Revelations about the extent of the phone-hacking scandal have fuelled discussion about the state of self-regulation and possible reform. Martin Moore, director of the Media Standards Trust, has created a thought-provoking list of seven possible ways in which the system might be reformed, from scrapping regulation altogether to full statutory regulation. Moore has weighed up some of the pros and cons of each idea and intends for them to serve as a framework for discussion of the issue.
The list:
1. Abolish the PCC, without setting up a replacement
2. Reform the existing PCC
3. Create an independent regulator
4. Extend a watered down Ofcom to cover all major media organisations
5. Create a professional body for journalists
6. Withdraw all media regulation, but reform, extend, reduce and clarify existing media law
7. Create a new statutory regulator for all media
Magazine publisher Future has said it is “considering a wider range of strategic options” for its US division in light of “challenging” conditions for the business.
In pre-close trading update the publisher said its position in the US “is significantly more challenging” than the UK. In July Future announced plans to “accelerate the transition of Future US into a primarily digital business”.
But this week, in a report preceding full-year earnings in November, the group said trading conditions in the US “reflecting ongoing weakness and decreasing visibility at newsstand” means the board is now considering a wider range of strategic options. PaidContent reports that the language used suggests the company “now may look to sell its business there”.
The company also claims in the latest report that the trends identified in its Interim Management Statement, published in July, have continued.
Revenues for the twelve months ending 30 September 2011 are expected to be down 6 per cent on last year, in constant currency. The Board remains comfortable with market expectations of results for 2011, subject only to any period-end adjustment required in relation to US newsstand returns, beyond those already announced and incorporated into fourth quarter estimates.
The Financial Times has reported that “one of James Murdoch’s closest advisers” has resigned. Alice Macandrew was Murdoch’s spokesperson but reportedly handed her notice in back in July.
She becomes one of the first senior executives to quit News Corp voluntarily over disagreements with the company’s approach, which saw the publisher contest phone-hacking lawsuits brought by celebrities and other public figures in 2010 and early 2011 and close the News of the World in July.
Visual.ly allows news sites and blogs to embed the uploaded visualisations – in the true spirit of the open data movement.
The visualisation has a timeline on the evolution of APIs and the release of public data, including facts and figures on Data.gov.uk, a site where journalists can access and work with public data which launched in public beta in January last year.
David Frost’s memorable encounter with Richard Nixon in 1977 has been voted the best broadcast interview of all time by readers of the Radio Times.
The magazine held a poll in conjunction with the BBC College of Journalism’s Art of the Interview season, asking readers to vote on a shortlist of around 50 interviews.
The Frost/Nixon interview came first by a decent margin, winning 19 per cent of the vote. In second place was Kirsty Young’s 2009 Desert Island Discs interview with Morrissey, which received 12 per cent of the vote.
Ken Clarke’s calamitous interview with Victoria Derbyshire earlier this year – in which he appeared to suggest that some types of rape were less serious than others – was in third place, and Jeremy Paxman’s famous 1994 interview with Michael Howard, in which Paxman asked an evasive Howard the same question 12 times in a row, was fourth. Skip to around 3:50 to see Paxman embark on his quizzing Odyssey.
The full list:
David Frost/Richard Nixon (1977) 18.6%
Kirsty Young/Morrissey, Desert Island Discs, Radio 4 (2009) 11.6%
Victoria Derbyshire/Ken Clarke, Radio 5 Live (2011) 10.8%
Jeremy Paxman/Michael Howard, Newsnight, BBC2 (1997) 7.8%
Becky Milligan/Anthony Steen, The World at One, Radio 4 (2009) 6.5%
Melvyn Bragg/Dennis Potter, C4 (1994) 5.5%
Michael Parkinson/Muhammad Ali (1971) 4.8%
Martin Bashir/Princess Diana, Panorama, BBC1 (1995) 4.6%
Diana Gould (Nationwide viewer)/Margaret Thatcher, BBC1 (1982) 4%
Sian Williams/PC David Rathband, Broadcasting House, Radio 4 (2010) 3.2%
Michael Parkinson/Emu (1976) 2.8%
Bill Grundy/Sex Pistols, Today, ITV (1977) 2%
Jon Snow/Alastair Campbell, Channel 4 News (2003) 1.7%
John Freeman/Gilbert Harding, Face to Face, BBC TV (1960) 1.4%
