Earlier in the year, Richard Sambrook (the former director of BBC News) wrote an article for The Guardian in which he argued that 24-hour news channels were no longer relevant in the modern world. This week, with news reaching The Independent that his thoughts are being taken seriously inside the BBC, I feel like it's time to put across an alternate point of view.

Here are six reasons I believe Sambrook is wrong.

1. News channels don't need to break news first

Cable news established the 24-hour news habit, but today social media and mobile phones fulfill the instant news needs of consumers better than any TV channel can. Twitter – and increasingly live blogs of breaking news events – consistently beat 24-hour TV channels. Being first – the primary criterion for 24-hour news channels – is increasingly the least interesting and effective value they offer.

Sambrook is right to say that the ability of television channels to deliver lines of breaking news at high speed is limited in comparison to online sources, whether accessed through mobile phones or social media. But most online and social media outlets are poor at putting those lines of breaking news into context. Indeed, at present, news channels are equally poor at this.

In my vision of a news channel, a line of breaking news would appear on screen, in much the same way as it appears online. Perhaps, "Valco supermarket chain in administration". I don't need the channel to break away from whatever it is reporting to bring me this news – it can simply appear on screen. That is the benefit of the visual medium.

Then, within a short period (say within fifteen minutes or half an hour), the BBC can put one of its expert business correspondents on the air to discuss that news in context. They can tell me the relevance of this to the City, to individuals, and perhaps even bring a degree of response from their journalistic contacts.

There is no need to discuss the news immediately and constantly repeat a single line accompanied with endless speculation. Instead, the channel should wait until there is something to report, and report it in a detailed and intelligent way.

2. News channels needn’t conform to expensive norms

The infrastructure behind a 24-hour news channel is impressive – and formidably expensive. The biggest cost comes from having created a machine that has to be fed. Every 15 minutes we go back to our reporter in the field for an update on what's happened since the last time we visited them. Most of the time the answer is "nothing".

Going back to a reporter in the field every fifteen minutes is not only expensively, it's also irritating. There is no need to do this. There are two reasons news channels do this: to fill time, and to follow the structure of a conventional network news bulletin every half hour.

We'll return to the former, but the latter is simply farcical. There is no reason (beyond "it's what we've always done") for 24-hour news channels to follow the structure of a conventional news bulletin. There is no reason why we have to return to the same correspondent to repeat the same news every hour. This is a problem of the format, not of the medium. A much more open-ended structure is possible.

3. News channels needn’t carry everything live

Newsgathering becomes a sausage machine, dedicated to filling airtime. Hours a day are spent on live feeds waiting for something, anything, to happen. The editor can't risk broadcasting a different report or going live somewhere else in case he misses the start and a rival channel can claim to be "first".

Of course, there is no reason to do this other than it being what rivals do. Every Wednesday, I cringe as presenters on television and radio fill in anticipation of Prime Minister's Questions, which starts a variable number of minutes after midday. Every Wednesday, I wonder why no broadcaster has had the bright idea of scheduling a five-minute discussion previewing the content, and then starting the coverage, cleanly and professionally at 12.05, through the simple use of a few minutes' delay.

The number of people who are insistent on watching Prime Ministers' Questions absolutely live is probably tiny. I know that I, for one, would prefer to watch a slick production with informed commentary and analysis rather than an unedifying scramble every week.

4. News channels needn’t uselessly fill time

The need to fill airtime – and particularly the need to be seen to be live – means that in the heat of the moment questionable editorial judgments can be made. Everything seems to be "breaking news". In the last 12 months we've seen the BBC showing live pictures of an empty courtroom in the US, eagerly anticipating the sentencing of already convicted kidnapper Ariel Castro – a story of interest to few if any in the UK.

There is a need to fill airtime. There is not a need to fill airtime with live content. With 24-hours at their disposal, and with less of an emphasis on a presenter reading a single headline every time news breaks, there is much greater scope for in-depth reporting and interviews with newsmakers. Watch an hour of any 24-hour news channel, and you'll almost certainly see an interview cut short, often for no good reason. Allow these to be much more open ended, and repeat them (in edited form, with expert analysis) and much of the airtime will be filled. As with Prime Minister's Questions, make much more extensive use of live delays and on-the-fly editing to increase the standard of presentation, and to allow the programme to naturally flow.

Similarly, I can see no reason why these channels don't make the most of the available air time to show more "explainers". I think an occasional airing of an updated 15 minute background package on what's actually happening in Ukraine would be a valuable service a news channel could offer. And it would fill time at low cost.

5. News channels can show pre-recorded packages

The number of stories that are conveyed by live "as it happens" pictures is vanishingly small. Many stories – the economy, climate change – aren't best served by pictures; others (inside Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan or Zimbabwe) often don't have pictures available until days after the event; many more work better with a well crafted, tightly edited package rather than a live feed.

