ITN chief executive John Hardie earned £682,000 in 2010, the Guardian reports.

The boss of the commercial broadcaster received less than the director general of the BBC, Mark Thompson for the year, however.

According to this article in the Telegraph published in July last year, Thompson received £838,000, including a £163,000 pension top-up.

The ITN chief executive, John Hardie, saw his total remuneration package rise last year to £682,000 as the broadcaster recorded a pre-tax profit of £400,000.

Hardie received a base salary of £350,000 in 2010, as well as a further £300,000 in bonus and benefits payments, according to the ITV News and Channel 4 News broadcaster’s full-year accounts published last week.

The former Disney executive took home a total remuneration package of £238,000 in 2009, after joining the company in June that year.

The Guardian’s full article is at this link.

Comment: Is the director general of the BBC overpaid in relation to the ITN boss? Or is the ITN boss, who is operating in a harsh commercial climate, underpaid?

• BBC executives’ expenses: the links. Now play!
• Despite group redundancies and pay freeze, Johnston Press CEO’s pay package nears £1m
• WSJ.com: Joint venture between BBC Worldwide and Channel 4 could be agreed within weeks
• Johnston Press chief executive million pound earnings revealed in annual report
• Announcement of pay cut for Rusbridger and no bonus for McCall following NUJ comments

Last week several news outlets, including the BBC, reported on a visit to Downing Street by the BBC’s director general Mark Thompson, who was allegedly there to discuss BBC news coverage of the government’s spending review.

It was suggested that such a visit may risk damaging the impartiality of the broadcaster, with Thompson reportedly trying to ensure a good relationship with the government in light of a licence fee review on the horizon. Others indicated that the meeting was on the order of senior government figures who wanted to “quiz” Thompson on content.

Commenting on the press coverage, Kevin Marsh, editor of the BBC College of Journalism criticizes what he regards as a promotion of appearance and impression over the facts in a post on the College of Journalism discussion blog.

Is it really a surprise for example, to learn that David Cameron’s press chief, Andy Coulson, had lunch with the BBC head of news, Helen Boaden, and that the subject of spending review coverage came up? Or that Mr Coulson would press for more ‘context’?

(…) Now, I have no special knowledge or insight here – but certainly when I was running Today or World at One it wasn’t that unusual to recruit senior executives to put in a good word when you were trying to fix big interviews.

And it’s easy to see that with a huge, high-profile season on the horizon – and the spending review season will run across all of the BBC’s national and regional programming as well as the news website – a bit of shoulder work from the chaps at the top is no bad thing.

See his full post here…

• Greenslade: What the papers did, and didn’t, say about Coulson
• Phone-hacking on Dispatches: a good documentary but not enough new evidence
• Covering the cuts: how the media is reacting to the spending review
• BBC CoJo: Working with user-generated content
• BBC College of Journalism blog: The problems with reporting a coalition government

BBC staff unions are expected to announce the result of a ballot for strike action later today, following pension proposals put forward by the broadcaster in June which could see the introduction of a one per cent cap on increases in pensionable salary and the closure of the final-salary scheme to new joiners.

In a blog post, NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear says the union expects the results to show “a massive vote in favour of action”.

He adds that an announcement is expected to be made between 3:30pm and 4:00pm today. The BBC previously told Journalism.co.uk it would be making further proposals at the beginning of September following the backlash from its initial suggestions. Its 90-day consultation period closes later this month.

More to follow later this afternoon.

• NUJ: Ray Tindle to meet with Parlimentary representatives over Enfield dispute
• NUJ: More strife for Newsquest as four more NUJ centres vote to strike
• BBC unions prepare staff for strike action
• Foreign Office in massive U-turn on World Service headline
• NUJ Release: Strike action halted at Trinity Mirror Birmingham titles

Blogger and freelance journalist Chie Elliott (@orangeblossomer) has written a wide-ranging piece to mark International Women’s Day and its relevance to the media/publishing industries. The post can be read in full on her own blog at this link.

It wasn’t that long ago that BBC boss Mark Thompson came under fire for replacing a mature female judge in a popular dance show with a pop star 36 years her junior.

