Owen Jones is leaving money on the table by staying at The Guardian

1) Embrace capitalism. 2) ??? 3) Profit.

One of the most surreal aspects of my job is that very occasionally a producer will phone me up and ask me to go on TV.

This doesn’t happen very often when you’re at my level on the professional ladder¹. Typically I’m the fifth or sixth number they try if my friend Kate and the next five people on their list are busy, and they conclude they need a man whose appearance screams “knows about computers”.

But this being a rare treat just makes it more exciting. I’ll perhaps get to go inside BBC Broadcasting House or the ITN building on Gray’s Inn Road and see what happens behind the magic. Plus it means that I can text my Mum and tell her to turn on the telly, so I can prove to her that I do have a real job after all.

To show you what I mean, here’s a clip of me on BBC News several years ago, stumbling my way through an explanation of Apple’s VPN ban in China, from back when I had hair as gorgeous as Sam Bankman-Fried².

Though it may look fun (it is!), it’s also an inherently stressful experience. As if you ever find yourself in my position, you’ll quickly discover that each TV ‘hit’ is a high stakes encounter.

If you perform well, you might be invited back to do it again (and you’ll pocket a small fee for the trouble each time). But if you garble your words, you’ll find the producer calling someone more privately educated else next time³.

So what I’ve learned is that there is a real, unappreciated skill to being a pundit.

You need to get your words out in order, you need to make a coherent point, and you need to actually answer the question you’ve been asked, all while knowing thousands of people are watching you wave your arms around on muted TVs in the corners of airports and Wetherspoons.

That’s why when I watch the news now, I become a theatre critic. If you pay enough attention, you can quickly work out who is good and who is bad by how often you see them on screen⁴.

For example, one ubiquitous presence on our screens is the travel journalist Simon Calder (if you don’t know his name, you’ll definitely know his face). One producer once told me that he’s the best contributor he’s ever worked with.

This is because Simon is a consummate professional and great at speaking clearly, with detail and insight – and I understand he will even send the producers notes ahead of time about what he plans to say, to make life even easier for the news team. What a pro.

This same dynamic is why we often see the same faces discussing politics too. It’s not just that they’re easy ciphers for a given set of political views (get a righty and a lefty, and voila, balance!). It’s also because as guests they are great performers too.

And this brings me to the person I really wanted to talk about today: Owen Jones.

If you’ve read this far into an essay about nerdy media inside-baseball, then you don’t need me to explain that he is the Guardian’s biggest name columnist, and a regular fixtures as on the airwaves, as a representative of the “to the left of Labour” position.

To be clear, I don’t know Owen⁵. And as regular readers will have intuited, I definitely do not share his politics. I’m a squishy centre-left sellout, and a chin-stroking, Starmer-supporting nuance bro. Very much a “so-called centrist” in Owen parlance.

In fact, over the years, we’ve exchanged the occasional snarky quote-tweet, not that I’d expect Owen to have any memory of who I am, beyond perhaps vaguely recognising my Twitter avatar as an annoying guy with smug, liberal⁶ takes⁷.

But despite our different politics, I can’t deny that Owen is a brilliant pundit. That’s why he gets invited on TV so often: He can make short, sharp points effectively. He isn’t afraid to pick a fight, which makes for the sorts of spicy viral moments that broadcasters love. And he talks with a moral certainty and zeal that only preachers can usually match⁸.

And as I say, I know from first hand experience that none of these things are easy to do. That’s why he has successfully amassed a huge following on social media. I’m entirely sincere when I say this is very impressive – he’s built his brand as a firebrand voice of the socialist left extremely successfully.

I mean, imagine if I were invited on to the telly to appear on Question Time – I know I’d be useless. I’d immediately find myself equivocating and saying “Well, this issue is very complicated, and I don’t know enough about it, so I don’t have a strongly held view”.

Or perhaps an audience member asking a question would flat-foot me, and because I’m pretty conflict-averse in person, I’d accidentally talk myself into agreeing that we do need to “send them back” after all.

This is why I find Owen an extremely interesting public figure and media personality – he’s great at being a pundit.

But there is something about his work I don’t understand.

Despite his clear talents, I don’t think Owen is making the most of his enormous audience. In fact, I think as things stand, he’s leaving money on the table – and that there’s a huge business opportunity staring him in the face. But I’m not sure he realises it is there.

So in the spirit of my previous pieces on how to fix the New Statesman, how to fix Local News, and how to fix Newsnight, let’s dive into how we can fix… er… Owen Jones’s career⁹.

Graun but not forgotten?