There is no reason for 24-hour news channels to be so focused on live pictures. Well-crafted, tightly-edited packages would be welcomed by viewers over somebody standing in the rain reporting nothing.

6. Sambrook's vision doesn't fulfill the BBC’s purpose

What might a reconfigured on-demand news service look like?

Sambrook's suggested on-demand news service (I haven't quoted his whole plan, for it is far too long) involves people actively participating in creating their own bulletin. This is precisely the opposite of what I believe the BBC should be doing.

We, the people, have terrible news values. The more the BBC tries to align itself with our values, the more it degrades its worth. We need to be told what we need to be told. We need experts to fight for coverage of their areas. We need to know what matters, not what we want to know. And we place our trust in the BBC to make those decisions for us.

If the BBC won't make those decisions, but will defer to us, then there is no point in the BBC existing. I can ferret out news that interests me from a wide variety of sources without the Beeb's help. And in the areas in which I have a particular interest, that's exactly what I do.

But the BBC, and its news channel, should be about expert contextualisation. It should be the outlet which says "actually, this isn't an important story, so we're not covering it in depth" more often that it says "sit up and pay attention, this is boring but important".

It should make the most of genuine experts in their field – including fields it currently covers with a laughable level of credibility, like science and technology. The BBC news channel should be the "news channel of record". It should cover things in depth and intelligently. It should not chase ratings, and it should not be in a race to read out lines of news with no context. It should not be obsessed with live coverage. It should edit, curate, and analyse.

In his analysis, Sambrook conflates the current output of news channels with the medium of news channels itself. He uses the argument that current output is poor to suggest that there should be no output. I disagree.

I think that news channels can be done better – particularly the BBC News channel, which doesn't have to answer to shareholders, and doesn't have to chase ratings. It should be held to a higher standard, and should drive the quality of 24-hour news up. The BBC should not abandon it altogether.

I am implacably opposed to capital punishment. There are few issues on which I'm so certain. The state should not kill people. As I've said before, humanity is better than that.

It was only a few weeks ago that I learned that the European Union forbids the export of drugs used for killing prisoners in the USA through lethal injection. For perhaps the first time, I felt a real swell of pride at what seemed a surprisingly strong and principled stand. It is rare to see ethics translated to action on this scale.

But today, Owen Dyer's article in the BMJ (paywalled) has given me pause for thought. This excellently-written article discusses, in some detail, the difficulties drug shortages have caused for the lethal injection programme in several states.

Dyer's article talks through a number of horrendous botched executions, as well as the methods (some illegal) by which states have attempted to procure drugs for lethal injections. I found it a deeply thought-provoking piece. Towards the end, Dyer comes to this point:

Arkansas’ attorney general last year called the state’s capital punishment system “completely broken … it’s either abolish the death penalty or change the method of execution.”

Initiatives are now cropping up in state houses to return to more violent methods. These methods are not so far behind us as some imagine. The last execution by firing squad was in 2010, the last by gas chamber was in 1999, and the last hanging occurred in 1996. The last use of the electric chair was in 2013 in Virginia.

Is it better to bend our principles to supply drugs and assure a more humane death, or to withhold them and ensure a violent death?

The dilemma is complicated by the knowledge that violent methods have less public support, so may – or may not – bring about the end of capital punishment in the USA sooner than non-violent methods.

I tentatively lean in the direction of the greater good, and suggest that drugs are withheld. But it is certainly a complicated issue.

Tomorrow, I'm going to post a review of Jeff Jarvis's Public Parts. Before I do, I feel compelled to write this post, which I probably should have written a long time ago, and certainly before my review of Gutenburg the Geek.

I think Jeff Jarvis is brilliant. I don't always agree with everything he says, but I certainly agree with him far more than I disagree with him. And, beyond that, I respect him. I respect his thoughtful consideration of issues. I respect his decision to live life in public. I respect his high quality writing.

In fact, Jeff's one of the few people whose writing I actively seek out, as I'm always keen to hear his view. I've read BuzzMachine since the beginning. I can't remember how I found his blog – I guess somebody must have linked to it – but I vividly remember reading his first post in the aftermath of 9/11. And I don't think there's any other blog I've followed so consistently since. I also love watching him on TWiG, though I arrived rather late to that party.

But, in the spirit of Public Parts, I feel like I should say something publicly. Jeff: I'm sorry.

I'm sure Jeff won't remember a tiny interaction we had nigh on a decade ago, but it has played on my mind for some time. In the run up to the 2005 UK General Election, Jeff kindly posted a link to my blog on his. This was kind of a big deal. He was (and is) a well-respected, highly trafficked blogger and journalist. I was a teenager blogging from my bedroom. And yet, for reasons I either can't recall or didn't even formulate at the time, I wrote a snippy post about being called a "British blogger" – which I was – and admonishing him for not using the site's trackback facility. Jeff responded with a comment that I've always taken as infused with (entirely appropriate) bemused frustration. Ever since, I've worried that my post might have pissed him off.

