The NUJ Commission on Multimedia Working: reading the report

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 December 2007 at 10:21
Tags: NUJ

The long-awaited report of the NUJ commission on multimedia working was published today on the union’s freshly-redesigned website.

This is the final version of the document that caused a bit of a furore back in October when excerpts were published in the union’s in-house magazine alongside a comment piece, provocatively entitled “Web 2.0 is rubbish“, by Commission member Donnecha DeLong. During the ensuing debate among bloggers, Guardian media commentator Roy Greenslade and Telegraph communities editor Shane Richmond both publicly renounced their union membership.

It’s no surprise then, that the final report is peppered with reminders that the union is not anti-technology. And indeed, reading the voluminous and wide-ranging document, and it’s safe to say that DeLong’s views are not entirely representative of the seven-member commission that produced the report. In a glowing final chapter, the commission sings the praises of social networking, RSS, widgets and mobile applications and the need for journalists to keep one step ahead of their employers in understanding the changes and developments in industry.

What is hard to overlook, however, is that the report consists largely of a catalogue of concerns about the way publishers are implementing their digital strategies. Journalists, it says, are being asked to do more, often working longer hours for little extra pay. Often the increased workload comes as employers are shedding newsroom jobs — although the report does acknowledge that at some publications, new jobs have been created for web editors and video journalists.

Most worryingly, the report catalogues how journalists with insufficient time, resources, or editorial workflow procedures are pressured to cut corners in the online production process, including practices that would never have been tolerated in print-only or broadcast-only newsrooms:

• Journalists on a daily group in eastern England told us: “There are no clear guidelines about what should go up when, whose job it is to put it up, who is checking it legally etc. In some cases reporters are effectively having to act as subs for their own material before posting it to website.”
• Some titles at a business magazine group in London are operating a haphazard “open outcry” system to get stories checked: “The system is that when a writer has done a story they shout ‘Can someone read this story?’ to check it before it goes up. It depends entirely on there being someone to do it. On one occasion a news feature went up to the website and there was no-one on the newsdesk to write a headline so it was done by a technician and it was libellous … It had to be taken down.
• Telegraph journalists said: “Editors are forced to think in terms of online picture galleries, Your View feedback, podcasts etc as well as the paper. Therefore … less time to devote to briefing writers and editing copy.”
• At present many newspapers that insist on National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) qualifications, for example, are prepared to accept much lower standards of training for such website material as video.

No doubt there will be some skeptical response to the document, as NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear has written today.

The section likely to arouse controversy in the blogosphere is the one dealing with user-generated content. That section repeats the union’s call for publishers to adopt its proposed code of practice on witness contributors, a document that caused just a bit controversy when it was introduced last year. Another section describes the increased need to interact with readers as a burden on journalists time. This is unlikely to impress those see virtue in news becoming more of a conversation between journalists and a less-passive audience.

Do any of the commission’s finding it all sound familiar? Has it got its recommendations right?

8 comments

NUJ freelance branch confirms first blogger member

Posted by Martin Stabe on 14 November 2007 at 11:49
Tags: NUJ

The of National Union of Journalists has formally admitted its first member who describes himself as a full-time blogger, the secretary of the union’s London Freelance Branch, Tom Davies, has confirmed.

Although many NUJ members blog as part of their job with other media outlets, Conrad Quilty-Harper, who writes for the blog Endgadet, is believed to be the first who applied listing “blogger” as his job description.

NUJ may get ‘first full-time blogger’ member tonight

Posted by Martin Stabe on 12 November 2007 at 18:13
Tags: AOL, Blogs, NUJ, blogging

The National Union of Journalists may tonight admit its first member to list ‘blogger’ as his job title.

The union’s London Freelance branch will tonight consider an application from Conrad Quilty-Harper, who is taking a year out from Hull University and is a freelance contributor to Engadget, the widely-read gadget blog ultimately owned by AOL.

However, Quilty-Harper’s case has also shown an anomaly in the union’s membership rules. Despite his freelance role, the freelance branch initially rejected Quilty-Harper’s application for membership last December on the grounds that he is a full-time student not enrolled on a journalism course.

