Depp is a famous enthusiast, with great taste – he loves Withnail & I, The Fast Show, Jack Kerouac, gonzo journalism, hard liquor, good wine and rock guitar.
As CW Andersen, Emily Bell and Clay Shirky put it in their spectacular essay on post-industrial journalism, "hard news is what distinguishes journalism from just another commercial activity".
In the Middle East, where good, independent journalism is hard to find, Al Jazeera has distinguished itself by its thorough and smart coverage of many important stories, particularly the Arab Spring.
"Morning is a great place to do serious journalism, the hard news," said Sid Bedingfield, executive vice president of CNN.
"The publicity attendant on this will compensate for the low advance, and collections of reprinted journalism are hard to get published today anyway".
That journalists need to be more entrepreneurial, but that the skills traditionally associated with top-flight journalism – passion, hard work, curiosity, determination, clarity of purpose, and so on – are also those employed by a successful entrepreneur.
Good journalism is hard work, and it's not free: it costs the Guardian to pay salaries and expenses for people who report, write and edit the stories that matter.
Travel journalism is hard work and the pay isn't always great either: Forget fantasies of being sent round the world on an assignment with a huge commission, all expenses paid, and having endless days lolling on the beach or people-watching in cafes.
Though Burgess's preface to that book is characteristically disparaging – requiring "an apologetic grimace, tinged with irony, on behalf of a whole profession" - he was obviously pleased to see his journalism between hard covers, because he allowed it to happen again in a second collection, Homage to Qwert Yuiop.
The public's insatiable appetite for sensationalism and gossip, which have been around for a few thousand years, combined with today's citizens' collective cunning in exploiting the Internet and a proliferation of apps, has given the profession of journalism a hard run for its money.
