The same evening political parties fought it out at the Libel Reform Campaign’s Free Speech Hustings in London, there was an excellent programme on BBC Radio 4.
Clive Anderson and guests, including Lord Hoffman, Gavin Millar QC, Adrienne Page QC, and solicitor Jonathan Coad, discussed “fears that Britain’s libel laws are being used to stifle free speech” on Unreliable Evidence.
Jon Slattery has today’s front pages of the Conservative-supporting tabloid newspapers on his blog.
As Slattery says, the papers have given Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg “a right going over” on the eve of the second leadership debate.
The Daily Mail has redefined news somewhat with its rehash of a Guardian article from 2002 – as its ‘Clegg in Nazi slur on Britain’ splash.
Meanwhile, on the Radio 4 Today programme Chris Huhne lashed out at what he said was a media smear against Clegg. PoliticsHome reports the Liberal Democrats shadow home secretary as saying:
So, you are trying to smear him by saying that because this firm happened to have done something that you regard as reprehensible it somehow carried off on Nick.
That is the kind of smear you are getting in the Tory papers this morning, and frankly it should be beyond the BBC.
Honolulu Civil Beat will have ‘reporter-hosts’, ‘peer news’ and is designed as a ‘civic square’ for Hawaii; what’s more it has soft-launched without any stories.
It has also introduced a payment plan from the start: $19.99 per month for full access to articles, although currently reduced to $4.99.
Oh, and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar is its CEO and publisher.
Its editor John Temple says, to first users:
How will we do this to best serve you? First, you’ll be part of the process. You might have noticed that we’ve opened the doors to this new civic square without putting up any news articles. That’s different – a news service without news, at least initially. It’s intentional. We want to begin by talking with you about what we’re doing, to hear what you want from us and what you think we should be asking. We believe conversation and civil debate with our reporter-hosts and with other members is central to what will make Civil Beat valuable. And we want you to see that the core of our service isn’t the article itself. Of course, incisive news reporting soon will be an important part of what we offer. But at the heart of our service are pages dedicated to providing you context and understanding about the issues you need to know about. These “topic pages” are living pages. They’ll grow over time, with your help. We know you’re busy and that our job is to help make it easy for you to learn about and truly understand what’s going on, and what you might be able to do about it. With our approach, you should be able to find the background you need when you want it, without having to surf thousands of pages of documents or make numerous phone calls to unearth what should be readily available to you.
If like us, you can’t make it to tonight’s Free Speech Hustings at London’s Free Word Centre, you will be able to follow online.
The Libel Reform Campaign event, featuring Dominic Grieve from the Conservative party; Dr Evan Harris from the Liberal Democrats and a Labour representative (TBC), will be live-streamed online.
Questions can be sent via Twitter using the #libelreform tag, or by email to news [at] libelreform.og.
Audio will be available at this link, or below:
Watch below, or at this link.
There will also be satellite events at another London location, and in Liverpool and Nottingham. Details at this link…
I’m having a play with the Telegraph’s new political database feature, currently in beta. While launched in time for the general election, it will live on afterwards as well, as a useful tool for tracking information about political candidates and constituencies.
The basic search allows you to find information about your candidates, eg. their educational background (private / state school etc.), as well as the background stats on the constituency itself.
If your candidate is an MP, you also get a link to the Telegraph’s expenses file on them, and their parliamentary allowances page. Check out Oldham East and Saddleworth MP Phil Woolas, for example.
Like Paul Bradshaw points out on the OnlineJournalismBlog, the really nice feature is the ‘advanced search’ option.
With this, you can narrow down your search to very specific criteria – by type of school (or even name of school – eg. Eton), age or the category of candidate they are.
It is in beta though, and a lot of information is still missing. Until all the information is complete (e.g every school for each candidate is accurate and complete) you couldn’t begin to make proper analyses of social backgrounds etc.
There’s a how-to guide at this link.
The swingometer feature is fun too (though perhaps needs clearer explanation on the main page – a pop out box, perhaps?):
“[F]ind which seats will change for a given swing. Choose from Labour v Conservative swing, Labour v Liberal Democrat, or Liberal Democrat v Conservative, and push the swingometer up to 20 per cent either way to see which constituencies change hands.”
