This was the British Press Awards citation a year ago when it honoured the Guardian for its Snowden files coverage.  Rob Evans and Paul Lewis were also honoured for their work on the NSA leaks, winning the news reporter of the year prize for what the judges described as their "incisive and genuinely sensational stories with eyebrow-raising power".
The Guardian and the reporters have made the most of the material: if you search for "Edward Snowden" on the paper's website, Google will turn up more than 600,000 results (which is not, of course, the same as 600,000 stories). There is the stunning interactive"NSA files decoded", which earned the paper the digital award at the Press Awards and the innovation prize at the British Journalism Awards in December. There are stories, analyses, interviews, debate, commentary, links to books - masses of them. 
Oh yes, and there was that Pulitzer Prize. And the European Press Award. And the Orwell Prize. And the Paul Foot award. And the Right Livelihood award....
But as the Press Awards judges noted last spring, Edward Snowden's leaks polarised public opinion and the newspaper industry.

The Daily Mail has never been the Guardian's greatest fan, nor has it been shy about saying what it thinks about the paper or Snowden. To the Guardian he is a whistleblower, to the Mail a traitor.
Over recent months, the Mail has seized every opportunity to attack the Guardian - examples include a Saturday essay by Stephen Glover on Nick Davies - "the man who did for the British Press" - and even a dig over an art critic who dared to express a contrary opinion on the Tower of London poppies. Last week a leader about Nick Clegg's call for a "public interest" defence for journalists who wind up in court turned into an attack on the Guardian and its "almost psychotic hatred of a commercially viable free press". 
Today the paper leads on a Snowden television interview in which he avoids answering questions about whether he had read all the documents he leaked. The tone of the story leaves the reader in no doubt of the Mail's opinion of Snowden:

The story turns to page 4, where the basement is about the Guardian and a change of online heading on the story - from "Edward Snowden tells John Oliver he did not read all leaked NSA material" to "John Oliver presses Edward Snowden on whether he read all leaked NSA material". As the Mail says, a definite watering down. But the Guardian says that's because the first heading was inaccurate. Also true, as you can see for yourself in the video at the top.
The Mail leader writers are again called into action to opine that the paper is a passionate defender of free speech, but that this has to be balanced against public safety. A view with which few would take issue. But, as ever, it has to be coupled with a swipe at the Guardian and its "supreme arrogance".

So far, so par for the course. But SubScribe has questions for both papers.
First, why is the Mail splashing on this story, other than as a vehicle with which to attack a paper that it despises? Do its readers care? A former Mail Online writer who contacted SubScribe after the James King "My year of ripping off the web" blog noted that she had never seen any news organisation so influenced by readers' whims. Stories on the website's home page were moved up and down according to the number of clicks, she said. As I write this, the Snowden story does not feature on the home page at all. And I have scrolled up and down three times to make sure.
Second, why did the Guardian not publish anything in its print edition on the Snowden interview? For the past two years, his every utterance has been deemed newsworthy - the paper even splashed on his opinion of proposed British surveillance laws. But while this latest story appears online, it is nowhere to be found in the newspaper.

This spat is hugely entertaining for journalists. But in their coverage - and non-coverage - of this story,  both papers have been following their own agendas without any regard for the reader. 
And that is unforgivable.

