Copyright Lewis Whyld/PA

The Guardian has reported today that an updated biography of the prime minister claims David Cameron texted Rebekah Brooks before she quit as News International’s chief executive.

An article on the Guardian‘s website reports that Cameron allegedly texted Brooks “to tell her to keep her head up” days before she resigned from News International.

It has also emerged that he agreed to meet her at a point-to-point horse race so long as they were not seen together, and that he also pressed the Metropolitan police to review the Madeleine McCann case in May last year following pressure from Brooks.

The prime minister then sent an intermediary to Brooks to explain why contacts had to be brought to an abrupt halt after she resigned. The authors say the gist of that message was: “Sorry I couldn’t have been as loyal to you as you have been to me, but Ed Miliband had me on the run.”

The revelations were made in the updated version of Cameron: Practically a Conservative by Francis Elliot and James Hanning. Brooks is due to appear before the Leveson inquiry on Friday.

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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.

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Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, and Nick Davies, the journalist who uncovered the extent of phone hacking at the News of the World, are to be this year’s recipients of the Media Society award.

In a release, the Media Society, a charity that campaigns for freedom of expression and the encouragement of high standards in journalism, said:

The Guardian’s revelations about phone hacking at the News of the World have not only been the biggest media story of the year, but have also triggered a public debate about the practices of the press, with potentially far-reaching consequences.

Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian since the mid-1990s, has presided over the paper’s development from a broadsheet to its current Berliner format, and its embrace of online journalism. He is an eloquent defender of the importance of journalism for holding power to account.

Nick Davies, meanwhile, has demonstrated the highest qualities of persistence in his following of the biggest media stories in recent years, while his concern for the health and future of his craft is manifest: he is an outstanding advocate of the importance of good reporting as the basis for good journalism.

Last year’s Media Society award went to Michael Grade and the 2010 honour went to Melvin Bragg.

Nick Davies has been handed several awards in the past year, including the Paul Foot Award, journalist of the year at the Foreign Press Association Media Awards 2011 and the Frontline Club award.

In February it was announced that Rusbridger was to receive Harvard University’s Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism.

Rusbridger and Davies will be honoured at a Media Society dinner on 24 May.

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A community of commentators provides the Guardian storytelling process with “cross-fertilisation from below the line”, David Shariatmadari, deputy editor of Comment is Free (CiF), the Guardian’s comment, analysis and discussion platform, told readers at the Guardian Open Weekend event today.

In a session called “digital revolution: how publishing is becoming collaborative”, Shariatmadari explained how 400 non-Guardian staff are commissioned to contribute to CiF every month.

In addition to commissioned commentators, a post-moderated commenting system,  and reposting content from niche blogs, the “opening processes” provided by social media results in “unearthing unexpected gems from the readership”.

“It’s difficult to say where the future of digital collaboration might go next,” Shariatmadari said, but feels “moderation will always be necessary”.

The Guardian trys to reduce the need by moderators by “managing the conversation”, with journalists, community coordinators and moderators joining the debate.

Laura Oliver, a community manager who is one of those “embedded” within the news room and areas such as CiF,  works to reduce the need for moderation by encouraging a healthy community of moderators.

Oliver sees her role as to represent and be the “voice of the reader”, encouraging a “two-way conversation” and broadening the overage.

Once a story is published, that’s not the end of it as that’s where the readers come in.

The Guardian wants to build a returning community, Oliver said, beyond asking readers to “send in pictures of snow”.

She gave the example of ensuring the team “connected” with those contributing from North Africa during the height of the uprisings and ensuring those commentators “would come back to us”.

She also highlighted the collaboration from readers and expert commentators during the daily blog on the Health and Social Care Bill, run during the debate around the amendments to the bill, the pause and its passage through parliament.

Claire Armitstead, literary editor of the Guardian, talked about crowdsourcing and call outs for reader responses and how they influence the sections such as Books.

What this new journalism has opened up is new ways of responding to criticism within the arts.

Dan Roberts, national editor of the Guardian, the chair of the debate, explained how his team started trying to capture witnesses to events, harnessing citizen journalists, and has evolved into opening up to publishing the daily newslist.

The idea is that publishing the list encourages feedback, Roberts said, “in the hope we get some advice and help”.

