Warwickshire MP: Trinity cuts are serious attacks on journalism

Posted by Patrick Smith on 22 September 2008 at 08:19
Tags: Regional Newspapers

It’s not just the National Union of Journalists that opposes Trinity Mirror’s proposed 65 redundancies at its Coventry and Birmingham newsrooms - North Warwickshire and Bedworth MP Mike O’Brien has called the cuts “serious attacks on news, journalists and journalism”. In a letter to Trinity Mirror regional director Steve Brown, Labour MP O’Brien says the cuts would “undermine the ability of my constituents to get the news”.

Holdthefrontpage reports that Brown has agreed to meet with Coventry South MP Jim Cunningham to talk over the plans.

The letter was leaked to the Spaghetti Gazette blog, which accompanies the Midlands series of arts and cultures magazines of the same name. In it, O’Brien says:

Some of your titles have been run down over the years by Trinity Mirror. For example the Bedworth Echo has no office in the town. Some fine journalists try to keep in touch from a distance. The [Coventry] Telegraph used top dominate news in North Warwickshire but cutbacks meant other newspapers have grown while as the Telegraph circulation has fallen again…

I ask for an explanation for these cuts and I ask you to reconsider them.

NUJ chapels across the titles have voted to strike on 7 and 8 October - if - the company cannot find enough volunteers to fill the 65 or so proposed redundancies. Brown is ”confident” of finding enough volunteers and the union will make a final decision on whether to walk out will be made on 6 October.

When exactly were the Daily Telegraph good old days?

Posted by Patrick Smith on 19 September 2008 at 10:18
Tags: National Newspapers, New Media

Roy Greenslade has posted an anonymous letter from a Telegraph Media Group employee who is less than impressed with Telegraph Media Group’s forward-thinking, converged publishing strategy.

Here are two main points from it:

National newspapers are beginning to head in the direction that local papers went 20 years ago, demanding levels of commitment - in hours and workload - that are unsustainable in conjunction with a normal family life.

The growth of blogs and online communities seems to be contributing plenty in the way of opinion, of which there’s already plenty and not enough in the way of facts. This is creating a brand of journalism in which it doesn’t matter if you get things wrong.

As Greenslade says, many will be nodding along as they read that piece. But Justin Williams, assistant editor at TMG, was not impressed. He writes:

“When, exactly, did journalists with aspirations to get on in national newspapers enjoy a normal family life? Was it during that hallowed period before the internet, before TV, before radio, even? Seriously, when was it?

Williams argues that TMG is simply doing what it needs to do to stay relevant but it seems that not everyone at Buckingham Palace Road shares that vision. 

The message to doubters from managements across the country seems to be that if they want to continue working in journalism, they should get with the programme.

Sheffield Wednesday drops libel case against fans’ forum

Posted by Patrick Smith on 17 September 2008 at 10:25
Tags: Broadcast, Law, New Media

Sheffield Wednesday FC has dropped its long-running libel case against 14 fans whose postings on the online forum owlstalk.co.uk prompted the club into a legal challenge in the High Court.

As George Monbiot writes in The Guardian, the original case started two and a half years ago and just over one year ago the High Court ordered the site owners to reveal the identity of three anonymous posters.

The club also pursued Wednesday fans who had posted negative comments about its chairman Dave Allen on the BBC Radio 5 Live football blog. Incidentally, Allen has now left the club after a disagreement with the board.

Monbiot has no time for the club or for British libel laws - often described as among the most stringent in the world - and points out that the current las is based on the rules from the 19th and 20th century designed to protect the reputation of upper class gentlemen.

Owls fans may well be lighting up the message boards again today: the team lost 6-0 away to Reading last night…

Journalists and social networking sites: new tools of trade

Posted by Patrick Smith on 17 September 2008 at 09:04
Tags: New Media, Regional Newspapers

For many journalists they have become an important part of the job, while for others they remain a waste of time and should be banned. Either way social networking sites, most obviously Facebook and Myspace, now play a big role in reporting.

(more…)

Telegraph, Trinity Mirror join Nokia’s mobile ad network

Posted by Patrick Smith on 17 September 2008 at 08:20
Tags: Mobile, National Newspapers, New Media

Both Trinity Mirror and Telegraph Media Group have joined Nokia Media Network, the telecom company’s mobile advertising network launched in February this year, according to paidContent.