I can't explain why I wrote what I wrote. I don't know why my response to praise was criticism. I can only put it down to a certain teenage immaturity and egotism.

You talk in Public Parts about some of the jerks that lurk online. You probably won't remember the incident, but I do, and I think, on this occasion, that I was a bit of a jerk towards you. And I'm truly sorry.

With all of that said publicly, I hope that I can get on and review Public Parts with everything on the table. Which I will do tomorrow.

As of 7th May, I will have been blogging for 11 years, mostly here at sjhoward.co.uk. Until today, the structure of the site had changed little in that time.

A few moments ago, I flipped the switch on the biggest ever overhaul of the site. I've rewritten every single template file (the files that power the design of the site) from scratch, and cut the number from 16 to 5. This helps to make the site zippier. More importantly to me, it means that the morass of code which I've cultivated over the last decade has been cut down to size and made navigable again, making maintenance a heck of a lot easier.

When people come to this site, they tend to access specific posts rather than the homepage. In the new incarnation of the site, the content of posts is front and centre. To make content easier to read, I've increased the text size considerably, and stripped back the design excesses. Templates no longer differ by type of post. I've reduced the colour palette and applied its principles more consistently across the site. I've drastically cut the number of extraneous links to irrelevant things scattered around the page. For example, while every page had a link to Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in the old design, this has now been removed. I think you can probably find your own way there.

Similarly, I've radically simplified the typography, now relying almost exclusively on two typefaces: Playfair Display and Raleway. I think some people might criticise the use of Playfair as the main typeface for copy – but I think it works well given the larger font size in use throughout. I'd be delighted to hear your thoughts.

I've moved contextual information to a smaller sidebar accompanying each post. This effectively reduces the prominence of this information in many cases, but by having it appear in a consistent position throughout the site, it is perhaps easier to find.

The redesign remains a work in progress, and I'll no doubt tweak it over time. That said, this hasn't been a rushed job… I've been plugging away at it, off and on, since early 2011.

Overall, the design is much cleaner, and (I like to think) easier on the eye. As I've experimented over the years, some people have commented that this sort of design is a bit sparse – especially compared to the smorgasbord of fonts, colours and styles used in the previous version. I think the new version looks better – but if you disagree, rest assured that, whatever my intentions now, clutter will no doubt accumulate as assuredly over the next eleven years as it has over the past eleven.

Anyhow, please do leave any thoughts or comments you have on the new design. After all, as the designer, it's hard for me to be objective – and the design is, in the end, aimed more at the reader than the writer.

I’d like to wish all of my readers a happy and prosperous 2014!

As it’s a new year, I’m making a couple of changes to the site. In 2014, I won’t be publishing any 2D posts. I think the last few posts demonstrate that I’ve really lost interest in that format after almost a year, and it has become increasingly difficult to make anything other than tenuous links between recommendations as my archive has dwindled.

So “out with the old”, and in with the… old. In 2012, I did a very popular series called photo-a-day, and I’ve decided to resurrect it for 2014, starting later today.

Weekend reads will continue to be published each Friday, and book reviews on alternate Wednesdays. And I’ll try and do a bit more ad hoc blogging, too.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a great 2014.

Until June 2007, this website offered an email subscription service whereby subscribers would receive copies of all posts by email, along with a few added extras now and again. By 2007, RSS feeds and the like made this seemed horribly old-fashioned, and I closed the service.

These days, however, I find myself more and more reliant on curated email newsletters from a lot of my favourite sites. I don’t have the time to trawl RSS feeds which have a low signal:noise ratio – I want somebody to pick out the best bits for me.

And so, today, I’m re-introducing this site’s email service. It is a little different to the one I closed five years ago. This time round, it will consist of a single weekly email with the best posts from this site, and other links and bits and bobs I’ve come across elsewhere but not deemed worthy of posting on here. It will come out on a Sunday, but (unlike the posts on here) it will always be sent in “real time” – so it might be late some weeks, or early others. It will always be freshly baked.

So sign up today – either by following this link, or (if you’re reading this on sjhoward.co.uk) using any of the dark grey boxes. I’ll be sending the first edition a little before midnight tonight – so if you want to collect a complete set, get signed up quickly!

Today is my “blogging birthday” – ten years ago today I wrote my first blog post, and have continued waffling more or less continuously since! In that time, I’ve written a little over 2,000 posts, had a little over 32 million hits and just a squeak over 7.6 million unique page impressions.

Thanks to everyone that reads the stuff I put up on here. Ten years ago, it would have seemed inconceivable that I’d still be blogging in the same place when I was 28 years old and a fully qualified doctor. Similarly the idea that I’ll still be here ten years hence seems a little crazy today. But who knows? If you keep reading, perhaps I’ll keep writing!