That way we know that we are chasing the things that readers care about.

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The Guardian’s Facebook app has been downloaded eight million times since it was launched six months ago, seeing around 40,000 downloads a day.

Speaking at the Guardian Changing Media Summit, Tanya Cordrey, director of digital development at Guardian News and Media, said the news outlet has been “blown away by the results”.

The “frictionless sharing” app works by readers opting in to share all articles they read with their Facebook friends, generating more traffic for the news site with “no editorial curation”.

She later explained that the Guardian has generated more money through ad revenue from the app than the news organisation spent on building it.

Six months ago months ago Google provided 40 per cent of the Guardian’s traffic. The launch of the Facebook app resulted in a “seismic shift” with social exceeding search as a driver on several occasions in February (see above photograph).

Cordrey predicted:

It’s only a matter of time until social overtakes search for the Guardian.

She said that the audience becomes more global everyday, providing “an amazing opportunity to learn about this new audience”.

It’s the audience we want to learn about rather than the platform [Facebook]

Readers are in “habitual grazing mode”, Cordrey said, traffic peaking in “the middle of the afternoon”.

Addressing those who believe the app has implications for privacy, Cordrey said “we are acutely aware of the critics” but readers are not being driven away or removing content they have read from their Facebook timeline.

“Once people have it, they use it,” Cordrey said, explaining “only a tiny percentage of people” have taken up the option of hiding their reading habits.

Earlier in the day Karla Geci, strategic partner development for Facebook said that it would be “just weird and awkward to read a whole article inside of Facebook”, saying Facebook’s role is enabling “distribution and discovery” rather than taking traffic away from publishers.

Asking herself if frictionless sharing “is creepy”, Geci said:

People are quite interested in being an influencer in their circles. Sharing what you are reading is something you did any way.

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The Guardian has launched Streetstories, an iPhone and Android app, providing audio stories based on the phone’s location.

The app is another Guardian project focusing on social, local mobile and is launched the day after the public release of n0tice, another move by the news organisation into the SoLoMo space.

Launched ahead of the Guardian’s Open Weekend event this weekend, the Streetstories app provides a guide to King’s Cross,the area of London where King’s Place, the Guardian building where the event will take place, is located.

Francesca Panetta, the app’s creator, has blogged about it.

Streetstories is a free app for iPhone and Android which triggers audio relevant to your location - your smartphone knows where you are, and plays the stories automatically. The way the app works is you plug in your headphones, start up the ‘autoplay’ mode and put your smartphone in your pocket. The app will find where you are and start playing the clips, so you don’t need to press any buttons, just wander anywhere in the area and your route will create your own narrative

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The Guardian’s latest venture into hyperlocal publishing is now open to all with the “full open release” of n0tice.

Matt McAlister, director of digital strategy for the Guardian Media Group, presented the social, local, mobile offering at today’s Changing Media Summit.

The seed of the idea came out of a Guardian Hack Day project inspired by geolocation services.

McAlister explained the concept to Journalism.co.uk, which has tracked the progress of n0tice:

If the phone knows where you are and if I see something interesting around me, why can’t I report on that and be an active citizen journalist or participant?

The team evolved the idea into “a community service explicitly tied to a location, almost as a navigation or a filter for finding information”.

Since accepting members by invitation only, early users have been influencing its development.

The platform has opportunities for hyperlocal news sites, which can brand a noticeboard, tracking interaction using web analytics.

Some hyperlocals have adopted n0tice as “their events database, essentially submitting events directly onto notice but with their brand and look and feel”.

McAlister explained that it can increase engagement for hyperlocals.

WordPress is a wonderful publishing environment but it’s not as good as crowdsourcing reports. You can get someone to comment on something you’ve written but it’s not as good for letting anyone share anything original directly into a community space.

The platform also has wider opportunities for hyperlocals and other users: they can potentially make money by creating a noticeboard.

Based on a classifieds system with users paying for premium ads, noticeboard owners keep 85 per cent of the revenue generated.

Here Matt McAlister explains the project’s development:

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Today the Guardian reports that ITV is under investigation by broadcast regulator Ofcom after news reporter Richard Pallot called black footballers “coloured” – while reporting on a racism in football summit held at No.10 Downing Street.

