Author Archives: Rachel Bartlett

About Rachel Bartlett

Rachel Bartlett is editor of Journalism.co.uk

Reporters Without Borders secretary-general to step down in new year

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Press freedom organisation Reporters Without Borders announced this week that its secretary-general Jean-François Julliard will step down on 31 January, in order to take up a role as director-general of Greenpeace France.

According to the announcement from RSF, “the organisation’s board of governors is currently looking for a replacement”.

Until they find a successor for Julliard, who was first appointed to the position in 2008, the organisation’s current representative in Brussels, Olivier Basille, will cover the role.

In a statement Julliard said:

I am leaving Reporters Without Borders at a time when it is in good shape. I have been pleased with what we have achieved recently. The development of our cyber-censorship unit and our repositioning as a press freedom NGO in both France and Europe have been important changes for our organisation.

We have just opened a bureau in Tunisia for the first time and we are soon going to reinforce our activities in Libya. I hope that this development at the international level will continue. Reporters Without Borders will have more exciting challenges to face.

Revised guidance on live court reporting due Wednesday

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Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge is due to outline “revised practice guidance” on “electronic text-based communications” tomorrow (Wednesday, 13 December), in a follow-up to interim guidance issued a year ago.

In December 2010 England and Wales’ most senior judge provided guidance which said individuals could be granted permission to use a mobile phone or other small electronic device “in order to make live text-based communications of the proceedings”, as long as they had made a prior application to the court.

At the time the guidance emphasised that permission for live reporting of court proceedings would only be granted based on each individual case.

According to a press notice, since issuing this guidance the Lord Chief Justice has run a consultation which has included contributions from figures such as the Secretary of State for Justice and Attorney General as well as bodies such as the Press Complaints Commission and Society of Editors.

Once the guidance is outlined in court it will be published online, the notice added.

Guardian’s n0tice launches advertising platform

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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.

#followjourn – @NickMartinSKY Nick Martin/correspondent

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Who? Nick Martin

Where? Nick is a correspondent for Sky News. He will be speaking at news:rewired – media in motion on mobile reporting.

Twitter? @NickMartinSKY

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips, we are recommending journalists to follow online too. Recommended journalists can be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to rachel at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

Sarah Hartley to join Talk About Local as interim managing director

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Sarah Hartley, a community strategist for the Guardian Media Group and part of the team behind its online noticeboard n0tice, is to join community media project Talk About Local as its interim managing director next year, according to an announcement on the site.

The post adds that she will continue to head “the community strategy for n0tice.com” but will also help with “exciting new initiatives in the pipeline” for Talk About Local, which was set up by William Perrin.

In a quote Hartley said:

I am delighted to be starting 2012 tackling some new challenges working alongside the talented and dedicated team at TAL.

We have some exciting new initiatives in the pipeline, helping people find their online voice for communities, as well as continuing to be active in supporting and promoting the many blogs and websites we are already involved with.

Read more here.

Media release: Reuters announces global extension of Journalism Trainee Program

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Reuters announced today that it will be extending its Journalism Trainee Program outside the UK from 2012 and into New York and Asia.

According to a release the scheme, which offers nine-months of training, has been running for 50 years.

University graduates, working journalists and other professionals wanting to move into journalism can apply for the highly competitive program that involves hands-on training in the classroom and on the newsroom floor. Trainees who meet Reuters rigorous standards will be placed in staff jobs and assigned mentors to guide their careers at the company.

In a statement in the release editor-in-chief Stephen Adler, added that this year a total of 15 jobs were made available to trainees.

Active recruitment across universities and top journalism schools is underway to find exceptional talent committed to journalistic excellence. Applicants should exhibit a passion for news, a competitive instinct, and speak and write fluently in English.

Applications can be made online with a closing date of 31 December.

Guardian study finds just 22.6% of journalists are female

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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.

#news2011: Russia Today on raising awareness through its FreeVideo platform

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After the second day of sessions focused on business at the Global Editors Network news summit, including paywalls and paid-for app, it was fitting that during the third and final day of presentations we heard about projects offering content and platforms for free.

One such project came from Russia Today which outlined its FreeVideo platform, described as an “English language video agency”. The website, which should be of interest to journalists worldwide, provides free video footage that journalists can download, edit and reuse for their own projects and output.

Answering a question from the floor about the business model, Alexei Nikolov, managing director of Russia Today, said it was to “promote the channel” on a global scale.

