Was the Scotsman right to sack Nick Clayton for blogging?

Earlier this week Journalism.co.uk picked up an update to Twitter from Nick Clayton, technology journalist, weekly tech columnist for the Scotsman, and recently signed-up blogger for Scottish media news website Allmediascotland (AMS):

The blog post in question - published on Friday 19 - mentioned, amongst other things, Clayton’s attempts to sell his house and the following statement, which seems to have riled The Scotsman:

“All but one of the too many estate agents I spoke to told me not to bother advertising in The Scotsman. Whether you’re looking for work or a home, the web’s the place to go.”

Clayton was told he was fired by Alison Gray, editor of the paper’s Saturday magazine, just hours after the post was put live, with it cited as the key reason behind his sacking.

“I’d written a slightly controversial blog entry for allmediascotland.com suggesting that, as websites replace printed newspapers, there would be little need for physical offices and that the role of the sub-editor would disappear. I hoped it would be a little provocative, but the most I expected was to have a few virtual brickbats lobbed in my direction,” said Clayton, in a follow-up piece.

Journalism.co.uk tried contacting the Scotsman, leaving messages with Alison Gray and the office of Tim Bowdler, chief executive of Scotsman Publications, but received no response to the following:

- does the Scotsman have a set policy on staff writing for external websites? and are journalists aware of this?

- could the blog post have been amended to prevent Clayton from losing his job?

- why was Clayton sacked for his comments on the state of print advertising after the Scotsman itself ran the story ‘Johnston Press hit by house market woes as property advertising slides’ on August 28?

Admittedly there’s no disclaimer on Clayton’s AMS blog - e.g. ‘the views expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of my employer’ etc etc - but nevertheless was this the right course of action for the Scotsman to take?

There’s nothing to stop a journalist from setting up their own personal blog or contributing in their professional capacity to another blog site - either as poster or commenter - and as the trend for doing so continues to grow more popular, will publishers start setting out stricter guidelines for what staff can and can’t say elsewhere?

Reactions like this and the idea of more stringent restrictions on where journalists can write online are counterproductive: letting journalists write, comment, engage and react with colleagues and readers online can help build an online community around them and their content, driving users back to the publisher’s site.

Spilling company secrets is one thing, but Clayton’s post was hardly exposing something that’s hidden from the rest of the newspaper industry.

Clayton has told me he’s contacted the National Union for Journalists (NUJ) (who haven’t got back to me either for that matter) - and I’ll be really interested to hear its stance on this: firstly, in reaction to the immediacy of his sacking; and more importantly, as to what this means for journalists working online, in multimedia and for multiple taskmasters.

Tags: Alison Gray, Allmediascotland, Nick Clayton, Scotsman Publications, The Scotsman, Tim Bowdler

BBC Editors: Use of graphic images in the Finnish shooting coverage

The BBC held back some of the YouTube footage of the Finnish gunman: was it right to do so? Full story...

Tags: BBC, Finland, YouTube

Media safety website has a change of identity

Media safety organisation, INSI, went live with its website  yesterday – www.newsafety.org -  with an all new look. It has actually had a complete change of identity too: INSI is now an org, not a co.

INSI first emerged five years ago, as the result of the concern at the growing global rate of casualties of journalists and their support staff.

With specialised news and features focusing on risk awareness, safety, health and training, they aim to provide advice and support for those reporting from areas of conflict, crime and corruption, natural disasters and disease.

The new website look is designed to make their resources easier to access by journalists around the world, with better video and audio.
INSI’s very keen to welcome feedback and suggestions for improvement: find their various contacts here.

Tags: INSI, journalism safety, safety

When Twitter goes bad: newspaper tweets a funeral

US newspaper The Rocky Mountain News has come under scrutiny for its use of microblogging tool Twitter.

The paper has been using the service to provide news alerts with its @The Rocky account, but recently experimented with an individual reporter twittering from the funeral of a 3-year-old.

“Rocky reporter Berny Morson filed live updates from the memorial service of 3-year-old Marten Kudlis. The messages are unedited,” reads the editor’s note accompanying the article on the death of Marten Kudlis, who was killed in a car crash last week.

Michael Roberts at the Latest Word blog points out that the updates are ’self-satirizing in the most morbid, inappropriate way possible’.

“Morson’s not to blame for the lameness of these entries, which suggest a golfing commentator whispering at green-side while Tiger Woods lines up a putt.”

Questions have been raised about the appropriateness of Twitter coverage before, but usually centring on its suitability as a medium for coverage e.g. does the event require frequent updates or can it wait? Covering a funeral - that’s proprierty gone AWOL.

Tags: Berny Morson, Marten Kudlis, Michael Roberts, The Rocky Mountain News, United States

SpinSpotter: unspinning online news?

Aimed at uncovering ‘bias and inaccuracy’ in online news stories, new service SpinSpotter has gone live.

