Forbes.com: Circulation revenue is more stable than paywalls, says Scripps senior VP

Open letter to the London Weekly and Invincible Media

February 9th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted by Judith Townend in Editors' pick, Journalism, Newspapers

After strong doubts about its viability and existence, the London Weekly did launch as the capital’s latest freesheet. Initial public reaction hasn’t been good. But despite a poor quality print and online product, and its producers’ elusiveness, the title has seemingly managed to attract advertisers. The Help Me Investigate group I set up last week has done some dogged online digging and for the latest task, user JWarren created a list of all the advertisers in the print product: Ticketmaster/Wicked Musical; Big Snow Festival; Seafrance; Southern Comfort; Aloud/Kerrang; Lyric Theatre; Celtic Blue Rock Festival; Zuricom; Envisage Recruitment; and Chisholm and Moore. Why are they backing the project and what do they know about Invincible Media? To join the Help Me Investigate group, email me for an invite or request an invite here.

Blogger James Ball feels that the London Weekly and Invincible Group, with which it is associated, have some questions to answer. He has sent an email to the editorial and commercial teams of the newspaper and to Invincible Group asking these questions.

“Virtually all need answers if The London Weekly wants to win any credibility with its sceptics,” he writes. [Read James Ball's full post at this link]

Here are a few of the questions raised in the letter:

What is the precise nature of the relationship between The London Weekly and the Invincible Group? There is no mention of Invincible on thelondonweekly.co.uk, but the two businesses are run from the same office in Hackney, and share many staff (and web hosting) in common.

Who are the Global Publishing Group? Why is it not registered at Companies House? Has it ever made any previous investments – and why haven’t they received any coverage?

Why has The London Weekly not been registered as a limited company?

Does The London Weekly really have £10.5m backing? Can we speak to the backers?

Ex-footballer Tony Woodcock – who has previously been involved with [Invincible Group founder] GJordan Kensington at awards ceremonies – appeared on ITN as a co-founder of the project. Given his other businesses are registered on Companies House, why isn’t GPG or TLW?

The London Weekly was widely said to be very hard to get hold of on both Friday and Saturday [last week]. Was its print run 250,000? How many were distributed? Who was the printer?

Why does Invincible claim to have offices on the 30th floor of 14 Wall Street – one of the most prestigious business addresses in the world – yet operate out of a monthly-rental office in Hackney? And why, given Wall Street’s location, is the US phone number given based in California?

Where are Invincible Radio’s “millions of listeners”? The site redirects to a free streaming service with fewer than 20 followers.

Is Invincible Magazine still published? Its forum is populated solely by spam and in many categories there have been fewer than five news stories in the last three months.

Tags: Advertising, Invincible, Invincible Media, James Ball, The Guardian, the London Weekly

Future of News meet-ups in Brighton and Birmingham

February 9th, 2010 | 3 Comments | Posted by Judith Townend in Editors' pick, Events, Online Journalism

Inspired by the first UK Future of News meet-ups in London, a couple of regional nests have been formed, with the Brighton and West Midlands groups holding their inaugural meetings last night.

Tweets from the West Midlands (#fonwm) here

Meet-up group at this link

Round-up here: http://journallocal.co.uk/2010/02/09/future-of-news-west-midlands-round-up/

Tweets from Brighton (#bfong) here

Meet-up group at this link

My colleague Laura Oliver live-blogged some notes from our Brighton event, which featured the Argus online editor, Jo Wadsworth and the Guardian’s software architect, Simon Willison.

Willison, who was the lead developer for the Guardian’s crowd-sourced MPs’ expenses projects, talked about the ups and downs of user-driven information gathering; and about his latest collaborative launch, Wildlifenearyou.com, a project that collects users’ animal photographs for an online wildlife mapping project. Users can rank and identify photographs, building their site profiles. The feature allowing users to pick their favourite picture of two (for example, what’s your favourite meerkat?), accumulated more than 5,000 votes within a few hours.

As Laura notes, a specific version of Wildlifenearyou.com, Owlsnearyou.com launched just a few weeks ago. Getting the site some extra coverage, Owlsnearyou cannily “piggybacked” on the Superbowl hashtag on Twitter by creating “Superb Owl Day”… Geddit?

Willison also told the group about OpenStreetMap, the first free, wiki-style, editable map of the whole world. He said that the project has become adept at responding to crises.

OpenStreetMap was given some high resolution photographs of Haiti, when the earthquake occurred, and the team traced them to create the best digital map of Haiti available. It has become the default map for rescue teams, Willison added.

Read Laura’s full post at this link…

Tags: Collaborative mapping, haiti, Jo Wadsworth, OpenStreetMap, Owlsnearyou.com, simon willison, Technology/Internet, The Guardian, wildlifenearyou.com

#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – spotting dodgy links

February 9th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted by Judith Townend in Top tips for journalists

This Money Saving Expert guide to spotting spam and not getting tricked by dodgy links is useful advice for journalists as well as general consumers. Check it out at this link. Tipster: Judith Townend.

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

Tags: E-mail spam, Linking, money saving expert, Technology/Internet

What format for the political leaders’ TV debates?

February 8th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted by Judith Townend in Broadcasting, Editors' pick, Journalism

So what format will the first televised leaders’ debates take?

The Guardian today reports that, amid lengthy negotiations, “some of the parties, notably the Liberal Democrats, have been pressing for a BBC Question Time format in which questions are not just asked by an experienced chairman, but also by the audience”.

And it sounds like the BBC host David Dimbleby would prefer something more Question Time, than his Sky News counterpart Adam Boulton.

In an interview with the Independent’s Ian Burrell, Boulton said:

Some of the print comment is seeing this as a bear pit, you will have the leaders and set the audience on them in a kind of Question Time. Certainly my vision is that it will be a very different thing from that.

