This website is no longer being updated.

Sam Parker’s journalism portfolio can now be found at: cuttings.me/users/samparkercouk

In addition he tweets as @samparkercouk.

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On this website are blogs and older articles. To see more recent stuff please visit the link above.

It started, like all blogs, as a labour of love, but sadly I no longer have the time to keep it updated. But I am happy for it to exist here in the ever-growing digital graveyard of forgotten blogs. At least until cuttings.me develops to function to redirect URLs.

Sam

It was the day that Charlie Brooker’s role as Twitterati royalty was turned on its head, and the writer was forced into a bewildered fire-fighting exercise as the angry Tweets rolled in. The reason? A Guardian column that saw him resemble that other giant of rib-tickling, sententious hyperbole, Bill Hicks, more than ever before.

Just as the late American comedian saved his strongest sermonizing – Old Testament style – for those he viewed as poisoning the public psyche, so too Brooker hit his finest form for years by slagging off tabloid journalists for the same crime. For Hicks’ infamous: ‘if you work in marketing: kill yourself’ read: ‘you’re wasting your life actively making the world worse.’

But where these comic soul mates begin to diverge is that Brooker, with his trademark, just-smelt-a-fart face, has to accept some pretty legitimate accusations of hypocrisy.

For a start: his own growing media profile has long relied upon ‘the warm cave of celebrity chef shag-shocks and tragic tot death- porn’ (a classic Brookerism) to thrive. From savaging TV with his early TVGoHome website, through to repeating the trick on Screenwipe, Brooker has gorged on the gruel served in the D-list celebrity workhouse with the same enthusiasm as any tabloid: he just made sure his shit came out the other end smelling a little smarter.

The newspaper that pursued the News of the World phone-hacking scandal so vehemently – Brooker’s Guardian (for it is, make no mistake, Brooker’s Guardian, despite his defense of ‘just being a freelancer’ – or was that same exemption for tabloid freelancers subbed out of his column?) – also commission their fair share of celebrity fluff. Their ‘Lost In Showbiz’ column is a high-brow take on low-brow culture that they probably imagine aligns them with the traditions of Chaucer, but the problem with this approach is that it ties you inextricably to the same appetites you’re sneering at, as Brooker knows as well as anyone.

Then there is his most high-profile project to date – a weekly current affairs show jointly created with David Mitchell, Lauren Laverne and Jimmy Carr – that thumps its left-wing agenda against your cranium with all the dull insistence of a depressed male stripper’s testicles in a public exhibition no one is really enjoying. Just as Brooker imagines tabloid hacks must require ‘a mental leap beyond the reach of Galileo’ to delude themselves that they’re contributing to honourable journalism, it must require a similar feat for Brooker to imagine that 10 O’Clock Live is genuinely contributing to constructive political debate in this country, when in reality its attention-deficit attempts at both debate and satire resemble the ‘banter’ levels of the average 6^th form common room.

There is a telling taunt in Brooker’s acerbic symphony. He tells tabloid hacks: “chances are you’re quite smart. And you probably love to write – or did, once…” I suspect this was the point that Charlie really got to them. The implication is clear: unlike him, they’ve sold out. Everyone starts off thinking they’re going to win a Pulitzer or write the Great British Novel at the weekends, but most of us end up churning out lowest common denominator candy floss for shadowy, media ring-masters with dubious tastes in right-wing governments. But not Charlie.

In this, there is more than a grain of painful truth. But what Charlie Brooker really has that most journalists do not isn’t a more accurate moral compass, or even just the ability to turn a wicked phrase. What sets him apart is the balls and entrepreneurial spirit it takes to set up your own satirical website in the late 90s, rather than stay with PC Zone until you’re made deputy editor and then retire in a death-rattle of averageness like the rest of us.

And here, for all the hypocrisy of the piece, is where intuitive journalists should stop debating how offensive Charlie has been and start asking themselves how he got in the position to offend them in the first place. It wasn’t with a degree from Oxford or via a Daddy in the Guardian news room. It was having the kittens-head-sized-cojones required to carve out an identity for himself in an industry where a million voices are bleating at once.

