Data: Really useful post from Paul Bradshaw talking you through how to visualise UK data on a map step-by-step. This post gives simple and straightforward advice from someone who has tried and tested the tools first-hand. Tipster: Laura Oliver.
Now for the ultimate journalistic challenge: how do you report a meeting that is not supposed to have happened?
Facts first: the book ‘Afghanistan, War and the Media: Deadlines and Frontlines’ edited by Richard Keeble and myself was launched at the Frontline Club in London last night. A debate was held there too about who was winning the media war in Afghanistan, but under the Chatham House Rule, which rather stymies reporting.
Participating were senior editors and correspondents from the BBC and Sky News and a senior military public relations official in front of a paying audience of 120. I can tell you no more about who took part. That’s the rule.
But some interesting themes emerged that I can talk about:
the media war was firmly being lost by the West and won by the Taliban;
the US authorities are better at managing the media than the British, who seem addicted to embedding;
embedding is nothing new but the British military have got better at straight news management (e.g.minimising the filming of casualties on the grounds that soldiers had rights to privacy and refusal);
the British army has made coverage of the war cheap and within the reach of regional papers and television to suit their own agenda;
embedding with the Taliban has been almost impossible and the era of the unilateral journalist firmly finished in this theatre of war.
One of the most interesting things to emerge was a perceived multiplication of casualties through military procedures and the 24-hour news cycle. Soldiers “die” five times: when the incident happens, when their name is announced by the MoD, when the body comes home and through Wooton Bassett, at their funeral and at the inquest into their death. So the 330 plus British casualties to date in Afghanistan can seem like many more thanks to this rule, hence the lingering but dwindling public support for the War.
It was a fascinating discussion and let me leave you with some quotes. Under the Chatham House rule, it is up to you to decide who said what:
“Afghanistan has seen the Hollywoodisation of war”;
“There are more embeds in Afghanistan than any other conflict”;
“Embedded is just posh silly name for what journos always done”;
“Sports journos know more about sport than war journos know about war”;
The value of industry body accreditation in journalism has been at the centre of debate this week, following a meeting of the NCTJ’s cross-media accreditation board last week, where members raised concerns about the impact of potential education funding cuts on the journalism industry.
Quoted in a report from the NCTJ Professor Richard Tait, director of the Centre of Journalism Studies at Cardiff University, argued that accredited courses must be protected in the face of cuts.
While the NCTJ is quite right to insist on sufficient resources and expertise so that skills are properly taught and honed, education is a competitive market, and NCTJ courses are expensive to run. In the likely cuts ahead, it is vital for accredited courses to retain their funding so that they are not forced to charge students exorbitant fees; otherwise, diversity will be further compromised.
Speaking to Journalism.co.uk about his comments further this week, Tait said he was voicing real concerns that courses which meet industry standards may be more at risk because of their expense:
There has been a huge expansion of courses about journalism and about the media, but not all of them are accredited. These are not real journalism courses, they are journalism studies courses. There’s nothing wrong with them at all, some of them are very good courses, but they are not a professional training of journalists.
It’s really important that whatever happens to journalism education we protect those courses that provide this professional training of the journalists of the future.
If you’re running a journalism course that does not have a digital newsroom, does not teach videojournalism or students how to report online or what podcasts are, what’s the use of that? Some universities have invested heavily in these areas. But when money gets short people will say “do we really need this digital newsroom, do we need to teach shorthand etc”. There is a danger of people saying “frankly bad courses might be cheaper”.
Just days after the meeting, Brian McNair, former professor of journalism at Strathclyde University and now working at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, happened to discuss his decision to pull Strathclyde’s journalism course out of NCTJ accreditation in 2008 in a post on allmediascotland. His comments, which were picked up by media commentator Roy Greenslade, have since prompted huge debate about the value of the body. In his post McNair said accreditation is not enough:
In a world where (…) the supply of traditional journalism jobs has fallen by as much as 30 per cent (and those that remain are scandalously low-paid), the high flying journalist of the future needs more than NCTJ certificates in Public Affairs and Media Law to get on. He, or she, needs talent, imagination, a spirit of independence, an understanding of IT and social networking and their impact on media, culture and society in general; everything in short, that the NCTJ curriculum squeezed out with its relentless stress on externally-decreed learning by rote.
Many, maybe most, successful journalists never passed an NCTJ exam. NCTJ-certified journalists are being sacked, perhaps as I write, sometimes by editors who sit on NCTJ boards and declare their allegiance to the “gold standard” of training. The old world of print journalism in which the NCTJ was formed is passing into history, replaced by content-generating users, citizen journalists and all those journalistic wannabees who make up the globalised, digitised public sphere in the 21st century.
