Opinions allowed

Fan though I am of Girls Aloud - Sound of the Underground was a throbbingly good Christmas No. 1 four years ago, while Racy Lacey (the bonus track on Chemistry) is 3 minutes of perfectly pure pop pap - I detected some signs of double-standards in their interview in this week’s New Statesman.

… the Girls have a complaint: none of their high-powered admirers has actually bothered to ask them what they think about politics…. says [Sarah] Harding: “It just isn't talked about in normal magazines and newspapers. We never get asked who we would vote for. It could be a general question to ask us in an interview, but it isn’t.”

Cheryl, Nicola, Nadine, Kimberley and Sarah are, you see, party political animals. Well, fair enough. I’ve nothing against popstar polymaths. However, they seem less willing to concede such latitude to politicians:

“Politicians know that we get listened to by more young fans than they do [says Cheryl]. That's why David Cameron said he fancied me. He was just trying to be cool. I bet he couldn't name a single song of ours. Do I fancy him? No! Politicians should stop trying to be cool and get on with running the country.”

To which I’m tempted to rejoin: pop stars should stop trying to be serious and get on with entertaining their fans.

Of course, in a sense, GA are right. Mr Cameron’s view of the aesthetics of members of popular beat-combos is perhaps not the most crucial piece of information we require in order to determine whether he should be handed the keys to Number 10. And yet popular opinion asserts that there is something ‘other’ about politicians, a stereotype some are attempting to debunk by showing how down wiv da kidz they truly are.

This conundrum illustrates a wider point - society’s disinclination to trust politicians unless they can identify with them. Fair enough, you might say.

But why? Why must we conflate the personal and the political? Is it the case that we do not have enough confidence to make up our minds for ourselves based on our own analysis of the facts as presented? And therefore must place our confidence in another’s hands? In which case we must be able to identify with them - culturally as well as politically - in order to know their decisions are in fact ours?

If so, this is an intellectually bankrupt argument.

Of course we must trust our politicians enough to feel sure they are presenting us with accurate and relevant information. But then it is up to us, as citizens, to form our own clear, cool judgments as to which policies are best able to solve society’s problems, and to vote for the party that best advocates our assessment. We should not abdicate this democratic right and duty to our politicians simply because it makes our lives easier.

Even if we do agree with Dave that Cheryl is fit.

There is such a thing as a free launch

The New Statesman e-mailed me t’other day to ask me to blog-up their re-launched website, www.newstatesman.com.

Which I am perfectly happy to do not least because they have adopted a permissive browsing policy, with all articles available free - and, more interestingly, an eight-year archive that can now be plundered by any casual visitor with no subscription required.

A trend is emerging: last week, the Independent website withdrew its annoying firewall (I can’t really believe people ever paid £1 to access each ‘blocked’ Indy article).

This is contrary to the New York Times’s policy. It’s over a year since the USA’s paper of record launched TimesSelect, which placed many op-ed articles beyond the reach of those not willing to fork out US$50 a year. The result? Their online presence is now turning a profit, but at the cost of the public conversation that universal reach allows.

It’s also a U-turn for the Indy. It was only last March that its chief executive, Ivan Fallon, commented to thegrauniad that the Indy ‘had no desire to give content away for free, and said the industry would need to embrace online charging.’ So why the change of heart?

Emily Bell, Grauniad Unlimited’s editor-in-chief , explained why back in October:

On our education site, a story earlier this year gloried in the headline "Necrophilia among ducks ruffles research feathers". Like the dolphin, it became our most popular story for days on end. This may demonstrate the effect Google has on any story carrying a word with sexual connotations in the headline, or indeed popular interest in animals doing strange things. But it also illustrates a key principle of web distribution - the value of a "long tail".

If you publish all your material continuously, although the top story of the day will still attract a high degree of interest, other stories being talked about elsewhere on the web can draw an equivalent or even bigger audience over time. A third of our traffic on Guardian Unlimited comes from stories more than a month old. Hardly surprising as we have 3m items in the archive, all of which attract fractional traffic on an individual basis, but collectively make a considerable impact. So when people ask me why we don't charge for the archive or at least put it behind a registration wall, this is a powerful reason why not.

This seems to be the conclusion that has now been reached by both the Indy and the Staggers.

Yet it’s not a universal truth. Pearson, which has controlling stakes in both the Financial Times and Economist, continues to firewall much of its comment and analysis, as well as its archive, with little sign of any change. It is perhaps part of these newspapers’ reassuringly expensive branding that they are premium products which subscribers will be attracted to precisely because of their exclusivity.