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Pay cuts and Twitter policy leave Thomson Reuters facing union action in US

February 9th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted by Romy van den Broeke in Legal, Newspapers

Thomson Reuters in the US has been referred to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by the Newspaper Guild of New York for planned cutbacks to the pay packages of journalists and other workers that are members of the union.

The reduced payments work out at roughly 10 per cent per worker, says the Guild, which has been in contract negotiations with the agency for more than a year, in a release.

In June 2009, Boston’s Newspaper Guild made a similar charge and challenged a pending 23 per cent pay cut proposed by The New York Times. The two parties reached an agreement in July with the pay cut reduced, but Guild members were left fearful for their jobs after the elimination of lifetime job guarantees for approximately 170 employees was also agreed.

But in this instance Reuters isn’t only facing charges by the Guild over changes to pay: the agency has also been brought to task by the Guild for its social media policy, which bans employees from updating personal Twitter accounts with posts which, in the words of the company, ‘would damage the reputation of Reuters News or Thomas Reuters’.

As the statement from the Guild points out:

A union activist was “reminded” of the policy after responding to a senior manager’s call to “join the (Twitter) conversation on making Reuters the best place to work” with a tweet that said: “One way to make this the best place to work is to deal honestly with Guild members.”

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Melvyn Bragg to receive Media Society Award for 2010

February 9th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted by Romy van den Broeke in Broadcasting, Events

Author, journalist and media personality, Melvyn Bragg, will receive the Media Society Award for 2010 to recognise his long-standing contributions to the industry.

With 20 published novels, 32 years at the helm of The South Bank Show and his present post at BBC Radio 4’s program, Our Time, under his belt – the accolade is a timely nod to Bragg’s influence across the industry.

Annually bestowed upon an individual for outstanding contributions to the media, Bragg finds himself in good company, with those in previous receipt of the award including Sir David Frost, Jon Snow, Sir Michael Parkinson and last year’s winner, Jeremy Paxman.

“Bragg’s contribution is immeasurable; his formidable journalistic skills have engaged our intellect across the broad sweep of all forms of art and culture. He is our chronicler of arts – a cornerstone of cultural programming and thought,” says president of the Media Society, Geraldine Sharpe Newton, in an announcement.

Bragg will receive his award on 3 June.

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Channel 4 tech journalist tells all about dotcom past

February 9th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted by Laura Oliver in Journalism

What does a technology correspondent do before he becomes a journalist?

Found an online network for the Jewish community? Launch a search engine for adult porn? Or both as Channel 4 News’ Benjamin Cohen did, starting out at the tender age of 16.

At 4pm (GMT) today on Radio 4, Cohen will discuss his dotcom past – including his stint as an unlikely porn baron and his sale of SoJewish to a newspaper, which he says wasted £1 million – in I Was a Teenage Dotcom Millionaire.

“In the programme he tracks down the investors who lost everything in his ventures and former employees to work out why things went so wrong,” says the blurb and there’s plenty more on Cohen’s whizzkid past – he was at one point higher than Prince William on the Sunday Times’ Rich List and also founded PinkNews.co.uk – in this Sunday Times’ interview.

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Former Trinity Mirror employee Craig McGill on the GMG Regionals sale

February 9th, 2010 | 2 Comments | Posted by Laura Oliver in Newspapers, comment

Craig McGill from digital communications company Contently Managed worked at Trinity Mirror – at the Sunday Mirror and Daily Mirror from 2000 to 2006 – and has freelanced for The Guardian.

Journalism.co.uk asked him for his comments on today’s announcement that Guardian Media Group is selling its regional news business to Trinity Mirror. His reaction is in full below:

Well, this is just comical – or it would be if it didn’t show the state of hysteria in UK press ownership and the fact that it will probably lead to a loss of jobs.

Firstly, we have Guardian Media Group looking as if it wants to go from being a ‘group’ to just looking after The Guardian because I wonder how much this sale was driven by the £89.8 million loss that GMG made last year.

Secondly, The Guardian is the very title that tells us constantly – almost as much as it goes on about The Wire in fact – that local content is what people want, it’s the future, it’s the killer app that will keep people looking for news.

If that’s the case why are they dumping all their local content creators? Or are they admitting that instead of highly paid professionals, a couple of bloggers can do the job instead? Or do they just want to be London-centric with a stringer or two elsewhere? That’s hardly inspiring in an age of devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. What should readers in those areas do? Go elsewhere?

Secondly, what makes this even more tragic is that they are being bought by Trinity Mirror. Now there’s two aspects to this: one, Trinity Mirror continually says that it has no money and is skint. However, they managed to pull together a £44 million package – including nearly £8 million in cash – that’s hardly my definition of skint. That’s a complete slap in the face to the journalists Trinity Mirror has thrown out over the years and for the miserable pay freezes, small pay rises and ridiculous cost cutting measures that the survivors have endured – all because there was a lack of money. That £8 million could have done so much more in many titles.

To add to that, Trinity Mirror has a record of poor investment in the regions – it chopped the Scottish Daily Mirror from a team of 30 to one over three years, the Daily Record and Sunday Mail titles work wonders with a small budget but are walloped by having to do more with less each year, which lead to the Scottish Sun overtaking them as the best selling daily in Scotland.

This buy smacks of a panic buy – almost as much as it was a much-needed sale for GMG. Who are the losers going to be? The obvious one is the people who have already lost their jobs – more will follow, we can be sure of that. Over time the readers will be losers too as there’s less journalistic competition bringing more stories.

