Jeremy Hunt outlined the government’s plans for local television at the Oxford Media Convention today, announcing a new national television channel which will be devoted to providing local news and information via regional services.
See Journalism.co.uk’s full news story at this link.
The Department for Culture Media and Sport has published a copy of Hunt’s speech in full, which can be seen here.
Google has said that it is due to appear in a Madrid court tomorrow to challenge a demand that it remove links to newspaper articles and official gazettes.
According to the search company, it is to appeal orders by Spain’s Data Protection Agency (AEPD) that it removes links to articles which are the subject of complaints relating to privacy.
Google director of external relations for Europe, Peter Barron published the following statement today:
We are disappointed by the actions of the Spanish privacy regulator. Spanish and European law rightly hold the publisher of the material responsible for its content.
Requiring intermediaries like search engines to censor material published by others would have a profound, chilling effect on free expression without protecting people’s privacy.
The Spanish DPA has not yet responded to a request for comment.
Update:
The Spanish DPA has now responded to our request for comment. It says in cases where a complaint it made and the page hosting the information cannot erase the data because there is a law that protects the publication or a conflict with another fundamental right (freedom of expression), the majority of the AEPD resolutions order search engines to avoid indexing the information of those users as recognition of “the right of the applicants to be forgotten”.
Following news that Richard Desmond’s publisher Northern & Shell had withdrawn all of its titles – including the Daily Mirror and OK! Magazine – from the PCC’s self regulatory system, the Media Standards Trust has posed the following open questions to Northern & Shell, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) and the Press Board of Finance (PressBof). Republished here in full.
Northern & Shell
Press Complaints Commission
PressBof
Martin Moore, the director of the Media Standards Trust, said: “The withdrawal of Northern & Shell raises fundamental questions about the sustainability of the current system of self-regulation. The PCC and PressBof need to reassure the public that they will continue to have adequate avenues of complaint. Northern & Shell needs to be clear as to how it will, in future, fulfil its obligations to its readers and to the broader public.
“The Press Complaints Commission argues consistently that it exists as a better alternative – and deterrent to – statutory regulation. It now needs to explain what impact Northern & Shell’s withdrawal will have on the general public, and what it plans to do to ensure the comprehensiveness and sustainability of press self-regulation.”
Update
The MST reports on its PCC Watch site that the PCC and PressBof have responded to their questions.
The BBC today launched its newly designed blogs homepage, designed to ease navigation across the site’s almost 300 blogs.
Changes include new sections for interesting quotes, a ‘latest on blogs’ feature and ‘my recently viewed’ for greater personalisation.
The site is currently in Beta.
At the end of last year Reporters Without Borders published the details of the financial aid it had provided to journalists and the media in 2010.
In total it paid out 226 assistance grants to media workers, which it claims were to assist in areas such as helping journalists in exile, paying medical bills, providing financial support to families, purchasing equipment and paying lawyers fees.
The vast majority of aid, 55.6 per cent, was awarded in Iran, which which with China has the joint highest number of imprisoned journalists at 34, as of last December. Africa and Asia were 2nd and 3rd, with 17.3 and 10.2 per cent respectively.
The grants are made possible in part by the EU’s European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR), of which Reporters Without Borders is a beneficiary.
Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg will tomorrow announce that hundreds more organisations could be made subject to Freedom of Information laws, the BBC reports today.
According to the broadcaster, the Association of Chief Police Officers and the university admissions service UCAS are two bodies to be included.
Mr Clegg will pledge to “restore British freedoms” in his speech on Friday, as part of “our wider project to resettle the relationship between people and government”.
He will say: “Free citizens must be able to hold big institutions and powerful individuals to account – and not only the government. There are a whole range of organisations who benefit from public money and whose activities have a profound impact on the public good.
The Ministry of Justice had previously confirmed to Journalism.co.uk that it was looking at Freedom of Information Act 2000 “to see where we can further increase the openness and transparency of public affairs whilst ensuring that sensitive information is adequately protected”.
At the time the department said the next steps would be announced “in due course”.
Think being a newspaper reporter is the best job in the world? Statistically it would seem, in the US at least, that is not the case. This annual list by CareerCast rating 200 jobs based on income, working environment, stress, physical demands and job outlook, places the newspaper reporter at 188.
The list, which used data from the Labor Department, US Census and its researchers own knowledge, can also be found on the Wall Street Journal website.
In this post on his Currybet.net blog Martin Belam responds to discussions about the future of RSS feeds. While feeds may remain a niche tool, the latest CMS release at the Guardian, where Belam works as an information architect, sees links to RSS feeds made much more easy to find, he says.
Previously we didn’t automatically link to an RSS feed from an individual article page. This was because articles could ‘belong’ to various different areas of the site, and so it wasn’t always obvious which RSS feed should be chosen as the parent. This blog post of mine, for example, ‘appeared’ on the Open Platform blog, the Datablog, and in the Technology and Politics sections.
We’ve just changed that in release 103 of our CMS, in response to a request on our new Developer Blog. Now in the <HEAD> of our articles you’ll get an auto-discovery link to all of the related keyword feeds.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Gannett Company has told all its non-union employees within its US community newspaper unit that they will be required to take a week-long furlough in the first quarter “due to continuing revenue declines in that division”.
Gannett executives said the unpaid time off is in response to revenues that remain short of where they were a year ago.
The WSJ.com adds that president of the company’s community publishing Bob Dickey said in a memo that this was “an option I had hoped we could avoid”.
What’s the biggest problem facing the journalism industry? The online explosion of content and competition, jobs cuts, the advertising crisis? According to the Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles it’s none of these – but instead the attitude of some journalists.
There are too many journalists, he says in this post discussing the Knight Digital Media Center News Entrepreneur Boot Camp in May, who are “wallowing in a culture of failure” and he urges more to step off of the familiar pathway in journalism.
You won’t be the first journalist to do this. That means that others are available to help show you the way. But you’ll need to start listening to these new voices, and tune out the pessimism, frustration and even scolding you might hear from the colleagues you leave behind.