The fact that in television, older, grey-haired male presenters carry on commanding respect well into their retirement age, whereas their female counterparts get sidelined as their age starts to show, could be a reflection of a society’s warped views about women, and not exclusive to the industry.

Women’s value and employability should not be conditional to age or appearance, but women in highly visible jobs such as television or film, do not always seem to have a choice. Anna Ford, a journalist worshipped by her male peers as something nearing a sex goddess in her heyday, decided to retire in April 2006, at 62, saying:

“I might have been shovelled off into News 24 to the sort of graveyard shift.”

The BBC’s  drive to recruit older female newsreaders, announced soon after the Strictly Come Dancing judge swap saga, strikes me as laughable. I can visualise a screaming headline: “Older women join ethnic minorities and the disabled under positive discrimination scheme.” Or, more bluntly, as The Independent put it: “Must be Female. Young Need Not Apply”.

• Women don’t fare too well on the power league lists
• Calling journalists to blog on International Women’s Day (Monday 8 March)
• #WANIndia2009: Women editors-in-chief and women readers – should we be having this discussion?
• #IWD: Gaby Hinsliff – ‘Too many women waiting to be invited to blog, where men just pile in’
• #IWD: Sarah Booker – ‘Journalism is a profession where anyone can prove themselves’

From reading recent media news you might think the the BBC’s passion for blogging was cooling.

First off, we learnt (via the Times initially, and then confirmed by the BBC) that the corporation is to significantly cut back its web content and reduce the number of online staff.

Then on Tuesday evening, BBC political editor Nick Robinson said he no longer read the comments on his own Newslog. Rather than widening the political debate, commenters were “people who have already made their minds up, to abuse me, to abuse each other or abuse a politician”, he said at an Election 2.0 debate at City University London.

Finally, as academic and blogger Alfred Hermida flagged up, the BBC Strategic Review labelled the blogosphere as “vast and unruly”. The report says:

Above the vast and unruly world of the blogosphere, professional media power may actually concentrate in fewer hands. Individual plurality may increase but collective, effective plurality decrease – with societies around the world left with fewer reliable sources of professionally validated news.

Professor Hermida, who specifically researches the BBC,  was surprised by the language and suggests reminding director general Mark Thompson that the BBC is part of the blogosphere itself:

Perhaps Forrester analyst Nick Thomas when he says that “Mark Thompson does not ‘get’ digital in the way that even his much-maligned predecessor John Birt did.”

But before we get carried away with the BBC’s blogging / web apathy, let’s take a step back. Malcolm Coles’ easy-read guide to the Strategic Review comes in handy here.

For one, as Coles notes on Econsultancy, halving the number of sections on the site is not quite the same as halving the size of the site. “The overall quality will be improved by closing lower-performing sites and consolidating the rest,” he reports.

And proactive web interaction will be developed. From Coles’ post:

The BBC also plans to open up its programme library (outside the areas with high commercial value) “over time” within BBC Online as a publicly accessible ‘permanent collection’.

The review says it will make programmes available on demand “alongside the component parts of those programmes (segmentation), programme information (full catalogue) and additional, complementary content (programme support”. And the site will look to deliver audiences through propositions like the BBC’s Wildlife Finder “which maximise the public value of archive programming”.

(…) It’s pledged to “turn the site into a window on the web” by providing at least one external link on every page and doubling monthly ‘click-throughs” to external sites: “making the best of what is available elsewhere online an integral part of the BBC’s offer to audiences”.

Anyway, read the report – or Coles’ summary – for yourself. PDF at this link.

• Who is an investigative programme for? ‘The people in it, or the man presenting it?’ asks Roger Cook
• BBC review of online activities: a better deal for local media?
• Producer responds to Guardian TV review: ‘If an opera is reviewed, you get someone who knows about opera’
• Times Online: BBC to cut web pages by half?
• BBC Question Time engages with Twitter #bbcqt

The Times claims to have seen details of the strategic review of BBC services director-general Mark Thompson that recommends the closure of digital radio stations 6 Music and the Asian Network and a severe reduction in the size of its website. The report is due to go before the BBC Trust next month.

The corporation’s web pages are to be halved, backed by a 25 per cent cut in staff numbers. Its £112 million budget will also be cut by 25 per cent. It is also pledging to include more links to newspaper articles to drive traffic to the websites of rival publishers.

