Paperhouse: Jon Snow is pro-privacy law – ‘tabloids are going out of business anyway’

Journalism.co.uk had this on its to-do list for this morning, but Sarah Ditum got there first and picked up Jon Snow’s comments from his reverse-role interview with Ann Widdecombe in the Guardian magazine on Saturday.

The Channel 4 News journalist – and Widdecombe reckons this is her scoop – would welcome a privacy act and says it wouldn’t affect the tabloids too much – ‘they’re going out of business anyway’.

AW Would you welcome a privacy act, Jon Snow?

JS I would welcome a privacy act, yes.

AW We have the scoop! Jon Snow says, ‘Bring in a privacy act.’

JS I believe that the tabloid media, in particular, have so intruded into the private lives of public people that they have brought it upon themselves that there should indeed be a privacy act.

AW I think that is absolutely right. I think…

JS Damn me, Ann Widdecombe, I didn’t think we’d have to sit here and agree.

AW And I consider that quite a coup, to have got Jon Snow to agree with me that we need to curtail the rights of the media. Thank you, Jon Snow…

JS I am totally opposed to, and would go to the gallows to prevent, censorship. But needless intrusion into the private lives of anybody…

AW Let me ask you this. Let’s imagine a politician – I don’t care whether it’s male or female, Jon, but let’s imagine a politician. You’ve got a politician who has never made any pronouncements about morality, who has a mistress. Is that the public’s business?

JS Not at all.

AW You’ve just put a lot of the tabloids out of business.

JS Well, they’re going out of business anyway, so that won’t mean much…

Paperhouse post at this link…

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paidContent: WaPo’s social media guidelines in full

Last week, the Washington Post issued a new social media policy, to deal with its journalists’ use of individual accounts.

Raju Narisetti, one of two managing editors, took the decision to close down his Twitter account, after the views expressed in some of his tweets were called into question.

paidContent has got hold of the full text of the social media guidelines:

Full post at this link…

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – basic HTML for journalists

Online editor Christian Dunn points us to a video with basic HTML for journalists. Tipster: Judith Townend.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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Labour conference wearies political hack (and it’s only day one) #lab09

The Guardian’s assistant editor and esteemed political pundit Michael White was spotted taking a well-timed, and no doubt well-earned, nap during the opening proceedings of the Labour party conference in Brighton today. Shame he couldn’t have spent the day lazing in the sun in a deckchair with a knotted handkerchief on his head…

Michael White, Guardian assistant editor. © 2009 Mousetrap Media

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A journalistic limbo until we reach The New World

According to many, the perfect storm is approaching. The winds have been whipping for a while. But there’s a problem. The Old King is dying but the New King, apparently, isn’t quite ready yet.

Clay Shirky, internet theorist and the harbinger-in-chief of newspaper death, encapsulated the problem at a recent Harvard Shorenstein Center talk:

“We are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism because the old models are breaking faster than the new models will be put in their place.”

He’s right. But, intriguingly, he also slings in a caveat. Shirky imagines a time in the future when everything is hunky-dory, and a broad conglomeration of multiple news organisations will ‘overlap and provide a small percentage of journalism individually, but taken as a whole, represent the same position of accountability held by newspapers in the 20th century’.

Perhaps. But until then, we’ve got a problem.

So what’s going to happen in this imminent limbo stage; when journalism enters an intermediate ‘state of nature’?

Allow me to imagine…

1) The paywalls go up, and a black market for scoops emerges

Paywalls and micropayment schemes begin to appear on news websites. A few of them make a decent stab of it: News International in particular, as they have a competitive advantage.

As Malcolm Coles at Econsultancy suggests, Murdoch’s sites begin corralling in Sky News, Sky Sports, Fox as well as umpteen other publications and broadcasters that it owns, offering an attractive package behind the wall.

Jason Wilson, writing at NewMatilda.com, suggests that News Corp will ‘draw on its corporate experience with pay television to leverage audiences and money using niche content of various kinds’ kicks in, and, for a while, it all seems to be working.

Desperate to lure readers beyond the paywalls, the organisations that enacted them scramble for scoops. They get dirty. They hunt for drug scandals and nip slips like never before. Investigative journalism becomes feral. They get some real goodies.

Infuriatingly, the exclusives start being screengrabbed and hijacked on pop-up sites.

A black market for scoops emerges,  but readers don’t care if the scoop they are reading is 14th hand and poorly delivered, because they’ve still got it.

