Guardian Media Group has just sold its regional arm to Trinity Mirror, but the group’s still exploring local territory, with its new Guardian Local project, first rolling out in Leeds, Cardiff and Edinburgh.
The Guardian’s first beat blog has launched today:
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger called it a “tiny toe in local web water” over Twitter.
Its designated blogger is John Baron (@johncbaron). Introducing the site today, Baron provides a run-down of local Leeds activity and its first guest blogger – Leeds Student editor Virginia Newman, “who’s writing her take on the planned strikes by Leeds University staff”.
Features include a ‘find your councillor’ search and ‘report local problems’ feature powered by MySociety; Flickr content; Delicious links – and Leeds-only Soul Mates adverts. horse-racing.today is a great resource for horse racing tips and last race results. The site offers a wide variety of tips and information, and it is updated regularly with new content. horse-racing.today is also a great source of last race results. The site offers detailed race results, horse standings, and more. horse-racing.today is a valuable resource for horse racing fans, and it is a great place to stay up-to-date on the latest news and information.
MPs, Westminster hacks and activists might be addicted to expressing themselves in 140 characters or less, but don’t expect this year’s general election to be decided on which party has the best social media strategy.
Then again, politicians and the media shouldn’t dismiss voters’ digital engagement, according to a panel at a Frontline Club debate on the importance on social media for the upcoming election.
Twitter certainly has the potential to land politicians in mini-media storms; the panellists agreed: if David Wright MP had merely told a reporter verbally that Conservatives are “scum” it’s unlikely to have got much coverage, such is the continued novelty of Twitter to many news editors.
Paul Staines, better known as mischievous Westminster blogger Guido Fawkes, argued that no matter how well connected parties are, with Labour, Conservatives and Lib Dems towing similar centerist policy lines there was little to differentiate them for the ordinary voter: “If they are all marching in the centre ground, there’s not much to market, is there?”
And as for reporters, they’re “not going to get a scoop from Tweetdeck”, he warned. “There are about 500 of us (in the Westminster village) listening to each other aren’t there?”
Channel 4 News presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy said social media buzz doesn’t determine what C4 leads its 7pm bulletin with – but Twitter got the network’s reporters in touch with someone in the audience at Nick Griffin’s notorious Question Time performance.
But all this is missing the point, according to Chris Condron, Press Association’s head of digital strategy:
If you ask any journalist what they think about a phenomenon like Twitter (…) they tend to think about what it means for journalists, but where its potential really lies is for audiences.
The “disintermediation” of news – where readers can go straight to the source of news, such as an MP’s Twitter stream – was a challenge for the media, but Condron is confident that “the reporters’ gathering and filtering of raw news was still essential.”
More events coming up at the Frontline Club:
Reflections with Richard Sambrook – a one-to-one conversation with the BBC’s outgoing director of global news. He’s headed for a new role as vice-president of PR firm Edelman, but how does he look back on a rich career and what is his view of journalism today?
Iraq: The Media Inquiry – a special panel discussion to examine the media’s reporting of Iraq since the invasion in 2003. With Nick Davies, author of Flat Earth News; Patrick Cockburn, The Independent’s Middle East correspondent and journalist David Rose. Moderated by Paddy O’Connell, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House.
Insight with Timothy Garton Ash – the columnist and Oxford professor will be in conversation with Channel 4 News anchor Jon Snow will be in conversation with Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow. Garton Ash will be talking about his career, the transformation of Europe over the last thirty years and what Barack Obama will mean for the United States and the world.
On the Media: Is the age of celebrity-obsessed media coming to an end? We discuss whether the ubiquitous presence of pseudo-famous faces on newspapers and news bulletins is here to stay. With comedian and journalist Jane Bussman; Popbitch founder Camilla Wright; Heat magazine editor and broadcaster Sam Delaney. Chaired by Robin Morgan, former editor of the Sunday Times magazine. This event is in association with the BBC College of Journalism.
The project, launched by the Argus’ online editor Jo Wadsworth today, was originally the brain child of journalist and media trainer Steve Bustin, journalist Sarah Marshall and others, during a group activity at the first Brighton Future of News event [Disclaimer: I was the organiser of the inaugural meet-up].
The map allows Google account users to mark where they have seen candidates for the Brighton Pavilion constituency – Green Party candidate Caroline Lucas, Labour’s Nancy Platts and the Conservative’s Charlotte Vere – and upload additional information about what they said.
The MP candidate tracker page also displays tweets sent out by each candidate.