While the plans to link out more are nothing new, the review reportedly includes a pledge to never “produce services at a ‘more local’ level than is currently the case”.

Full story at this link…

• Beehive City: Alan Rusbridger vs John Witherow on BBC Radio 4
• Big numbers vs local audience – what should regional newspapers chase?
• Newsquest attracts 4.8m unique users in 2007
• BBC review of online activities: a better deal for local media?
• Study of French news sites: Facebook sends 13 times more referrals than Twitter

The BBC Trust has published more details of the strategic review of the corporation’s activities, which it announced in July, led by director-general Mark Thompson.

One focus point of the review will be ‘streamlining the BBC’s online services’ to ‘narrow the focus on distinctive content and help to create a more open BBC’, the Trust said in a release yesterday.

This includes considering which online services could be stopped

“The Trust recognises external concerns over scale and growth of BBC online operations. Equally, it’s an immensely popular service with audiences and an important tool for the UK economy,” said Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the Trust.

“We have no intention of diluting BBC commitment to universal access to free news online. But beyond that we want to question honestly what licence fee payers really expect to get from their licence fee and what they might be surprised to see the BBC doing in the online world.”

At the Society of Editors conference last week David Holdsworth, controller of English regions, discussed BBC Online plans to bring in RSS feeds from newspaper websites – just one example of how the corporation could be a better neighbour to local media, he said.

The Trust said Thompson’s review must take these kind of relationships into consideration and ask ‘how can the BBC work with the rest of the industry to ensure its investment creates the greatest possible value?’ This question has been a sticking point for many local media groups following the dispute over the corporation’s plans to increase its local video offering online, which were later rejected by the Trust.

Additionally, sharing or linking the BBC’s websites with other public or not-for-profit cultural and creative organisations, such as community radio services, should be looked at, the Trust recommended.

The first findings of the review will be published in early 2010 and opened to public consultation.

• Times Online: BBC to cut web pages by half?
• BBC Trust launches ‘its largest’ TV service review – into BBC One, BBC Two and BBC Four
• Media Release: BBC Trust confirms permission refusal for BBC’s local video plans
• Brand Republic: BBC will not launch new local web plans, says Boaden
• BBC Trust responds to MPs’ accusations over commercial expansion

The BBC already has a pretty good track record for its ‘process’ blogs, what with The Editors’ Blog, the Internet Blog and Journalism Labs. And it has launched another, just in time to host a post by Mark Thompson on the BNP / Question Time decision.

The blog, edited by Chris Jones, will be a place where ‘decision makers and experts can talk about things going on inside the BBC’ it says.

“This could include anything; from major announcements to how parts of the corporation operate. We’ll also be highlighting and linking to the fascinating debates happening on the many other blogs, message boards and other social media, inside and outside the BBC website.”

About the BBC blog at this link.

• Treasury reaches out to hyperlocal sites for Budget coverage
• Sky News website closes down discussion boards
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – 10 social media tips for bloggers
• BBC Editors blog: Developments for the BBC News website
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – don’t forget the forums

What’s the difference between a refresh and a re-launch? We’ll leave that for the Guardian and the BBC to fight out…

The Guardian today reported that a ‘radical redesign’ and re-launch of BBC websites is planned for March 2010, with a focus on social media – according to the paper’s sources.

Among the changes outlined were a ‘a new homepage and underlying hosting platform,’ radical changes to news navigation, commenting facilities on programmes, the launch of the Open iPlayer and new connections to third party platforms.

The BBC, however, denied such a ‘radical overhaul’ to Journalism.co.uk, although it said ‘a refresh of the BBC News site’ will take place in due course – as previously reported.

In a statement it said:

“We’re always looking to improve the BBC experience for our users but contrary to reports, we are not planning a radical overhaul of the BBC’s websites.

“We are looking at how we can genuinely make BBC Online part of the web and meet our users growing expectations that they can contribute in different ways to our web site, and more broadly how we can share our technologies with other media companies.

“The website for Strictly Come Dancing as well as the Open iPlayer are examples – and as previously announced, we are planning a refresh of the BBC News site in the new year. Any investment in BBC Online is tightly assessed for market impact and public value before we commit to it.”