According to the Guardian:

ITV News apologised shortly after the broadcast on its Twitter page and the word has been removed from all future catchup editions of the broadcast, including an edited clip on the ITV News website.

The ITN-produced programme is now investigating how the pre-recorded report that included the word was allowed to be broadcast.

An ITV News spokesman said: “ITV News apologises for the inappropriate use of the word ‘coloured’ in a report on racism and football in today’s News at 1.30pm. We take this error very seriously and we regret any offence caused.”

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The Guardian has 3.9 million monthly active users, over half of whom are under 25.

Facebook has today published a “spotlight” on the Guardian’s app on its developer blog.

The app has had more than six million installs, suggesting that more than half of those who have opted in use it regularly.

The Guardian’s app, which launched at September’s Facebook f8 conference, encourages “frictionless sharing” and those who opt in to the app to allow their Facebook friends to see what they are reading.

Less than two months after the Guardian’s app was released, the news outlet said the app was delivering an additional one million hits per day.

As well as encouraging younger readers, the Guardian’s app is also giving older content a new lease of life, as Martin Belam, one of those working on the app at the Guardian explains in this blog post.

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Guardian News and Media says it is “currently researching and exploring a range of options”, amid claims that it is thinking of developing a new hotel concept.

A post on the Washington-based Harry’s Place blog quoted a market research email which described the hotel idea as “an atmospheric place to unwind, broaden your mind and meet others”.

This would be much more than simply a place to stay and would offer an inspiring break for our guests.

The hotel would offer a diverse programme of activities and events including workshops, debates and classes featuring guest speakers, writers, artists, chefs and political commentators.

Or it could simply be a place to relax with others. A stay at the hotel would be a social experience with plenty of communal space. We are in the very early stages of forming this plan and your feedback will be valuable in helping us to shape it.

Guardian News and Media said in a statement today: “We are currently researching and exploring a range of options relating to our successful adult educational course – Masterclasses – and our travel offerings.”

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The Guardian has today announced the launch of a two-day festival with more than 300 speakers.

Its Open Weekend will take place on 24 and 25 March and be open to the paying public.

It will cover topics such as the phone-hacking scandal, which will hear from speakers including Guardian investigative journalist Nick Davies and Tom Watson MP.

In a release, the news outlet said speakers presenting at the event at its Kings Cross offices would will include “Guardian editors, writers and columnists will be speakers from all over the world – including Egypt, Pakistan, the US and India”.

Among those taking part are authors Ian McEwan, Robert Harris, Jeanette Winterson, Alain de Botton, Kamila Shamsie and Adhaf Soueif, the economist Jeff Sachs, the director Steve McQueen, the playwright David Hare, artists Grayson Perry and Jeremy Deller, broadcaster Jon Snow and politicians David Miliband, Tom Watson, Zac Goldsmith, Caroline Lucas, Tristram Hunt and Chris Huhne.

The Guardian’s best-known faces will also be hosting a series of debates and conversations. These include Charlie Brooker, Marina Hyde, Polly Toynbee, Zoe Williams, Grace Dent, Michael White, Jackie Ashley, John Harris, Suzanne Moore, Jonathan Freedland, Simon Hoggart, Nick Davies, Deborah Orr, Simon Jenkins, Peter Bradshaw, Michael Billlington and Simon Hattenstone.

The event promises to “bring to life the Guardian’s uniquely open, collaborative and networked approach to publishing on the web, and will be a key moment in the Guardian’s forthcoming brand campaign”.

In the release, Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief, Guardian News & Media, said:

We pride ourselves on our open and collaborative approach to journalism and what better way to demonstrate this than physically opening our doors to readers? The Guardian is at a pivotal moment in its history and our first-ever Open Weekend will give readers the opportunity to join us on our journey. Our top writers, editors and photographers will be there to speak, discuss and listen, and readers will be able to meet with some of their favourite Guardian faces.

Tickets cost £40 for a Saturday day pass, £30 for a Sunday pass or £60 for the weekend.

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The Guardian iPad edition has been downloaded more than half a million times since it launched in October 2011, with 23,000 downloads on Christmas day alone.

The Guardian has not released figures for the number of editions downloaded.