The site, which describes itself as ‘very beta’, lets users install a special toolbar – Spinoculars – to identify, share and edit online articles, which they consider biased.

“I believe that journalism has become spin-heavy because journalists operate in an echo chamber. They eat with other journalists, socialize with them, and ride in cabs together. Closeness of groups can drive closeness of opinion and intellectual laziness,” said Todd Herman, founder and chief creative officer of SpinSpotter, in an open letter.

SpinSpotter has attempted to create an objective criteria for what is and what is not biased by working with US journalism schools and using the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics.

“Their [the journalism schools'] expert knowledge (…) were then combined with guided user input and sophisticated algorithms to identify each instance of bias and inaccuracy in online media, whether it is a reporter stating opinion as fact, an unattributed adjective, a paragraph lifted from a press release, or an expert source with a clear conflict of interest,” a press release from SpinSpotter said (it’s okay, I’ve flagged it up and linked to the release).

Looks like the Spinoculars are only available for Firefox at the minute. Once downloaded and turned on they’ll identify if elements of a news story have previously been identified by another SpinSpotter user.

You can also use them to select and report articles or parts of stories that are biased according to different ‘rules of spin’, whether its as a result of the reporter’s voice or a lack of balance.

SpinSpotter comes hot on the heels of NewsCred – a site aiming to gauge the credibility of news sources - launched late last month.

Tags: online news stories, Society of Professional Journalists, Todd Herman

Online Journalism China: Fake news feeds public mistrust in media

Chinese sports writer Wang Xiaoshan has used the controversy over the age of China’s double Olympic gold medallist, He Kexin, to open a wider debate on the prevalence of so-called fake news.

The original case against He stemmed largely from Chinese press reports, both state-run and independent, that gave her age as 13 in the run up to the Games, and therefore below the minimum age of 16 required to take part in the gymnastic competition.

That such a wide variety of sources could all be prone to the same inaccuracy seems unlikely, but in a piece sourced from Wang’s blog and translated by John Kennedy at Global Voices, Wang suggests such mistakes are symptomatic of ‘many media’s pre-existing problem of making up news’.

According to Wang, there is ‘no way that He Kexin could have forgotten her own age’, and the widespread reports suggesting she was 13 were the result of laziness and an unwillingness on behalf of journalists to verify their sources.

China has been plagued by fake news for some time:

The most recent case comes from the official newspaper of Guangdong province, the Nanfang Daily, in which a reporter claims to have witnessed police foiling a terrorist bomb plot in the city’s airport.

If the journalist had listed the police as his source his story may have escaped unnoticed, but saying the story came from unnamed ‘travellers in the airport’, who were privy to the hijackers’ intentions, sparked a wave of incredulity amongst the paper’s web community.

In another instance, national broadcaster CCTV was lambasted for releasing footage that apparently showed Olympic volunteers donating money in support of the May 12 earthquake relief effort, only for eagle-eyed viewers to point out that the ‘donors’ did not actually put any money into the collection boxes.

The latter example is an obvious instance of propaganda designed to unite the country in the wake of a devastating disaster, but the commercial press is equally culpable.

According to David Bandurski, a journalist and researcher at China Media Project, the proliferation of fake news is the result of Chinese media’s struggle to redefine its role in the wake of the curtailment of government subsidies in the mid to late 1990s.

The withdrawal of the government’s financial support was not coupled with a loosening of the shackles of state control. As such, Chinese media faces an intense battle to attract readers and advertising revenue, but is stymied by both the perception and the reality that it is not free to report, or sell, the truth.

This catch 22 situation is best evidenced by a controversy that erupted in July 2007 when a local TV report showed Beijing street vendors making buns using waste cardboard and pork fat. National state media also ran the piece and it gained international prominence, but authorities later claimed the freelance reporter responsible had faked the footage.

This left the public suitably perplexed as to whom to trust, and deeply undermined confidence in the veracity of Chinese media reports. Many believed the story was damaging enough to warrant a cover-up by the government as it fell at a time when China faced significant international pressure over its food safety record.

Beijing responded by launching a campaign against freelancers.

Bandurski notes that such government-backed campaigns punish the individual journalists responsible without ever reviewing the ‘the deeper institutional causes’ that allow fake news to proliferate. He draws a parallel with the punishment of corrupt officials, who are seen as ‘isolated moral deviants’ rather than products of a system that is at its root corrupt, or at least encouraging of corruption.

Fake news will continue to be filed, whether intentionally or as a result of bad practice, until Chinese media finds a way to sell truth as a commodity and regain the public’s trust.

Yet a sceptical public that questions what it reads can only be a good thing: a healthy mistrust of officialdom may, over time, spur alternative news sources to find ways to supply readers with the truth, reducing the need for sensationalist fake news in the process.

Tags: Beijing, CCTV, China, David Bandurski, John Kennedy, Nanfang Daily, Wang Xiaoshan

Wires in a twist - why you should always check your news agency feeds

As we’ve blogged before, Nick Davies’ recent book, Flat Earth News, uses findings from a specially-commissioned team of researchers at Cardiff University to show national newspapers’ dependency on press agencies.

