But in the meantime there has been a revolution upstream of journalists, in the supply of information to us. Access to a newspaper library used to be the single most professionally important perk of a staff job. But in the last ten years all newspaper libraries have shrunk horribly. Last year, on the Independent, it rapidly became clear that almost any query could be answered more quickly on the internet than by asking the Mirror Group library. The only important English newspaper that cannot be read online is the Daily Mail.
American papers are even better.
An enormous amount of modern journalism consists of recycling clippings - it is cheaper. The web now lets you recycle clippings before they have even appeared in this country. The web-based databases that I have been talking about do not go back more than a year or two yet. The newspaper library is the sort of thing that CompuServe did well, which is why it is a shame to see it up for sale. It was one of the few online services that ever made money, because it sold valuable information to peo- ple who had to pay for it.