The problem with those shows is that sometimes you get a common view emerging from the panel – or in the case of Nick Griffin, the panel and the question master and the audience all against one person.

Well, if we get a group thing from the three leaders it will be a disaster. The point is to get them to differentiate themselves from each other in front of the audience rather than circle the wagons against the audience.

But Dimbleby, speaking on BBC Radio 4 Front Row on 26 January, said that he’d like to see an element of Question Time, if not the “whole hog”:

[Listen to interview here]

(…) I would certainly favour – not going the whole hog of Question Time and having a kind of mixed audience asking questions – but the kind of thing you could do – I don’t say it will happen – is to divide the audience into three groups so the viewer knows exactly who they are: Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour and allow those people perhaps to put the occasional question, or applaud (…) somehow we’ve got to get it beyond the sterility of the American debate, or people will be bored by it and it will be a pity.

Stirring things up a little more, Boulton took the opportunity during the Independent interview to criticise Dimbleby’s handling of the BNP leader’s first appearance on Question Time in 2009:

I have to say that I did feel David Dimbleby got too involved and seemed to be operating as a panellist. I think if I had been doing that I would have tried to move it along so it wasn’t 50 minutes talking about the BNP. I would have tried to have got the BNP talking about law and order, Europe, foreign affairs, whatever.

But Dimbleby, speaking on Front Row last month, defended the style:

[Once it was agreed] it then of course became complicated because if you put the BNP on, people don’t want to talk to him about the post office strike, they want to talk about race, they want to talk about immigration, his views on that. They want to talk about the connections with the Klu Klux Klan, all those things.

We realised the audience would come, as indeed they did – it was a London audience – with a whole load of questions on race so we stuck with that. I did a lot of work with the producers on chapter and verse on everything that Nick Griffin had said.

I thought we did it the right way and I think it worked well. [The fact that] in the end something like 10 million people saw that programme – either when it went out or afterwards, is the vindication of it.

Tags: BBC Radio 4, BNP leader, British Broadcasting Corporation, David Dimbleby, Nick Griffin, Question Time, United Kingdom

StinkyJournalism.org: ‘Dubious Polling’ Awards 2010

February 8th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted by Judith Townend in Editors' pick, Press freedom and ethics

US-based site StinkyJournalism.org has picked out its top ten ‘dubious polls’ for 2010. The winner…? Fox News Network for a poll that showed how 120 percent of the public were thinking – “and this did not include an additional 15 percent who weren’t thinking!”

Full post at this link…

Tags: dubious polling, fox news network, stinkyjournalism.org

The Content Makers: How much are freelance journalists getting paid?

February 8th, 2010 | 1 Comment | Posted by Judith Townend in Editors' pick, Jobs, Journalism

A useful exercise is taking place on the other side of the world: Margaret Simons, a freelance journalist, media blogger and lecturer is investigating freelance rates in Australia. So far she has gathered over 100 responses to her first post, ‘Journalists should not work for free – so tell me what they are paying’. She promises to write up the results soon – we’ll link to them on this blog, when she does.

Full post at this link…

Here was the original plea:

[1 Australian dollar = 0.56 British pounds]

I think it would be useful to find out what different freelancers are getting paid by our mainstream publications. Here’s what I know:

Fairfax broadsheets start by offering .60c to.70c a word these days, but can be pushed higher if they want you badly enough. Section editors are adept at getting around the bean counters’ rules.

The Monthly still offers its $1 a word, which was princely when that magazine started, and still handsome.

I hear the RACV magazine pays well for both words and photos.

What do others know? Let’s share the market knowledge. Contributions to margaret@margaretsimons.com.au. Anonymity will be preserved.

Tags: Australia, Crikey, freelancers, freelancing, Margaret Simons

Mashable: Slideshow on ‘the future journalist’ – what will they need?

February 8th, 2010 | 2 Comments | Posted by Laura Oliver in Editors' pick, Multimedia, Social media and blogging, Training

Great presentation from Mashable on ‘The future journalist: thoughts from two generations‘.

Created for Mashable’s NextUpNYC event the presentation was part of an on-stage discussion between Sree Sreenivasan, a professor and dean of student affairs at Columbia Journalism School, and his former student and Mashable contributor Vadim Lavrusik, which looked at the skills need by the journalist of the future, their approach to the business side of journalism and their use of social and multimedia:

Tags: Columbia Journalism School, Columbia University, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, mashable, Sree Sreenivasan, Vadim Lavrusik

Guardian: Fair comment, the soul trio and a change for UK libel laws?

February 8th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted by Laura Oliver in Editors' pick, Legal

A legal case dating back to 2006 involving a musical trio, the Gilettes, their agent and an Italian restaurant in Leeds could have a significant impact on the use of fair comment as a defence in UK libel actions.

In the case, which will be brought in front of the Supreme Court, the Gilettes as claimants have had two applications for a defence of fair comment by their agent 1311 events struck out.

Explains the Guardian:

It will be the first study of the issue by the country’s highest legal authority since the law lords looked into it almost 20 years ago. Media organisations hope it will clear away a tangle of legal complexities around a defence which many claim has become increasingly difficult to mount in recent years: that an opinion is not libellous if it is based on fact, is in the public interest and is levelled without malice.

Full story at this link…

Tags: defamation, fair comment, law, libel, media law, Supreme Court, The Gilettes, uk

#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – who’s covering your story?

February 8th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted by Laura Oliver in Editors' pick, Top tips for journalists

Tracking news: Use dygest.com to see which sites are writing about a topic. Similar stories on different sites will be summarised by dygest so you don’t have to read the same story more than once. It’s only in beta right now, but it’s one to watch. Tipster: Laura Oliver.

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