Many of us have been saying it for years : “The BBC is not what it used to be.”

The reasons are many but one stands out. As London has gradually separated off from the views and values of the rest of the nation, so the Beeb has followed suit.

The once proud Corporation is now generally seen as run by a cadre of “metrosexual Guardianistas” — after the clunkingly leftist newspaper. The joke is that they are all balding 39-year-olds called Tristram. Not true, of course, but it strikes a real chord.

In fact, the Beeb is the biggest pensioner in the land, receiving around $6 billion (£3bn) in benefits every year in the form of the licence fee. This licence is levied on everyone in the country who watches television of any sort — even if they never sample the dubious delights of the BBC itself.

The Corporation is now so bloated and privileged — think of the International Olympics Committee where the President is addressed as Your Excellency — that it’s almost impossible to manage or control, especially by the small-beer programme-makers drafted in to do the job.

Today, we hear that the police may be called in to investigate alleged widespread fraud and misrepresentation.

The last Chairman, Michael Grade, a man of some stature in broadcasting, left suddenly to head up ITV, the Beeb’s main rival. Did he sense the disaster waiting to happen?

The previous top management was effectively decapitated by a rogue Government spin doctor for telling the truth about Iraq intelligence. So the Beeb is penalized both for telling the truth and for falsifying it. The lesson is that Government makes a poor bedfellow for any media organization priding itself on its integrity.

After the fiasco over the false allegations about the Queen, in which footage of a photoshoot with American photographer, Annie Leibovitz, was shown in the wrong order to make it look as if the Queen was storming out of the session when, in fact, she was coming in, the BBC has all but collapsed.

Its shaky amalgam of internal bureaucrats and outside production companies has been shown to be grossly inadequate. The once rigorous ethos and in-house training regimes have been largely abandoned in favour of roving freelance operatives who work on short-term contracts for every other broadcaster.

The oddly named BBC Trust has ordered an immediate suspension of all phone-in and interactive competitions after an internal investigation uncovered a string of editorial breaches. They include the flagship charity shows, Children In Need, Comic Relief and Sports Relief.

BBC Director General Mark Thompson (pictured) presented the findings of an internal audit to the Trust yesterday.

The Trust said it was “deeply concerned that significant failures of control and compliance within the BBC, and in some cases by its suppliers, have compromised the BBC’s values of accuracy and honesty.

“The Director General’s interim report to the Trust about additional editorial failings shows further deeply disappointing evidence of insufficient understanding amongst certain staff of the standards of accuracy and honesty expected, and inadequate editorial controls to ensure compliance with those standards.”

The recent debacle over the trailer for a documentary series about the Queen was just one example of many editorial breaches. It has also emerged that RDF Media, which made the series, used the same footage at a festival in Cannes, France, earlier in the year.

It’s now known that the BBC put fake winners on air during phone-in competitions for Children In Need, Comic Relief, Sport Relief and other programmes. It was fined $100,000 (£50,000) only last week for a similar event on the once much-loved children’s show, Blue Peter.

No word yet, though on sackings or resignations of senior BBC personnel, but after this catalogue of woes, it seems almost inevitable. At the least, Mark Thompson, the DG, and Peter Fincham, Controller of BBC1, should be participants in the head-rolling reality show.

Let’s hope they don’t have a phone-in competition for that.

In a post on the 4th of July, I claimed that U.S. vistors to Syntagma outnumbered Brits by 4 to 1. How wrong could I be!

That figure was one set in stone some time ago. Such statistics tend to stick in the mind to be repeated over and over.

I’ve just checked again and that ratio is now a staggering 89 to 1.

Even on our most British site — Royal Anecdotes – it’s now 24 to 1.

Thank you America. You’re the tops.

Sunday is a reflective day, so my thoughts naturally turned to the three resolutions I made back in March — New Year is the worst time for resolutions, I find, because the weather is so dismal it’s easy to be tempted away from them.

Here they are again :

1. Give up politics — news junkies are always neurotic nerds.
2. Fatblogging — lose 12lbs of winter pudge before summer (or was it Easter?)
3. Make time for writing offline.

So how have I done? … DABYL.

That’s an anagram because I can hardly bring myself to write the word. Clever clogs among Syntagma readers may be able to work it out.

Basically, #3 has been achieved. That was the easy one so I had to crack that at least.

However, #1 has been washed away because of a change of Prime Minister here in Britain. Not something you can just ignore, is it? Gordon Brown is rather dull though, so it should be easy to get that back on track.

The real failure is #2 — an easy one to fail at, I’m sure. The reasons are numerous. First, the weather has been so appallingly wet for months that I’ve not been able to venture out on my morning 5-mile photowalk except very sporadically.