The network claims an audience of some 100m and a 10 per cent click-through rate and already boasts Reuters and Cosmopolitan among its members who host ads via Nokia’s own mobile site and other services.

This shows the growing importance of mobile as an editorial and commercial platform. While print readership goes down, mobile content keeps getting more and more readers. And the next step is to find out how to make some money from it.

The Drudge Effect: why linking makes sense

Posted by Patrick Smith on 16 September 2008 at 09:10
Tags: National Newspapers, New Media, Online

Some online publishers are still wary about linking to other sites’ content, particularly that of their rivals. Why give them more exposure? Why send readers - and therefore advertisers - elsewhere when you’re spending all you time and money on keeping them?

Because, as Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 points out, it makes complete sense: good linking improves engagement and ups your readership.

He cites Nielsen Online stats fo the top 30 US news sites for May 2008 that ranks sites by sessions per user. The winner? The Drudge Report with 21.1 sessions per user and an audience of 2.7m.

And Nielsen’s stats for June 2008 show that the average Drudge user spent a staggering 59 minutes on the site.

Drudge is of course simply a list of links, but this simple site has 500m page views, 12m unique visitors and 1.95bn ad impressions every month. Karp says:

That’s right folks. Drudge beats every original content news site by a two-to-one margin. Drudge is also one of the largest news sites that isn’t built on an offline brand or communications portal.

Still think sending people away with links is not a good strategy online?

18-09-08 update

Karp now ups the ante in a new post urging traditional news sites to start automatically aggregating the news on their homegpages. There is, he says, no rival to Drudge and as most homepages don’t change very radically throughout the day, why would you go back more than once a day?

Guardian Media Group shuts Greater Manchester weekly offices

Posted by Patrick Smith on 16 September 2008 at 08:38
Tags: Newspapers, Regional Newspapers

It seems that not even privately owned regional newspaper businesses are immune from a downturn in advertising and the credit crunch: Holdthefrontpage tells us that Guardian Media Group is to merge several of its Greater Manchester weekly newspapers offices, with a net loss of six.

The Heywood Advertiser, Middleton Guardian and papers in Didsbury, Beswick and Accrington will lose their offices and be moved to neighbouring offices. The Wilmslow Express in Cheshire is to move from Wilmslow to the Macclesfield Express -a distance of 7 miles, according to Google Maps.

HTTP reports that staff from the Beswick office could be moved to the Tameside Advertiser, based in my hometown of Ashton-Under-Lyne, a good six miles away.

GMG has 22 weeklies in and around Manchester, which are  part of the MEN Media Group, and it says that the moves will not result in any fewer journalists or any “loss of focus” in the local market.

Sir Ray bucks the trend to buy three more weeklies

Posted by Patrick Smith on 16 September 2008 at 08:20
Tags: Newspapers, Regional Newspapers

It may be tin hat time for regional newspaper companies but that hasn’t stopped newspaper proprietor Sir Ray Tindle from adding to his local newspaper empire with three more purchases, as the FT reports.

This time Tindle has bought the Leigh and Westcliff Times, the Canvey Island and Benfleet Times and the thew Rayleigh and Eastwood Times.

Those websites probably don’t give a comprehensive flavour of the papers’ content so it will be interesting to see if they get some online investment, which Tindle’s recently-purchased London papers have seen.

Tindle told Jon Slattery in April just why it is he keeps on investing - and making money from - print.

Ann Leslie on dwarves, frozen sheep and a career on the frontline

Posted by Patrick Smith on 15 September 2008 at 15:21
Tags: Journalism

Superlatives are often used when newspapers  describe their own star writers but few would argue with its assertion that its own Dame Ann Leslie is “one of the greatest foreign correspondents of our times”.

The paper today prints an extract of Leslie’s autobiography Killing My Own Snakes in which she recalls witnessing some of modern history’s great events - the fall of the Berlin wall, Mandela’ walking to freedom - and her encounters with some of its most interesting characters.

But the encounter with the notorious “irascible Scot” Tom Campbell, the Daily Express’s Manchester news editor who took a young Leslie to task for having the nerve to be a woman in the newsroom.

“There’s a dwarf in Oldham says he was at school with Cary Grant,” he growled at me. “And while you’re about it, lassie, there’s a flock of sheep frozen to death on the moors.”

“Er, do we have an address for the dwarf?” I asked nervously. “Or, indeed, the sheep?”

My boss’s expression darkened further. “You find the dwarf! This is called J-O-U-R-N-A-L-I-S-M, lassie… You find the dead sheep by looking for hooves sticking up over the snow, And you know what, you’re keeping a good man out of the job!”

