Category Archives: Comment

#ge2010: Election Night review – a night of TV drama starting in Northern Ireland

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Broadcast journalism lecturer at Coventry University John Mair reviews last night’s election coverage from the BBC from his post in the broadcaster’s Northern Ireland election newsroom:

Lunchtime Friday and still no clear answer. The British people have spoken but in a divided way. The politicians are wriggling to get advantage or cling on to power (you decide). The most exciting election campaign of modern times has been followed by the most exciting night of election drama of modern times.

Nowhere was the drama greater than here in Northern Ireland where I was working on election night – the other election, often ignored by those ‘across the water’. First casualty, Northern Ireland’s First Minister Peter Robinson whose 31-year stint as MP for East Belfast ended in stunning defeat by a woman of the centre – Naomi Long of the Alliance Party. Robinson has had an annus horibbulis having to face television investigations announcing his wife’s affair and, after that, his own land dealings came under scrutiny. Last night was his nadir. He rushed to the count at Newtonards Leisure Centre, spoke briefly to the local media and was then ushered out. Now he has gone to ground to lick his wounds and fend off predators.

The Robinson moment was magic telly: milked by the local outputs, but less so by the networks. They wanted more of Lady Sylvia Hermon, who defected from the Unionists when they joined with the UK Conservatives. The Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) were seen off in what should have been their heartland North Antrim by Ian Paisley Jnr – brands are as important in politics as anywhere else. He and father – who preceded him in the seat for 40 years – showed their contempt for the TUV by singing the national anthem before his victory speech. Worse for ‘moderate’ Unionism, Sir Reg Empey lost out in South Antrim to the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). The planned Tory beachhead in Northern Ireland became a washout. It was a media confection.

The BBC Northern Ireland Election programme ran for seven-plus hours using all the 18 counts at eight locations as their prime material. Down-the-line interviews galore at the outside broadcasts based on deep local knowledge. The local commercial station – Ulster Television – did not even make it to the starting line. No election news between 10:30pm and 09.30am. That did not go unnoted by fellow hacks.

The BBC’s ‘Dimbleby programme’ had a magnificent set on its side and some pretty special Jeremy Vine virtual reality graphics too – my favourites being the Downing Street staircase or the House of Commons with real faces smiling and nodding. Modern Television journalism is about entertainment and keeping it simple. Nowhere more so than in the use of electronic graphics. All of that plus live reporting from many of the big beasts of telly journalism. It’s fascinating to see how many of them still used the basic journalistic skills, like Kirsty Wark doorstepping/walking besides and interviewing Nick Clegg on the hoof on the way to his count.

It’s difficult from inside my bubble to know how the drama played out in the nations. It certainly kept us rapt in this television control room. You could not have written the script. But the 2010 General Election story has not yet reached its final chapter. Plenty more drama to come…

Read John Mair’s report from the BBC’s TV ‘hub’ in Belfast on the build-up to election night.

Comment: Tension mounts in Johnston Press newsrooms

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Unless Johnston Press executives do something quickly, internal pressure could rival Eyjafjallajokull’s. Week after week the resentment bubbles up. A summary of recent events, according to the National Union of Journalists and previous reports:

  • JP staff stuck abroad due to the ash cloud were asked to take it out of their holiday allowance, or as unpaid leave.
  • On the same day NUJ members attended the Edinburgh shareholders’ meeting, asking the board “questions about executive pay, staff morale and the pressures on journalists to continue to produce quality newspapers in the face of 12 per cent staff cuts, a pay freeze and inadequate training on the Atex editorial production system.” (NUJ May 2010)

Across the group, there was a 70 per cent vote by NUJ members for industrial action “to combat job losses and  increased levels of stress and workload caused by the introduction of the Atex content magagement system,” according to the NUJ.

New content management system, Atex, is causing embarrassment for its journalists, resulting in misaligned pictures, or even missing pictures. They have difficulties with formatting the content properly.

Jon Slattery hosts a candid and sensibly anonymous account from a Leeds-based Johnston Press journalist this week:

Here in Leeds, on the Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post, we have been waiting for months now to be told we are going Atex – i.e. replacing subs with templates for reporters to fill. We have heard from smaller centres all over the group what is likely to happen. It started to get close when we heard Scarborough subs had been “offered” redeployment to Sheffield – a two-hour drive on a good day.

