By Ian Burrell

My colleague Simon Calder, himself a notable travel broadcaster, today praises Michael Palin for being the best in the business. But can the great Python – who’s having a bit of a branding issue at the moment with a prominent namesake’s participation in the US presidential election race – really stand comparison with the great Alan Whicker?

By Ian Burrell

So the BBC has revealed the framework of its Out of London scheme to move television production outside the capital and make the corporation’s output more obviously representative of the diverse regions that pay for it.

It’s a laudable exercise, though I suspect we’ll see hotels in Belfast, Glasgow and Cardiff doing good business with the Beeb for a few years as they put up large numbers of London-based staff who’ve been told to temporarily relocate for a few weeks so that a show can be given a regional imprint.

If this initiative works we are promised that we can expect not only more accurate portrayal of life in all parts of the UK, but more senior ‘big cheese’ television industry jobs for those living far away from White City. What, though, if you happen to be Scottish and of Pakistani parentage? Or Mancunian of Jamaican heritage or living in Belfast but of Chinese ancestry? What chance then of getting one of these top jobs?

By Ian Burrell

In spite of possible strike action looming at the Daily Telegraph, Will Lewis, the paper’s effervescent editor-in-chief, insists that his paper is in a "new golden age", having relaunched last week in full colour. But "it’s not Disneyland", he admits, after being reminded that his newsroom is widely considered to be the unhappiest in Fleet Street. Lewis thinks the carping is a signal of the Telegraph’s success. "The people that get bitched about the most are the best," he says. "It’s because we are performing that people are talking about us."

By Ian Burrell

Danny Baker, who returns to Radio 5 Live on Tuesday 16 September to present 606, the show which he made great in the early Nineties, has an extraordinary website devoted to his talents, The Internet Treehouse.

It’s a site that documents the varied career of an unorthodox broadcaster who claims to prefer the title ‘The Candyman’ to his own name, at least when he’s on the air. To the casual observer, it looks like Danny – who appears on the site in animated form – is having a great time up there in the Treehouse, where fans discuss his quips on a busy forum and visitors are invited to listen to classic clips of Baker’s music hall-inspired humour. Sadly he can’t bear to go near the site, he reveals today in an interview in The Independent.

By Ian Burrell

Given the pre-election onslaught he faced from the London Evening Standard and in particular that paper's reporter Andrew Gilligan, it is not perhaps surprising that the former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone prefers to look elsewhere for coverage of events at City Hall, his former fiefdom.

But what is interesting is that Ken's trawling for info about a world which still obsesses him has made him a compulsive visitor to Tory blog sites. "I'm glad of the blogs," he tells The Independent. "Over the last three months, the only place you could get really good coverage of what's happening in City Hall [has been] on the blogs. The internet was covering City Hall in a way that most of the media weren't."

By Ian Burrell

The Internet, it has been said, has made journalists of all of us. Where once we might have kept a private diary by our beds, we now put our thoughts up online, disseminating them to as many strangers as we can possibly induce to take an interest in our musings.

This usurping of the role of the professional journalist is not, as is sometimes suggested, a phenomenon confined to the field of commentary. Frontline reporting and investigative work, the last bastions of the traditional news organisations, are now no longer the preserve of the so-called Fourth Estate. Of course, the mobile phone has turned tourists into camera-wielding correspondents at scenes of environmental disaster. It has transformed night-clubbers into paparazzi.

But it is more than that.