Tag Archives: guardian

Release: Guardian promotes Tanya Cordrey to ‘new executive role of chief digital officer’

Michael Bruntonspall on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Guardian News and Media today announced the promotion of Tanya Cordrey, current director of digital development, to the role of chief digital officer with immediate effect.

According to a release:

Tanya joined GNM in 2008 initially building the digital portfolio of environment products and most recently overseeing the product development team. In her new role Tanya will continue to have product oversight as well as supporting the strategic development of the organisation. She joined GNM from the start-up company Zopa.com and was previously on the UK executive team at eBay for five years.

Her new role encompasses her position as director of digital development, but she will now report to chief executive of Guardian Media Group Andrew Miller.

In the release Miller said Cordrey – along with David Pemsel, who was today named as chief commercial officer – “worked tirelessly and with great creativity to make our digital-first strategy a reality, attract unprecedented numbers of global readers and create new revenue streams”.

These changes are part of our strategy to bring both GNM and GMG closer together as we build a stronger, more digitally-focused organisation.

See the press release here.

Guardian gives readers option to ‘hide Olympics’ section on homepage

The Guardian is offering its readers the option of hiding the part of its homepage dedicated to the majority of its Olympics coverage, in a move similar to that which it took during the Royal Wedding last year.

Back in April 2011 the Guardian also featured a button on its homepage to remove Royal Wedding related coverage.

And this feature is something that has been seen elsewhere during big news events. The website for Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet gave its readers the choice of a “Breivik-free” version during the trial of Anders Behring Breivik.

And just like the Guardian, Norwegian title, Verdens Gang, also offered a button for users to remove Royal Wedding coverage last year.

Hatip: @TheMediaTweets and @hayjane

Guardian US, #smarttakes and ‘pop-up aggregation’

The Guardian’s US operation announced yesterday the launch of a new socially-driven aggregation series, #smarttakes.

According to a post on Comment Is Free the new project will see the introduction of “a pop-up aggregation tool that collects standout pieces of commentary and analysis from Guardian readers”.

We’ve been experimenting with the concept in recent weeks, like when the drone scandal broke, when Facebook went public and when the Montreal protests erupted. As of today, pop-up aggregation has a permanent home on the Guardian.

Currently the project is US only. The project will see users involved by tweeting about comment pieces with the #smarttakes hashtag. According to the Guardian announcement “great recommendations will also get retweeted from @GuardianUS”.

Hatip: Nieman Journalism Lab.

Reporting on the new development Nieman adds that the Guardian will also offer a “curated roundup” on the series’ page.

also spoke to Amanda Michel, open editor for the Guardian but who was previously involved in setting up #MuckReads at ProPublica, the non-profit’s “ongoing collection of watchdog reporting elsewhere”. The Nieman post highlights some of the lessons Michel learnt with #MuckReads:

Over email, Michel told me one lesson from #MuckReads was how to create a long-term commitment to using a hashtag. That helps not just to populate the project, but to build support, she said.

On the subject of open journalism at the Guardian, we recently spoke to national editor Dan Roberts about some of the lessons learned from the Guardian’s UK projects such as its open newslist experiment and Reality Check blog.

Guardian to disclose funding arrangements for travel articles

The Guardian has announced it is to disclose the full details of who paid for journalists’ transport, accommodation and other expenses at the bottom of travel articles.

The new policy has arisen following a recent complaint from a reader about an article in which the reporter’s expenses were covered by environmental campaign group Greenpeace.

The reader said: “In my opinion it crosses an ethical line for purely financial reasons and I would be very interested to learn the paper’s position.”

Guardian deputy editor Ian Katz responded:

I think that in many circumstances it is fine to accept trips funded by governments, NGOs or lobby groups, though in all cases we should declare them at end of the piece. All funded trips should be authorised by a senior editor and the judgment we should make is, ‘What would the reader, armed with the information about how the trip was funded, make of it?’ If the answer to that is that the reader would probably consider it dodgy, or somehow contaminating of our coverage, then we shouldn’t take it.

Readers’ editor Chris Elliott wrote in his column today:

The Guardian is going to take a step further towards openness in the area of travel writing. In future, travel features will specify which aspects of a trip were paid for and by whom at the end of such features. Across the rest of the paper, on each desk, there are plans to log any trips taken, to ensure that such trips are tracked and signed off by a senior editor.

Guardian considering ‘becoming involved’ in journalism training

The Guardian has confirmed it is in conversations with a number of universities “about the possibility of becoming involved with their journalism courses”.

