Category Archives: Editors’ pick

Comment: Response to Kelvin MacKenzie on shutting journalism colleges

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Media law, 100 words a minute shorthand and how to shoot and edit a video, these are just some of what I probably would not have learned in my first month on a local paper.

But according to former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, writing for the Independent this morning, “there’s nothing you can learn in three years studying media at university that you can’t learn in just one month on a local paper”.

He believes aspiring reporters should start on their local newspaper at 18 and be on a national by 21. Perhaps he is unaware local newspaper editors, radio stations and TV newsdesks are not exactly falling over themselves to take on teenagers with no training.

Learning on the job may be a highwire act but it will be a lesson you will never forget compared with listening to ‘professor’ Roy Greenslade explaining why Wapping was a disgrace. No amount of academic debate is going to give you news sense, even if you have a PhD. It’s a knack and you’ve either got it or you haven’t.

There are more than 80 schools in the UK teaching journalism. These courses are make-work projects for retired journalists who teach for six months a year and are on a salary of £34,000- £60,000. Students are piling up debts as they pay to keep their tutors in the lifestyles they’re used to. I’d shut down all the journalism colleges today. If you want to be a print journalist you should go straight from school and join the local press. You will have a better career and you won’t owe a fortune. Good luck.

This is not the first time MacKenzie has rubbished journalism courses.

The Independent’s full story is at this link.

So, fellow journalism graduates, are you shouting at your computers/phones/iPads yet? Or has MacKenzie got it right?
Please comment and let us know what you think.

Malcolm Coles: Why the Guardian’s future does look bleak

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Writing on his blog, SEO expert Malcolm Coles claims the disparity in price between the Guardian’s digital services and print product is a problem for the company’s revenue.

Responding to a comment piece by former Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie, which predicts the Guardian’s print edition will be dead in a decade, Coles asks the paper: “Please, let me give you more money”.

A newspaper buyer until he got an iPad, Coles now pays £3.99 a year instead of £230 to read the Guardian everyday in print.

The collapse in what I pay is because I read most of the news for the next day’s newspaper on the Guardian website on my iPad the evening before. And I read anything new on my iPhone on the way to and from work. The newspaper has nothing in that I need.

Read the full post on Coles’ blog at this link.

UK national papers offering collective ad package

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Marketing Week reports national newspapers across the UK are to join together to provide brands “with a collective advertising package that will see them sell ads on their own and rivals’ titles for the first time”.

The collaborative package offers brands dedicated space next to Wimbledon editorial in papers which are members of the Newspaper Marketing Agency, including broadsheets such as the Times, Independent and Guardian, as well as tabloids the Sun and Daily Mirror. Outlining the deal on its website the NMA says:

Simply choose a package to suit your target market and budget. In return, during the two week tournament, when all eyes will be on news from SW19, the NMA and the national newspapers that make up the NMA membership will serve you space alongside the cream of tennis journalism; in print or online.

Open statements introduced in privacy and malicious falsehood cases

An update to the Civil Procedure Rules, which came into effect yesterday, means statements in open court can now be made in malicious falsehood or privacy cases where a claimant wishes to accept an offer of settlement.

In a post on its website law firm Schillings described the update as a “subtle” yet “important” change.

A statement in open court can therefore be used as an important mechanism for vindication for victims who have had their privacy invaded. This is especially important in “false privacy claims” where there is often lots of speculation about a person’s private life that is untrue. In these cases in particular it is vital to be able to set the record straight and let the world know that the allegations were untrue and infringed privacy.

New Statesman: Hugh Grant turns the tables on the phone hackers

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Hugh Grant secretly recorded a conversation with former News of the World deputy features editor Paul McMullen, during which the reporter claimed that former NotW editor Rebekah Brooks “absolutely” knew about illegal phone hacking.

The revelation appears in an article Grant has written for the New Statesman, which is guest-edited this week by the actor’s former partner Jemima Khan.

Grant, who believes he was himself a victim of phone hacking, ended up talking to McMullan when his “midlife crisis car” broke down in a Kent village just before Christmas and he was forced to accept a lift from the reporter, who was following him.

He was Paul McMullan, one of two ex-NoW hacks who had blown the whistle (in the Guardian and on Channel 4’s Dispatches) on the full extent of phone-hacking at the paper, particularly under its former editor Andy Coulson. This was interesting, as I had been a victim – a fact he confirmed as we drove along. He also had an unusual defence of the practice: that phone hacking was a price you had to pay for living in a free society. I asked how that worked exactly, but we ran out of time, and next thing we had arrived and he was asking me if I would pose for a photo with him, “not for publication, just for the wall of the pub”.

I agreed and the picture duly appeared in the Mail on Sunday that weekend with his creative version of the encounter. He had asked me to drop into his pub some time. So when, some months later, Jemima asked me to write a piece for this paper, it occurred to me it might be interesting to take him up on his invitation.