The book is out on 25 September.

Breakingviews appoints FT correspondent as senior editor

Posted by Patrick Smith on 15 September 2008 at 11:14
Tags: National Newspapers, New Media

The financial analysis and comment site Breakingviews has re-hired Chris Hughes from the Financial Times, where he was senior corporate reporter and investment banking reporter. He worked at the site before, from 2003 to 2006, but returns this time as senior editor based in London.

The SIIA Global Information Industry Summit heard from the site’s founder and editor-in-chief Hugo Dixon, himself a former FT man, who said he planned to unveil a whole series of tie-ins with media across the world.

Independent to go full-colour from next week

Posted by Patrick Smith on 15 September 2008 at 10:28
Tags: Journalism

It was the first broadsheet to go tabloid (or compact, as newspapers executives prefer to say) back in 2004 but is now the last of the quality papers to move to full-colour printing.

The Independent will be resplendent in colour from next Tuesday, joining The Times and Telegraph as the latest to join the full-colour club this year.

And from today, selling for Â£1, the Indy is the most expensive UK daily newspaper, except the Financial Times. Editor Roger Alton attempts to explain the price rise fro 80p to readers in a letter in today’s paper:

These are extremely challenging times for all businesses, and newspapers are not immune from the difficult economic climate, no matter how hard we try to absorb all the costs without you, our readers, noticing.

The former Independent editor echoed the point often made by his long-standing predecessor Simon Kelner, now managing editor, that the Indy is “still less then half the cost of a cappuccino in a high-street coffee chain”.

Alton also promises a “sassy” makeover for the paper’s Extra features sections, an expanded arts and books supplement on Fridays and a bigger sports section on Mondays.

Interestingly, looking over the story from Press Gazette’s Breakfast With the Editor interview with Kelner in 2006, he makes some interesting points about the paper’s relationship with its website:

If you have an exclusive story at five o’clock to go in the following day’s newspaper, the idea that you would put it on the website for nothing strikes as complete madness…Until there is a model for making money out of a newspaper website, we’re not going to plough millions into it.

This was over two years ago and a great deal has changed in web economics. But would Kelner subscribe to this view now?

Guardian wins libel battle against AIDs pills seller

Posted by Patrick Smith on 15 September 2008 at 08:43
Tags: Journalism

The Guardian was celebrating a major legal victory this weekend as Matthias Rath, who claimed his pills could reverse AIDs and cure cancer, dropped his libel action against the paper.

He sued over three articles exposing his activities, which have been blamed for causing deaths by encourage people to refuse conventional medical drugs.

The articles were by The Guardian’s Bad Science columnist Ben Goldacre, a medical doctor and academic, who in a comment piece defends the right of journalists and academics to scrutinise drug companies’ evidence.

BBC global news director defends commercial approach

Posted by Patrick Smith on 15 September 2008 at 08:27
Tags: Journalism

For many, the BBC putting adverts on its massively popular world-facing site bbc.com/news was a step too far for the state-funded, state-owned broadcaster.

But Richard Sambrook, director of BBC Global News and the man in charge of that site and the BBC News channel thinks, that commercialisation needs to go further. He tells The Guardian:

“We are operating in an incredibly competitive field that is developing very quickly. If we think the BBC should be one of the world’s leading news providers… in the end you’re not going to able to compete purely on the licence fee.”

The Beeb’s foreign online operations and the venerable World Service are funded by the Foreign Office, but that’s not enough to “compete with the Googles, CNNs and Yahoo!s”, says Sambrook.

Plans advance for group-wide Johnston Press union action

Posted by Patrick Smith on 12 September 2008 at 09:18
Tags: Journalism

NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear is a busy man.

But in between addressing the TUC conference, writing for the New Statesmanand working on a plan for a new building shared with broadcasting union Bectu he has found time to talk to union reps across Johnston Press’s titles about group-wide action.

It’s a very busy time for the union at the moment: With some 80 jobs at threat at the Express, about 60 casual staff to be axed at the Telegraph, strike action planned again at Sheffield Star, possible action oncoming at Trinity Mirror’s midlands titles and rumblings at the Daily Record and Glasgow Evening Times, the NUJ has its work cut out.

And as we learned from Dear’s blog last month, reps from across Newsquest have met to discuss their own group-wide day of action. “Watch this space…” the GS said.