He has been documenting his efforts to join the union by posting his correspondence with the branch on the photosharing website Flickr.

“I had to tell the guy who phoned up that I’m not going to be a student this year,” Quilty-Harper wrote in a post today showing the letter informing him of tonight’s meeting.

“Turns out I’ll have to phone them up and say I’m a student again next year, at which time they’ll revoke my membership and I’ll have to apply again.”

Writing on his blog last week, NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear mentioned that he had approved the first membership application from someone listing their job title as “blogger” — apparently a reference to Quilty-Harper.

“Whilst we have hundreds, if not thousands of members who write blogs, this is the first person who earns their entire living solely from freelance blogging,” wrote Dear.

“Who says we’re not attracting new media workers?”

NUJ multi-media commission: ‘publishers don’t understand the web’

Posted by Martin Stabe on 19 October 2007 at 10:43
Tags: NUJ

The current issue of the National Union of Journalists’ magazine, The Journalist, has the first extract from the report by the union’s Commission on Multi-media Working, which is due to be published in full next month.

“Interviews carried out by the NUJ commission have revealed that few publishers and broadcasters with a web presence understand the web,” The Journalist says in its introduction.

Somewhat inexplicably, The Journalist isn’t available online. So here are some highlights to ensure that this important topic finds its way into the vibrant online discussion between professional peers that is the journalism blogosphere.

“In the panic with which many newspaper owners reacted to the rush to go online, many enforced quite large scale redundancies, to slash costs to cover internet investments that would not pay off in the short term,” the commission report says.

The commission’s survey on NUJ chapels found that 50 per cent of chapels had experienced redundancies since the web operation was introduced; 75 per cent of chapels said their workloads had increased; 37 per cent said journalists were working longer hours. Only 34 per cent said the quality of new media was professional, 52 per cent called it adequate, and 14 per cent said it was poor.

The rest of the report extract catalogues a range of strange web workflow practices and a lack of proper editing procedures on web sites:

• Journalists at one “daily group in eastern England” told the commission that there were “no clear guidelines about what should go up when, whose job it is to put it up, who is checking it legally etc.”
• Journalists at one London magazine group reported the web was being run by an “open outcry system” — “The system is that when a writer has done a story, they shout ‘can somebody read this story?’ to check before it goes up.” On one occasion, a feature was put online by a technician rather than a journalist, resulting in a libelous headline that had to be taken down.
• A chapel at a Newsquest title in north of England told the commission that “stories are going online unsubbed” directly from a newsdesk.
• In some publications, “there are no experienced journalists working on the websites and copy is handled by web technicians“.
• The ease of copying and pasting leads to journalists under time pressure to “simply lump text across without proper consideration of its quality or reliability”.
• Running unedited press releases is always a problem, but the difficulty of editing video makes video news releases present a particular problem. One Newsquest chapel told the commission: “Police will send us video footage of a drugs raid. We would never run a press release from the police word for word, but we seem happy to do it with their video.”
• Single-journalist video reporting has clear drawbacks, the report says. “To have to seek out information and people to interview, then interview and photograph or film them, then have to write and voice the script, is an inefficient way of working and can never produce such good results as a team.”
• The report stresses the need for proper video training. “Untrained or semi-trained writers or photographers have been turning in such poor video material and taking so long to do it that even the meanest employers appear to be taking notice,” the report says. Several publications reported having to ease up on enthusiasm for video as reality caught up with quality expectations. However the report also acknowledges that “in centres where video training has be thorough, and the journalists are given proper support, work of high quality is being done.”
• Members from a regional daily told the commission: “There is real concern over lack of policy/guidelines and lines of responsibility between papers and web … things would be better if there was a dedicated video unit subject to the web team so decisions about what to cover and how could be integrated into the day’s news plan”.
• “The practice of reporters taking photographs is becoming widespread, to the detriment of the quality of images.”

Does any of this sound familiar? What is to be done?

