Ian Burrell: Commentators with something to say

On the Radar

Newspaper columnists should speak their minds. Which is why it's refreshing to hear Jenni Russell holding forth on the merits of website paywalls, and taking issue with both her employers. "I don't think that technically the paywall is working well enough," Russell warns her bosses at News International, for whom she writes a Sunday Times column behind a paywall. "People are finding it difficult to log on." Russell's other gig is for The Guardian, which is vehemently opposed to charging for access to its website. Jenni is not convinced by that either. "Somehow we've got to find a way to pay for decent journalism, and simply putting it all out there for free isn't going to work," she says.

Russell is shortlisted in the second annual Comment Awards, which will be dished out this morning over a champagne breakfast at RIBA in London. Best of luck to my colleague Stephen Glover, who is also nominated. Networking queen Julia Hobsbawm, who runs the awards through her media business Editorial Intelligence (ei), has selected a Vivienne Westwood Lurex top for the occasion, which will be hosted by Peter York.

This year, Hobsbawm is anxious to pay tribute to the late right-wing polemicist and former Spectator editor Frank Johnson, whom she credits with having coined the term "commentariat" – which has become ei's watchword. The firm's championing of Britain's commentators – sending out daily digests of the thoughts of key opinion formers – has seen it grow to the point where it has established a US outpost, ei Atlantic, allowing Americans "to tap into" ei's London network. "We have built up a database that is so detailed it's in fact a biography-base of more than 20,000 opinion formers and players right across business, politics, media and academia," says Hobsbawm.

As well as its programme of speaker-based events, ei runs an annual Names Not Numbers symposium at Portmeirion in Wales (the setting for the cult TV show The Prisoner). Simon Schama, the Culture minister Ed Vaizey and new Channel 4 chief David Abraham are booked for the next one in March. Hobsbawm's more pressing problem is in recognising the power of micro-blogging as a platform for the commentariat. "I would consider a Twitteriat award," she says.

* Next Tuesday, in London's Mayfair, the free paper Metro is holding an event called Urban Eye in which "a selection of the foremost urban minds speak about the trends that will matter the most for urbanites over the years to come".

Among the speakers, alongside the likes of futurist blogger Mark Earls and trendspotter Josh Spear, will be that man-about-town Jonathan Harmsworth, fourth Viscount Rothermere and chairman of the Daily Mail & General Trust. In the style of a Hollywood star at an awards ceremony, Lord Rothermere will make his submission via a film recording, but as he is talking on the future of the press, and rarely speaks publicly, it should make for good viewing.

* That's more than is being said of News at Ten. ITV's flagship bulletin is panned by a new report for its alleged obsession with violence. The survey by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), in partnership with American analysts Media Tenor, examines the coverage of 37 international news programmes and names News at Ten – alongside Fox Special Report, CBS Evening News and ABC World News – as an outlet that devoted more than 50 per cent of its coverage of world news to stories about violence.

Steve Killelea, founder of the IEP, says such an approach is not helpful to the process of rebuilding countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. "When too much media attention is placed on violence, 'security' is seen as the only way for establishing peace; this runs contrary to current study and analysis of what creates peace." The report claimed that the channel Al-Jazeera English provided a more balanced picture of events in Afghanistan than either the BBC or CNN.

It found that Al-Jazeera reported three times more positive stories on that country than the BBC, and eight times more than the American network.