Round-up: Ofcom’s public service broadcasting review and ITV regional news cuts

The verdicts are in on Ofcom’s second public service broadcasting review, which gives ITV the go ahead to cut its regional news programming to save money.

Broadcasting union BECTU has criticised the move for ‘betraying regional news audiences’ and causing 100s of jobs losses.

“OFCOM’s decision to give ITV the go ahead to cut regional news services by half, is further evidence, says BECTU, of the regulator dancing to the tune of ITV and its shareholders,” said the union in a press statement.

The National Union for Journalists (NUJ) has also raised concerns over the decision, describing it as a sign of Ofcom’s failure to stand up for the public interest.

“Today’s announcement signals a regulator that has failed in its remit and is intent on presiding over the decline and eventual death of local and regional news on the ITV network. All in all a dismal day for supporters of plurality and quality regional programming,” reads a post on the union’s Save The ITV News campaign blog.

Both the unions claim research conducted by the regulator, and announced in a release accompanying the review, contradicts the ITV decision. The key findings of the research, according to Ofcom, suggested that:

• 9 out of 10 people do not want the BBC to be the only provider of public service content in the future
• a majority of people want ITV1 to continue to provide regions and nations news to complement the BBC

According to a report by MediaGuardian, 500 jobs could be cut from the broadcaster’s regional news operations as part of the changes.

paidContent:UK dissects the review on a different level flagging up the regulator’s calls for more links to public service content on websites.

“This might include new online tools that help people ‘bump into’ new websites which otherwise they might not have found, along the lines of stumbleupon.com or last.fm, with a public service perspective,” the review says.

Today’s review will be subject to a consultation period, ending on December 4, the results of which will be published in early 2009.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Waiting for the CAR to arrive

Earlier in the week we blogged that the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Lillehammer (GIJC) had received a little criticism for being a bit 1.0 in its coverage.  But if its partcipants made limited use of the social web to report live from the event, the Computer Assisted Reporting (CAR) contingent was out in force and here’s what they had to say.

Paul Myers, a BBC specialist in internet research, and web trainer, told Journalism.co.uk how slow CAR is in the UK.  “People pick up on the flashy stuff like Google maps, but not CAR,” Myers said.

“This is quite typical in my experience - lots of resistance when I started training journalists in using the internet at BBC in the early 90s. It has been uphill struggle to convince people to use the web,” he told us.

In an opening session, the director of computer-assisted reporting at ProPublica, Jennifer LaFleur, urged people not to be deterred by how complicated it sounds.  “Computer assisted reporting (CAR) is doing stories based on data analysis, but it’s really just working with public records,” she said.

“Don’t get intimidated by the statistics, maths or excel and access focus: these are just the tools we use to report with.”

Along with database editor Helena Bengtsson, from Sweden’s public broadcaster SVT, LaFleur highlighted several recent successful news stories that had been unearthed by using CAR.

One, an investigation into the voting patterns of Swedish EU-parliamentarians, showed that several of the most high-profile parlimentarians abstained in 50 per cent or more of cases, causing political outcry.

But, maybe journalists should leave the more high powered CAR to the IT people? No, was the blunt answer to that audience question. CAR should be par for the course, said LaFleur. “90 per cent of stories we presented here were done with Access and Excel. I am a journalist doing journalism,” she said.

“You have to interview the data as you interview a person,’ added Helena Bengtsson. “When I do a query on data… I’m asking the data as a journalist.

“There is a lot of information in the data that IT-people wouldn’t have discovered. We’re journos first, data-specialists second,” Bengtsson said.

GCIJ Lillehammer also ran classes on RSS, scraping the web, being an online ‘bloodhound’ and effective web searching.

“There are two reasons for that: we have the training expertise and see major need for training in web research and computer assisted reporting”,  Haakon Hagsbö, from SKUP (a Norwegian foundation for investigative journalism) and one of the organisers of GIJC  Lillehammer, told Journalism.co.uk.

“It has certainly been very popular at earlier conferences. People don’t know what they don’t know until they attend the training. It’s a real eyeopener, but they soon find that it’s not rocket science, as these are simple yet powerful tools. We see more and more examples of colleagues from all over the world who meet online and use the web for research.

In reponse to Isaac Mao’s comment that there had been a low take-up of live social media reporting from the conference, Haugsbö said: “We have streamed everything live online, but other than that I don’t have a good answer to this.”

BBC enjoys bumper web traffic as banks’ fortunes slide

It might be doom and gloom for Lehman Brothers staff, but at least someone’s gaining from it… Business news sites are reporting excellent traffic over the last few days - not least of all, the Beeb.