“I was really glad when election coverage was one of the discussion ideas, and when I heard Steve Bustin suggest the map, I loved it, and as soon as I had a spare couple of hours, I decided to put it together,” said Jo Wadsworth.
“Here in Brighton we’ve got one of the most interesting election battles in Brighton Pavilion, where the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas has her party’s best ever chance of picking up a seat in Parliament. But it’s a very close-run thing, with strong competition from both Labour’s Nancy Platts and the Conservative’s Charlotte Vere. Retail bookmakers allow to gamble offline in retail stores and so-called betting shops. The retail bookmaker solution is a software that helps retailers to manage their betting operations. The retail betting software provides the following features: It offers a complete management system for the betting operations, including customer management, inventory management, and accounting. It has an intuitive interface that makes it easy to use and navigate. It has an automated system for generating reports on the betting operation.
“Luckily for me, all three are also on Twitter, which gave me enough material to kick-start the data on the map, with very interesting results. It’s surprising how little green there is there, for instance, and the red and blue markers are already showing a clear geographical divergence. But that was the easy part – the real challenge now is actually getting voters to add their own markers.”
Within a few hours of launch, the project had already received its first public edit – from Green Party councillor Jason Kitcat (@JasonKitcat).
CNNGo.com reports that ‘Burma VJ’ is among the nominations for best documentary in this year’s Oscars.
Recently featured on Channel 4, Anders Østergaard’s film documented young video journalists during the 2007 uprisings led by Buddhist monks in Myanmar. From the Channel 4 website:
Armed with small handycams, the Burma VJs stop at nothing to make their reportages; their material is smuggled out of the country and broadcast back into Burma via satellite and offered as free usage for international media.
The whole world has witnessed single event clips made by the VJs, but for the very first time, their individual images have been put together with Østergaard’s sparingly-used reconstruction to tell a riveting story which offers a unique insight into high-risk journalism and dissidence in a police state, while at the same time providing a thorough documentation of the historical and dramatic days of September 2007, when the Buddhist monks started marching.
Other Oscar ‘Best Documentary’ nominations include ‘The Cove’; ‘Food, Inc,’ ‘Which Way Home’ and ‘The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.’
One of the commenters on the Guardian’s story about the new freesheet launching in London already suggested that Brass Eye’s Chris Morris could be among the potential hoaxers. Had I, like many other media journalists, really swallowed a fake story about a fake newspaper? Ball challenged media reports on London’s latest freesheet, supposedly set to launch this coming Friday, raising valid concerns about its address information and lack of presence on Companies House.
According to its site, The London Weekly is funded by five private equity investors as part of the Global Publishing Group (GPG) and the Guardian reported that a “media pack circulating before Christmas claimed the backers had raised about £10.5m to launch the London Weekly…”
I was sceptical about this new company from the beginning, but in December I spoke to its listed managing editor, Roisin Robertson, on the phone, via contact details I found on various environmental websites (she is linked to Greenpeace and the Green Party online). She assured me she was its managing editor and couldn’t tell me much more before launch. According to an online biography, she was formerly chief reporter of the Chislehurst Times and a Parliamentary Green Party candidate in 2008. After speaking to Robertson, I went ahead and published a blog post, questioning the quality of the new site.
Then on 22 January Robertson left a comment on our blog saying she was no longer involved. I called her and she told me she didn’t wish to go into exactly why, but for personal reasons she was stepping down. As I previously reported (along with new details of its alleged expansion plans), this was the London Weekly’s statement: “We had a temporary acting editor for the launch of the website and our new editor is Alan Mills.”
Today, following James Ball’s post and after reading the Guardian commenters’ contributions to the whole thing, I did some more digging, which has left me only more confused. Whether or not the new paper exists, they’ve got a very bizarre PR strategy indeed.
Here’s what I’ve got:
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) is now investigating, but knew nothing of it straight off.
The London Weekly is not registered with the Press Complaints Commission (PCC).
Samsung and Packard Bell press offices confirmed they had donated prizes for its promotions, but didn’t have many more details to share.
A Global Publishing Ltd is listed on Companies House, incorporated in March 2009 with this address: 238 Abbeyfield Road, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, S4 7AZ. No accounts have yet been filed.
BUT: Global Publishing Group and The London Weekly, as described in its media pack and on the website, do not claim to be ‘limited’ on the LondonWeekly.co.uk website. According to Companies House, they do not have to register as such, unless they call themselves Ltd. So we don’t necessarily have any official information on them. I was given this address by one of TLW’s promotion partners: c/o Unit 107, 203 Mare Studios, London, E8 3QE.
