I keep repeating that this site is non-political. And so it is.

You can hear a “but” coming, though, can’t you? Well, you’re wrong, it’s a “however”.

However, Syntagma has 90 American readers for every Brit, so, conscious as we are that politics is big news in the States right now, we have a small announcement to make:

Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, is coming to visit you this week.

Ignoring the deafening silence, I just want to bring you up to date on Broonie’s progress. Frankly it’s a regression of unparalleled proportions.

Leaving aside my own psychological assessment of him when he first came to office last year, yesterday we were treated to the most devastating political assassination by a journalist that I’ve ever read.

Even if you’re not interested in politics, read it as a master class in the art of personal destruction, much as you might tackle Machiavelli’s The Prince.

It’s all the more calamitous for Brown because the first half gives him his due, albeit in back-handed fashion. It’s what comes next that hits home. Matthew Parris, a journalist at The Times (London) and a broadcaster of great wit, provides us with a forensic deconstruction of Gordon Brown which overflows with such penetrating psychological insight that Brown must have shrivelled up when he read it.

Already far behind in the polls and with ratings only ever matched by Neville Chamberlain, Brown is practically dead in the water politically. Now read this extraordinary coup de grace.

Here it is.

The cartoon is by the brilliant Peter Brooke, also of The Times. It features Gordon Brown after a painting of a gruesome nude woman by Lucien Freud which sold for countless millions recently.

This is another part of an interview I gave recently to Gerry Reynolds, retail analyst. The first part was published here yesterday. #

Gerry : Looking at the network in more detail, how did you get into online publishing in the first place?

John : About four years ago I started experimenting online. I had a free Blogger.com blog called, appropriately enough, Syntagma, in which I wrote anything that came into my head. Like most play blogs it jumped around all over the place. But it gave me a grounding in HTML and paved the way for what has happened since.

As an additional commercial project, I designed a static website, The Dial, in a magazine format, which attempted to make money out of books by direct sales. It did, but fell well short of challenging Amazon.

Then there was a forum about writing and editing as careers, with a monthly magazine called, Serendipity. Lots of work but zero financial returns from that one, although it became the basis for my subsequent educational publishing business.

Gerry : So you were basically messing around at that stage?

John : Yes, but building foundations sounds much better.

I wanted to discover if a full-time professional writer and journalist could make a living online. It’s taken two years, but now I know the answer — yes.

Gerry : But not quite in the way you do in the print world.

John : No, it’s a very different medium and requires far more technical knowledge about the internet and how it works. It’s a real nightmare at first, because you haven’t got a clue what you, or anyone else, is doing. You just have to learn by trial and error, and that takes time. After four years at it, I’m still learning — mainly because the technical side moves on and you have too keep up or be left behind.

Gerry : Would you recommend writers and publishers to come online?

John : I think they have to. You can’t avoid it now with the amount of convergence going on. Long pieces will always have a primary place in print because readers find books and magazines so convenient, but rapidly updating news has already moved online in ways that would astonish older journalists and publishers. Tech news is also embedded in websites now with newer tools, like Techmeme, sorting it all out according to relevance. So it’s a kind of massive, distributed magazine.

Gerry : But the money angle is crucial.

John : For a professional it has to be. If a piece of writing makes money for the author, it justifies the writing of it, partly because authors need the cash, but also because it represents a vote of acceptance from the reading public. Nothing improves an author’s mood more than brisk sales for their work. Don’t ever fall into the high-minded trap that writing for an undefined audience where money doesn’t matter is a “purer form of art”. It’s a soul-destroying exercise and usually masks the fact that the writer is not very good.

Gerry : What are the economics of an online income stream?

John : My bookselling days taught me never to sell directly from a website. Books are heavy to ship, and margins are terrible. So, avoid selling physical objects online, unless you have a successful bricks and mortar business which will underpin it. In that case, online sales supplement an already solvent enterprise.

Digital content networks rely almost exclusively on advertising for revenue, so that’s another technical hornet’s nest to get your head around.

I started experimenting with Google’s epoch-making Adsense system when I had my Blogger.com blog. Waiting to reach the magic $100 mark — the point at which the first cheque arrives — proved to be a minor eternity. Lately, though, just as I was about to give up on Adsense, the number of clicks has been picking up rapidly based on a few high-traffic sites. Adsense is now a valuable part of the overall mix.

Gerry : So you’re really an ad-space salesman?

John : Oh, yes, that’s what it’s basically about. The content side is there as a hook to hang the ads from, so you might think it’s less important. As a writer and publisher, though, I don’t see it that way, and I’ve always tried to give our advertisers value for money in terms of quality content.

Gerry : Therefore, you are writer, publisher, ad salesman, internet technologist …

John : Photographer, as well as bookkeeper, accountant (although these tasks are now outsourced to a professional) , entrepreneur, teamaker and general dogsbody. A bit like every other small business owner really.

Gerry : But with many tough technical skills to master and a great deal of flair needed?

John : You flatter me, Gerry. But I won’t disagree.

Gerry : Let’s look at the size of the business now. Will it expand from here?

John : I hope so, but in an organic way from the inside out, rather than bolting other bits on to the outside.

Gerry : No acquisitions then?