Labour magazine Tribune reportedly facing closure

Posted by Patrick Smith on 9 September 2008 at 10:59
Tags: Magazines

As Britain’s trade union leaders gather in Brighton to ratchet up the pressure on Gordon Brown at the TUC Conference, the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary reports that the Labour movement magazine Tribune is facing closure due to a lack of funding.

The long-standing publication that counts Aneurin Bevan and George Orwell as its former editors is under threat of either closure or merger with largest shareholder Unite to form an in-house magazine.

Its editors will be hoping that recent increases in circulation will be enough to persuade the five main union shareholders to keep the publication open.

Former editor and now United Nations correspondent for al-Jazeera Mark Seddon was impressed with the news. According to the Standard he said: ”Labour seems to be losing its head at the moment. If it loses Tribune it will have lost its heart.”

Music mag Clash gets six-figure funding from Scottish government

Posted by Patrick Smith on 9 September 2008 at 10:12
Tags: Magazines

It’s not all doom and gloom in the magazine industry.

Independent music magazine Clash has secured £230,000 in funding from the Scottish government to fund its website - taking its total online investment to £500,000, said paidContent.

www.clashmusic,com will be hiring for 18 online jobs including news staff and reviewers. 

Google digitises more newspapers for digitial news archive

Posted by Patrick Smith on 9 September 2008 at 08:39
Tags: Newspapers

All-conquering search giant Google is expanding its digitisation programme of US newspapers with more signing up to the scheme to make their classic print stories viewable and searchable through Google News.

The New York Times was one of the first to sign up to the project in 2006, with some of its stories available to see now - but for a one-off charge of $3.95. Google’s official blog has more on the plans.

Both The Times and The Guardian have launched their own archives in the last 12 months - The Guardian is available for free for a two-week trial while The Times has unlimited access for a “free introductory offer”.

(via David Black’s blog, group digital director of Trinity Mirror)

Online bulletin boards are closer to slander than libel, rules Justice Eady

Posted by Patrick Smith on 9 September 2008 at 08:19
Tags: Law

Defamatory messageboard comments should be treated as slander and not libel, Justice Eady ruled recently, significantly changing the way online comments are dealt with by the courts.

As The Telegraph’s Shane Richmond points out, Eady said in a case concerning an obscure financial messageboard that the comments were much closer to slander “than the usual, more permanent kind of communications found in libel actions”.

Reports of the case can be found here and here.

Eady said that because bulletin board users acted so informally and without inhibition to each other, the conversation was usually casual and could not be treated as normal, potentially libellous, communication. The posters were hiding behind their “avatars”, online pesudonyms or personae, a “disinhibiting factor” for Eady.

He did say it wasn’t the case that “blogging cannot ever form the basis of a libel action”, but as Richmond says, it’s not clear whether Eady means blogging or simply commenting online.

Slander, as NCTJ students will (or should) know, is harder prove in English courts than libel - whereas in libel damage is assumed and the defendent has to defend itself, slander must be proved by the claimant.

There are four exceptions. Damage doesn’t need to be proved when a slanderous comment: imputes that someone has committed a crime punishable by death; that they are suffering from a contagious disease (leprosy, VD etc…); suggests unchasity in a woman or any statement calculated to disparage someone in their office, trade, calling or profession.

Sacked Marks and Spencer whistleblower speaks out on ’surveillance’

Posted by Patrick Smith on 8 September 2008 at 11:24
Tags: National Newspapers

The executive who was fired from Marks & Spencer for revealing details of a plan to cut redundancy terms for the company’s 60,000 staff to the press was named as Tony Goode last night.

The Times, who broke the story of the plans - and Goode’s dismissal - reports that he gave a press conference in Brighton ahead of this week’s TUC conference where he spoke out against the company’s alleged practice of monitoring staff.

The single father-of-two, represented by the GMB union, alleges that M&S gave details of his calls to reporters even though they were made

M&S say his claims are “utter nonsense” and that it is impossible to monitor personal phones.

New Weekend magazine for Belfast Telegraph

Posted by Patrick Smith on 8 September 2008 at 08:10
Tags: Newspapers

The Belfast Telegraph’s new 64-page Weekend lifestyle and features magazine went on sale on Saturday. The paper’s staff seem to be excited about it, with editor Martin Lindsay describing it as the best supplement thje Telegraph has ever produced “by a country mile”.

You can watch the video here of the glitzy launch last week.