Protecting our privacy is becoming trickier by the day.
This week the Mail has reported that Russian websites are watching British families through their computer webcams and streaming their lives online.
Is this any more or less sinister than GCHQ monitoring our emails and phone calls? Or than police following and keeping dossiers on people not suspected of breaking any laws? 
We fret about privacy and security online and update our Facebook status with toothless assertions as to our copyright. But we don't read the T&Cs when we sign up for a new service or app. We allow our computers to remember our passwords, which means we forget them ourselves. We joke about the funeral, dating or slimming ads that crop up on our pages, and become irritated when ads for something we bought online a couple of weeks ago keep appearing. If you're so damn clever Mr Internet, you should know I've got this, and don't need another one. 
And when we sign up for a new app or program, we happily "sign in with Twitter" to avoid the faff of having to create another new profile and another immemorable password - thus giving the newbie access to shedloads of personal information just so that we can play Scrabble or Candy Crush with minimum fuss.
"I'd like to join your network," says a LinkedIn email from someone you've never heard of, but who seems to be quite important in their field. If they're grand enough and there are enough shared contacts, we might succumb. Madness.
Last week four people in America started a class action against LinkedIn for sharing information with potential employers - a service the website actively promotes by telling businesses: "Get the real story on any candidate” and “find references who can give real, honest, feedback”.  
Away from the computer, we collect "loyalty" cards whose real purpose is not to reward customers for consistent patronage, but to spy on their shopping habits, to conduct market research on the cheap.
It's all pretty frightening. Some might even choose to liken it to Big Brother (Orwell, not Endemol). As The Times did on Wednesday.

This spread, on pages 16 and 17, took a look at how Google was weaving its tentacles through every thread of its users' lives. I have read it several times and have yet to find the quote that makes the main heading, but that may be my failing rather than the paper's. The anecdote that provides the way into the main story is interesting: a couple decide to get married but keep the news as their secret. Before they know it, they are knee-deep in ads for diamonds and honeymoons. They conclude that Google must be monitoring their private chats and decide to remove the company from their lives.
There is no news story to justify this glorified case study, nor indeed, is there evidence to back up the page one write-off:

The newly betrothed Janet Vertesi is the only user quoted in the spread, and while she says that friends and family are asking her how to live without Google, that doesn't really warrant the "growing boycott" line.
The newsiest bit of the piece is a Pew Organisation poll that found that 91% of Americans surveyed felt they had lost control of how personal information was collected "by companies such as Google".
This survey of 607 adults was published on November 12. Its purpose was to see how people's perceptions of privacy and security may have changed since the Snowden revelations. The 91% statistic was highlighted as its most striking finding.  
Setting aside the fact that the sample was small, let us look at what the survey report had to say on the question of personal information. Indeed, let us reproduce that section in full:

So there it is. The word "Google" does not appear.
The Times story goes on to say that Google spent more in donations to midterm political campaigns than Goldman Sachs and that its financing projects aimed at finding a cure for Parkinson's and a pill to beat cancer. It might also have mentioned that it is running an Ebola appeal in which it gives $2 for every dollar donated.
Much is made, as might be expected, of the "don't be evil" motto and the big picture panel and sidebar focus on exotic parties, tigers, Stevie Wonder -  as though young men anywhere in the world who found themselves with riches unimagined might behave differently.
The analysis in the outside column mentions tax avoidance and the search results suppressed under the "right to be forgotten" rule - without mentioning that this is happening as a result of the failure of Google's appeal against a European ruling. Yes, it's censorship. But it's also obeying European law.

What many Times readers must wonder when they come across this spread is "What's this all about?"
There is no doubt that the pervasiveness of Google is troubling. It is a subject worthy of proper consideration. The whole question of our privacy needs looking at in depth. But this isn't it.

Google is the biggest player in the game and the knives are out. Earlier this month an organisation called Public Citizen published a paper called Mission Creep-y, which also addressed the company's growing influence. The video below shows a television discussion of that research.

All of this comes as Google tries to reach agreement in a four-year-old antitrust battle with the EU. European regulators were concerned about the way search results were appearing and in February the company appeared to have reached a settlement. But rivals, politicians and publishers were unhappy and on September 23 the competition commissioner Joaquin Alumunia announced that he had told Google that it had to come up with a better offer on how it would change its practices or face formal charges.
Funnily enough, News Corp's chief executive Robert Thomson had written to Alumunia a couple of weeks earlier urging just such a course of action. Google, Thomson said, was a platform for piracy. It was an "egregious" aggregator that was "willing to exploit its dominant market position to stifle competition". 
Google swiftly responded - and here is the FT's presumably impartial take on the spat.
News Corp wasn't taking any risks, and last month James Murdoch joined in during a session at the Mipcom television conference in Cannes:

