Bloggers’ reaction to the British Press Awards

Posted by Martin Stabe on 29 March 2007 at 16:57
Tags: British Press Awards, Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times

Here’s a shock: Some right-wing political bloggers have reacted badly to their journalistic bête noir, Polly Toynbee, collecting the gong for columnist of the year. on Monday night.

For the Devil’s Kitchen, this was a sure sign that “everyone else in the MSM is even stupider than Polly herself”.

He went on to claim:

If we needed any proof of the Leftist sympathies and utter mediocrity of the British MSM, this surely must be the clincher although I must admit that handing the National Newspaper of the Year to The Observer would also go some way to confirming the rightness of one’s utter contempt for the entire sorry industry.

DK quickly updated his post to acknowledge the reminder of another blogger, Bookdrunk, that more conservative papers have also won the award in recent years.

Of course, this just proves the point anyway:

If there’s one thing that bloggers who cover the media agree on, it’s that there’s plenty of mediocrity and outright hackery for the entire political spectrum.

Oh dear.

The bloggers who earn their living in the dastardly MSM were a tad more charitable.

Weber Shadwick chief executive Colin Bryne proves you can’t have it both ways. After years of complaints about bad behaviour at the Awards, Bryne was “left wishing for a bit of the old spicy behaviour and wondering why the lady in the gold bubble dress on the next table had to visit the loo every ten minutes”.

City University head of journalism and Press Gazette columnist Adrian Monck was left wishing for wifi — or at least mobile reception in the hall. In Monck’s comments, Neil McIntosh kicks off the much-needed debate about how we should reflect print-online convergence in next year’s awards. More on that important topic soon…

HarperPress editor Annabel Wright. Over at 5th Estate, she congratulates the Sunday Times’s Christina Lamb for winning the fourth British Press Award of her career as Foreign Reporter of the Year.

“Foreign correspondents seem to me a very particular breed, driven to take risks that would terrify most of us,” she writes, before posting excepts from the introduction of a book of Lamb’s journalism that will be published in July.

(more…)

Naughton on young people and newspaper readership

Posted by Martin Stabe on 12 November 2006 at 20:11
Tags: BitTorrent, Flickr, Journalism, MySpace, Observer, Technorati

John Naughton’s presentation on young people’s media consumption — and specifically, lack of newspaper readership — was one of the highlights at the Society of Editors conference last week (not least because it brought about the revelation that my editor’s Sunday league football shenanigans can be viewed on YouTube).

The Observer has wisely published nearly the whole thing. Some key quotes:

[I]n any other industry, the discovery that your potential future customers weren’t interested in buying your product would prompt an investigation into whether there was something wrong with the product. But what one hears - still - from the newspaper industry is that there’s something wrong with the customers.

…

[L]ook round the average British newsroom. How many hacks have a Flickr account or a MySpace profile? How many sub-editors have ever uploaded a video to YouTube? How many editors have used BitTorrent? (How many know what BitTorrent is?)

And while some of our teenagers’ interests coincide with ours, many do not. Here, for example, are the top blog tags on Technorati last night: Bush, careers, college, comedy, Congress, death, Democrats, elections, Flickr, gay, Halloween, Iraq, Microsoft, money, Republicans, Saddam, Ted Haggard, vote, war, breaking-news, tagshare, YouTube. Some you’ll recognise. But you won’t see much about many of these in the papers.

As the blog cliché goes, go read the rest.

@Society of Editors: ‘The future is already here’

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 November 2006 at 11:23
Tags: Journalism, Lancashire Evening Post, Observer, Press Association, Society of Editors, The Herald, World Editors Forum

This morning’s second panel, a “digital update” entitled “the future is already here” is chaired by Lesley Riddoch and comprises: PA’s Robert Freeman; Gordon Mack of The Herald; Simon Reynolds of the Lancashire Evening Post; Bertrand Pecquerie of the World Editors Forum; and John Naughton of the Observer.

Freeman, PA’s multimedia editor, starts with a video clip. The public have started to take the multiplatform world for granted, he says. The vox pops on the video clip prove it.

Freeman echos Carolyn McCall’s stress on software development from the AOP and World Digital Publishing conferences.

Mack is the digial media editor of the Herald, and describes himself as a “paidup member of the old media”. The Herald has increased onllne readership 45 per cent year on year, he says. It has worked with PA to produce online multimeida content, particuarlly at the Edinbourgh festival. But the paper has been “unmoved” by mobile. And there’s a digital editon, which has extended the Herald’s reach — for a few subscribers.
Web content remains wedded to print, he admits, and says this is a mistake. But now the first multimedia journalists are making their mark at the paper.Human resources, he says, is a major stumbling block to making
Another challenge are legacy print workflows that are not really adaptable to multichannel delivery.

