Here’s an oddity from last Friday’s business supplement to the Irish Times. Despite the – so hard to avoid a cliche here – tumult? turmoil? meltdown? crash? in banking and on the markets the paper found space for a short article on the “Growing importance of protecting company data.” Space was, however, lacking for the journalist’s name – or perhaps modesty forbade. The “article” asks us to take the validity of its headline entirely on the word of one person: Ciaran Farrell of Kroll Ontrack Ireland, which is in the data protection and retrieval business and is the only company mentioned in the piece. Of 357 words, 147 are direct quotes from Farrell and 37 are paraphrases of what he said, leaving 210 to come from the anonymous journalist. If you put the title of the – I can’t call it an article – the thing into a search engine you will see the Irish Times/Kroll’s piece of work has spread its noisome wings all over the world.