Further explanation will be given further down the line, a spokesperson told Journalism.co.uk.

In March 2009 director-general Mark Thompson announced that the BBC must cut £400 million from its budget within the next three years to avoid going over its statutory borrowing limit. Thompson said the corporation was targeting a five per cent cost reduction for television programme cost, year-on-year, for the next five years, a cumulative saving of 20 per cent.

This month he has talked of a ‘radical’ review of a different kind, one which will not necessarily dismiss the notion that the BBC has reached its limit of expansion (a suggestion originally made by culture secretary Ben Bradshaw).

Speaking at the BBC Open Day in August journalism controller of BBC Future Media & Technology, Nic Newman, said there will be no new editorial launches; rather users would see a ‘re-arrangement’ of content in the new year.

• PDA: BBC to create social media editor role
• Guardian: Cuts will see World Service merged with BBC News, says Thompson
• Mark Thompson on the defence: BBC review will be ‘radical and open-minded’
• BBC iPlayer international iPad app will ‘definitely’ launch this year
• NMK: ‘Prism of newspapers’ restricting online innovation, says Telegraph assistant editor

Oddly, it looks like the BBC and Politics.co.uk are the only two news organisations to report on Greg Dyke’s appearance at the Liberal Democrat party conference, where the former BBC director-general claimed that the BBC is part of a ‘conspiracy’ preventing the necessary ‘radical changes’ to UK democracy.

[Update: The Belfast Telegraph and The Herald in Glasgow also reported some of his comments - please do send over any other sightings]

Dyke – who was director-general from 2000-2004, before resigning after the verdict of the Hutton Report – made the comments on Sunday at a fringe meeting about MPs’ expenses at the Liberal Democrat party conference.

Dyke said a commission should examine the ‘whole political system,’ but added: “I fear it will never happen because I fear the political class will stop it.”

Major changes he had wanted to make to the BBC’s coverage of politics had been blocked, Dyke claimed. Some of his comments, as reported by the BBC:

“The evidence that our democracy is failing is overwhelming and yet those with the biggest interest in sustaining the current system – the Westminster village, the media and particularly the political parties, including this one – are the groups most in denial about what is really happening to our democracy.”

(…)

“I tried and failed to get the problem properly discussed when I was at the BBC and I was stopped, interestingly, by a combination of the politicos on the board of governors, one of whom was married to the man who claimed for cleaning his moat, the cabinet interestingly – the Labour cabinet – who decided to have a meeting, only about what we were trying to discuss, and the political journalists at the BBC.

“Why? Because, collectively, they are all part of the problem. They are part of one Westminster conspiracy. They don’t want anything to change. It’s not in their interests.”

Politics.co.uk reported a slightly different angle: Dyke also claimed that politicians damaged by the expenses scandal should not be allowed to conduct financial scrutiny of the BBC or other public bodies. Dyke said:

“When I was director-general of the BBC I regularly appeared before select committees and had often quite I thought quite dumb people coming and giving me tough questions.

“How can those people question you now? How can someone who’s flipped their mortgage possibly sit there and start asking me about expenditure at the BBC? Because you just come back to them. I think some people are completely undermined by this. They should go because they can’t do the job.”

• BBC News: Dyke in BBC ‘conspiracy’ claim.
• Politics.co.uk: Dyke: Expenses scandal undermines BBC scrutiny

A blog search picks up a little more mention of the comments and this video interview with Greg Dyke by Mark Thompson (Lib Dem ‘Mark Reckons’ blogger, not the current BBC D-G):

Hat-tip: MediaLens.

• Guardian: Greg Dyke’s LTN group to bid for national TV network
• #Citywot: Journalists to debate the influence of political reporting – 6pm BST
• POLIS: The BNP and Question Time: How Belgian media handles the extreme right
• PCC director speaks out over Lord Puttnam’s criticisms of regulatory body
• BBC executives’ expenses: the links. Now play!

BBC director-general Mark Thompson yesterday responded to the various criticisms of News Corp’s James Murdoch and culture secretary Ben Bradshaw at the Royal Television Society’s binnenial convention in Cambridge.