The development was first reported by XCity magazine, City University London’s student newspaper, in its latest edition.

XCity understands that the annual course fee could be around £9,000.

In a statement today a Guardian spokesperson added:

No decisions have been made about the precise nature of the course, or even which partner in education would work best with us. It is therefore not possible to say when a course might start or to give any detail on how it might be run.

Video: New Guardian TV ad retells story of ‘The Three Little Pigs’

The Guardian last night unveiled a new television advertising campaign, retelling the classic fairy tale “The Three Little Pigs” to illustrate the paper’s new “open” model of journalism.

“Open Journalism creates many new opportunities to engage with our audience – to celebrate and communicate this we have invested in a major new brand campaign which will run on TV and through Outdoor, digital media and various press channels,” the paper says.

Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger adds:

“Our approach recognises the importance of putting a newspaper at the heart of the open eco-structure of information so that you can then harness different voices and link to an array of other sources… we can harness, aggregate, curate and report, which is a distributive model of journalism that has a richness and diversity of content.”

What do you reckon? Here’s the full video:

NUJ: More newspaper bosses should take pay cuts

The National Union of Journalists has welcomed news that Guardian News and Media editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger has offered to take a pay cut – and the union has called on other newspaper bosses to do the same.

The Guardian reported that Rusbridger would take a 10 per cent voluntary cut in the 2012-13 financial year, from £438,900 to £395,010. His pension contribution will also be reduced.

NUJ deputy general secretary Barry Fitzpatrick said in a release:

“I welcome Alan’s response to the NUJ’s suggestion that he should take a pay cut and show a lead to executives within the industry at a time when many journalists face redundancy and pay freezes. I hope that others including Sly Bailey, chief executive of Trinity Mirror, and Richard Desmond owner of the Express newspapers, will now be following suit.”

Trinity Mirror investors have expressed concern about Bailey’s pay package, almost £1.7 million in 2010. The company’s share price has fallen by 87 per cent in the past decade.

Newspapers and PCC deny Baroness Buscombe claims

Three newspaper publishers have denied a claim by Baroness Buscombe (pictured) that they threatened to quit the organisation because of negative adjudication recently.

Responding to Robert Jay QC at the Leveson inquiry today, who said: “I think a number of editors threatened to leave the PCC”, Buscombe replied: “Yes, the FT, the Guardian, the Mirror.”

Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger tweeted:

The Mirror said:

The Financial Times added:

The PCC said: “Baroness Buscombe was giving a personal recollection of her conversations and experiences whilst at the PCC, during her evidence at the Leveson Inquiry this morning. The PCC has not received any formal proposals from these publishers to withdraw from the system in recent years.”

Guardian launches ‘next phase’ of open newslist: Newsdesk Live

The Guardian has launched a new liveblog in its next development of its open newslist trial, which it started last year to facilitate greater discussion around the given topics.

According to a blog post by UK news editor Dan Roberts, Newsdesk Live was prompted by “limitations” with the open newsdesk which became apparent, “chiefly the difficulty of using a simple grid and 140 characters to communicate all the complexities of the day’s news with an outside audience”.

Newsdesk Live will “incorporate the open newslist, but will also feature a live comment thread allowing readers to discuss what’s going on directly rather than having to do so via Twitter”.

Journalist Polly Curtis is overseeing the project, Roberts adds:

For the period of the experiment, Polly is joining the national newdesk to work alongside other UK editors to help feed ideas from readers back into the newsgathering process.

Hat tip: 10,000 Words blog

Guardian study finds just 22.6% of journalists are female

The New York Times newsroom in 1942. By Marjory Collins [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

 The Guardian today published the findings from its research into gender in the press, based on “a simple count of newspaper bylines” and those appearing on the Today programme on Radio 4.

The bylines were said to have been taken from articles published in a total of seven newspapers from 13 June to 8 July. The Guardian reports that the research, led by Kira Cochrane, found that women journalists accounted for just 22.6 per cent, as opposed to 77.4 per cent for male reporters.

National papers were all shown to have large gender gaps in byline averages. The Daily Mail and the Guardian recorded the lowest male dominance at 68 per cent male and 72 per cent male respectively.

In its ever-open approach to data the Guardian has made all the data available as a downloadable spreadsheet and is asking its audience to get involved by posing the question: “What can you do with this data?”

Read more here.

Research published earlier this year, commissioned by the Women in Journalism group, found that almost three quarters of journalists working in the national press were male.