According to an article from yesterday’s Ariel, the BBC’s in-house magazine, the bbc.co.uk story from Monday ‘Lehman Bros files for bankruptcy’ was the site’s ‘most popular story’ in its 10-year history with more than 1.7 million page views.

From Ariel:

Boom time for business online as Lehmans goes bust: records fall while Wall Street trembles

Monday saw records tumble at the BBC news website’s business section.
As financial crisis circled the globe, culminating in the closure of Lehman Brothers, the BBC’s business pages enjoyed a record reach with 2.35 million individual readers logging on, double the usual amount.

And it also set a new record for most-read story: ‘Lehman Bros files for bankruptcy’ had more than 1.7m page views, making it the most popular story in the site’s 10-year history.

All told, the section attracted 9.25m page views in a single day.
Tim Weber, the business section’s editor, praised coverage of Lehman Brothers’ demise, which he said was ‘fast, comprehensive and authoritative’.

And he told ariel online: ‘Business and economics stories have always been more popular than most people suspect, but since the start of the credit crunch a year ago our daily reach has soared by about 50%.

‘However, Monday’s meltdown of investment bank Lehman has taken things to a new level.
‘It’s the most fascinating time in my live as a business journalist, but it’s also great to see that our audiences really appreciate our output.

‘Right now, at 1530 UK time on Tuesday, we’ve already reached more than 1.45 million people – it’s bound to be another bumper day.’

Forbes.com opinion channel gets a makeover

Forbes.com/opinions has had a makeover, as of today. Under the control of new opinions channel editor, Tunku Varadarajan, no time has been wasted in having a bit of an autumn clean. Particularly significant is the introduction of an array of high-profile new columnists.

Here’s a run-down of the changes:

• Four main topic categories: Business and Economics, Foreign Affairs and Defence, Culture and Society, and Politics.

• 16 new columnists will be writing weekly columns for the channel, including author Reihan Salam, economists Brian Wesbury and Bob Stein, former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson and Quentin Letts (from the UK).

• Book reviews every Monday and Thursday, on all subjects, as well as daily essays and commentaries.

• Forbes.com Editor Paul Maidment’s will produce a weekly video “Notes on the News” about international politics and business.

• Forbes magazine Publisher Rich Karlgaards’s daily blog “Digital Rules” will still run, in addition to a new video blog “Talk Back” about the business world.

Varadarajan was previously contributing editor at the Financial Times, where he wrote opinion pieces, arts and culture essays and book reviews. Before that, he was at the Wall Street Journal for seven years - most recently as Assistant Managing Editor.

He gives fuller run-down of all the changes here.

Survey showing that ‘trust in the UK’s national media is on the up’ actually shows nothing

Do you trust the telephone more than the internet, might have been a more valid question than that asked by media company Metrica’s UKPulse survey this week, when it questioned respondents on what they thought were the most trustworthy forms of media.

According to their press release (to which there is no link on the Metrica site), the study asked 13,000 UK adults whether they trusted the internet more than newspapers.

So far so good – it’s an important question. But in the company’s analysis of the results, it compared the internet with news sites.

“The internet in general has gained four percentage points, with 34% of UK adults now saying they trust its content. News sites as a specific online media type though do fair [sic] a lot better with 54% - more than national newspapers!”

That’s like comparing the percentage of people who trust the printed pages of books, with the percentage of people who trust Bill Bryson. It’s simply not a useful comparison.

The internet is the publishing medium, and is not comparable to TV channels or newspapers, which are editorially directed. The internet is the technology by which material is reproduced (in some cases the same material as that appearing in newspapers). When people said they trusted television they weren’t talking about their television sets, rather the channels they watch.

By and large, news site content is the same as the content of newspapers, so it seems bizarre that people trust online news sites more. What is even more baffling, is that blogs fared worse than news sites for gaining people’s trust. But, these very news sites have blogs.

I need persuading that any kind of fruitful analysis can be gleaned from this rather badly thought out study. When someone comes up with relevant and comparable categories then this type of study would be extremely revealing.

For example, do people trust a well-known newspaper journalist’s blog more than an unknown blogger’s?

Furthermore, as Adrian Monck points out in the comments on Roy Greenslade’s blog:

“The problem with trust polling is that it says nothing about the reliability of the media, whilst giving the appearance of providing an answer…”

Greenslade himself asks us about the significance of the increase in trust in UK media, but I think the real question to be asked here is how to profitably analyse people’s trust in different types of online media.

Does anyone know of any good studies conducted on people’s trust in new media? Or how best to measure the media’s reliability?

Guardian material on paidContent:UK

As a result of Guardian News & Media’s acquisition of ContentNext, Media Guardian content has started to appear on paidContent:UK. Just recently the same occured vice versa: the appearance of Paid Content articles on the Media Guardian site.