The site includes “stock footage” as well as video covering specific news events. Xenia Fedorova, head of the department of promotion and development of media projects for the broadcaster, explained that all the footage comes with multilingual scripts and shotlists.

She added that the website has more than 9,000 news channels already registered and using footage “on a daily basis”.

I spoke to her more at the end of the session about the decision to go down the free distribution route, their attribution methods and to find out whether there are plans in the pipeline to monetise the platform.

There are of course other platforms out there offering video content to journalists, such as the UK-based Video News Agency and also in 2009 Al Jazeera opened up its footage under creative commons licensing.

Journalisted Weekly: Leveson Inquiry, Tahrir Square and England RFU

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Journalisted is an independent, not-for-profit website built to make it easier for you, the public, to find out more about journalists and what they write about. It is run by the Media Standards Trust, a registered charity set up to foster high standards in news on behalf of the public, and funded by donations from charitable foundations. Each week Journalisted produces a summary of the most covered news stories, most active journalists and those topics falling off the news agenda, using its database of UK journalists and news sources.

Journalisted Weekly: Leveson Inquiry, Tahrir Square and England RFU

for the week ending Sunday 27 November

  • The first wave of witnesses to give evidence to the Leveson Inquiry dominated this week’s news
  • Violent protests in Tahrir Square, and the England rugby team scandal, covered lots
  • Carina Trimingham lobbying row, Basra bombs and Welsh budget resolution covered little

Covered lots

Covered little

Political ups and downs (top ten by number of articles)

Celebrity vs. serious

Arab spring (countries & current leaders)

Who wrote a lot about… clashes between the Government and Unions over planned public sector pensions strikes

Long form journalism

Journalists who have updated their profile

  • Jack Oughton is a photographer at KKVA Fine Art Photography and Portraiture and works freelance for The Independent, the International Astronomical Union, FHM and Empire magazines, along with a number of companies. He was previously a writer intern for Catch 22 Magazine after completing a Higher National Diploma in Astronomy and Science at the University of Glamorgan. He has written several books: ‘Glamorgan University Observational Diary’, ‘A Layman’s Guide To Nuclear Fusion’ and ‘The Speech Of The Chimera’, all in 2010. Follow Jack on Twitter @koukouvaya
  • Jane Symons is a freelance health writer, media consultant and facilitator whose work has been published in publications including the Daily Express, Daily Mail, The Sun, The Times, the Telegraph and Sunday Express, as well as various women’s magazines. She has previously been editor of Sun Health at The Sun, health editor of Woman’s Own, and chief sub editor for the Telegraph Magazine. In addition, she has written two books: ‘Pregnancy: The Best for You and Your Baby’ in 1999 and ‘How to Have a Baby and Still Live in the Real World’ in 2003. Follow Jane on Twitter @janesymons1

The Media Standards Trust, which runs journalisted, won the ‘One to Watch’ category at this year’s Prospect Think Tank Awards

Read about our campaign for the full exposure of phone hacking and other illegal forms of intrusion at the Hacked Off website

Visit the Media Standards Trust’s Churnalism.com – a public service for distinguishing journalism from churnalism

Read the MST’s submission to parliament’s Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions and the House of Lords Communications Select Committee on investigative journalism

The Orwell Prize 2012 is now open for entries following a launch debate on ‘Writing the Riots’

For the latest instalment of Tobias Grubbe, journalisted’s 18th century jobbing journalist, go to journalisted.com/tobias-grubbe

#news2011: ProPublica model ‘not feasible’ as commercial venture, says editor-in-chief

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A commercial version of ProPublica is not “feasible at present”, its editor-in-chief told the Global Editors Network news summit today.

The US investigative news site, which relies on funding from philanthropic donations, was launched in 2008.

Giving a keynote speech to the event in Hong Kong via video-link Pro-Publica’s Paul Steiger, a former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, said he did not think a commercial organisation would be able to do as ProPublica does and “concentrate on doing nothing but investigative reporting”.

“It is possible that news organisations can have investigative reporting as part of the menu of reporting”, but not to the same extent.

The industry has gone from a high profit margin business model to one with much tighter margins.

As a result news organisations are “much less able to take the risk of sending reporters out on a project that might not produce a viable story,” he said.

I don’t think it is impossible at to make it happen in places outside of the US though. It just requires energy and ingenuity.

Click here for more on ProPublica and how it is funded.