Referring to Tim O’Reilly’s AOP speech, Mack says compares his online staff — two producers, a quarter-share of a developer and one salesman — to the 9,000 staff at Yahoo! and 85,000 and Time Warner. Asymetrical competition indeed. But perhaps old media are not the big media.

Simon Reynolds says the 120-year-old Lancashire Evening Post in Preston is no longer a newspaper, but a “fully integrated news organisation”. He shows a hilarious clip from the paper’s News Idol competition, with the mayor of Preston reading the news in a monotone that was “hardly Jeremy Paxman”. A more sombre clip shows the return of the remains of a local soldier who had been killed in Iraq. The paper managed to cover this event better than local television as well.

“The result of this revolution really speaks for themselves,” he says. “We’re doing well over 500 stories a week on our site; 500 photographs and much more audio and video”. The site has 1.5m page impresssions month, had quadrupled to 120,000 unique users, all while the paper’s print circulation has increased.

Bertrand Pecquerie tells newspapers to become a news aggregator for their region by building a network of targeted web sites, giving Dagbladet.no in Norway as an example.

Sharing tools, like links to Digg and Technorati, should be on each story page, he says, showing the sharing sidebar from WashingtonPost.com.

Next, he shows Bluffton Today as an example of hyperlocal coverage. Social community news, not breaking hard news is the centre of papers that are embracing this approach, he says.

Only one newsroom will be vry difficult to manage. He shows Axel Springer’s Die Welt group, which has three newspapers: the quality national Die Welt, the regional Berliner Morgenpost, and compact edition targeted at young readers, Welt Kompakt. They have three different teams, but they share several services. This sort of multiple paper platforms will become more common as freesheets and other

Then it gets interesting. He compares the Telegraph’s new hub-and-spoke newsroom design to Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison. No seriously. It reflects an authoritarian tendancy for managment to control jorunalists, he says.

“I believe this kind of newsroom will fail,” he says, stressing that it undermines the creativity journlists need in favour of a Modern Times-style industrial news production on multiple platforms.

John Naughton deserves his own post for his presentation about future generations of “digital native” readers.

Relaunching and circulation: The ugly truth

Posted by Martin Stabe on 4 November 2006 at 17:43
Tags: Guardian, Independent, Journalism, Observer, Times

Mark Friesen of Newsdesigner.com has a fascinating post that visualises the effect of relaunches on newspaper circulation.

Graphing the before-and-after ABC figures of several American newspapers that have recently undergone expensive redesigns, the continued — and sometimes worsening — downward trend is unmistakable.

But here in Britain, the relaunch effect appears to be slightly more positive.

Friesen also plotted ABC figured from the Times, Independent, Guardian and Observer in the same way. It shows the Times and Indy posting circulation gains since embracing the compact format. The Guardian and Observer achieved big circulation spikes when they relaunched in the Berliner size, but have since tumbled back to their circulations of around a year before the relaunch.

The Observer’s reliable source

Posted by Martin Stabe on 30 October 2006 at 14:39
Tags: Journalism, Observer, Star

Yesterday, the Observer’s media diarist boasted that “the Daily Star’s infamous ‘Daily Fatwah’ spoof … has come into our possession.”

Was it, by any chance, delivered by the postman? The spoof proof came into the possession of all Press Gazette subscribers a fortnight ago, when we ran it on page 2.

Update: And where did the Sunday Herald get this?

Weekend paper roundup

Posted by Martin Stabe on 18 April 2006 at 10:54
Tags: Blogs, Five, Guardian, Independent, Journalism, Metro, Observer, People, Times

The continuing fake sheikh brouhaha wasn’t the only meta-news item this extended weekend.

Columnist and documentary-maker Dominik Diamond did not go through with his planned Easter crucifixtion in the Philippines, the Scotsman reported. The Scotsman also reported that the Scottish Information Commissioner will be naming and shaming public authorities that are failing to comply with the Freedom of Information Act.

Friday’s Guardian says former Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie is exploring the possibility of launching an upmarket sports magazine and had a profile of Seymour Hersh, the legendary American investigative journalist who has been making waves again about his stories about the US military’s plans for Iran.

The Sunday Times says Swedish tycoon Pelle Tornberg is planning to bid for the new free afternoon commuter paper in London, the one major European city where his Metro group does not own the commuter title of that name.

In the Independent, Peter Cole argued that newspapers are vacillating between panic and complacency over bird flu. There’s also a profile of Trinity Mirror boss Sly Bailey, on the occasion of her 12.9 per cent pay rise.