From Friday 13 January iPad readers will be asked to pay £9.99 for a monthly subscription. Content has been free of charge for users in the first three months since launch, due to a sponsorship deal with Channel 4.

From tomorrow (Saturday 7 January) the app will include the Guardian’s Weekend magazine for the first time. The new weekly section, accessible from the app’s top navigation bar, will feature content from the Guardian’s award-winning magazine supplement, including columnists and recipes.

In a release, Merope Mills, editor of the Guardian Weekend magazine, said: “Weekend magazine’s stunning photography perfectly suits the form and the clean, modern design of our app on iPad. From tomorrow, readers will be able to enjoy a leisurely read of our award-winning longform journalism, flick through the galleries of ‘Your Pictures’ or watch our brilliant fashion and beauty correspondents Jess Cartner-Morley and Sali Hughes, as they guide readers through the latest lifestyle trends.”

The release also states that Guardian six- and seven-day print subscribers will continue to receive free access to the app after the three month period via their current subscription. Users who download the app after 13 January will receive a week’s free trial before signing up for the monthly subscription.

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By Matt Buck, currently engaged as engraver to @tobiasgrubbe

If…

1. Rupert Murdoch revives the News of the World, but online-only.

2. Nick Davies loses his job at the Guardian, but joins the revived News of the World as part of its investigative team.

3. The Guardian poaches the “fake sheikh” Mazher Mahmood from the Sunday Times.

4. A trend develops for floundering local newspapers to be bought out by local entrepreneurs, returning control and vested interest to their communities.

5. The Leveson inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the UK press concludes nothing needs to be done about unethical and/or illegal media practices, as they are redundant because everyone is publicly revealing everything about themselves on social media sites like Facebook anyway.

6. Journalists are officially declared to be bloggers, thereby ending a perennial (and very tedious) debate.

7. The Guardian launches a paywall.

8. Richard Desmond, founder of Northern & Shell and owner of Express Newspapers is knighted in the New Year Honour list and becomes chair of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC).

9. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and is appointed National Security Adviser to the Obama administration.

10. Facebook buys the Daily Mail, as part of a number of strategic acquisitions of ‘accordant’ news outlets throughout the world.

Thanks to Matt Buck for permission to use his excellent cartoon.

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One of the sessions at news:rewired – media in motion will look at how newsgames and gaming mechanics are being used in journalism.

Shannon Perkins, editor of interactive technologies at Wired.com and who created Cutthroat Capitalism, a game where the player puts themselves in the position of a Somali pirate, will be coming over from the US to speak at news:rewired. In a Journalism.co.uk podcast he said a reader should “develop a deeper sense of the underlying themes of a story” by playing a game.

Another speaker presenting in the newsgames session at news:rewired is Bobby Schweizer, a doctoral student at the Georgia Institute of Technology and co-author of Newsgames: Journalism at Play. He will also be joining us from the US.

Here is a list of 10 newsgames to give an idea of how games can be used in storytelling.

1. The world at seven billion (BBC)

This BBC interactive, which uses gaming mechanics, is proof that newsgames go viral. The world at seven billion was the most shared and “liked” news story on Facebook of 2011 with 339,149 shares, comments and likes. It was also the most clicked story on Facebook this year and was the fourth most popular news story on Twitter in 2011 with 73,783 tweets.

2. Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: whose line is it anyway? (Guardian)

A newsgame was also the second most popular news story on Facebook in 2011, with 219,023 shares, likes and comments. It is the Guardian quotes quiz where readers are asked to guess whether a line is a quote from former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi or actor Charlie Sheen.

This one was “produced very quickly”, according to the Guardian, and is an idea that could inspire small news organisations without a budget for big game development.

3. Cutthroat Capitalism (Wired.com)

This newsgame was created by news:rewired speaker Shannon Perkins after reading an article in Wired Magazine. The player becomes a Somali pirate. The game states:

You are a pirate commander staked with $50,000 from local tribal leaders and other investors. Your job is to guide your pirate crew through raids in and around the Gulf of Aden, attack and capture a ship, and successfully negotiate a ransom.

4. Los 33 (Chilean miners) (Chilean design firm Root33)

This newsgame is based on the rescue of the Chilean miners trapped underground in 2010. According to Bobby Schweizer, who will be speaking at news:rewired, the game, which asks the player to rescue the miner, provides an insight into the slow process involved in rescuing each miner.

