Page three of today’s Sheffield Star. Bottom of the nibs column.

So yeah, “cat doesn’t need rescuing” is probably the weakest story you’d want to print in a regional newspaper on any given day.

You certainly wouldn’t want to print it twice.

Page seven of today’s Sheffield Star.

Printing a crappy story once may be regarded as a misfortune. Printing it twice looks like carelessness.

Using the word “stranded” twice in the first par (hat tip: Sarah Whittle) is…well…

Johnston Press chief Ashley Highfield recently gave an interview in which he boasted that all their papers ran at a “healthy” profit margin of over 20%. Good to know maintaining that level of profit in a contracting industry hasn’t had a noticeable effect on quality.

Diane Abbott’s unfortunate twitter exchange on the caucasian penchant for the devious has been the subject of every radio phone in and TV news talking heads segment today, with many decrying the comments as racism.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I’ve been quick to accuse people of that and worse in my time - often when they’ve committed no greater crime than lack of tact and slowness of thought. Occasionally, I’m ashamed to admit, I’ve been quicker to accuse because of political leaning or a past display of prejudice.

But what’s more important, from a moral standpoint - the content of Abbott’s tweet, or the way one responds to it?

The league of white, male, privileged, relatively rich people queuing up to feign hurt or distress at such comments on the telly is frankly, unseemly. It’s impolite. It’s ungentlemanly and crass. As a relatively rich, straight white man who lives in a good neighbourhood, I’d like to respectfully ask them to button it.

Some of my ancestors did some pretty horrible things to the rest of the world. Things that bring shame on my heritage. And now, arguably in part as a result of those horrible things, I enjoy a comfortable existence.

If I have to take a minuscule amount of time away from enjoying the fruits of those horrible things to be (perhaps unfairly) vilified for it, so be it. Call it a free punch and take it like a grown up.

So when Twitter allows its users to decide for themselves how they want to use the service, and plans their development around those ideas, it works really well:

With Twitter having made its way to the mainstream, one early tweeting convention has brought a nerdy flavor along for the ride. It can be a bit jarring to come across Heidi Montag tweeting about her “#superficial_album,” using the pound sign to make her tweets more likely to appear in searches and become trending topics. Though we might forget where that # originated, the record shows where credit is due — and it’s to an individual Twitter user.

Se also retweets.

On the other hand, when Twitter decides it knows best, and tries to force its users to use the service in a particular way, it tends to go less well.

Twitter’s official iPhone app, formerly Loren Brichter’s Tweetie and an otherwise awesome client, got a lot of negative reactions from the recent addition of the Quick Bar, a mandatory trending-topics banner on top of the tweet list. A lot of people really hate it, calling it the “dickbar” and often abandoning the Twitter app entirely because of it. Its initial implementation as a floating overlay over anything you were doing in the app was far worse. Now, it’s just at the top of the main timeline, and it scrolls with the list. But it’s still offensive to most people who hated its debut, because making it scroll with the list didn’t solve the problem of it being there and being mandatory.

All I’m saying is that had Twitter learned anything from its own history, it probably wouldn’t have foisted a watered down dickbar -a dickbutton, if you will - on the top icon level of the official iPhone app. I’m guessing it also would have thought twice before deciding it didn’t want users to be able to see their retweets in a single place. That’s all I’m saying.

Is it time for Apple to make good on its promise of deep Twitter integration, and provide an iOS level Twitter reader?

Yesterday’s Wikileaks debate at Docfest was truly fascinating, and featured an absolutely stellar panel - data journalist James Ball, Judith Ehrlich, director of The Most Dangerous Man in America, a documentary about Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith and “wikivisionist” @exiledsurfer.

The whole discussion can be heard in the link in my previous post, and my take on WL seemed to be shared by some members of the panel. I’ve always been of the opinion that Wikileaks, as is the case with any political actor, was much more interesting before it became the story. Further, though, yesterday’s discussion leads me to think that it’s not just the quality of the story that has been damaged by the iconization of Julian Assange, but the good that it can do for the world.

The suggestion by @exiledsurfer (iirc) that the channels for whistleblowers to leak to WL have closed, and that no new information has been leaked to WL in 12 months is disappointing. In a way, the whole idea of Wikileaks is unavoidably self defeating. It has to be based upon a cultish dedication to the open information philosophy in order to change how the world thinks about secrecy, but perhaps the practical implementation of a service for whistleblowers requires one too many compromises for Assange.

The conclusion must therefore be that Wikileaks has, in a way, served its purpose. It has shown what is possible, and changed public perception of data, information, privacy and secrecy forever. As James Ball says, “Google wasn’t the first search engine, Windows wasn’t the first operating system.” It now falls to others, perhaps even the mainstream media to appropriate the techniques and ideas of Wikileaks and build on them.