Yahoo media blog the Cutline reports that the Guardian is busy building a new US digital operation which “will be significantly larger” than the Guardian’s previous work in the US.
Vague details around the plans were revealed in a Cutline interview with Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger.
He said the liberal English broadsheet is building a new US digital operation that will be based in New York rather than Washington, D.C. (The paper’s roughly 10 stateside reporters are currently based in both cities.) Pressed for additional details, Rusbridger demurred, but said the venture “will be significantly larger than anything we’ve done in the states before.” He was presumably referring to the Guardian’s previous attempts to crack the American news market, the most recent being GuardianAmerica.com, which had a short run between 2007 and 2009.
The Guardian began laying the groundwork for this expansion of its American shop last week with the addition of a New York-based chief revenue officer, whose job will be “to plot a fresh course in the US,” according to paidContent’s Robert Andrews.
A spokesperson for the Guardian had no further comment.
MP Chris Bryant and acting deputy commissioner for the Metropolitan Police John Yates are due to appear in front of the Home Affairs committee today to answer questions about the Met’s investigation into the News of the World phone-hacking affair.
Earlier this month, Bryant accused Yates of misleading the committee previously in claiming that the number of of phone-hacking victims was between eight and 12.
According to a report by Politics.co.uk, Byrant criticised Yates’ argument that the Crown Prosecution Service’s definition of phone hacking was limited to voicemails intercepted before they were listened to by the intended recipient.
“Yates misled the Committee, whether deliberately or inadvertently. He used an argument that had never been relied on by the CPS or by his own officers so as to suggest that the number of victims was minuscule, whereas in fact we know and he knew that the number of potential victims is and was substantial.”
In related news, the Media Guardian reports today that the News of the World’s computers “have retained an archive of potentially damning emails, which hitherto it had claimed had been lost”.
The millions of emails, amounting to half a terabyte of data, could expose executives and reporters involved in hacking the voicemail of public figures, including former deputy prime minister John Prescott, actor Sienna Miller, and former culture secretary Tessa Jowell.
The Guardian reports that MPs on the home affairs select committee are likely to question Yates about these emails later today. You can watch the committee session via Parliament Live TV here.
Johnston Press chief executive John Fry collected earnings of more than £1 million in 2010, according to the publisher’s annual report, sent out late on Friday afternoon.
According to the figures Fry earned a basic salary of £525,000 in 2010, the same as the previous year, which was then boosted further by benefits and performance related bonus. This led to a total of £1,001,000, an increase on 2009 when Fry received a total of £969,000.
The salary details of other directors were also detailed in the report, with chief financial officer Stuart Paterson, who resigned last year, receiving a total of £520,000 and Danny Cammiade, chief operating officer, receiving an increased total of £618,000.
The report outlines the publisher’s financial performance in 2010, with key statistics including a decrease in total revenues of 7.1 per cent to £398.1 million, a drop in circulation revenues of 2.8 per cent to £96.7 million and an increase in digital revenues of 4 per cent.
Finance journalist Chris Wheal reports that the Treasury press office will not provide him with figures showing how much worse off families will be as a result of the budget.
Wheal recorded a conversation with a press officer from the Treasury (and then uploaded this to Audioboo) when he called back to double check that the figures, which apply to a graph within the budget report, would not be released to him.
In the conversation Wheal is told the figures are available, but will not be published for two weeks.
Let’s be clear on this: The Treasury knows it must release the figures under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. But it knows that a FOI request allows it 20 working days to respond, so it is delaying by less than that. It is using a freedom of information loophole to delay giving taxpayers information it could – and should – publish instantly.
The Treasury press officer has not yet responded to a request for comment.
US video news start-up site Newsy has raised $1.5 million in new funding, according to a report by Beet.tv of an interview with CEO Jim Spencer.
The funding will allow the site, which currently monitors, analyses and presents news coverage from across the world, to expand in terms of original programming, adding to staff and moving correspondents to different locations.
The company curates about 15 video segments a day which are compilations of clips from many news organizations. They are edited around a specific news topic. The segments are then introduced by a “host” in the Columbia studios. The news source of the videos are identified with links.
In the interview Spencer says the funding will help the site grow into a “true mobile news organisation”.
Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has agreed to appoint Diane Coyle as vice chairman of the BBC Trust, the department for culture, media and sport said today,
According to a release this followed an open recruitment process and Hunt has now submitted his recommendation to Privy Council to seek the Queen’s formal approval of the appointment.
