Journalisted Weekly: News of the World, Space Shuttle and Harry Potter

Journalisted is an independent, not-for-profit website built to make it easier for you, the public, to find out more about journalists and what they write about. It is run by the Media Standards Trust, a registered charity set up to foster high standards in news on behalf of the public, and funded by donations from charitable foundations. Each week Journalisted produces a summary of the most covered news stories, most active journalists and those topics falling off the news agenda, using its database of UK journalists and news sources.

The News of the World, Space Shuttles and Harry Potter

for the week ending Sunday 10 July

  • The News of the World, phone hacking and the Atlantis Space Shuttle grip the headlines
  • The final Harry Potter film enchants the media
  • South Sudan gaining independence and Berlusconi’s bribery pay-outs covered little

Covered lots

  • The demise of the News of the World, which published its last issue on Sunday after 168 years in print, 605 articles
  • The final Harry Potter film, ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2,’ which premiered in London on Thursday, 10 years after the first film was released, 118 articles
  • The Atlantis Space Shuttle landing at the International Space Station for the last time, 69 articles

Covered little

  • South Sudan gains independence, following decades of conflict with the North in which around 1.5 million people died, 54 articles
  • 59 dead and more still missing, many of them children, after a cruise ship sank on Russia’s Volga river, 6 articles
  • Silvio Berlusconi’s firm, Fininvest, to pay 560million euros for bribery, 3 articles

Political ups and downs (top ten by number of articles)

Celebrity vs serious

Arab spring (countries & current leaders)

Who wrote a lot about…’phone hacking’

Roy Greenslade – 12 articles (The Guardian), Ben Fenton – 12 articles (The Financial Times), Salamander Davoudi – 11 articles (The Financial Times), George Parker – 11 articles (The Financial Times), Dan Sabbagh – 7 articles (Freelance), Katherine Rushton – 7 articles (The Telegraph), Ian Burrell – 6 articles (The Independent)

Long form journalism

Sign up to the campaign for a public inquiry into phone hacking at hackinginquiry.org
Visit the Media Standards Trust’s new site Churnalism.com – a public service for distinguishing journalism from churnalism
Churnalism.com ‘explore’ page is available for browsing press release sources alongside news outlets
The Media Standards Trust’s unofficial database of PCC complaints is available for browsing at www.complaints.pccwatch.co.uk

For the latest instalment of Tobias Grubbe, journalisted’s 18th century jobbing journalist, go to journalisted.com/tobias-grubbe

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