WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

After more than three days of chaos, London Mayor Boris Johnson spoke for the nation when he said:

“It can’t be beyond the wit of man surely to find the shovels, the diggers, the snow-ploughs or whatever it takes to clear the snow out from under the planes, to get the planes moving and to have more than one runway going.”

Airports and airlines had over ten days notice of the approaching ‘arctic’ conditions but chose instead to do… nothing.

Instead my printed paper arrived to the front door every morning punctual and in perfect conditions

More about the London mess here.

El Pais reports that the father of Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, was one of the civil British citizens rescued by the Royal Navy in Santander.

Stanley Johnson arrived last Saturday to Madrid after a trip to the Galapagos.

What was the criteria to get one place in the HMS Albion?

More questions for politicians taking care of their relatives.

More details to come about these VIP stranded travellers.

(Picture by AP)

Boris Johnson is a real character.

Like New York mayors Fiorello Laguardia or Ed Koch, he is a picturesque and extravagant political figure.

He was the editor of The Spectator and he writes very well.

So, The Daily Telegraph, owner also of The Spectator, decided to pay him 250,000 GBP a year for a weekly column in the paper.

He gives 50,000 GBP to charities, so 50 columns a year means that he really makes around of 4,000 GBP per column.

I don’t know how much other leading British or American columnists charge for their columns, but it doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.

And perhaps he is right, and this really is what he called (watch here the video) just “chicken feed”.

The real problem here is not what he makes as a columnist (as mayor he gets 140,000 GBP a year) but how you can cover local politics if the mayor is on your payroll.

That’s the big issue.

A London newspaper cannot pay anything to the mayor of the city.

Period.