It seems a remarkable statistic, but this is the 2,000th published post on this blog.

In fact, the total is somewhat higher than that, as there have been some posts that have disappeared over the years through various times I’ve broken the site and had to restore from a backup, and that sort of thing. There are also some things which I’ve published as pages rather than blog posts, which don’t count towards that total. But, regardless of all of that, as of the publication of this post, there are 2,000 blog posts up on this site, ready to read. My contribution is still outgunned by yours – there are (at the time of writing) 4,893 published comments. And some 1.3 million unpublished spam comments have been caught before publication on here by Akismet.

Later this year, I’ll have been blogging for a decade, which seems a ludicrously long time. I’ll have to celebrate in some way. Maybe I’ll bake a cake.

Anyway, this is just a quick post to share that bit of statporn… and, of course, to thank you for continuing to read the blog!

There are few things that are further from my area of expertise than coffee retailing, but here’s a thought that occurred to me last week, and that’s been festering ever since.

All the major coffee shop chains and many local coffee shops have loyalty schemes these days. These are often of a particular type: buy X coffees and received the Yth coffee free. The generosity of such schemes varies widely: X=5 at McDonald’s, X=9 at Caffe Nero, and X=15 at Starbucks. Some chains do something slightly different – Costa, for example, gives points equivalent to 5% of the customer’s spend to be redeemed on future purchases, but let’s set those alternative schemes to one side.

The thing that links all of the common schemes is they are effectively fixed ratio reinforcement schedules. That is, they entice customers to buy more coffee by promising a freebie every X visits. But a wealth of literature from psychology reveals that this isn’t really very effective in getting people to form habits, not least because their motivation to consume drops off immediately after claiming free coffee Y.

A far more effective method of getting people to form habits is to build a variable ratio reinforcement schedule. As with gambling, this means that the punter / customer never knows when the win / free product is going to materialise. This keeps motivation consistently high.

In practice, what I’m suggesting is that the ratio of visits to free coffees is kept the same (X+1:1), but that the free coffees are dispensed at random. This would appeal to me: I’d love to come to pay for a coffee and be unexpectedly told that this one’s free. An infrastructure change would be necessary for some coffee shops – stamp cards wouldn’t really work well for this – but, for example, Starbucks already uses swipe cards which could be made to work this way fairly easily.

Alternatively, instead of randomising at the individual customer level, the tills could be set to randomise across all customers. Or, to make it even simpler, with every coffee purchased, each customer could be given a scratchcard with a 1 in X+1 chance of winning a free coffee. The latter might even be preferable, as there would then be two “special” visits: the one in which the customer wins, and the one in which they redeem their winning scratchcard. The customer would feel rewarded for their loyalty twice as often at no extra cost to the vendor.

If judging on cost alone, why would I visit retailer A, where there is no chance of getting my drink for free on a particular visit, when I could visit retailer B, where there is a 1 in X+1 chance? Economic discounting would probably play against traditional schemes: I’d probably rather have the chance of a free coffee today than the certainty of a free coffee after X visits.

Of course, retailers would have to be careful about how they presented this scheme: it would likely be to the detriment of any brand to associate themselves with gambling. Yet this seems like it should be a minor point, which should be easily overcome.

So here’s the thing: this idea appeals to me as a consumer, a wealth of literature suggests that it could increase trade, yet (to my knowledge) no-one uses it. Why not? Where’s the rub? What have I overlooked in my assessment? Tell me why I’m wrong!

A little over twelve months ago, I was asked on a discussion forum to make predictions about the retail sector in 2012. I’d forgotten all about this until today, when somebody pointed out my prescience!

On 30th December 2011, I posted the following (forgive the reformatting!):

M&S is going to have a bad year: They seem to be doing everything humanly possible to disassemble the formula that brought them back from the brink a few years ago. On the other hand, WHSmith’s profits are up, even if their sales are down – I reckon they can ride out the storm for a while. My predictions for chains that will collapse are JJB (frankly surprised they’re still around); Past Times (feels like it’s had its day, so to speak); and Mothercare / ELC (already pulling out of town centres, doesn’t bode well).

And, indeed, M&S had a bad year, WHSmith did reasonably well, Past Times closed, JJB closed, and Mothercare is on the brink.

You might think I’d feel proud of my amazing predictive abilities, but in fact, I feel mainly freaked out – especially since my history with predictions isn’t great. It’s also weird to think that I correctly predicted thousands of job losses – it gives me a creepy sort of guilt, as though I’m somehow responsible.

So given the discomfort I’ve inadvertently caused myself, the only prediction I’ll make for this year is that the economy will fully recover with no more companies folding, and unemployment will hit record low levels. Though if that turns out to be true as well, I might displace Mr Soult as the media’s favourite north east retail analyst!