Much of a recent NUJ meeting agenda was taken up by Northern divisional manager, Chris Green, says the anonymous correspondent. He adds:

We have seen a lot of nice suits pass through this place and walk away with pockets bulging, leaving the papers thinner and crappier.

JP’s recent strategy would suggest that the ‘suits’ aren’t really prioritising the web, after its failed pay wall trial – with reports of very (very) few subscribers. Journalists aren’t even asking for that much. Slattery’s man on the ground says:

…I do not want to make a stand for standards in journalism. I want to make the best of a bad job. I am not even sure I want to make a stand for strict demarcation between subs and reporters. But however you carve it up, somebody has to do the bloody work…

Johann Hari: ‘The forces blocking British democracy are becoming visible in this election’

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One of these forces is the British media, says Hari, who suggests that the televised leaders’ debates act as a counter to the right-wing press – in particular yesterday’s kicking of Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg by the Conservative-supporting papers – and as such the media’s distorting effect on democracy could be bypassed:

The British media is overwhelmingly owned by right-wing billionaires who order their newspapers to build up the politicians who serve their interests, and marginalise or rubbish the politicians who serve the public interest. David Yelland, the former editor of the Sun, bravely confessed this week that as soon as he took his post, he was told the Liberal Dems had to be “the invisible party, purposely edged off the paper’s pages and ignored”. Only a tiny spectrum of opinion was permitted. Everyone to the left of Tony Blair (not hard) had to be rubbished – even when their policies spoke for a majority of British people.

The TV debates, then, were a very rare moment in which a slightly more liberal-left voice could speak to the public without the distorting frame of pre-emptive abuse and distortion. The window of permissible opinion was opened a little – and people responded with a wave of enthusiasm. It could’ve been opened wider still – to the Greens, say – and found a receptive audience too.

The reaction of the right-wing press to briefly losing the ability to frame how politicians address the public has been a frenzied panic worthy of Basil Fawlty. They have “revealed” Clegg is a paedophile-cuddling, Gaddafi-licking foreigner and crook who wishes we had lost the Second World War. But now – for a change – people can test the smears against what they see and hear with their own eyes, unmediated, on TV.

Read the full post at this link…

Outsourcing photography – what cost to local news organisations?

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Last week, the Associated Press’ (AP) commercial photography arm, AP Images, launched a new service and a new revenue stream. The new Editorial Assignment Service offers other news organisations the chance to hire out its photojournalists to cover events for their reporting.

(Read more about the launch on the British Journal of Photography’s site and Photo Archive News.)

Twenty-five AP photographers are available via the assignment service and the images on display on the marketing site are great quality. For the AP it’s a new source of revenue and use of existing resources to create a money-making service; for other news organisations – as far as the agency is hoping – it could be a labour-saving device, allowing them to outsource work on far-flung or one-off assignments.

I’m thinking in particular of local media and newspapers here. Many of whom are already AP members in the US – some of whom have left the agency as a results of increased membership fees. Much is made of multimedia and the potential of online publishing platforms to mix words with rich images and more. But where do images from the field stand on a local or regional newsroom’s budget at a time of cuts/limited financial resources?

Some such news organisations are turning photo departments into visual departments – adding video to images – and creating their own money-making products by putting these desks at the heart of the newsroom. US newspaper the Star-Ledger and its website NJ.com is now generating revenue from specialist coverage of local events, in particular high-school sports, and as such video and images remains high on the agenda.

While outsourcing could bring a greater range of images to some news sites and free organisations from the labour of obtaining them, the local knowledge and understanding of an audience can’t be outsourced or replaced by the AP. Local media outlets wanting stronger visuals would do well to develop their own rather than outsource and build products for both a multimedia and potentially commercial end.

Comment: It’s time for social networks to tell us how our data is used

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We explain why we consider Address Book Importing (ABI) and friend connection tools dangerous  for journalists; and why we believe it’s time for social networks to be more upfront about how they use our data.

Our research on social networks and Address Book Importing (ABI) published today shows that Facebook has a big problem, which will only get bigger, as it develops its connection-making features.