On constituency search you can see where parties have picked their battlegrounds, which can be further narrowed by retiring or defending MP. So, for example, I can search all Labour target battlegrounds, where they are defending seats. There’s a swing feature here too:
[S]earch by swing required for a change of MP from the 2005 results. This can be organised by party using the drop-down bar and slider – so it is possible to show all the seats that would fall to the Conservatives given a 10 per cent swing from Labour, for instance.
Like Paul Bradshaw says, it’s a shame that there’s no API available or ‘mashable’ data on tap, but definitely a very nice looking tool – which I need some more time to play around with.
Business Insider has grilled Kevin Krim, global head of Bloomberg Digital, on the site’s new design.
Krim says:
We felt it was critical to create a new platform, a new palette, a new canvas to deliver a must-use site for news throughout the day, every week. We already have a good global audience, we want to grow that.
(…)
We’re also focusing on aggregation. We’ll link to third party sites if we think its relevant to our audience, we’ll show it, no matter who it’s done by. There’s not a lot of options for business people. When they wake up in the morning, we want to be their one stop.
He also admits the re-launch is part of some serious rivalry:
BI: So, basically you want to kill your rivals like the Wall Street Journal, FT, Reuters?
KK: That’s the idea.
Publisher of the Mail Online, the Daily Mail & General Trust (DMGT), has shared some of its executives’ slide show presentations from an investor day.
The presentations explain on why the online paper is staying free, and not going down the the Times Online route.
You can download the slides here, or find paidContent:UK’s excellent summary at this link. The group says that while charging for niche and mobile might work:
MailOnline – uniquely among UK newspaper sites – is now big enough to make the advertising model pay.
The Huffington Post has launched a new US politics service, the “HuffPost Hill”, a daily newsletter “which aims to whisk readers into evening with a free, modern, e-mail version of an evening newspaper,” reports MediaBistro.
It harkens back to an era that publication editors believe still ought to exist.
As briefly noted on this blog earlier, Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang (known as VG), has put together a ‘Hitchhiker’s Central’ page on its site, for travellers stranded by the volcano ash cloud to arrange emergency overland transport.
Media journalist Kristine Lowe reports on her blog how she was able to use the service to help get Journalism.co.uk trainer Colin Meek home from an online course he was teaching in Oslo.
“What VG.no could offer in this situation was scale. With its close to 3 million unique users a week it offered people a brilliant connection point that few other sites could,” says Kristine. “It’s a great service to its readers and, I’m sure, a great click winner too.”
How Kristine set up Colin’s journey home:
[W]hen I found a friend who was willing to drive from Oslo to Dover and back to get him home, I was able to fill up the car in both directions, thereby covering the costs of the trip, by submitting a message to Hitchhiker’s Central. I did call around a few other travellers advertising for lift to London before submitting an ad myself, and several of those I talked to had already found lift from Oslo to London which suggests my experience was not unique.
Within minutes of placing an “ad” (a free message) on Hitchhiker’s central, the receptionist at a Rica hotel in Oslo called me to ask if I had room for a British businessman staying at the hotel (…) The last passenger on the trip to Dover (they arrived this morning) was a Norwegian student desperate to get back to the UK for his exams at Cardiff University. On the way back to Oslo, the car will bring a salesman, a singer and a conductor – all Norwegians who were stranded in London.
Without this arrangement via VG.no, overland costs were adding up to around £1000, Colin tells me. A Eurostar one-way fare was going to be around £250 and the one-way ferry crossing from Oslo to Copenhagen would have been 1950NoK (£215) minimum. “It would have taken me about three days – at least – with no guarantee that some of the legs would be available.”
So, VG.no’s collaborative site has been helpful, both in terms of cost and time for Colin. But, he adds, the 18-hour car journey was something of a personal challenge – he’s getting on the sleeper train back home to Scotland.
Media blogger Jon Slattery has persuaded an anonymous editor of a council-run newspaper to reveal his publication’s agenda and motivation.
In a specially commissioned post, the editor who does not describe himself as a journalist, is critical of new and expanding ‘council rags’ – as well as local newspapers for their cost-cutting measures.
[I]f you look at what some of the boroughs, like Hammersmith and Fulham, are doing with their faux newspaper, complete with motoring, gardening and sports pages and property supplements, they have crossed the line between a council rag and a thing that you would pick up casually, and think ‘this is a real newspaper’. I think that is dangerous.