Shane Richmond notes in the Telegraph that ‘it doesn’t matter that versions of the story on free sites ‘won’t be as good’ because they’ll be free, which offsets the loss of quality considerably’ (and Google’s Eric Schmidt agrees).
More »

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Update on cuts at Trinity Mirror’s Media Wales – 15 (.2) jobs at risk

Yesterday we reported how 13.2 jobs could go at Media Wales, subsidary of Trinity Mirror which publishes The Western Mail, The South Wales Echo, Wales on Sunday and the Celtic series of weekly papers.

Union members at Media Wales will hold a strike ballot, after they were not guaranteed there would be no compulsory redundancies. Two weekly newspapers, the Neath and Port Talbot Guardians, which Trinity Mirror says are loss-making, will also be closed.

We asked TM why the extra 0.2 of a job? It’s a part-time role but in fact, the total anticipated redundancies amount to ‘approximately 15′ a spokesperson said. So, in fact, it’s 15.2: 12 full-time roles at the surviving newspapers; and three full-time and one part-time at the two weeklies due to be closed in October.

Trinity Mirror has responded to the strike ballot with this statement:

“We are disappointed that the NUJ has chosen this course of action which does nothing to address the commercial challenges facing Media Wales. However, we are continuing to work with the NUJ and all staff to try to achieve these necessary changes through voluntary means.”

“Since the introduction of our multimedia newsroom in April 2008, we have continued to review its progress and to seek new ways of improving the way we work. We now believe the time is right, when taking the economic conditions into account, to make further changes to build on what we have achieved,” said Alan Edmunds, publishing director, Media Wales.

“The decision to cease publication of the Neath and Port Talbot Guardians reflects the challenging economic conditions affecting our local advertising markets and a declining trend in weekly newspaper sales,” said Sara Wilde, regional managing mirector, Trinity Mirror North West and Wales.

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Broadcastnow.co.uk: Piers Morgan has no guilt about £2m ITV deal – and wants to double it

The Sun has pinched quotes from Broadcast’s excellent interview with Piers Morgan, published yesterday. Despite ITV’s economic woes, the former Daily Mirror / News of the World editor turned media celebrity, doesn’t feel an ounce of remorse over the £2m deal – in fact, he’s looking to double it.

“Piers Morgan will not be accepting a pay cut when his two-year, £2m golden handcuffs deal with ITV comes to an end next May.

“I am looking to at least double it. I’ve got no problem if they take it away from somebody else who feels guilty about this type of thing, because I have absolutely no guilt issues about my salary whatsoever. I think I’m worth every penny.”

Full interview at this link…

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Daily Finance speculates paidContent.org’s future at GNM

AOL site DailyFinance.com cites unnamed ‘industry sources’ who suggest that Guardian News & Media (losing £100,000 per day) may be forced to sell assets to raise cash.

Could ContentNext, publisher of PaidContent.org, sold for a reported $30 million (or more) to GNM last year, be among them?

Rafat Ali, publisher of paidContent.org, says it would news to him. Guardian America CEO Caroline Little says she is unaware of any plans. A GNM spokesperson denies it.

But that doesn’t stop Daily Finance’s speculation. WebMediaBrands, formerly JupiterMedia would be a potential bidder if GNM were to sell, it reports.

Full story at this link…

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Mexican journalist shot dead in newsroom

Norberto Miranda Madrid, a Mexican journalist, was shot dead in his newsroom on Wednesday night.

The AP reports, in a news piece about the identification of a new point man in the Mexican drug war, that at least five gunmen entered the newsroom in Nuevo Casas Grandes and killed the 54 year old journalist in front of his colleagues.

Norberto Miranda Madrid was director and wrote a crime and politics column at the news website Radio Vision Casas Grandes, said Chihuahua state attorney general’s spokesman, Vladimir Tuexi.

Miranda wrote several newspaper columns, worked as a correspondent for El Heraldo newspaper and for a radio station, reports the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.

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Editor&Publisher: Should newspapers forget paywalls and focus on online ads?

A lengthy report from US-based Editor&Publisher looks at news payment models and whether it would be more sensible to focus on online advertising.

It opens with a quote from Ken Doctor, affiliate analyst at Outsell Research and author of the blog Content Bridge:

“The industry needs to turn its attention back to advertising. It has long been what has sustained the American press, and it’s an important revenue source going forward.

“With online revenue flagging as much as it has, attention has been turned and diverted. If advertisers aren’t going to save us online, maybe the readers will save us online. Even if [paid content] worked, it adds only a small revenue stream.”

Full story at this link…

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