[See full report: How social networks are using your email address book data – and what it means for journalists]

If you are a member, like 400 million other people worldwide, then that problem could become your problem through no fault of your own. Journalists, in particular, are more vulnerable than most.

Why they do it

Like all social networks, Facebook strives to be seen as indispensable. Facebook wants you to tell it who you are connected to and it has a vested interest in making those connections public.

For Facebook, the more connections it can make between people the better. That’s what drives membership and visits and profits. Many claim that user privacy is the main casualty of a business model that depends on users revealing personal information online.

It is an issue that has come to involve stalking, grooming and identity theft. Facebook argues that instead of imposing regulation on social networks, governments should leave the control of personal information in the hands of the users.

That argument would carry weight if the company’s privacy controls were transparent and easy to use, and its members were given the information they need to make informed decisions.

Threat to journalists

But here’s the crux. Our in-depth look at the practice of ABI reveals that Facebook is failing to provide users with the information they need to properly protect their privacy. From the perspective of a journalist, this means ABI can threaten the privacy of your sources and even your career.

Facebook presents its ‘Find People you Email’ tool as a way for you to check if people you know are also Facebook members. You do this by giving Facebook access to your online contacts file on Gmail or Yahoo for example, or by giving it access to your desktop contacts file.

Facebook says: ‘Upload a contact file and we will tell you which of your contacts are on Facebook.’ Sounds harmless enough and sounds like it will do what you expect. Use the ‘learn more’ option here and Facebook tells you that they may use the imported information to generate ‘suggestions’ for you and your contacts on Facebook (see statement below).

But we’ve pieced together what Facebook doesn’t tell you. Not only does Facebook ‘find people you email’ on Facebook, it downloads all the email addresses in your contacts file whether you want it to or not.

Users aren’t given clear information that this will happen. Then, without giving you any control over the process, it uses the email addresses to generate ‘friend recommendations’ for people you know – and those you don’t.

Then, without telling you and without your control, Facebook generates ‘recommendations’ linking you directly with others in your contact file on any email invites you choose to send. Facebook also holds on to your contacts file – linking you to your file on an on-going basis.

You may have countless reasons why you don’t want to be publicly connected with people in your contacts file. People in that file may be professional contacts, confidential sources, business associates or even the target of a long-running investigation; people from whom you may want to keep a discreet distance for any number of reasons.

If you are not completely aware what ABI means, the potential for disaster is endless. Imagine if you use Facebook’s ABI to check if your mates are on Facebook and you give it access to your desktop address book.

On there are your friends, your sources and your colleagues. Many may not be impressed if, out of the blue, they are ‘recommended’ your husband, your boss and your mate who has tagged you in a dozen Christmas party pictures.

What if the NHS manager you’ve lined up to interview is ‘recommended’ to the health service whistleblower you’ve cultivated? What if your source in an investment bank is ‘recommended’ to your source in the Financial Service Authority? Will any of them trust you again?

Strange recommendations

We grew suspicious about Facebook’s ABI tool precisely because two of us at Journalism.co.uk started to receive bizarre recommendations. Recommendations that could only mean one thing – Facebook had accessed the email addresses of our contacts.

We think the majority of Facebook users and, certainly, the vast majority of journalists, wouldn’t use ABI if they were given the full picture. Patti Laubaugh’s devastating experience with Facebook’s ABI reveals what can happen when you mistakenly mix your professional and private lives on social networks.

As we’ve reported, Reuters is so concerned about the potential for calamity that it is warning its journalists: “Be aware that you may reveal your sources to competitors by using ‘following’ or ‘friending’ functionality on social networks.” But this doesn’t mention the risk of ABI.

We had a useful dialogue with Facebook about our findings but nothing it told us made us any more relaxed with the practice of ABI.

The company defended its practice by stating that people can opt to ‘learn more’ about the Friend Finder tool by accessing this statement:

“We may use the email addresses you upload through this importer to help you connect with friends, including using this information to generate suggestions for you and your contacts on Facebook.”

Time to be more upfront

We think Facebook members are not adequately warned exactly how ABI is used and could be misled by the information provided.

Worse still, users have to click through to yet another window before they learn that they can delete an uploaded contacts file. Facebook knows better than anyone that the more clicks you ask a user to perform the less likely they are to get somewhere you don’t particularly want them to find.

