Greenslade: Change of direction for Guardian Media Group?

Roy Greenslade reports on the Sunday Times’ coverage of a new direction for Guardian Media Group. According to the Times’ print edition yesterday, GMG is planning to separate its newspapers and their website from the rest of its multimedia assets.

The report follows previous claims by the paper that Andrew Miller, new GMG chief executive, is looking at a sale or stock market listing for its Trader division.

Full post on Roy Greenslade’s blog…

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An interview with BBC World News Today presenter Zeinab Badawi

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has posted a video interview with BBC World News Today presenter Zeinab Badawi in which the broadcast journalist shares some of her views on media freedom in the UK and the world and describes her family’s move from Sudan to the UK.

In the old days we used to say ‘foreign news’. And ‘domestic news’. And now actually, it sounds a bit odd if we say foreign news and British news because the two live off each other. They’re almost one and the same.

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The Awl: My summer on the content farm

Freelance journalist Jessanne Collins on what it’s like to work as a copy editor for Demand Media’s websites:

I was to be an intermediary between the web at large and the raw, reliably weird substance that results from the unlikely union of algorithmically created topic assignments and writers of, shall we say, widely variable competence. The actual nuts and bolts of style consistency and tone were part of it, of course. But they seemed to be peripheral to what I was actually being asked to do, which was to quality-check each piece of content according to a set of generic yet meticulously detailed standards. It fell on my shoulders to ensure not just that no dangling modifiers marred any directories of Jacuzzi-having hotels, but that the piece wasn’t plagiarised, written off the top of some Jacuzzi-having hotel aficionado’s head, based on obvious or non-information, referencing other websites, or plagued by any of the other myriad atrocities that web content can be subject to these days.

Full story on The Awl at this link…

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CPJ and Russian media outlets challenge ‘climate of impunity’ after latest attack

Russian media outlets and the Committee to Protect Journalists have called on President Medvedev to deal with unsolved crimes against the media, following an attack on reporter Oleg Kashin this weekend which led to him being placed into an induced coma.

According to a report by AFP, 26 reporters and media outlets, as well as hundreds of others, have signed an open letter demanding protection for journalists’ rights.

“By demanding the protection of reports, what we are talking about is not only our own trade,” the letter said. “One must also protect the rights of our readers. The rights of reporters to fulfill their obligation in a normal fashion and not worry about their lives — this is the right of society to speak and be heard.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists has also called on the government to act. In a statement, CPJ executive director Joel Simon said:

We are outraged by the attack on Kommersant reporter Oleg Kashin. While it is important that President Medvedev has called for the perpetrators to be ‘found and punished,’ we also believe that the government itself has considerable responsibility. By failing to prosecute those who have carried out crimes against journalists in the past – including 19 murders committed in the Putin era – the Russian government has created a climate of impunity. Government statements and expressions of sympathy are simply not sufficient. Arrests, prosecutions and convictions are what are urgently needed.

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Manager of Washington startup TBD.com leaves amid ‘stylistic differences’

At the end of last week it was revealed that the general manager of Washington startup news site TBD.com, Jim Brady, had resigned.

In an internal memo (published by FishbowlDC), TBD publisher Robert Allbritton says Brady decided to move on following “stylistic differences”.

In his positions at AOL, Washingtonpost.com, and now at TBD, Jim has proven himself to be a true visionary and a champion of innovation in the world of online journalism.  The results of his expertise are self-evident: our site is being studied and praised throughout the community of people studying the future of media.

As we talked about the next phase of our growth, it seemed clear to Jim and I both that we had some stylistic differences. So with mutual respect—and in my case a lot of appreciation for the work he has done across the company for the past year—we decided to shake hands and go in different directions.

Hatip: Lost Remote

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CJR: The US newsrooms doing interactivity on a budget

The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) takes a look at some US news organisations who are producing data visualisations and interactives for their websites with limited budgets and staff resources.

I believe the Times’ [New York Times] newsroom has at least two dozen people working full time on interactive projects; many smaller papers might be lucky to have a handful of people who know Flash. Even if newsrooms have graphic artists working on election-result maps for the papers’ print versions, many do not necessarily allocate the same level of staff time to online displays.

Full article on the CJR’s website at this link…

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Coulson under pressure again after police interview and questions over civil service help

The News of the World phone-hacking scandal continues to make the headlines this week as former editor Andy Coulson, now director of communications for Downing Street, was questioned by police.

According to the Press Association, Downing Street confirmed that Coulson had “attended a meeting with Metropolitan Police officers voluntarily on Thursday and was interviewed as a witness”.

Yesterday the Financial Times reported that shadow Cabinet Office minister Jon Trickett is to write to the head of the civil service to “seek assurances” that no civil service time has been spent advising Coulson.

Coulson has consistently denied accusations that he was aware of phone hacking at the tabloid.

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#followjourn: @lee_ryder – Lee Ryder/sports writer

Who? Lee Ryder, the Evening Chronicle’s chief sports writer and NUFC correspondent. A football writer “who still eats, sleeps and breathes the beautiful game”.

Where? Blog on the Tyne

Twitter? @lee_ryder

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – getting into music journalism

Music journalism: Looking to break into music journalism? Check out this Q&A with industry experts on the Guardian’s Careers site. Tipster: Laura Oliver.

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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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange defends choice to walk out of CNN interview

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange defended his decision to walk out on an interview with CNN last week in a one-on-one with Al Jazeera’s the Listening Post today.

According to Assange, the CNN interview, specially arranged with journalist Atika Shubert, had broken agreed ground rules stating it would only cover the stories revealed in the Iraq war logs release about Iraqi citizens. Assange claimed that the journalist later called him to apologise and said she had been instructed to go off script by her bosses.

Assange once more questioned mainstream media’s relationship with WikiLeaks. He spoke about the changing situation between the New York Times, which was involved in the Afghan war logs publication but has recently criticised Assange in its pages, and the whistleblowing site:

My impression is that the Times feels that its forced in that position, that simply is the real politic. In order for the Times to keep its influence as a newspaper… It has to act in a defensive manner and one of the ways to defend yourself is to distance yourself from people… My very strong suspicion is that you discover what happens when you don’t do that, when it appears that you’re criticising the US military… your proprietor suffers as a result, your access to military sources suffers as a results.

Assange said that since the site’s foundation getting people to submit information and mounting a legal defence – the things he thought would be most challenging – had proved relatively easy. Getting coverage of the material that’s leaked away from reports on the organisation itself has been more difficult, he said.

Details of the show can be found at this link…

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