And even at the Mirror’s Manchester office, there must be people wondering what’s going to happen next. After all, does Manchester need two big news hubs? Surely a building merger is on the cards, followed by ’shared resources’ and then ‘merged resources’.

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Marc Reeves: Why is GMG selling the cash cow?

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

Marc Reeves, founder of the newly launched Business Desk West Midlands, blogs on news the Guardian Media Group is to sell Manchester Evening News (MEN) to his former employer Trinity Mirror:

[T]he key questions: what do GMG and Trinity Mirror get out of the deal? For the latter, I think it’s pretty clear. With declining revenues and circulation, another round of consolidation is probably an inevitable strategy for the biggest groups, whose scale demands  that de-duplicating resources and cutting costs are required to counter the exodus of readers and advertisers. There’s also a very handy strategic regional  fit for the Manchester titles alongside Trinity’s existing Merseyside titles.

For GMG, though, it’s less clear. Does the disposal allow the group to concentrate on the march towards digital dominance  spearheaded by the Guardian brand? Or perhaps GMG has just decided that the ‘cash cow’ role of the regionals simply doesn’t work any more in the new media economy, and it’s better off without the distraction. Whatever the case, my money is on a rise in the number of deals  amongst the major publishers following  the TM-GMG shuffle, as more try to optimise the geographical ’sense’ of their sometimes disparate and accidental portfolios.

The acquisition of the Manchester Evening News by Trinity Mirror – publishers of my old paper the Birmingham Post – has baffled some of my former colleagues.

Why would Guardian Media Group, MEN’s owner, sell the very cash cow that existed only to keep the venerable – and loss making – Guardian newspaper alive?

Moreover, why would Trinity Mirror embark on yet another bout of corporate indigestion as they attempt to swallow yet another acquisition, with all the financial, cultural and managerial angst that goes with it.

I remember (yes dear reader, because I was there) spending many of the early years of this century as part of the team that was charged with incorporating the old Southnews group of weekly newspapers in London and the Home Counties into Trinity Mirror’s southern business.

That October 2000 acquisition came with a £285m price tag for around 60 free and paid-for newspapers (no one bought websites then – don’t you remember the dotcom bubble?). The deal announced this week, in which Trinity Mirror gets the Manchester Evening News, the Reading Post and a stable of other regional titles and websites for less than a fifth of that price. The Southnews deal came back to bite Trinity Mirror, as the early noughties advertising slump forced it to post a considerable write-down against the acquisition just a few years later.

Of course, the very economic foundation of the regional newspaper industry has shifted irreversibly since then, so comparisons are probably unfair.

However, back to the key questions: what do GMG and Trinity Mirror get out of the deal?

For the latter, I think it’s pretty clear. With declining revenues and circulation, another round of consolidation is probably an inevitable strategy for the biggest groups, whose scale demands that de-duplicating resources and cutting costs are required to counter the exodus of readers and advertisers. There’s also a very handy strategic regional fit for the Manchester titles alongside Trinity’s existing Merseyside titles.

For GMG, though, it’s less clear. Does the disposal allow the group to concentrate on the march towards digital dominance spearheaded by the Guardian brand? Or perhaps GMG has just decided that the ‘cash cow’ role of the regionals simply doesn’t work any more in the new media economy, and it’s better off without the distraction.

Whatever the case, my money is on a rise in the number of deals amongst the major publishers following the TM-GMG shuffle, as more try to optimise the geographical ‘sense’ of their sometimes disparate and accidental portfolios.

Full post at this link…

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GMG sells regional media business to Trinity Mirror for £44.8m

February 9th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted by Laura Oliver in Newspapers

Months of speculation about the future of Guardian Media Group’s regional media business is over – the group has announced today it will sell GMG Regionals to Trinity Mirror for a total consideration of £44.8 million.

Within the regionals group MEN Media publishes 22 titles in the north west of England, including the flagship Manchester Evening News; while S&B Media publishes 10 titles in the south of England, including the Surrey Advertiser and Reading Post. Both will go to Trinity Mirror.

Manchester-based TV station Channel M and GMG Regionals Woking titles will not be part of the deal, which is expected to complete by 28 March.

The deal also sees departures for GMG Regionals chief executive Mark Dodson and MEN Media chief executive Ruth Spratt. More significantly it marks the sale of the Guardian’s Manchester roots, as the paper was started in the city on 5 May 1821.

More to follow from Journalism.co.uk.

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BBC head of religion and ethics disputes Sunday Telegraph article

February 9th, 2010 | 2 Comments | Posted by Judith Townend in Broadcasting, Editors' pick, Newspapers

Aaqil Ahmed, the BBC’s head of religion and ethics, has criticised the Sunday Telegraph for the way it presented his comments in an interview. In a BBC blog post yesterday, Ahmed writes that he had given an interview ahead of the Church Of England’s Synod debate and its motion on the issue of religious broadcasting on televisions:

The article appeared on Sunday under the headline “Church is ‘living in the past’ says BBC chief”. Great headline – but the truth lets the story down. The problem is: I am that BBC chief and I definitely didn’t say that. In fact there were a lot of things in the Sunday Telegraph article that surprised me when I read them.

(…)

The Sunday Telegraph article quotes me as saying that the BBC should not give Christianity preferential treatment. The question I was actually asked was whether minority faiths should be treated differently from other faiths – to which I replied that all faiths should be treated in the same way and that I don’t believe in treating any faith differently. It’s all a bit different when you put it in its proper context, isn’t it?

Full post at this link…

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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.

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Future of News meet-ups in Brighton and Birmingham

February 9th, 2010 | 2 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.

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.

Group breakout time at the #bfong on TwitpicAs 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…

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#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. Full story...

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