It added:

“We believe that people come to Facebook to find their friends, and so we provide this as part of our efforts to help people find each other, and to share and stay in touch.  We use a variety of different factors to determine whether to suggest that people connect on Facebook and we respect privacy settings of the users when we do.”

But in order to use the privacy settings in an informed way users must be given the whole picture. Like Gus Hosein of Privacy International says in our main report, it’s time for social networks to stop pretending they’re cuddly start-ups and face up to their privacy control responsibilities as world communication systems.

David Yelland: Nick Clegg is free of Murdoch’s ‘tentacles’

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David Yelland, the former Sun editor now enjoying lifting the lid on the realities of tabloid newspapers since he saw the democratic light, comments on Nick Clegg’s rise – and how it could leave Cameronite press ‘floundering’. The article appeared in the Guardian today. An extract:

The fact is these papers, and others, decided months ago that Cameron was going to win. They are now invested in his victory in the most undemocratic fashion. They have gone after the prime minister in a deeply personal way and until last week they were certain he was in their sights.

I hold no brief for Nick Clegg. But now, thanks to him – an ingenue with no media links whatsoever – things look very different, because now the powerless have a voice as well as the powerful.

All of us who care about democracy must celebrate this over the coming weeks – even if Cameron wins in the end, at least some fault lines will have been exposed.

Full story at this link…

Jonathan Rayner: ‘Time to put some balance back into journalism’

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The Law Gazette’s Jonathan Rayner attacks newspapers’ lack of balance, in the run-up to the election. Of both national and regional journalists, he asks: “When did reporters stop reporting the news and become political propagandists instead?”

What is the journalist’s job? Is it still finding out and reporting what’s going on, because how else will everyone know? Or is it convincing the readers, because of their proprietors’ commercial or political interests, to vote in a certain way?

Full post at this link…

#IWD: Why do men dominate newspaper letter pages?

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It has always fascinated me why male names dominate the readers’ letter pages in newspapers, the original home for crowdsourced comment. What’s more, it’s a trend that plays out online too: men are already significantly noisier on Google Buzz, for example, and dominate online comment in subjects like politics and media.

I was pleased to discover around this time last year that the unequal gender split bothered one @patroclus too (aka writer Fiona Campbell-Howes) who actually set about documenting the trend in 2008 with the blog Guardianletters.blogspot.com/.

She never got any real answers from the newspapers she studied and eventually she let the blog run dry. But the old posts are still there to see, with some revealing graphs, too. The chart below, for example, shows the percentage split between men, women and indiscriminate for April-May 2008 at the Guardian and Observer.

Most recently, the theme was picked up by Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour in January 2010.

“Why is the letters page, of whichever newspaper you care to choose, invariably dominated by men?” the programme asked. The Observer has actually called for more women to write in.

Jenni Murray talked to Stephen Pritchard, readers’ editor at the Observer, and Sarah Sands, deputy editor of the London Evening Standard. Pritchard and Sands seemed to agree that time was a crucial factor – maybe women had less of it. Sands also identified a reluctance on the part of women to declare their opinion publicly.

But does the lack of time and innate modesty theory really hold true, when we look at the amount of female time spent, and number of views shared, on MumsNet, or fashion and food blogs and forums?

I’d be interested to see some more research in this area. It’s a theme that journalist Gaby Hinsliff picks up on in her introductory post for today’s International Women’s Day themed LabourList. Of political blogging, she says “there are too many women waiting to be invited to blog, where men just pile in”.

Like Hinsliff, I’m reluctant to see female-only gimmicks used to remedy the situation, but simultaneously intrigued by the louder male voice, a phenomenon that may be key in understanding why men dominate executive boards across so many industries. Yes, we have a lot of female journalists in the newsroom, but only a handful of women make it to the top levels of the media industry – and even fewer become CEO or editor.

Former Trinity Mirror employee Craig McGill on the GMG Regionals sale

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Craig McGill from digital communications company Contently Managed worked at Trinity Mirror – at the Sunday Mirror and Daily Mirror from 2000 to 2006 – and has freelanced for The Guardian.

