Good news for some.

A FREELANCE friend told me last week about trying to sell a story to a national newspaper. "I rang them up," he said, "and it was like talking to someone who'd just been in a car accident."

On the one hand, journos will always complain newsdesks aren't treating their stories with the Watergate-shattering respect they deserve. And on the other he had a point. The combination of phone-hacking and corruption scandals, a public inquiry and three police investigations are having a serious effect on even those of us who are not under suspicion.

If you open a national newspaper today, you'll have to look hard to find a story that hasn't come from a press office, showbiz agent or what's known as a 'buy-up' - when someone comes to us for a full sit-down chat and a cheque.

Today The Scum splashed on a buy-up with the mum of a £45m lottery winner. The Daily Glimmer went with a story from the wires about a baby killed in an American tornado, the Wail with information from an FOI request, The Groaner's done Russia, The Tims did the opinion of a Falklands War vet and the Wellygraph led with a behind-the-scenes briefing from our beloved Chancellor Gideon.

They're are all perfectly reasonable stories, got in perfectly reasonable ways. On a Monday papers have less news in than the rest of the week because they were prepared on Sunday when there's very little going on, and without the Screws (RIP) setting the agenda there's less material for the dailies to mop up. But I've sat and read all of today's papers and I can't for the life of me see a story about crime, politics or health that hasn't been officially approved in some respect.

Critics will say this just goes to show that all such yarns were got via criminal means, and now the guilty parties are so scared of being caught they've cleaned up their act. But a more realistic person will wonder whether all newspapers would have had the budgets to pay a bung or hack a phone on every story, never mind the inclination. In my experience the vast majority of tales come from somebody telling someone else something for free, as a bit of gossip, sometimes with and sometimes without realising that information would be passed on to a journalist.

I've known celebrities who tell their friends things on the clear understanding it will end up in print, and I've known stories which came about because someone sat and gossipped to their hairdresser, who in turn repeated it to the next client who just happened to be the wife of a journo having her roots done. Coppers I've dealt with over the years generally tell you stuff for free, for exactly the same reasons that celebrities, politicians and showbiz PRs do - because it makes someone look good. A good journo takes such briefings with a pinch of salt, but listens to them all the same. Vanity works harder than money does.

The scrutiny the Press is under is fair enough. Criminals need to be investigated and held to account, whatever business they're in. But the timing of an inquiry being held before the criminal cases which sparked it, the investigations which are being dragged out over years, is leading to what can only be called a story crunch - just like an economic recession, only with a lack of public information.

Without a single criminal case being heard or conviction won, journalism has become a trade where the phone has stopped ringing. A copper on a case who thinks his superiors have screwed it up is not going to take the risk of a quiet word in a journo's ear. A soldier who has had to spend thousands of pounds buying his own kit isn't going to get his mum to ring a newspaper on his behalf. A teaching assistant, council clerk, librarian, prison officer, dustman or anyone else employed on a public wage is going to be terrified of losing their job if they flog a tip for £50 - and it's tips which are often the first step on the story ladder, which allow an investment of time and effort to build up to a really good scandal.

Do you think politicians have stopped lying? Do you believe prisoners are all being well-behaved, that celebrities have turned their backs on drugs and hookers, doctors have stopped making mistakes, or that the courts only jail the guilty and let the innocent walk free? Those stories are still happening. We just aren't hearing about it.

And if they're scared, then so are we. Hacks worry every phone call and email could be handed over to the police, that papers won't protect the sources we work hard to reassure, that so much as buying a pint for a CPS lawyer after court will see everyone involved collared by a police force under pressure to compensate for its previous mistakes. We err on the side of extreme caution rather than take a risk.

Which of course is good news for some. Particularly if you're in charge of a government overseeing controversial changes to the criminal justice and welfare systems, sacking thousands and cutting benefits. It's good news too if you are one of the top bods in the Met Police, and want to tell other people what is and is not in the public interest without letting them make up their own minds.

It's quite good if you're a publicist who can threaten cowed journalists, or a celebrity with a book or DVD to sell, and it's bloody brilliant if this time last year you were a Prime Minister facing difficult questions on how much you knew about the whole damn mess when you employed one of its central figures as your spin doctor.

And it's more marvellous still if you are a lawyer acting for one of the truly guilty individuals who not only corrupted others but became corrupt themselves, who twisted my trade and abused their position for their own gain. Because not only is there a bucketload of billable hours in this, when it finally comes to court your client will walk.

I do not want news that has been approved by a press officer, run past the police or checked against Hugh Grant's moral compass first. I want my news back - cleaned of criminality and paying off its debts but just as badly-behaved and mischievous as it ever was, kicking over the dustbins, cocking a snook and scribbling away frantically because it had a really, really good story to tell.

Maybe tomorrow?

Scrutiny stills the hand, even if it's not a guilty hand.

You're Hari a laugh.

THE WORST journalists are the ones who don't get it.