Update: Blogger and Guardian columnist Jeff Jarvis calls the NUJ’s effort a “whiny, territorial, ass-covering, protecting-the-priesthood, preservation-instead-of-innovation faux report”.

The Telegraph’s community editor, Shane Richmond, isn’t impressed with the report, either. He also doesn’t like the two introductory articles in The Journalist.

Update 25/10:Roy Greenslade intends to leave the union over this. Guardian Unlimited’s Neil McIntosh weighs in as well.

22 comments

NUJ ADM: Should journalists boycott Israel? And can they?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 14 April 2007 at 14:03
Tags: Israel, NUJ

Blogging journalists have been reacting to the motion calling for a boycott of Israeli goods that was passed on Friday by the National Union of Journalists annual delegates meeting in Birmingham.

The ADM voted, 66 to 54, in favour of the call for a boycott, citing Israel’s “aggression” in Palestinian territories and its “savage, pre-planned attack on Lebanon” as the rationale.

Blogging journalists’ reactions have so far been critical of the decision. Lloyd Shepherd looks forward to hearing about “similar boycotts of Saudi oil (abuse of women and human rights), Turkish desserts (limits to freedom of speech) and, of course, the immediate replacement of all stationery in the NUJ’s offices which has been made or assembled in China.”

Freelance Craig McGinty writes:

I AM a member of the NUJ and am wondering how boycotting any nation’s goods, whether it’s Israel, China or Umpah Lumpah Land will help improve the lot of both staff and freelance journalists.

Telegraph Washington correspondent Toby Harnden describes the boycott as “inane, ineffectual, counter-productive and insulting to the intelligence” and worries that many of the ADM motions betray a fixation with “trendy leftie” causes:

I am a member of the NUJ, though at times like this I wonder why. A union battling for better pay and conditions is one thing. But why should my dues be spent on anti-Israel posturing of which I and many other members want no part?

The wording of the motion condemning of Israel, Harnden argues, is “tendentious and politically-loaded propaganda that would be rightly edited out of any news story written in a newspaper that had any pretensions of fairness”.

One commenter on Harden’s blog notes that given Israel’s booming high-tech industry, boycotting the country could prove rather difficult:

[I]f the NUJ are serious about boycotting Israel, they should throw out their laptops and cellphones: all Windows software was and is developed in Israel, and the Motorola, Nokia and most other cellphone CIM’s are all made there too. Back to Underwood manual typewriters and two tin cans with a string for the Fourth Estate!

Anybody want to speak up in favour of this motion?

Update 17/4: This week’s Press Gazette leader says: “Stop the political posturing and look at the key issues“.

50 comments

182 responses to the Freedom of Information consultation

Posted by Martin Stabe on 13 March 2007 at 20:46
Tags: BBC, Crown Copyright, Ethics, Freedom of Information, Guardian, Investigations, Journalism, Mashups, NUJ, foi, foia

The Government has received 182 responses to its consultation on the Freedom of Information Act fees regime.

We know about five of these so far. One submission is Press Gazette’s petition, signed by more than 1,250 journalists who oppose the Government’s plans. Another is the Guardian’s strongly-worded defence of journalists’ use of FOI. The BBC has also made its opposition plain.

FOI campaigner Heather Brooke’s submission is posted on her blog. It’s a forcefully-worded piece which is notable for introducing two very practical arguments to a debate that is usually dominated by abstract polemics about the public’s “right to know”.

First, Brooke assaults the Government’s frequent claim that Freedom of Information Act introduces a net cost to the public purse and the economy as a whole. Instead, she makes a strong case that FOI — combined with a more liberal system for the re-use of public-sector information — would boost the economy by fostering a stronger private-sector information industry like the one in the United States. More transparency would also save the Treasury money in the long run by making public record-keeping more efficient and exposing waste.

Second, and perhaps more interesting to readers here, she argues that a strong Freedom of Information regime would improve British journalism overall, by encouraging “responsible, informative journalism, leading to an informed and civically engaged electorate”.

