps for not the reasons I would have expected at the start of the season.
I’m sad because it brings to an end my most remarkable season as a Derby fan. I had a similar moment just before England played italy in the Euro final, sad that the most amazing campaign as an England fan was over, win or lose, the journey was at an end. No more friends around for beers, no more random chats at bus stops with strangers and no more impromtu street parties.
I have written and spoken extensively on the #SaveDerbyCounty campaign, it looks like we’ll manage the primary objective with American crypto and logistics entrepreneur, Chris Kirchner purchasing the club.
But ultimately, the hurdles on the pitch proved too much, when Derby were deducted -21 points in the autumn, the Dad’s Army of ageing pensioners and young guns led by Wayne Rooney, could have splintered and not bothered. Instead, they had one heck of a go at the greatest escape, and gave many fans some of their best moments supporting the Rams.
In January when the situation looked really dire and we might not meet the EFL deadline of funds by 31st Jan. I started frantically thinking of how I could ramp the issue up the national agenda (amongst partygate and Russian troops building up Ukrainian border). I didn’t know really what else I could do.
The below tweet from the Chief Football Writer at The Times, Henry Winter started a chain reaction.
I teamed up with my old Westminster friend, Ryan Bourne who is now one of the world’s leading economists and we started running Twitter Town Halls, which attracted thousands of people. We formed a Derby County group of creators, who all shared ideas and urged each other in our creative endeavours.
Be it podcasts like Talk Derby To Me or Steve Bloomers Washing, writers like Ollie from Derby County Blog, talented young designers like Jake Barker and fan groups such as the Punjabi Rams. It has deepened a set of only tangential relationships that previously existed and we all now have a lot more people to go to games with!
The football club could have gone the similar way of Bury and Macclesfield, dying without the national agenda really noticing, but the sheer will and noise that Derby fans have created have stopped this happening thus far, although there are many hurdles still to get over, but if we go bust now at least we made a noise.
It wasn’t just players who were doing their bit on the pitch, a football club employs many people, many of those people could have also taken the opportunity to jump ship and look for other opportunities. In fact it probably would have been a rational career move, but football and being rational are not bedfellows. Whilst the executive layer of the club disappeared, people like Owen Bradley stepped up to become a prominent non playing face of the club. The media production facilities of the club have been extraordinary.
The City of Derby itself has undergone an explosion of creativity trying to save the club and as Michael Gove’s Levelling Up white paper observed the social capital of a place comes from the stories and the social narrative that a city can tell itself.
It is a challenge for those cities, towns and regions who have seen their economies fundamentally shift in the last 30-40 years. What is the modern day story they tell of themselves and who tells it. This is part of the reason Mayors and further devolution are important.
Well, the city of Derby has potentially an amazing story that it can tell itself from the last nine months, I include some of my favourite videos below.
Even if Derby County can get over the financial hurdles, it has a long and hard road ahead of it, but having spent 19 of the last 20 seasons in the Championship (the only other season being when they registered the lowest points total on record in the Premier League), I am quite looking forward to some new away days and being the biggest fish in the league.
A video summing up the season, you’ll have to click to expand
When the team was relegated on Bank Holiday Monday at QPR, a load of Derby fans turned up to welcome the team back to the training ground:
And finally, I remember when the idea of a march was first mentioned on a Twitter Town Hall - I wasn’t sure how many would turn up, maybe 1,000 tops I thought. Well I am happy to be proved wrong on that one.
A piece of unloved concrete freeway that goes over the railway tracks that were part of the foundations of Derby, has now become a part of the fabric and tapestry of the City as over 10,000 Rams fans marched over it like an army towards its final battle.
Local elections
I just wanted to give a quick shout out to two old political friends who won in the local elections last week, Dan Hamilton in Wandsworth and Dave Skelton in Enfield.
Both have stood and come closer to becoming Members of Parliament, it says a lot about their character and their commitment to their local areas that they have both put themselves up for local council level, and I know both will throw themselves into it with full gusto.
Thousands of people are dedicated local councillors and paid £15k for a lot of extra work. I hope Dan & Dave make it to the green benches eventually.
All politics is local after all ..
Check this out
Graham Ruddick writes a good piece on who speaks for business in Britain? What are the new outlines in the post pandemic world. Is time up for the archaic institutions such as CBI, BRC and British Chambers of Commerce? A theme we shall return to
Watch this: Navalny, an extraordinary documentary in to Putin’s biggest opponent, really well shot. The trailer is below and it is available on BBC iPlayer.
End of the Notebook …
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Until next time!
Interesting, but then you refer to Ridge, CNN, BBC. So I won't be back.