The ones who shrug when they hear a contact has had their life threatened after they printed a lie; the ones who think because they survived one screw-up they'll survive the next one; the ones who think power equates with being bullet-proof.

Despite common belief, such journalists are rare. It's exactly the same as in any other industry where there is always one person in your office whose lack of general human decency makes them stick out. In a newsroom the remaining 99% of the staff might be sociopaths but they generally know roughly what morals look like, not least because otherwise we could not do our jobs.

If you don't know right from wrong yourself it's impossible to interview someone with empathy, hard to get the right quote, difficult to see past your own ego to the story and the people in it. If every journalist were like the caricature many people believe us to be we wouldn't be able to spot human interest, much less feel it, and newspapers would not have sold millions of copies for 300 years.

If nothing else a sense of survival keeps you roughly on the straight and narrow. If you make up stories other journos who are made to look bad as a result will stitch you up every chance they get, if you don't stand your round you never get one bought and if most hacks had done what Johann Hari did they would be down the Job Centre quicker than you can say "gross misconduct".

For those as don't know, Johann is the star columnist of a snoresheet which I have not been bored enough to read since I was last in a dentist's. He made reference to polishing quotes in his interviews and a tabloid hack called Brian Whelan did some digging and found that Johann had fabricated entire slabs of interviews, repeatedly, for years. He used quotes his subjects had said or written previously along with heartfelt details about how they were looking deep into his eyes while they said it.

It's not phone-hacking Milly Dowler, but it's still not on. It's a lie, his subjects didn't know about it, and what's more he used such pieces to win a prestigious award for political journalism with a £3,000 pot and a judging panel who, presumably, were unable to use Google.

He was subsequently found to have set up a fake internet identity to discredit critics, accuse other journalists of alcoholism and anti-Semitism, and act as an unofficial Hari cheerleader. I have got drunk with and greatly respect two of his victims, former New Statesman deputy editor Cristina Odone and Observer writer Nick Cohen, who are both fine journos. It was all pretty vicious and - just as with that guy in your office - his behaviour showed more about his own insecurities and character than it did his industry.

He was suspended for two months, was subject to an internal inquiry, has returned his prize (but not the cash) and issued a public apology for most, but not all, of his behaviour.

But he still doesn't get it. And here's why.

Johann Hari disgraced himself and tainted his profession just like Andy Coulson, through hubris and stupidity. He thought he could do whatever he liked because he was Johann Hari, with a big picture byline.

He says he was "wrong and stupid". No mate, you were crap at your job, nasty when you were found out, and you just didn't care. You were incapable of drawing the right quote out of your subject, unable to see beyond your own prejudices to report fairly and accurately, and more importantly did not manage to put your monstrous ego to one side and see that you were in the wrong. And you have apologised now only because you must.

It's not all Hari's fault. He was recruited straight from university without ever studying law, shorthand, government or anything else I had to sit an exam in. He never had to chat his way across a doorstep, deal with someone threatening suicide or waving a gun, or realised long-term contacts have to like and trust you. He never learned a bit of humility or that everything you write has consequences somewhere.

That's because big-name writers who bring in readers get a little leeway from The Editor. Jeremy Clarkson can be almost as rude as he likes, Su Carroll can pick her own subjects, Richard Littlejohn can write 2,000 words in iambic pentameter if he chooses. But they're still supposed to have a basic grasp of the main rules of their trade and the first and most important of which is: NEVER BECOME THE STORY.

Hari failed on all counts. He's a bad journalist earning a huge salary on a struggling newspaper with tight budgets that can barely afford proper news coverage, staffed by people trying their hardest and each of whom, had they brought their newspaper into the disrepute he has, would have been sacked.
Yet he's not only still in a job, he's on a five-month holiday two months of which were paid, and is "retraining" at Columbia University in the US. How can you retrain someone who was never trained in the first place?

Well, in the certain expectation I will never be asked to do it, I hereby offer to train Johann Hari. If he wants to spend three months with me rather than attending seminars on the free press in Somalia I'll not charge him a penny. I will teach him shorthand, lecture him on the Contempt of Court Act 1981 and Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1976, grill him on local government, the council tax system, the defences against defamation and how to win a drinking contest.

I'll send him out on deathknocks, pack jobs, magistrates' hearings, junkie inquests, tell him to drive 300 miles on a hopeless tip at 10pm then insist he's back at work for 7am, make him spend his birthday at a late-night local council planning committee, publish his phone number and paint his name on the side of his car so everyone knows who he is. I'll show him what to do when someone comes at him with a lump of wood or collapses in tears, and how to file off a notebook down a bad line while you're being shot at to someone who's drunk.

It's not perfect and I could probably think of some more stuff but that seems to me like a syllabus which will teach him to care about his trade, the people in it and those he writes about. That, or it puts you off for life.

He probably wouldn't last an afternoon.

He hasn't even got his pen out.