This half-hour radio 4 programme on the increasingly prevalent use of pilot-less drones in war gives a nice overview of the subject. Being so short, it doesn't go into some of the thornier issues surrounding their use - the law on extrajudicial executions, the differences in accountability between military and CIA use of drones - but it's extremely enlightening nonetheless.
Google has added a new section to its Google News service that aims to highlight "in-depth pieces of lasting value" culled from its regular aggregate sources of journalism. The service is called Spotlight, and it uses one of Google's infamous computer algorithms to automatically select items of "investigative journalism, opinion pieces, special-interest articles, and other stories of enduring appeal", according to the search giant.
Now far be it from me to question the coding genius behind this particular aspect of the world's most dominant media organisation, but when I had a quick look at the Spotlight page for a UK audience I was served with a top 5 that included two unremarkable blog postings from sports journalists, a picture caption from the Daily Mail about the christening of Charlotte Church's new baby, and an old Andy Murray match report from the US Open. The only item that came even close to fitting the "lasting value" description was from the New Yorker.
Further down the list I find more celeb trash (Eternally Youthful Demi Moore denies having any plastic surgery!), a bit more unremarkable sport, a Times rant about idle youngsters from Michael Portillo, The Sun's review of a recent music festival and two of The Onion's less amusing bits of whimsical nonsense.
Of the 17 items Spotlighted, two or three might be worthy of further attention beyond the regular news cycle. At a push.
Sorry Google, but maybe (gasp!) an algorithm might not be up to the job of defining journalism of lasting value. You could always hire a living, breathing editor to do it for you.
Fear not, Ian. When the sites on which Google exercises its parasitic algorithms are snug behind pay-walls there might be a few more living editors (and reporters) around to produce journalism of lasting value, not just to trawl the internet for it.