Editorial Intelligence: ‘a disgusting idea’?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 3 April 2006 at 09:42
Tags: BBC, Daily Mail, Ethics, Journalism, Spectator, Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Times

The Sunday Times yesterday reported on a row — sorry, “catfight”, among leading media figures over whether journalists and PRs should hobnob in a forum sponsored by big organisations.Some journalists, it seems, are not impressed by Editorial Intelligence, PR guru Julia Hobsbawm’s “information and networking club” which seeks to bring together spinmeisters and leading columnists.

The Sunday Times story appears to have been provoked by a Guardian column in which Christina Odone  described EI as “PR meets journalism in Caribbean freebies, shameless backscratching and undeclared interests”. Institutionalising the “already rather dubious relationship” between hacks, flacks and the organsiations the latter represent, Odone wrote, “is just bad news.”

Odode is not alone, it seems. The Sunday Times reports that BBC has forced Barney Jones and Kirsty Lang to quit the Editorial Intelligence advisory board, after learning that they would be paid £1,000 to hold the position and £200 to attend its seminars.
Melanie Phillips has refused to get involved and saying “I don’t think that journalists and PRs should be in a jolly boat together.” Rod Liddle described the project as “a disgusting idea which suggests journalists might be up for hire.”  John Lloyd also resigned, following his appointment to head the Reuters journalism institute at Oxford — but Matthew d’Ancona is less concerned about his membership.

Editorial Intelligence sells its corporate subscribers access to an online directory of profiles of  and columnists, along with its quarterly magazine and access to networking events to bring PRs and journalists together.

Are Odone, Liddle and Phillips right — is this something journalists should not get involved with?

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.

The Spectator survey says…

Posted by Lou Thomas on 2 March 2006 at 13:30
Tags: Journalism, Spectator

The “Sextator” moniker the Speccy attracted under Boris Johnson’s tenure may have upped its profile so what better way to flag-up the passing of the baton to Matthew d’Ancona than a sex survey?