Worse, my trampoline broke beyond repair and I’ve been wary about replacing it. It was only 3-feet in width so clearly not quite up to professional standards — but it was all that would fit into the office.

Mid-July and it’s still emptying down outside. Yesterday was St Swithun’s Day which means it will rain for the next 40 days and 40 nights. Why are these Biblical type prophesies always so depressing?

The result is that I’m starting again from scratch with a new scientific approach to fatblogging. I’ve made more room in the office and ordered an 8-foot trampoline with a guard rail to stop you bouncing off into thin air. A very easy thing to do on a 3-foot job.

I’ve also started on the GI program (glycaemic index) which is probably the most effective fitness programme ever invented (it says here). Miraculously, it has a cheat’s shortcut : eat 1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon everyday and the rest takes care of itself. Well, that’s what the book says. I’m going to try it anyway.

My only regrets? Tesco’s “outdoor bred” pork pies — I never knew they bred pork pies — and Californian Merlot, which washes them down very nicely. But you can’t have everything.

Maybe the cinnamon will help? Hmmm.

Today is Day 1. I’ll write a fatblog here every Sunday. How can you resist?

Mind how you go.

Last month I did a little piece on Tony Blair’s departure from office. I mentioned in passing that he was a something of a techno-dummy [British understatement].

I remember him at the British launch of Windows XP stumbling through a speech of eye-watering ineptitude. When he came to the bit where he had to explain what XP was, his wife had to step in and describe the product. Sooo embarrassing.

Anyway, now that he’s left office, more news of his monumental ignorance reaches Syntagma’s ears. It seems he’s bought his first cell/mobile phone — ever. It’s a red Motorola, which sounds like a freebie from Richard Branson to me.

After taking lessons in how to use the thing, he eventually managed to send a text message. The reply came back :

“Who are you?”

Perhaps “Take me to your leader” might have been better.

Back to the drawing board, Tone. No iPhone for Christmas for you.

Syntagma was recently 78,000 on Alexa — not a bad score given the number of sites out there.

Then, inexplicably, it started to rise. Up to 180,000.

Since I’ve switched to a Windows Vista machine with no Alexa toolbar it’s gone up to 325,282. Can this be my own doing for not supporting the number every time I go to the site?

No, Alexa is rubbish. Our traffic has risen enormously in the very months it’s gone from 78,000 to 325,000.

Why do we bother quoting these useless statistics?

Face it, we’ve all come under the cosh in the blogosphere at some time or other. It’s a bit tedious, isn’t it? DoshBlogging is a much better option — and it pays better too.

The Times (London) has a cluster of pieces today under the heading, Blogging for Dosh – the print version is much more comprehensive, so buy a copy if you can.

Apart from the now-mandatory two or three paragraphs on Darren Rowse, Mr Problogger, it looks at other moneymaking phenomena online, such as Perez Hilton, Julie Powell and Clotilde Dusoulier.

Tom Whitwell, whose blog, musicthing.co.uk, makes a bob or two, gives us “Ten ways to get rich blogging”. The best one for me is, “Keep your costs down”. He cites Perez Hilton, whose office is a coffee shop he inhabits all day for the price of a few lattes. Now that’s smart.

But read it yourself.

The Syntagma Story continued.

The word you most hear in connection with blogging is “passion”. Write about what you’re passionate about, is the general counsel given to new bloggers. Is that good advice? It’s now so engrained in the folklore of professional blogging as to be almost unchallengable.

I’m going to be counter-intuitive about this because, as a network owner of nearly two years standing, I’ve learnt a thing or two about passion. I’ve also found that situations aren’t always what they seem.

If you’re passionate about something, say, cats or Minoan amphora, you really have to be more than just knowledgeable about them. You must also be a very good writer — someone who can express the full depth and breadth of your ideas and well-stocked mind and carry them intact into other people’s consciousness.

Alas, very few are. Most are people who fizz for a while, then burn out when their efforts come to nothing. I call them Catherine Wheels.

At the commercial network level, bloggers who apply for jobs do want to make money. Why else would they apply? On the other hand, they also want to write about what interests them, and are often encouraged to do that.

How many times have I heard, “I want to write about Etruscan architecture” or some such niche. “Do you want to make money?”, say I, in my usual mercenary way. “Well, I don’t want to sell my soul, if that’s what you mean”, they reply. “But,” say I, “do you want to make money?”

Of course, they do, but they don’t want to admit it as baldly as that.

Almost all newbie bloggers are schizoid by nature. They really, really, really want to earn money, but they also want to preserve “the integrity of their art”. I usually remind them that William Shakespeare was constantly being chased for debt and even defaulted on his tax payments.