After an investigation of 2,207 domestic news articles and their sources over two random weeks, the research team reported that 60 per cent of ‘quality print-stories’ (carried by the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Independent, the Daily Mail and the Times) came wholly or largely from a combination of PR releases and news agency copy.

The dangers of dependency on wire copy were illustrated on journalist Jo Wadsworth’s blog this morning: she describes how yesterday her site’s biggest hits and highest comments were on ‘several month-old stories about Premiership teams,’ which can be viewed here.

It looks like it was a technical error (she blames gremlins for playing havoc with the paper’s PA national football feeds), but it shows how manual checking on automatic feeds can never be replaced.

Tags: Cardiff University, Jo Wadsworth, Nick Davies, The Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, the Independent, The Times

BBC Editors Blog: BBC not influenced by Home Office counter-terrorism unit

The BBC has responded to claims made in a Guardian article that its coverage of al-Qaeda had been influenced by a Home Office counter-terrorism unit. "The programme was called 'al-Qaeda's Enemy Within' and explored how the war of ideas within the Jihadi movement is becoming as important as the military frontline," explains Nicola Meyrick, executive editor of radio current affairs. "Was it the result of a 'push' from RICU? Absolutely not. The truth couldn't be more different." Full story...

Tags: al-Qaeda, BBC, Home Office, Jihadi, Nicola Meyrick, terrorism

Editors Weblog: Interview with Nick Davies on the future of investigative journalism

The author of Flat Earth News discusses the future of investigative journalism, and the benefits and restrictions of the specialism in a multimedia world. Full story...

Tags: Flat Earth News, investigative journalism, Nick Davies

Who’s behind Wikipedia: Virgil Griffith’s WikiScanner investigates

Questions continue to be asked of the credibility of information on Wikipedia, but the online encyclopedia is increasingly becoming a tool - and often a first point of call - for journalists.

Enter Virgil Griffith’s Wikiganda project and device WikiScanner, nominated for a Knight-Batten award for its use by Wired.com.

The devices could help journalists to separate fact from fiction on the site – and throw up some news leads in the process, the California Institute of Technology student told Journalism.co.uk.

1)How does WikiScanner work?
WikiScanner’s core functionality is the listing of ‘anonymous’ edits [of Wikipedia listings] via real-world organizations.

When you make an edit to Wikipedia, you have two choices: first, you can register and leave your username; or you can edit anonymously. But, when you edit anonymously, it uses your IP address - a number which identifies what computer network you are from - in lieu of a username. Wikipedia does this for convenience to distinguish your anonymous edits from someone else’s anonymous edits.

In essence, WikiScanner combines two databases: the list of all IP adresses that have made edits to Wikipedia; and what IP addresses belong to which companies. So with WikiScanner you can type a company name, and it shows you what edits have come from IP addresses owned by that company.

2) You recently upgraded Wikiscanner – why?
Pretty much everyone agrees that transparency is good for Wikipedia.

WikiScanner went a long way towards this, but it had two major flaws: it was too easy to hide from by either registering an account or by editing from home; and secondly, it took too much effort to find the interesting stuff [such as this article using the tool by Wired.com].

WikiScanner 2.0 addresses both of these defects. It tries to discover what organization registered Wikipedia accounts are coming from, and it uses some intelligence to highlight the edits that are likely to be the salacious conflict-of-interest stuff that people love to find.

3)You’ve also been working on a project call Wikiganda – what does that entail?
We all know that there are real-world organizations with radically opposed views. Wikiganda is a personal attempt to discover whether these divergent views spill over into sustained edit wars on Wikipedia. I do not know the answer to this question, but I’d like to find out.

What you do is input two real-world organizations that are ideologically opposed to each other, and Wikiganda lists the edits to pages that both organizations have modified. If the two sides are continually contradicting each other, the user flags it, and the world gets to inspect the results for themselves.

4)What’s the purpose of the project?
I am demonstrating that to have reliable information online doesn’t mean we need to erect walls blocking anonymous contributions. Instead, we can do back-end analyses of the contributions to filter out the bad stuff.

Overall - especially for non-controversial topics - Wikipedia seems to work. For controversial topics, Wikipedia can be made more reliable through techniques like this one. As for related approaches, I think colored text [a project that highlights Wikipedia articles in different colours according to their trustworthiness] is an immensely promising direction for combating disinformation in Wikipedia.

5) Do tools such as Wikiganda and WikiScanner enhance Wikipedia and other open online information sources by making them more transparent, or do they undermine them?
WikiScanner and Wikiganda do not undermine open information sources at all - it merely tells us the truth - that interested people and parties attempt to shape and influence them. From there we can take steps accordingly to address the problem.

Tags: California Institute of Technology, online encyclopedia, open online information sources, Virgil Griffith, Wikiganda, WikiScanner