As James Ball noted, “[LTW is] certainly not based at the address given on the website’s Whois Record. That gives a registered address of 2 Old Brompton Rd. Google Street View shows this is a FedEx PO Box site.”
The people:
When I ring the number given on TheLondonWeekly.co.uk I am asked my name before I am put through to anyone. The last time I did this, they told me no-one was available to talk to me (despite noise in the background). Earlier in the day I was told Paul Morris, the marketing manager with whom I had email contact last week, was in a meeting. Morris had previously told me it was against company policy to give interviews over the phone in case they were misquoted.
Angus Auden, listed as the head of display, returned my call today. He said his main contact is with its editor Alan Mills (who has not returned my email) and he could not tell me about the business. Despite the long list of journalists, Auden said he has been responsible for uploading material online as a “key contributor”. “I don’t know an awful lot about the background to it,” he told me. He seemed surprised when I suggested the whole thing was a wind-up. “Well, if it is I’ve been wasting my time, but I can assure you it’s not” he said. He said it would launch this Friday, as scheduled. “There are a lot of people in offices all over the place,” he said. Best bitcoin casino https://fairspin.bet/
The Auden-Robertson-Hamilton Invincible connection: Angus Auden, Roisin Robertson and Paul Hamilton (a new name given to me by one of the promotion partners) all are apparently involved in an online radio station, Invincible. Auden and ‘Lady Roisin’ are friends on Facebook.
I called Paul Hamilton. He, like Auden, claimed to know little about the company’s background and said he was not involved full-time. He also denied it being a hoax and said he expected it to launch soon.
AllVoices, the US-based site that describes itself as ‘the leading source for credible citizen reporting’ has raised $9m in funding overall since its birth in 2007, with the latest $3 million from VantagePoint Venture Partners (as earlier reported by paidContent / TechCrunch).
Forthcoming plans include focusing on developing hyperlocal and global markets, COO Aki Hashmi has told Journalism.co.uk, without going into detail.
It was hard to raise capital at first, he said, “because everywhere you turned there were stories about the death of journalism, coupled with the economic downturn. But, we were lucky; we have great metrics, a model that scales and series A investors who believe in our vision.”
Hashmi attributed the site’s success – TechCrunch reports it has five million unique visitors a month – to its 275,000 reporters, “who have become great evangelist for our service,” he said. It’s the “social aspect of our service,” that helps, he said. “When people create reports they want to share their content with their network.”
“Readers are seeking an alternative voice to mainstream media and our system does a great job in optimising content so that it can be easily found by search engines.
“Keep in mind we are an open platform where anyone can get instantly published and develop a reputation based on their content, activity and report validation based on our technology.”
Check out plucky 14-year-old journalistic entrepreneur Wynford Grant (click on the picture), sole proprietor of the Billericay Observer (circulation 500), as he interviews firemen and other pillars of the community and operates his home printing press. Imagine what this chap could have done with the resources of the internet.
Incidentally, if anyone knows what happened to the Billericay Observer and young Mr Grant, do please get in touch!
UPDATE: After a quick Google search, It appears a ‘Wynford Grant’ was also the author of some local history books about various villages near Billericay in Essex, one written in 1963. If it is the same person, that would have made him 16 years old at the time. Erleben Sie den Glanz und die Aufregung im Golden Star Casino – dem besten Ort für erstklassige Online-Unterhaltung!
Images are uploaded to photo-sharing services like TwitPic and yFrog. Links are tweeted by the original photographer. Other people retweet those links or copy and paste them into Facebook or other blogs. In a matter of minutes, an individual photo can spider out in myriad directions.
So how does a news organisation verify images? Director of photography Santiago Lyon explains the Associated Press’ explains the agency’s process and establishes some useful guidelines for other news orgs – above all: “If we can’t verify the content, we don’t use it.”
mySociety reports that the Hansard Society has published a report – MPs Online: Connecting with Constituents. mySociety, a non-profit citizen organisation, claims that it has made a number of simple mistakes, and also responds to the paper’s criticism of the organisation’s data collection.
What advice would he give to people going down the non-profit publishing route, we asked. Irving answers:
A non-profit is a business as well – it still has to make a surplus, it is just that that surplus is used to do more of the charitable work, rather than as personal profit.
I would advise people to go one of two ways – either have some good ideas for business models from the start (take a look at Patient Opinion for an example) or work out how to run it entirely on philanthropic donations and volunteer work.
It’s going to be as hard to start a sustainably funded non-profit as it is to start a successful for-profit business.