The Observer says racism is rife in British newspapers, according to the Commisson for Racial Equality. In a story laden with martial metaphors, the Observer also suggests that the recent newspaper acquisitions in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia by David Montgomery’s Mecom group is just a warmup for an assault on British newspapers. Peter Preston says the latest ABC figures show the People is in big trouble, but that this is part of a bigger transformation of the tabloid universe:

We know the ancient redtop order of things is crumbling. Lads have their boob-filled mags; cable TV runs gossip shows; websites peddle porn unlimited. The target arena, in sum, is a lot more crowded than it used to be, and the working-class audience may be Polish or Pakistani now - so not much into seaside humour and Union Jackery.

Preston also has some interesting views on the success of the newly-compact quality papers. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Independent, Times, and Guardian titles don’t owe their recent success to sardine-tinned commuters enjoying the new tabloid or Berliner format. Most of their gains, after all, seem to be coming on Saturdays.

It was also busy weekend in the blogosphere. Those who were not obsessing over the ‘Euston manifesto’ published in the New Statesman noticed some interesting things, as well. Regret the Error caught the Gloucestershire Echo naming the wrong man as a convicted criminal.

Chicken Yoghurt has some pointed questions about the Independent’s commitment to environmentalism. Why are they giving away free flights on the same front pages that fret about global warming, Justin McKeating wants to know.

On the Huffington Post, Larisa Alexandrovna accuses the Associated Press of plagairising a story she wrote for the news web site Raw Story. But the AP was independently contacted by some of Alexandrovna’s sources, so it’s all a bit of a storm in a teacup about the wire not attributing the story to her investigation. But it does speak volumes about big news organisations’ attitudes to online-only upstarts like Raw Story. Alexandrovna says an AP spokesman told her that the agency’s policy is that information gleaned from blogs does not require attribution.

Finally, forget the well-known traffic-boosting effect of a link from Slashdot or Digg. Among blogging journalists in the United States, the major traffic-driver is Jim Romenesko’s blog at the Poynter Institute. Just about every American journalist reads it, and a link from Romenesko can drive a small blog’s traffic through the roof in an instant, as one journalism lecturer in Florida discovered last week.

British Press Awards: Critic of the Year

Posted by Martin Stabe on 20 March 2006 at 20:53
Tags: British Press Awards, Journalism, Observer

The Critic of the Year is Jay Rayner of the Observer.

British Press Awards: Supplement of the Year

Posted by Martin Stabe on 20 March 2006 at 20:27
Tags: Journalism, Observer

Supplement of the year goes to the best newspaper magazine colour supplement. The winner is the Observer Food Monthly.

Weekend news roundup

Posted by Martin Stabe on 13 March 2006 at 10:41
Tags: Aberdeen Press & Journal, Economist, Guardian, Independent on Sunday, International, Ireland, Johnston Press, Journalism, New Statesman, Northcliffe, Observer, Sportsman, Sunday Telegraph, TakeSport

We trawl the weekend papers and web sites so you don’t have to:

The Business identifies Andy Stewart, a founder of brokers Collins Stewart Tullets, as the final investor in the Sportsman. Spencer is thought to have invested £1m for less than a 10 per cent stake. The other shareholders in the sports and betting daily that is launching on 22 March include Michael Spencer, Ben and Zac Goldsmith, Ben Arbib and Max Aitken. Staff on the new paper will own a 10 percent share.

The Sportsman will face additional competition in the form of a 64-page free weekly sports betting magazine which launched on Friday. Backed by entrepeneur Chris Akers, TakeSport distributed 30,000 copies at rail and Underground stations in London, the Independent reports.

The wonderful blog Regret the Error, which carefully scrutinises the corrections columns, spots an interesting item that ran in the Guardian on Friday. Nothing to do with the “headline of the week” on Press Gazette’s Page 28 the previous day, I’m sure.

In Saturday’s Telegraph, Roy Greenslade speaks to outgoing Economist editor Bill Emmott, and serves up comments by former New Statesman editor Peter Wilby criticising the sober magazine newspaper as “almost stifling in its monotonal certainties and infuriating in the arrogance of its judgments”.

Emmott, on whose watch the Economist has doubled its circulation to upwards of 1 milion, gets his jabs in: “I guess a sniping response would be that if I wanted advice from someone who ran a failing magazine I’d ask for it. More seriously, it is a blinkered interpretation of why people read the magazine.”

Bookmakers Paddy Power consider Ed Carr a “dead cert” to replace Emmott in the editor’s chair, but that doesn’t stop the speculation in the diary columns. The media diary in the Independent on Sunday suggests former deputy Clive Crook, now at the Atlantic Monthly in America but still penning paeans to the Economist, is a leading external candidate at tomorrow’s interviews. “If successful, Crook would be the first person from without the ranks of the Economist to take the top job in its 160-year history,” the Sindy notes. Elsewhere in the paper, though, diarist Christopher Silvester reckons Economist US editor John Mickethwaith turned down the Spectator chair because he had been promised the top job at his own place.