If James was being "diplomatic", Dad has made no bones about his opinion of the "parasitic, content kleptomaniac plagiarists" of Google, not least in series of tweets over the years: 

In the current European campaign, it's not quite clear whether the problem is tax avoidance or market domination - neither topics on which News Corp can reasonably speak without pots and kettles being mentioned - but what is obvious is that the Murdoch company is uncomfortable with Google's spreading influence. Possibly rightly so. But it is worth noting that the Thomson and Murdoch interventions are concerned not with personal privacy - as the Times spread is - but with Google's perceived advantages and practices as a business rival.

The German publisher Axel Springer is equally unenchanted with the boys from Silicon Valley. In April its chief executive Mathias Döpfner published an open letter to Google chief Eric Schmidt in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung saying he was afraid of Google, and accusing it and Facebook of having a "totalitarian mentality like the Stasi or other secret police in service of a dictatorship". It wanted, he wrote, to create “superstate that can navigate its floating kingdom undisturbed by any and all nation-states and their laws”.
In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review this week Döpfner identified a divergence of opinion between America and Europe. The Americans thought Europeans were backward-looking and failed to understand that the tech economy was based on data.
Europe, he said, knew from history that total transparency and total control of data led to totalitarian societies.

So there are plenty who take issue with Google's trajectory. Whether it becomes News Corp and its papers to question other businesses that are dominant in their markets, that want to drive competitors to the wall or that don't pay their fair share of taxes is for others to debate. 
But as an observer of journalism, I found The Times's out-of-the-blue spread unsatisfying. The associated leader was quite restrained, emphasising the point that people do have a choice whether to use Google. Maybe John Witherow was not entirely comfortable with the note struck by his master's voice, yet felt obliged to beat the corporate drum.
There is a big issue here to be tackled journalistically, but it requires an overarching approach and heavy investment in personnel and money - both resources in short supply. 
Who can look at the entire question of privacy, personal security and surveillance without being accused of having a vested interest? 
Someone needs to.

There's an old-fashioned look about the Guardian this morning. What could it be?

Oh, it's forgotten the puff!
Forgotten? Or decided that its splash is so important that nothing should diminish its impact?

As SubScribe has noted  before, the Guardian is not a popular member of the Fleet Street gang. The phone hacking saga made it few friends, and its holier-than-thou air doesn't help.
Here we can see an example of why it gets up people's noses. 

Edward Snowden's leaked documents from America's National Security Agency not only let the world into the secret of how the Obama administration listened into Angela Merkel's phone calls, but also won the Guardian a hatful of awards, including a Pulitzer prize and being named Britain's Newspaper of the Year.

Snowden is clearly important to the Guardian. But how far up its own backside does a paper have to be to think that this source - an American living under asylum in Russia - and his opinions on forthcoming British legislation are of overarching significance to its readers?

People concerned about invasions of privacy, infringements of liberty and rushed legislation do not need their concern validated by the foreigner whose actions, more than anything else, led to this situation in the first place. And those who support the proposed new laws are the very last people who would be swayed by the fact that the "traitor" Snowden is against them.

Snowden's views may be worth reporting - The Times and Mail think they are, while at the same time both making the point that he is the reason for this week's legislation - but as a top-to-bottom splash on a puff-free front? 
And with the boast that these opinions were shared during a seven-hour interview in a Moscow hotel, "one of only a handful of interviews since he sought asylum a year ago"?
As one of the key conduits for Snowden to get his material out into the world, there is nothing surprising that the Guardian should get to interview him. What is surprising is that there is an air more of privilege than of entitlement that Snowden should now choose or agree to speak to the paper.

Readers are promised the full interview later in the week. Wonderful.

*The Government has said that the legislation being pushed through this week is merely formalising the existing arrangements. For an alternative view, please see this from Graham Smith.