John : Not unless they are simple absorptions of complementary activities. Over-complication is the bane of the business world. Companies grow to a size where they are no longer responsive to market fluctuations. Then they have to demerge parts of the business to survive.

For me, Syntagma still has the feel of a hobby project. I still enjoy doing it and the business aspects don’t overwhelm it. If I don’t like doing something, I’ll drop it, or outsource it. But all expansion means shifting from specialist to generalist, and that can’t be changed.

Gerry : You’re not in a hurry to launch a Syntagma IPO, then?

John : Good God, no. Why do people do that? Prestige, big job titles, vanity, more money than they can handle. The fate of Icarus is always in the back of my mind.

Gerry : Would you say that you’ve reached your goals now?

John : If someone had told me I would be taking down a six-figure dollar income within a fairly short time, I wouldn’t have believed them. My original objective was to sell the business for a tidy lump sum and start again. I never thought it would make much of an income because all revenue was being pushed into expansion.

The epiphany was that there is an optimum size for a single-owner network, and that you can earn a good salary from it. The surprise was that you can’t sell networks now for $30million. You win some, you lose some.

The real decisive moment though, was settling for that. Why chase chimeras, when you can be content with what you’ve got?

Gerry : How is that resolved in practice?

John : If you set no upper limits, you’re really at the mercy of events. It’s no good having a $10m business if your costs are $11m. Mr Micawber defined that problem 150 years ago.

The trick is to set an upper boundary that gives you the best split between receipts and obligations, building in the vagaries of the tax system, of course, and depending on the amount of effort you can comfortably provide. Everyone will reach a different conclusion, but it has to be within your comfort zone. You are, after all, in this for the long haul.

Gerry : So you’ll not be selling the business?

John : I’ve personalized the business so much, it’s hard to see who would buy it now. But the idea of creating an empty shell of a company, with no branding, so that anyone can buy it, just isn’t how I do things. I’ve always preferred chocolates to boxes.

Gerry : Cheers, John.

Read Part 3 of this intrview.

A few years ago, when I headed up a marketing department at BT (British Telecom), I asked a Sunday Times tech journalist, whose work I admired, to write a short piece on packet switching (the base technology of the internet) for one of our publications.

When the copy arrived I thought it must be a joke. The piece was full of spelling mistakes and basic grammatical errors. I was shocked by the lack of pride in craftsmanship — although technically it was correct.

If I tell you it was only 300 words long and the asking price (agreed) was £300 ($600), you get some idea of my disappointment.

Naturally, I refused to pay — an office junior could have done better. The journalist pointed out that we had use of his name (true) and that he had sub-editors at the Sunday Times to knock his copy into shape. He then threatened that if I still refused to pay, he would get the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) to picket BT Headquarters.

The Honcho above me ordered me to pay him off immediately. The Chairman would be incensed to find pickets on his red carpet entrance.

Although I’d done a bit of freelance journalism for the nationals before then, it was my first real taste of in-house pros. I was not impressed. (I should point out here that I commissioned other journalists after that and many were just fine.)

Now to blogging. In my view, online writers let themselves down by taking pride in the wild and woolly world of blogging. There are some excellent writers in the tech blogosphere, some even write for the nationals. Jeff Jarvis (The Buzz Machine), for example, pens frequent features for The Guardian (UK). And there are many others. The distinction between print and online publishing is narrowing by the day. Print journalism isn’t disappearing, it’s just taking over more and more of the online space.

The description “blogger” has a certain cachet in the political world, because politicians, with lots to hide, are terrified of them. The mainstream media watches them like hawks in case they miss a scoop or some realtime dirt. But this is a narrow slice of a much wider market for news, commentary and on-the-spot reportage.

I have to say, there’s a bit of cultural cringe about blogging in general, especially among those who take themselves half seriously. The belief that mainstream journalists are necessarily better, or better informed, is not borne out by facts. In the tech sphere, for instance, online material is usually way ahead of the MSM in detail and accuracy.

Take the recent Wall Street Journal non-story on the “10th anniversary of blogging”. The reporter made a good stab at the topic but was no match for people writing online who had been in on it personally. Like most inventions, there’s a long incubation period involving different individuals who each put a piece or two in the jigsaw puzzle. But the editor seemed to want a nice crisp date, and a hero to parade before the world. There wasn’t one, so an obscure figure was dredged from the swamp of time and shoved into the limelight with mud still running down his face.

D’you know, I can’t even remember his name, poor devil.

Back to the tag “blogger”. It’s a well-known fact that in the theatre a tragedian is taken far more seriously than a clown. Sometimes that’s unfair, because the clown can have more talent, and entertain many more people.

By tagging ourselves as bloggers, we hand a monumental advantage to the print journalist. We can be dismissed as clowns and unprofessional bag carriers.

For the political thorn-in-the-side, it’s a smart move. For anyone who wants to be taken seriously by the big, rotten world, not only their peers in Techmeme, it’s not just shooting oneself in the foot, it’s aiming a silver bullet at the heart.

So let’s resolve to be writers, journalists, authors — not bloggers. Forget the medium, think the message.

As our lamented former Monarch, King George V might have put it, “Bugger blogging!”