The Sindy also goes after the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Mail, asking “Have Middle England’s best-loved papers lost the plot?” Sources close to deposed Sunday Telegraph editor Sarah Sands say she’s furious for being “fired for carrying out the brief she had been given”, noting that under her leadership, circulation rose from 666,031 before she arrived last May to 683,741 last month.

As for Daily Mail and General Trust, the Sindy notes that its regional Northcliffe division made £102m on revenues of £520m. That 20 per cent margin compares unfavourably to the 34.5 per cent at regional rival Johnston Press and 35 per cent at Gannett. Plans for staff cuts at Northcliffe are expected to be unveilled this week.

According to the Sunday Times, meanwhile, reports that DMGT is considering selling off the Aberdeen Press & Journal for £120m. The Sunday Times says DGMT is negotiating with Johnston Press and at least one other potential buyer, a sale could happen “within the next few weeks”.

An advert for a highly-paid post as a Department of Health speechwriter that appeared in Press Gazette raised eyebrows at the Times. At £56,000 per annum for the part time post, the paper calculates, the right applicant could expect to trouser more than George W. Bush’s chief wordsmith, the paper calculates. Well, not quite:

However, the department said last night that an error had been made when drawing up the job details. It said that the actual salary would be a pro rata payment, and the speechwriter could expect to earn between £18,000 and £26,000 a year.

“[T]here probably isn’t enough money in the world to pay someone for the thankless task of defending Britain’s monumentally incompetent health system,” notes one former Republican speechwriter, Rodger Morrow. Still, British blogger Tim Worstall has already applied.

The Polski Herald is an eight-page Polish-language suppliment that is included in Dublin’s Evening Herald every Friday. The Observer quotes its news editor, Tom Galvin, urging British news papers to follow his paper’s example of reaching out to immigrant communities: “I would say to fellow journalists in Britain, especially in those areas where there are large new immigrant communities like the Poles, that this is the way to increase and build a new readership. There is a real and very new market out there.”

News sites’ .eu domain names

Posted by Martin Stabe on 8 March 2006 at 14:04
Tags: Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Economist, Financial Times, Guardian, Independent, Independent on Sunday, International, News of the World, Observer, Online, Sun, Sunday Mirror, Sunday Times, Times

Kieren McCarthy — one of the blogging freelances recently mentioned in a Press Gazette feature — had a story in yesterday’s Times about the new .eu top-level domain for European web sites. The story behind the story is on his blog today.

At present, only registered trademark owners and others who can document a legal claim to a particular name can register with the European names registry EUrid. Owners of big online brands like Amazon and Skype, McCarthy reports, are fretting over whether they will be able to secure their .eu domain names before 7 April, when registration is expanded to a free-for-all “landgrab” for the general public:

… they have good reason to worry, according to EURid, the company behind the domains. “We will give the domain to the first company that applies with a valid trademark,” explained spokesman Patrik Linden.

That means even big names are not necessarily safe. Linden confirmed that Amazon had now been approved as owner of its .eu namesake, but pointed out that there was a Volvo Amazon car in the 1960s, so the car manufacturer could well have a legitimate claim.

Another car manufacturer, Volkswagen, has won a battle of the brands over Polo.eu. It beat both Ralph Lauren and Nestle to the name by a matter of minutes, according to domain name management company NetNames.

Clearly this also affects news organisations’ web sites? Are their European domain names safe?

The Telegraph has won a race for telegraph.eu. Associated Newspapers controls dailymail.eu. The Beeb has registed bbc.eu and skynews.eu is controlled by BSkyB. Also secure are itv.eu and itn.eu.

Surprisingly, perhaps, News International has grabbed thesun.eu, newsoftheworld.eu, sundaytimes.eu and thetimes.eu. But one RM Peddemors, a resident of the Netherlands, has staked claims to timeonline.eu. The same individual is also claiming economist.eu and observer.eu. Only Guardian Newspapers is appears to be challenging the claim to their trademark.

The German postal service has registered express.eu, and four companies (not including Trinity Mirror) are claiming mirror.eu.

The domain ft.eu is set to host a salmon-coloured financial news web site, but some of the other more Euro-friendly papers seem to have missed out.

Neither the Irish or British incarnations of the Indy will have independent.eu: That went to Swedish bank Independent Finans AB. Even normally web-savvy Guardian seems to have missed out: although they have secured guardianunlimited.eu, Guardian Flachglas GmbH, a glass manufacturer in Thalheim, Germany, has snapped up guardian.eu. One other domain name that a Guardian employee has recently been diligently buying up in various TLDs is still available on .eu.