While Thompson said that he agreed with parts of Bradshaw’s RTS speech and said that a ‘radical and open-minded’ review of the BBC would not dismiss the suggestion that the coporation had reached its limits of expansion, the director-general said he found some of Bradshaw’s ideas ‘frankly puzzling’.

“He [Bradshaw] set out a long list of the current BBC public services. By the way, I don’t know many broadcasters who haven’t launched multiple services over the past decade. But with one or two exceptions, these new BBC services weren’t approved by the BBC Trust. They were approved by the Government of which Ben is a member. Indeed, the Government asked the BBC to launch a range of new services to help with their policy of encouraging the public to move to digital television and radio. Ben’s surprise at these services is itself surprising.”

The speech can be read in full at this link.

• BBC Trust launches ‘its largest’ TV service review – into BBC One, BBC Two and BBC Four
• How to interview Mark Thompson, what his speech looks like, and more
• Sir Michael Lyons on the BBC Trust, the licence fee and how it’s spent
• BBC creates 12 new regional broadcast roles as part of new local news plans
• BBC review of online activities: a better deal for local media?

In an interview with the Guardian, BBC director-general, Mark Thompson, said that executives are considering the part- privatisation of the corporation’s  commercial arm, BBC Worldwide.

Thompson also said that the provision of free BBC online news was ‘utterly non-negotiable’. “I would rather the BBC was abolished than we started encrypting news to stop people seeing it,” he told the Guardian.

Full story at this link…

• Media Release: BBC axes deputy director general post and Mark Byford
• Guardian: Cuts will see World Service merged with BBC News, says Thompson
• FT.com: BBC review confirms plans to cut website and digital stations
• Guardian: ITN chief executive’s pay package nearly £700K
• Mark Thompson on the defence: BBC review will be ‘radical and open-minded’

A daily round-up of all the content published on the Journalism.co.uk site. You can also sign up to our e-newsletter and subscribe to the feed for the Journalism Daily here.

News and features:

• BBC director-general attacks ‘relentless onslaught from the press’ in staff memo
• New UGC reporting projects as WaPo political site comes out of beta
• Alex Brummer: ‘Far from scaring people, the press were providing readers with reliable information’
• Freelancers: Let us know what you’re working on
• Smart moves: Wall Street Journal expands European news staff

Ed’s picks:

• Nieman Journalism Lab: NYTimes’ pulled post lives on
• LAObserved: Open plea to Rupert Murdoch from senior editor at Fox 11
• Slatest: ‘News Dots’ graphic for connecting stories
• British journalist rescued from Taliban but interpreter died; reports suggest British soldier also killed

Tip of the day:

• Building your online portfolio

#FollowJourn:

• @craigmcginty/online publisher

On the Editors’ Blog:

• Future of Journalism: live video from Cardiff
• Jon Bernstein: Sorry Guido, the BBC did for Duncan

• British journalist rescued from Taliban but interpreter died; reports suggest British soldier also killed
• Slatest: ‘News Dots’ graphic for connecting stories
• Sean Langan at the Frontline Club: “perhaps I was like Icarus flying too close to the sun’
• Slideshare: research tips for journalists from @colinmeek
• MediaShift: Teaching social media should go beyond the basics of Twitter

Nuria Leon, a journalist and postgraduate student at the University of Westminster, recently demanded an explanation from BBC director-general Mark Thompson regarding the lack of varied BBC news content from Latin America. You can listen to the encounter here.

Now she needs journalists’ help: for her MA dissertation in media management she wants to find out what journalists think about coverage of Latin America in the UK. [NB: Latin American countries listed here, and UN information on the Americas here.]

So, if you think there is a hole in English-language reportage from that part of the world, please help her out. Here are her questions. Please leave your thoughts below, or email her directly: n.leon at my.westminster.ac.uk.

• 1. Given your own experiences:

• a. What do you think causes a gap between between Latin America and the UK in regards to the distribution and production of news?

• b. What would help create a direct link between both markets for the production and distribution of news?

• 2. What do you think about international news agencies and their service from Latin America?

• 3. Do you think there is a demand for customised news services, rather than homogeneous news packages offered by international news agencies?