You perform the rescue 33 times if you want to finish the game – which is impossible really to complete. It’s trying to get across that concept that maybe you can’t explain in a written article.

When you see video clips edited together of each of the miners returning to the surface you have three to five seconds of each of their faces, you don’t get that real sense of how long it actually took. The game was able to express that in the way that other stories couldn’t.

5. How should I vote in the General Election? (Telegraph)

This is a game produced by the Telegraph. It asks users to answer a series of questions to find their values and concerns. The game then cross-checks responses with party pledges and the player is then told how they should be voting. This game received much attention as voters were often surprised by the results the game returned.

6. The budget calculator (most major news sites)

Perhaps the most widely used form of gaming mechanics used in news is the budget calculator. The viewer enters a salary, the fuel-type of their car, amount of alcohol units consumed per week and other details and then gets told how much better or worse off they will be based on the new budget.

This budget calculator from the BBC shows gaming mechanics in online news is nothing new – going back at least 10 years. Here are BBC examples from 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011.

7. Christmas on the high street: retail winners and losers (Guardian)

At the beginning of this year the Guardian produced an interactive based on the Monopoly board. By clicking on each retailer the player finds out how business faired last Christmas.

8. Obameter (PolitiFact)

PolitiFact also uses gaming mechanics, such as with its Obameter, which tracks the US President’s campaign promises, the Truth-O-Meter (which also comes in app form) to test politicians’ and the GOP Pledge-O-Meter to rank political promises.

Speaking at the World Editors Forum in October founder and editor of the site Bill Adair said he felt there was “a tremendous lack of imagination” in the news industry in how to take advantage of new publishing platforms.

It’s like we’ve been given a brand new canvas with this whole palette of colours and we’re only painting in grey. We need to bring all the other colours to this new canvas.

9. Dollars for Docs (ProPublica)

US investigative news site ProPublica regularly uses gaming mechanics in news stories, such as with Dollars for Docs which enables people to find out whether their health professional has received money from drugs companies. Speaking at the World Editors Forum Scott Klein, editor of news applications, told the conference that as well as adding context, a news app has the ability to personalise and place the user at the centre of the story and offer them the ability to see the impact on them. “It doesn’t just tell a story, it tells your story,” he said.

10.  Fix the deficit (New York Times)

Here’s a budget puzzle from the New York Times. The reader is asked to work out where to make spending cuts to balance the books and hopefully get a sense of the financial challenges, tough decisions and the size of the shortfall.

Want to find out more about newsgames? Book a ticket for news:rewired here.

Recommended reading, viewing and listening:

• Newsgames: Journalism at Play, by Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer (who will be speaking at news:rewired)
• The European Journalism Centre has an interesting post on newsgames that includes links to other examples of games
• This video on a session on gaming in news at ONA11, a US conference for journalists
• Matt McAlister from the Guardian has blogged on a related theme asking whether journalism can fuel game development
• A post by Philip Trippenbach, currently editor-in-chief of Citizenside and about to take up a new role at Edelman Digital who frequently blogs about video gaming and gaming mechanics details a talk he gave at a previous news:rewired
• Mary Hamilton has blogged about news games back in 2009
• There is also a Journalism.co.uk podcast on how video games can tell news stories

This is a cross-post from news:rewired.

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New online noticeboard, n0tice, which is owned by the Guardian Media Group, today announced the launch of an advertising platform which will enable noticeboard owners to earn revenue.

According to a post on the site, which also enables community groups, individuals, hyperlocals and bloggers to post announcements, event information and local news, noticeboard “owners” can now “earn revenue by selling featured positions for classified listings or ‘offers’.”

Outlining the model n0tice says owners will take an 85 per cent revenue cut, while the platform gets the remaining 15 per cent.

Posting an offer on a noticeboard is self-serve and free for n0tice participants. Offers can then be upgraded to a Featured placement for £1/day (or the equivalent base-level regional currency). Featured positioning includes both a visual enhancement and priority ranking on the page.

Alongside the new revenue platform, n0tice also announced the addition of other new features in today’s post, including geoRSS and the ability for each user to have a number of noticeboards.

Read more on n0tice here.

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