Of course, you can use a blog as a stage to perform on — if you are your own product. Selling yourself is a good way to use weblog software. But most blog writers want to earn cash from the act of writing the blog itself, and that requires focus, not passion or self-indulgent choices of subject matter.

Take books as an example. Books are one of my own passions. I’ve tried writing about them online and selling them on affiliate terms with Amazon and others. It just doesn’t work. Local stores will undercut you on the bestsellers — supermarkets now offer huge discounts — and long tail stuff is too thin a gruel to live on.

Just reading a book to review takes a minimum of three hours. How many can you do in a working day? Not more than one realistically. So passion is not enough.

Unfocused bloggers need to ask themselves three questions :

1. Do I want to spend a lot of time writing about my fave subject irrespective of whether it makes money or not?

If the answer is Yes, then they don’t belong in the commercial sector.

2. Can I become a thought leader in a monetizable and lucrative niche?

Assuming the answer is No, go to question 3 — because a network can’t gamble on someone turning into an Om Malik or Michael Arrington :

3. How can I make money from the work I intend to put into writing online?

Now we’re getting somewhere.

This is the point at which a rookie become marketable and usable for a commercial network.

Although we’ve had many site failures at Syntagma Media — and author failures too — we have turned round a lot of failing sites — and authors — by changing the emphasis, usually in the direction of big-ticket products and services, or high-end reportage and commentary.

Like everything else, it’s about professionalism and focus. The passionate, unfocused blogger is not a useful factor in a successful operation. Mainstream media use authoritative and reassuring voices in their presentation. That’s not accidental.

Passion would be so out of place.

The Wall Street Journal is being sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News International.

Owners Dow Jones are reported to have agreed a $5 billion bid according to sources acting for the board. Negotiations have been completed and the board is confident the terms of the deal will be accepted by the Bancroft family, which controls a majority of voting shares in Dow Jones, over the next few days. A formal announcement is expected next week.

The Business Online exclusively reports :

Murdoch’s News Corporation will take over America’s most prestigious financial publisher at the price he originally offered on April 17, when he proposed $60 a share when the stock was trading at $36, a 67% premium … The arrangement is a tougher version of the one put in place by the British government when Murdoch bought The Times and The Sunday Times in 1981. Murdoch will have less control over the independent directors at the Journal than he does at Times Newspapers, where they are regarded as weak and ineffectual. But one source, acting for the Bancrofts, admitted privately that the Dow independent panel was only a “fig leaf” to facilitate the sale and that over time Murdoch would get round it.

With Murdoch reportedly ready to do a deal to take over a chunk of Yahoo! in exchange for MySpace, things are getting very interesting down at the billabong.

Update: Wired is reporting a refutation of this story : “An article published on Thebusinessonline.com this morning stating that an agreement in principle has been reached for the sale of Dow Jones & Company to News Corp is incorrect.”

Heads up Robert Scoble.

Good news for those of us in Britain delicately poised between buying a Blackberry (I know I’m behind the curve here) and waiting for Apple’s iPhone to arrive. O2 is about to sign the much sought-after contract for the UK and may have it out for Christmas.

It means switching mobile networks for me — I’ve always bought Richard Branson’s Virgin-Motorola phones, and stuck with BT for broadband and landlines. O2, which started off at BT when I worked for them, is now owned by Spain’s Telefonica.

The BBC posted this at midnight last night, after spending most of yesterday at the top of Techmeme :

The agreement with O2 is reported to include Apple receiving a continuing share of the revenue generated for the network operator. The handsets are expected to be sold for about £300 and O2 will be hoping that the lure of the fashionable phone is enough to win customers from rival networks.

It certainly will — has done in my case — and will be a terrific boost to lacklustre O2.

I’ve been watching the hysteria around the iPhone in the states, and read so many reviews of it through the usual suspects, it would be hard to ignore the tiny beast when it arrives. And £300 is only $600, a smallish premium on the U.S. price. Normally, we can expect to pay double.

I wonder though why we have to be so far behind America in these launches?

Update: The Register has just published a piece claiming that the components in the 8Gb iPhone cost $220. That makes the expected UK price of $600 pretty fair taking everything into account. The $220 doesn’t include the cost of assembly, shipping, marketing, or the price of the software that makes the iPhone work. Clearly Apple is relying on lifetime revenues from O2, and sales of other media to make its fortune with this gadget.

Update 2: Bob Cringely is now reporting, “It is my understanding that Apple and AT&T are planning a fall rollout for full 3G iPhone service.” Let’s hope O2 is up to speed on that one.