Journalism.co.uk asked him for his comments on today’s announcement that Guardian Media Group is selling its regional news business to Trinity Mirror. His reaction is in full below:

Well, this is just comical – or it would be if it didn’t show the state of hysteria in UK press ownership and the fact that it will probably lead to a loss of jobs.

Firstly, we have Guardian Media Group looking as if it wants to go from being a ‘group’ to just looking after The Guardian because I wonder how much this sale was driven by the £89.8 million loss that GMG made last year.

Secondly, The Guardian is the very title that tells us constantly – almost as much as it goes on about The Wire in fact – that local content is what people want, it’s the future, it’s the killer app that will keep people looking for news.

If that’s the case why are they dumping all their local content creators? Or are they admitting that instead of highly paid professionals, a couple of bloggers can do the job instead? Or do they just want to be London-centric with a stringer or two elsewhere? That’s hardly inspiring in an age of devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. What should readers in those areas do? Go elsewhere?

Secondly, what makes this even more tragic is that they are being bought by Trinity Mirror. Now there’s two aspects to this: one, Trinity Mirror continually says that it has no money and is skint. However, they managed to pull together a £44 million package – including nearly £8 million in cash – that’s hardly my definition of skint. That’s a complete slap in the face to the journalists Trinity Mirror has thrown out over the years and for the miserable pay freezes, small pay rises and ridiculous cost cutting measures that the survivors have endured – all because there was a lack of money. That £8 million could have done so much more in many titles.

To add to that, Trinity Mirror has a record of poor investment in the regions – it chopped the Scottish Daily Mirror from a team of 30 to one over three years, the Daily Record and Sunday Mail titles work wonders with a small budget but are walloped by having to do more with less each year, which lead to the Scottish Sun overtaking them as the best selling daily in Scotland.

This buy smacks of a panic buy – almost as much as it was a much-needed sale for GMG. Who are the losers going to be? The obvious one is the people who have already lost their jobs – more will follow, we can be sure of that. Over time the readers will be losers too as there’s less journalistic competition bringing more stories.

And even at the Mirror’s Manchester office, there must be people wondering what’s going to happen next. After all, does Manchester need two big news hubs? Surely a building merger is on the cards, followed by ‘shared resources’ and then ‘merged resources’.

Comment: A black day for British journalism

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Padraig Reidy is news editor of the Index on Censorship. The Index on Censorship and English PEN also issued a statement at this link. The BBC’s statement in open court can be read at this link.

Yesterday was a black day for British journalism, when the BBC, perhaps through fear of expense, or perhaps simply because of the uncertainty and lack of backbone that has plagued the organisation for years now, conceded in a libel case brought by oil traders Trafigura.

This was a matter of the utmost public interest. The BBC should have held its ground and in a court of law a clear vindication of Trafigura or otherwise should have been made. It’s a terrifying prospect that even the nation’s biggest broadcaster can’t face up to big business in our libel courts such are the costs involved.

newsnight2Trafigura and its solicitors Carter-Ruck have now become synonymous with attempts to stifle free expression in the UK. First it gagged newspapers who attempted to report on waste dumping in Côte d’Ivoire with an injunction. Then it attempted to gag Parliament itself over the reporting of a question on the matter by Labour MP Paul Farrelly. Now, acting with confidence of its advantage as a claimant in England’s rotten libel courts, it has forced the national broadcaster to apologise, rather than face a potential £3m court case.

Libel laws are, most would agree, necessary. People should have a right to defend themselves from outrageous and injurious accusations. But this is quite different from corporations protecting themselves from investigation of their practices and the consequences of their practices.

Through the libel law and the ad hoc privacy law emerging from Mr Justice Eady’s courts, foreign companies, like Trafigura and Kaupthing, the Icelandic bank, can scare off British reporters, and in turn deprive British people of information.

This state of affairs cannot continue, which is why Index on Censorship, English PEN and Sense About Science, has formed the Libel Reform Campaign, offering 10 simple recommendations to make libel laws fairer for all – claimants and defendants. A petition launched last week at libelreform.org has already attracted thousands of signatures, and there have been some favourable noises from Westminster. But favourable noises only go so far: now is the time for all our politicians to take action and end the UK’s status as a global free speech pariah.