Coyle, a former economics editor of the Independent, is already a serving member of the BBC Trust.
In a statement, outgoing BBC Trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons said he welcomed the confirmation that Coyle had been put forward for the role.
“Diane has made an important contribution to the work of the Trust in its first four years, particularly in leading the Trust’s work on public value. I’m sure that in this expanded role Diane will be looking forward to the opportunity to bring her wisdom, insight and consistent good humour to even more of the Trust’s work.”
Earlier this month Lord Patten was approved by the Culture, Media and Sport select committee as a “suitable candidate” for the role of chairman of the BBC Trust after being named as the government’s preferred candidate in February.
As the BBC puts an end to its 65 years of traditional radio broadcasting in Russian, it is hosting a series of special programmes this week looking back at its journalism over the years.
This will include speaking to key members of the Russian media to share their views on the broadcaster, including the owner of the Independent, Alexander Lebedev and leading Russian journalists and writers.
The final programme will take place on Saturday (26 March) with the BBC Russian live weekend programme, Pyatiy Etazh (Fifth Floor).
The BBC started regular Russian-language broadcasts to the Soviet Union on 24 March 1946. Throughout the years, the BBC radio brought independent news and analysis to Russian-speaking audiences. In its special programming, BBC Russian looks again at the key stories it has covered – reporting the cold war and the perestroika, the attempted putsch of August 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the two Chechen wars and Beslan, the Russia-Georgia conflict and everything else that has mattered to its audiences in the region.
The BBC’s Russian output will continue on bbcrussian.com, where two radio programmes will be broadcast every Monday to Friday and one will be broadcast on Saturdays and Sundays.
Russian is one of seven radio programming languages which were proposed for closure as part of cuts to the World Service, along with Azeri, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish for Cuba, Turkish, Vietnamese and Ukrainian, and Russian.
Twitter reached its fifth birthday this week. It took the social networking site a little over three years to accumulate one billion tweets. It now reportedly handles that number every week.
The world’s most followed Twitterers may be celebrities, but over the last five years journalists have been gradually realising the power of the tool and its relevance to the industry. We asked you who you found an inspiration on Twitter:
Here at Journalism.co.uk we’ve come across some other great examples too, so here are just five of those, illustrating the powerful ways journalists are using Twitter.
The Guardian’s Paul Lewis truly harnesses the crowdsourcing power of Twitter, perhaps best known for his work following the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests, during which he put a call out on Twitter for witnesses to the incident. Similarly the Tweet shown above, this time in relation to the death of deportee Jimmy Mubenga aboard an aeroplane, also illustrates the power of Twitter in these cases as he went on to find a man “in an oil field in Angola, who had been three seats away from the incident”.
Strategist for National Public Radio Andy Carvin has often been praised for his use of Twitter, in particular his interaction with a community of followers for help in the verification process of his journalism, asking via Twitter for more details and eye-witness accounts of events from his contacts. According to this Guardian report, since December last year Carvin has been sending out more than 100 tweets a day.
Michael van Poppel, who was just 17 at the time, set up a Twitter feed for breaking news which went on to be taken over by Microsoft news channel MSNBC.com and now has more than two million followers (@BreakingNews). Poppel is now president and founder of BNO News, a news wire service.
The new managing director of Northcliffe Media, former Metro director Steve Auckland, is planning to launch a review of the division’s 115 regional newspapers, according to the MediaGuardian.
Last month Journalism.co.uk reported that parent company the Daily Mail and General Trust has ruled out buying or launching any more local newspapers, but said it was interested in any approaches for its regional newspaper division.
Today the Guardian reported that Auckland will carry out a “swift and radical review”, which could include reducing the number of days on which some of the loss-making titles publish and some newspaper closures.
“If you have got stacks of titles and lots of loss-makers and lots publishing six days a week and not making money you have got to look at the portfolio,” he said.
“I want a step change. It might be harsh but it gives a platform for the future. The key thing is a product portfolio review. We have to look at the number of titles and frequency of publishing.”
The Media Guardian reports that News Corporation’s iPad newspaper the Daily will be available in the UK within months, following comments by News Corporation’s chief digital officer Jon Miller at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit.
The chief digital officer of Murdoch’s News Corporation, Jon Miller, told the Abu Dhabi Media Summit that the Daily would be available in western Europe “not too long from now”. When asked if that would be in the first half of this year, he answered yes.