But while Tait reiterated McNair’s call for talent to be the measure of a journalist, he insisted that accreditation is a vital tool for students:
The problem is that there are a huge number of courses which have got the magic word journalism in them. If you’re a student and you’re looking at this multiplicity of courses and trying to work out what one is up to a certain standard, that’s absolutely essential.
What you’re already seeing in journalism is that it is becoming a profession where who you know is becoming more important than what you know. It should be about talent. I think that if you don’t have the accreditation process, the rigorous approval of courses by accreditation bodies, how can the students work out what to do?
What do you think? Let us know in the comments or by voting in the poll below:
The Newspaper Society has presented a submission to the House of Commons’ Justice Select Committee, claiming that reporting restrictions within the Children, Schools and Families Act 2010 that aim to protect privacy within family court proceedings will result in a “regime of secrecy”.
The NS says that although the media warmly supported the previous government’s aim of increasing openness and transparency and improving public confidence in the family justice system, its conclusion, regretfully, is that the Act will not achieve this.
(…) The NS points out that the Act’s effect is apparently to make it a contempt of court to publish any article referring to family proceedings, even if derived entirely from material already in the public domain and even if the parties were not identified, if the publication was not derived from an “authorised news report”.
[T]hat the intention of increased transparency has been lost in the Act’s drafting, that the aim of achieving privacy for the families has been conflated into a renewed regime of secrecy which – if the relevant provisions in the Act are brought into force unamended – will not only fail to deliver the desired public accountability but will represent a major reduction in what can now be lawfully published, and will actually further reduce public debate and discussion of the family justice system.
The case, which Inforrm says is likely to result in an important clarification of the relationship between Articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and the media, is based on two complaints over the publication of information or images relating to an individual. The first – Von Hannover – refers to a complaint by Princess Caroline of Monaco against photographs taken of herself and her husband on holiday, one of which made it into the press before she took out an injunction, while the second – Springer – is a complaint by publishing group Axel Springer over a ban on reporting the arrest and criminal conviction of an actor.
In a useful summary of the MLA Submission, Inforrm provides the following bullet points:
Article 8 does not create or require the creation of an “image right”.
Publication of a person’s photograph (or image) does not, of itself, necessarily engage their Article 8 rights’ whether this is so depends upon all the circumstances; a certain level of seriouness is required before there will be any interference with the right.
The right to reputation is not a Convention right. Publication of a defamatory statement about a person does not, of itself, interfere with their Article 8 rights.
It is vital, in any balance between the Convention rights under Articles 8 and 10, that media reporting upon all matters of public interest or public concern is strongly protected.
The reporting of court proceedings (in particular, criminal proceedings) requires wide and strong protection.
News International’s paywalled newspaper sites TheTimes.co.uk and SundayTimes.co.uk are launching a new feature which aims to enable readers to keep track of stories of interest.
We hope this latest addition to our websites will help you to personalise your news and get straight to the stories that are important to you.
The tool will notify readers when their favourite sections publish new articles and when a previously read article is updated. It also provides them with a history of read articles which they can quickly link back to.
Editor of Sun Online Pete Picton has been enlisted to help launch a “new digital project” at News Corporation in New York, according to a paidContent report.
News Corp has already enlisted New York Post executive editor Jesse Angelo to head the project, which seems designed to go nationwide with a mass-market U.S. title on iPad in the same way the Sun has been in the smaller UK for decades.
Picton has been editor of the Sun Online for the past 10 years.
The Business Insider has spotted that Bloomberg appears to have started to provide its news content on the Yahoo Finance site.
According to BI’s report, a Yahoo spokesperson confirmed that the company has added Bloomberg.com content to its financial news portfolio. Business Insider adds that this is one of many deals to increase the site’s original content.
Yahoo Finance, which has content deals with dozens of financial news sites (including Business Insider), also is in the process of ramping up its original content. The site just poached outgoing Newsweek economics editor Dan Gross, and is looking for an editor to head up a new financial news blog.
In the case of Sanoma Uitgevers BV v Netherlands, the court held unanimously that the requirement of the applicant to provide material to the public prosecutor was not prescribed by law and violated Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The case refers to journalists from a car magazine who had attended an illegal car race and taken photographs in 2002. The authorities had demanded the journalists hand over their images to police.
Following ongoing legal disputes, which led to the material being surrendered and then later returned to the magazine, the case came before the European Court of Human Rights. The magazine challenged the legalities surrounding the disclosure of information to the police that would have revealed their journalists’ sources. In its original judgement, dated 2009, the court found that “the information contained on the CD-ROM had been relevant and capable of identifying the perpetrators of other crimes investigated by the police and the authorities had only used that information for those purposes”.
But following the referral of the case to the Grand Chamber this week, which included a media intervention by bodies including the Guardian News and Media and the Committee to Protect Journalists, the court held that Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights had been violated and awarded the claimants 35,000 Euros for costs and expenses.