• 4. What benefits would you see if both markets started to conduct direct, continuous and permanent business?

• 5.  Do you think the UK would be receptive to more Latin American news content?

• 6. Do you believe there is a niche for such a service? A need?

• 7. More generally, what could help reduce the gap between Latin America and the UK news industry?

• Five and Hulu sign technology deals with Signiant
• #followjourn: @leonwatson – Leon Watson/journalist
• Going back to the backlink licensing case: NLA’s full statement
• ReadWriteWeb: Google allows readers to customise news
• News International steps up blocking of aggregators

The narrative is familiar to anyone who has followed the broader technology industry for any length of time – new triumphs over old.

The reality, inevitably, is more complex, more layered, more textured.

Certainly change is disruptive, but old technology rarely disappears completely. Rather it coexists with the new.

Just look around your office if you want proof of that.

You may not use the fax machine but someone does, and you’ve certainly sent a letter or made a call on the land line. Communication is not all mobiles, email and instant messaging.

As it is with technology, so it is with media.

And nothing demonstrates the laziness of the ‘winners and losers’ legend more than the domestic news story of the year – MPs’ expenses. Here we have seen the best of old and new media, one feeding off the other.

Let’s retrace our steps:

What was meant to be a public domain story, put there by a hard-fought freedom of information request, turned into an old-fashioned scoop.

The Daily Telegraph acquired the data and did a first class job poring over the numbers and putting in place an editorial diary for the drip-drip of expenses-related stories.

The first fruits of this were splashed across the front of the paper on Friday May 8 and, by my count, the story set – and led – the news agenda for the next 23 days.

To this point it was only a new media story in the sense that the Telegraph was enjoying an uplift in traffic – one in every 756 expenses-related searches led to the site.

But what the paper was offering was fairly conventional fare. It took others to do some really interesting things with it.

A fine example was work done by Lib Dem activist Mark Thompson who spotted a correlation between the safeness of an MP’s seat and the likelihood that they are involved in an expenses scandal.

Elsewhere, there were mash-ups, heat maps and the rest.

And then the deluge. Parliament released its data – albeit in redacted form – and for the first time the Daily Telegraph was in danger of losing ownership of the story to another newspaper.

True to type the Guardian offered the most interactive experience inviting readers to: “Investigate Your MPs expenses.”

Wired journalist Jeff Howe, the man credited with coining the phrase crowdsourcing, will nod approvingly at this development.

According to one definition Howe uses, crowdsourcing is ‘the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open cal’l.

In this instance the Guardian was taking a task traditionally performed by its journalists (designated agents) and outsourcing it to its readers.

Where the Telegraph did its own number-crunching, the Guardian farmed much of it to a third party, us.

So has the Guardian’s crowdsourcing experiment been a success?

On Sunday the paper boasted that almost 20,000 people had taken part, helping it to scour nearly 160,000 documents. So far so great. But by Wednesday, the number of documents examined by the army of volunteers was still 160,000.

With some 700,000+ receipts and other assorted papers to classify could it be that the Guardian’s efforts were running out of steam?

If they were, this didn’t stop its rival from following the lead.

One Telegraph correspondent may have dismissed those engaged in this kind of ‘collaborative investigative journalism’ as ‘Kool-Aid slurping Wikipedians’, but his paper seemed to take a different view.

By the middle of the week, the Telegraph was offering its far-less redacted expenses documents in PDF form and all its data in a Google spreadsheet, while simultaneously asking readers directly: “What have you spotted?”

Both papers – and the wider media come to that – have enriched our understanding of a complex and sprawling story. What started as a proprietorial scoop is now in the hands of the crowd.

Old media and new coexisting.

Jon Bernstein is former multimedia editor of Channel 4 News. This is the first in a series of regular columns for Journalism.co.uk. You can read his personal blog at this link.

• Guardian.co.uk: Crowd-sourced experiment – ‘Investigate your MP’s expenses’
• Nieman Journalism Lab: Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s expenses experiment
• Malcolm Coles: MPs’ expenses – the best of the web
• Guardian launches crowdsourced investigation into Tony Blair’s finances
• Telegraph to publish ‘unredacted’ expenses information… in print