So Grant returned to the the Castle Inn Pub in Dover wearing a hidden microphone, and the fruits of his chat with McMullan will be published in this week’s New Statesman. An edited version is at this link.

Nieman: New data on the Daily suggests social media decline

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Joshua Benton at the Nieman Journalism Lab has been analysing the success – or as he believes the decline – of Rupert Murdoch’s iPad only US newspaper, the Daily, by monitoring tweets sent directly from the app.

This post is interesting, not only as an insight into possible problems at the Daily, but for some of the techniques and tools Benton uses for his analysis.

No one outside News Corp. and Apple has a reliable way of knowing how often people read the Daily. But there is one way in which the Daily’s app interacts with the public web — through Twitter sharing. On nearly every page in the app, there’s a sharing button in the top right that allows the reader to share a link to the story on Twitter or other social networks. (A few pages, like the table of contents and user-customized pages, aren’t sharable.)

Benton has used PostRank, a Canadian social media indexing service that analyses how individual web pages are shared through social media.

It’s easy to think of a tweet as just 140 characters, but there’s a lot of metadata around that little snippet of text: when it was tweeted, who tweeted it, how many followers she has, what date she joined Twitter, and more. Amidst all that data is information about where each tweet was generated. Did it come from Twitter’s web interface, or from the official Twitter BlackBerry app, or a third-party app like Echofon or TweetDeck? That’s in there.

And thanks to Twitter’s requirement that app developers register with its API to allow in-app tweeting, that means you can track every time someone tweets from within the Daily.

The data doesn’t look good for the Daily. Its activity on Twitter seems to match my own perceptions of how they’re doing — an early rush of excitement; a decline as people lost interest and the app struggled with technical problems; a plateau once the tech got sorted out; and then another decline once the app started charging users.

Nieman Lab’s full post is at this link.

paidContent: Sulzberger: $40m estimate for paywall cost is ‘vastly wrong’

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Arthur Sulzberger has said Bloomberg’s report stating the development of the New York Times’ paywall cost between $40 million and $50 million is “vastly wrong”, but refused to say what the switch to paid digital content did cost, according to a post on paidContent.

Sulzberger also declined to offer any numbers when it comes to subscribers, saying it was too soon but that the company would provide some details eventually. At another point, asked about complaints that the pay plan is too complex, he urged people to be patient. Noting that the company was able to tweak the system between the launch in Canada and the US-global launch 10 days later, Sulzberger said: “We’re going to learn, adapt, make it simpler. But I don’t agree that it’s too complex. It’s new. Let it breathe for a little bit before you make judgment.”

paidContent’s full post is at this link.

Alan Rusbridger on relationship with WikiLeaks: ‘things are quite difficult’

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Last night Journalism.co.uk was at the Press Awards, where the Guardian was named Newspaper of the Year. At the ceremony the paper was praised specifically for its its coverage of the WikiLeak’s releases.

We caught up with Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger at the end of the awards, who said that while the current situation with WikiLeaks is “difficult” there will be more revelations to come.

I think WikiLeaks was the stand out story, not only nationally but also globally. I think it had a global impact and I think it will be historically significant. I can’t think of another story in my lifetime where a story created by a newspaper has become the most discussed thing in every capital city around the world. That was the stand out story.

At the moment things are quite difficult between WikiLeaks and the Guardian, because they just are, partly due to the communications. It’s very difficult to keep relation with people if you never see them and the only way of communicating is through encrypted text messaging.

I think there will be more revelations to come and I think lots of papers are going to be developing their own mini versions of WikiLeaks. One thing WikiLeaks has taught us is the importance of working out how to get information securely and publish securely and I think that’s been a valuable lesson for us all.

You can see the full list of winners from the Press Awards here.

Follow the Press Awards tonight with Journalism.co.uk

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Journalism.co.uk will be at the Press Awards from 7pm onwards and will endeavour to report the winners of each category live via Twitter from @journalism_live.

You can also follow a livestream of the event on the Press Awards website and keep up to date on Twitter by following the hashtag #pressawards.

More details on the shortlisted entries can be found at this link.

ReadWriteWeb: Twitter to offer brand pages like Facebook’s, report says

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ReadWriteWeb reports Twitter has plans to create brand pages, much like Facebook’s, which will provide more space for brands – such as news organisations – to communicate, outside of the structure of 140 character messages and short profiles.

“Branded pages on Twitter could be interesting, although Twitter is more flow-based than page based,” says Rick Mans, Social Media Lead at Capgemini, a technology consulting service based in Paris, France with 110,000 employees across 40 countries.

Would users recoil at increased brand messaging on Twitter? Might it lead to the MySpace-ification of Twitter profile pages? Making customized profile pages a paid product for verified business owners could help prevent that from happening. It may be difficult to imagine how users would react – but it’s very clear that business users would love to take a shot at it.

ReadWriteWeb’s full article is at this link.