First, Freedom of Information means more accurate, factually-based reporting, including analytical computer-assisted investigative journalism:

The polemical style of much British journalism is due in large part to the difficulty obtaining official information. It is noteworthy that the UK lacks any organisation devoted to computer-assisted reporting – a type of investigative journalism that is well developed in the US and Scandinavia where freedom of information laws are much stronger and well-developed. I have worked with several organisations to try and build up this type of analytical journalism in the UK but the difficulties are enormous. …

Regular readers will know that I completely agree with her about this.

Brooke also makes the interesting argument that greater access to legitimate sources of information would reduce the need for journalists to resort to dubious or illegal methods for obtaining data:

If the government wants to encourage legitimate reporting techniques then it needs to provide an efficient and timely mechanism to make this type of reporting cost effective. This mechanism should be the Freedom of Information Act. In the US, the federal FOIA combined with strong state FOI and public records laws means there is no demand for an information black market. Having worked as a journalist in the US for eight years, I never once came across a reporter who had used a private detective to gather information. There was simply no need. All the information needed was available in the public domain.

By contrast in the UK, trying to access information legitimately couldn’t be more time-consuming and difficult. Obstacles are constantly put in one’s way and everything the government does encourages the creation of an information black market economy. Now we are going to jail reporters who access information illegitimately, but a more effective solution to this problem would be to create incentives to use legitimate information gathering tools. The main way of doing this would be to make the FOIA more effective.

The NUJ made similar noises about encouraging investigative journalism through Freedom of Information in a Parliamentary committee on media regulation this week. Its own 10-page response to the consultation has also been submitted.

I look forward to seeing the other 178 submissions. I hope I don’t need to file a request …

Inside this week’s Press Gazette

Posted by Martin Stabe on 30 March 2006 at 13:23
Tags: ABC, BBC, Citizen journalism, Daily Telegraph, Economist, Guardian, Journalism, Mirror, Mobile Phones, NUJ, New Media, News of the World, Online, Regionals, Spectator, Sunday Telegraph, Times, War reporting

Some highlights from tomorrow’s Press Gazette:

The owners of the Daily Telegraph, the Barclay Brothers, have discovered that their ploy bringing libel cases under French criminal law — a tactic most recently deployed against the Times — cuts both ways. The Sunday Telegraph has paid out to the estranged father of comedian Jimmy Carr after his lawyers threatened drag the paper before a French tribunbal.

George Galloway has threatened to publish pictures of Mazher Mahmood after the News of the World’s “fake sheikh” attempted one of his famous sting operations on the controvertial Respect MP. (The Guardian’s Duncan Campbell today has more on the foiled “sheikh-down”.)

A former Times fashion journalist, Emily Davies, is at the heart of a plagiarism row after an American publisher gave her a £515,000 advance on a book. In a statement to us, Davies admits “genuinely accidental misattribution” of parts of the book proposal — but says there is “a dirty tricks campaign” to discredit her. Lawyers have stopped us from publishing Davies’s publicity photograph.

Regular Dog readers already know this, but the Guardian’s web site will make £1 million profit this year. This emerged at the MediaGuardian Changing Media Summit, where Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow enthused about citizen journalism.

Roy Greenslade told a Newspaper Society conference that regional newspapers need to challenge to the online competition from the BBC. His most recent Daily Telegraph column is adapted from the speech. We hear that Greenslade, who recently resigned from the Telegraph, has some super-secret online project for the Guardian up his sleeve.

Multichannel television on mobile phones set to be launched by mobile network O2 within a fortnight, and if the results of a recent pilot of the service in Oxford is anything to go by, news is set to be one of the most popular offerings.

New Economist editor John Micklethwait says he wants to double the magazine’s circulation to 2 million readers worldwide over the next 10 years. Speaking of new magazine editors, we also have an interview with Matthew D’Ancona of the Spectator — he’s into punk rock, apparently.

The National Union of Journalists is backing Richard Gizbert, a London-based correspondent for ABC News, who was sacked after he refused to go to Iraq. The American television network is appealing against an Employment Tribunal ruling that Gizbert was unfairly dismissed.