In July, Journalism.co.uk reported that Guardian News & Media had bought ContentNext, behind paidcontent.org, paidContent:UK and the Indian news site contentSutra.com.

An early report by the Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD column reported that according to sources it was a figure ‘north of $30 million.’

The deal marked a ’significant expansion’ of GNM’s US presence, a press statement said at the time.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Norway’s Journalisten - a role model for UK journalism trade titles?

Kristine Lowe asks, is there a business model in covering the media for the media?:

(Disclaimer: Kristine works part-time for the Norwegian journalism magazine and website Journalisten and has previously contributed to Press Gazette and NA24 Propaganda)

Recording the miserable state of our industry, and listening to experts predicting its imminent death, is a daily plight for media hacks in the western hemisphere.

Newspaper readership for one seems to be in perpetual decline, a fact often bemoaned by the media columnist.

However, a recent article in MediaGuardian by former Press Gazette editor Ian Reeves suggests that the UK’s journalism trade titles, such as the National Union of Journalists’ (NUJ) The Journalist magazine and Press Gazette, are faced with an audience of hacks, who have lost the appetite for news about their own.

“You’ll never make money out of journalists,” Reeves quotes Haymarket’s Michael Heseltine as saying.

Yet that is exactly what the Norwegian equivalent of The Journalist does.

Journalisten.no recorded £1.4 million in revenues in 2007, despite competition from Kampanje (Campaign) - a trade magazine that also covers PR and marketing; NA24 Propaganda - a dedicated media news site; and the media sections of national and regional newspapers.

Roughly £800,000 of this came from advertising and £300,000 from subscriptions, leaving the magazine and news site, which are published by The Norwegian Union of Journalists (NJ), with a post-tax profit of £104,000.

Hardly enough for the hardened business world, but more than enough to justify the existence and further expansion of a ‘local newspaper’ for the country’s journalists.

The news site had 11,000 unique Norwegian-based visitors last week, while the main benefactors of the bi-weekly magazine are around 10,000 union members, who receive it as part of their union membership.

Other than union members, the magazine does have about 1,000 subscribers in the corporate and NGO sector, but not much has been done to market it to a broader audience recently.

The key to Journalisten’s revenues has been capturing the job classifieds market for media jobs, which is easier said than done in a more fragmented market such as the UK. Another minor stream of revenue for Journalisten is a database of PR contacts.

But Journalisten is hardly an isolated example: US-based media site Mediabistro, which also earns money from freelance listings, membership fees and training, must have had a decent turnover to have made it a worthwhile acquisition for Jupiter Media.

Swedish Résumé, owned by Swedish media giant Bonnier, is another contender with 15,000 unique visitors per day online and 29,000 readers per week for its magazine.

These are just two examples which spring to mind here and now, does anybody have other suggestions?

TechCrunch UK: Ashley Norris on the failure of UK blog publishers

Guardian: James Murdoch calls daily/Sunday integrations ‘cost-cutting exercises’

James Murdoch has spoken out against integrating daily and Sunday newspapers into seven-day operations, dismissing the process as “cost-cutting exercises”.

He told staff at its UK newspaper division News International that the introduction of integrated seven-day operations in Britain had “diminished daily and Sunday rivals”.

links for 2008-06-25

• Video: Jeff Jarvis and the Future of Journalism part 2 | Media | guardian.co.uk
  It’s a link economy, stupid

  In part two of his seminar to the Guardian, as part of the Future of Journalism series, Jeff Jarvis argues that links are worth more than content

  (tags: guardian jarvis)
• YouTube home to nearly half web clips watched in UK, comScore reveals | Media | guardian.co.uk
  YouTube accounted for almost 50% of the 3.5bn video clips viewed by UK web users in March, well ahead of the 1.2% share of the BBC and its iPlayer service, according to research firm comScore.
  (tags: youtube comscore)
• Preview: CNET’s new, improved look | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com
  The new CNET home page includes a carousel highlighting several stories across News, Reviews, and Downloads, as well as an integrated video player for CNET TV content
  (tags: cnet revamp)
• Why journalists must learn the values of the blogging revolution | Greenslade | guardian.co.uk
  The debate over blogging’s usefulness to journalism tends to get stuck in a cul de sac, mainly because too few people - well, too few journalists - treat it seriously.
  (tags: greenslade blogging)
• Interview: Rob Grimshaw, MD, FT.com: New Niches, Pinker Pages, No More Subscribers | paidContent:UK
  Paid Content UK chats with FT.com head
  (tags: FT Rob Grimshaw)
• IPC buys Mousebreaker website | Media | guardian.co.uk
  Magazine publisher IPC Media has bought the casual gaming website Mousebreaker in an effort to increase its access to an audience of young male internet users.
  (tags: ipc)