A special programme from BBC Radio 4 aired yesterday: ‘Moats, Mortgages and Mayhem’ which looked at media coverage of the whole scandal.

The editor of the Daily Telegraph, Will Lewis defended coverage of MPs’ expenses, rubbishing suggestions that his paper had irreparably damaged Parliament.

“Will Lewis told the BBC his paper’s reports about MPs’ claims would make Parliament more ‘open’ and allow a ‘new generation’ of people to be elected,” reported the BBC.

(….) “former Tory leader Michael Howard said some of the paper’s coverage had been “inaccurate and unfair.”

You can listen to Lewis’s comments here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8123362.stm

Or the programme, presented by Nick Robinson and produced by Martin Rosenbaum,  in full here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lh47j

Nick Robinson’s own comments are also very insightful: his frustrations about the lack of time to ‘ponder’ on the revelations, and the questions raised about presenting accusations fairly.

Hat tip: Journalism student and blogger, Nigel Barlow. On his blog he says: that he has a couple of problems with the Telegraph’s reportage: “Firstly that there was no differentiation between claims that were accepted or rejected. Secondly that the paper has been selective in the MPs that it has targeted.”

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In the final session of the Society of Editors conference, Will Lewis, editor-in-chief of the Telegraph and its Sunday sister, surmised the five areas he saw as being key for media groups’ success in the digital age:

• Localisation
• Personalisation
• Media groups becoming ‘enablers’ rather than handing down knowledge from on hig
• Double media- not a just video or just text – a combination of content platforms
• Being obsessed with the customer – and for the Telegraph, he added, it means consumers in all their guises and not strictly limited to those in the UK

Listen to him outline his vision of the future:

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Here’s a little moment of mirth from the closing session of the Society of Editors conference in Manchester.

During the Q&A session, Media Guardian reporter Jemima Kiss asked Telegraph editor Will Lewis about the transparency of ABCe ‘benchmarking’ monthly web traffic figures and if he was planning to again use Hitwise metric results in Telegraph advertising.

The website had previously run an ad on the homepage quoting Hitwise and proclaiming its position as the top quality UK newspaper online.

The Hitwise metric is considered by some to be an inferior measurement of a websites’ traffic than the figures supplied by Nielsen/NetRatings, comScore or the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCE).

A visibly riled Lewis told her that Telegraph marketing campaigns were ‘none of her business’ and that the Telegraph site stats were open for all to see on the site.

But what was it that riled him?

Was it the Guardian’s quest to have ABCEs recognised across the industry as the sole measure of websites metrics?

Having it rubbed in that according to this metric the Telegraph trails the Guardian by quite some way, almost in a polar opposite of the print edition?

Or was he tired of the puritanical zeal on this issue that encourages Guardian employees, it seems, to ask him a similar question every time he appears in public?

Listen here to the exchange:

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