For all it feels a bit like Charlie has shat on his own kind, he is still making a salient point. Very few of us aspire to write malignant gossip about other people’s sex lives. Some of us may have to do it in order get started. But transcending all that takes an extra quality few people have.

We may not like it when his guns are turned on us but Brooker, like Hicks, can get away with being holier-than-thou, not because he’s very funny but because he embodies the essential truth of what’s he’s saying. I’m a journalist. I’ve wasted parts of my life actively making the world worse. But I’m not offended by the smug hypocrite – I admire and envy his right to be one.

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Last night, the Mail Online won the ‘digital innovation award’ at the 2011 Press Awards – presumably for managing to entice users who claim to despise everything the paper stands for with a killer celebrity gossip section. Meanwhile, the Guardian won the paper of the year for its role in Wikileaks.

On the surface of it then, a bad night for The Times – at least as far as the paywall debate goes. With subscriber figures still modest, formal recognition as an online pioneer, or the main crown as the ‘best paper’ altogether would have been welcome triumphs.

Yet despite this, last night’s results – in which the title claimed five individual writer awards – illustrates the strongest argument for why you should join me behind the paywall. Put simply: The Times has the finest collection of writers on any one publication in the UK by a country mile.

Around a year ago, I wrote a blog for GQ.com on the moral obligation of ‘valuing journalism enough to pay for it’ – inspired in no small part by the fact I was a struggling freelancer at the time. By and large I still stand by it.

But the moral or economic impetus isn’t the real factor behind why I encourage people to sign up. Last night, Caitlin Moran, David Robertson and Matthew Parris all won individual awards (two each for Caitlin and David), which only really scratches the surface of what is the The Times’ biggest strength.

Caitlin Moran is a critic and columnist not so much ‘on fire’ at the moment as tearing her way through the cosmos on a giant, ciggerette-shaped rocket. One of her awards last night paid tribute to her remarkable Lady Gaga interview in Berlin, but devotees will have noticed that everything, from her recent review of a Lily Allen documentary to a homage to holidaying in Aberystwyth has a quality of prose that seems to put Caitlin on a different planet from everyone else this year. It’s exhilarating to read, and not for nothing is @caitlinmoran the person all aspiring writers on Twitter wish they were best friends with.

Then, in a completely separate field altogether, there is George Caulkin (who didn’t win anything last night). A correspondent for the North-East, he is the only national football writer at work today who doesn’t seem to write about the area through a prism of clichés and received opinions. More than that though, he joins Matthew Syed, Simon Barnes and Patrick Barclay on a team of wonderfully distinctive and thought-provoking voices on the beautiful game.

Giles Coren, Robert Crampton, Hugo Rifkind, David Aaronvitch – even Frank Skinner – this could happily turn into a fawning tribute to brilliant individual writers. But the crucial part of this is that they all bat for the same team. Each of these names pushes the envelope in entertaining and challenging us from the pages (print and digital) of The Times. Each of them is worth paying for.

This is what makes The Times’ insistence that they ‘value the quality of their journalism enough to charge for it’ ring true, rather than sound like just a self-important excuse for sticking with an out-dated funding model.

For liberal-leaning, aspiring journalists like me, the fact that Rupert Murdoch is behind it all could be a source of anxiety. It shouldn’t be. Those still learning how to write should be devouring these people’s articles, not rejecting them to make some stand or other against Fox News – or more fool them if they don’t.

There are many things the Guardian, the Daily Mail, NOTW and others do magnificently. Comment Is Free is easily the most vibrant and engaging community platform in the UK. Live-blogging – when it stops trying to reinvent the wheel of news reportage and plays to its real strengths – is fascinating. Integrated web ads may well be our future.

But for me – and I suppose it is a matter of priorities – the most talented and distinctive writers in the country operating at the height of their game is a mouth-watering prospect worth dipping into your pocket for. After the best part of a year behind the paywall I can happily report: I like it here.

TIMESONLINE PROS:
Access to leading writers
Excellent navigation and design
No trolls – comments left by people actually engaged by topics
Paying for it makes you value and consider content far more (surprise, surprise)

TIMESONLINE CONS:
You’re logged out too frequently
Frustrating that articles can’t be freely shared via social media

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