Gordon Wilson – Enniskillen (1987) 1.2%
Paxman Meets Hitchens: a Newsnight Special (2010) 1%
Owen Bennett Jones/Michael Caine, The Interview, BBC World Service (2011) 1%
Michael Parkinson/Meg Ryan, BBC1 (2003) Awkward 0.9%
Jon Snow/Zac Goldsmith, Channel 4 News (2010) 0.8%
Jeremy Vine/Gordon Brown, Radio 2 (2010) 0.7%
Katie Couric/Sarah Palin, CBS (2008) 0.7%
Tom Bradby/William & Kate, ITV News (2011) 0.7%
Graham Norton/Lady Gaga, The Graham Norton Show, BBC1 (2011) 0.6%
Robin Day/Japanese Foreign Minister, ITN (1959) 0.6%
Russell Harty/Grace Jones, BBC (1981) 0.6%
Robin Day/John Nott (1982) 0.6%
Oprah Winfrey/Michael Jackson (1993) 0.6%
Melvyn Bragg/Francis Bacon, South Bank Show, ITV (1985) 0.6%
Baroness (PD) James/Mark Thompson, Today, Radio 4 (2009) 0.6%
Adam Boulton/Alastair Campbell, Sky News (2010) 0.5%
David Frost/Kenneth Tynan & David Irving (1968) 0.4%
Hugh Stephenson & James Bellini/Sir James Goldsmith, The Money Programme (1977) 0.3%
Paula Yates/Michael Hutchence, Big Breakfast, C4 (1994) 0.3%
Peter White/Christopher Reeve, No Triumph No Tragedy, Radio 4 (1999) 0.3%
Dan Rather/Saddam Hussein, CBS (2003) 0.3%
Jeremy Paxman/Mark Thompson, Newsnight, BBC2 (2010) 0.3%
Redhead/Nigel Lawson, Today, Radio 4 (1987) 0.2%
Jenni Murray/Monica Lewinsky, Woman’s Hour, Radio 4 (1999) 0.2%
Ruby Wax with Jim Carrey, BBC1 (2003) 0.2%
Fern Britton/Tony Blair, Fern Britton Meets, BBC1 (2009) 0.2%
Piers Morgan/Cheryl Cole, Life Stories, ITV1 (2010) 0.1%
Brian Oprah Winfrey/Tom Cruise (2005) 0.1%
John Wilson/Bob Geldof, Meeting Myself Coming Back, Radio 4 (2011) 0.1%
Adam Boulton/George & Laura Bush, Sky News (2008) 0%
Jenni Murray/Sharon Shoesmith, Woman’s Hour, Radio 4 (2009) 0%
There could be no doubt: someone had broken into my flat. Three months after arriving in Russia as the Guardian’s new Moscow bureau chief, I returned home late from a dinner party. Everything appeared normal. Children’s clothes lying in the corridor, books piled horizontally in the living room, the comforting debris of family life. And then I saw it. The window of my son’s bedroom was wide open…
The Online News Association’s annual conference and awards took place in Boston at the end of last week.
Here is a round-up of the must-read blog posts which will help you sort though the noise of an event that saw 21,000 tweets sent by around 1,200 journalists.
The second screen is literally what it sounds like — the screen readers look at in addition to the TV. This could be an iPad, a laptop or a phone.
According to [Patrick Stiegman of ESPN] stats about Internet consumers, 85 million Americans consume both TV and the web simultaneously. This provides a huge opportunity for news organisations to serve fans in real time, alongside live events.
One particularly interesting area for UK news sites to consider is how the New York Times, which doesn’t control the first screen, competes with eyes for the second screen.
The post explains how Brian Hamman and Tyson Evans of the New York Times have observed and outlined the cycle for event coverage online:
1. Event cycle: What’s happening, how much can I get about the event before it happens?
2. Analysis cycle: When event is started, what does it all mean
3. Conversation cycle: What are other people and my social circle saying and how can I chime in?
To accomodate for all three cycles of these major events, the best project to point at is The New York Times’ Oscars coverage, which was a dashboard built with three streams.
And the post explains how you can do it all for free:
If you don’t have a team of developers to spend three months building these tools (as Evans and Hammans spent on the Oscars site), there are free tools you can use to achieve the same thing:
If you were unable to take a trip to the US to attend #ONA11, you can learn about key developments in journalism at news:rewired – connected journalism, which takes place in London on 6 October.
It is “highly probable” that the Sun on Sunday will launch in January, media commentator Stephen Glover predicted in the Independent today.
In his article on the rumoured new Sunday paper, Glover also explains why he thinks a Sun on Sunday makes better business sense than the News of the World, which “despite selling some 2.8 million copies a week, was barely breaking even”.
Glover argues that the Sun will need to recruit a fraction of the 160 News of the World journalists in order to “produce a seventh-day edition of the newspaper”.
If it sells at 50p (half the price of the News of the World, and cheaper than Sunday red-top rivals) it would probably be profitable with a circulation of a million. In the event, it may well sell many more copies than that.
Glover describes the axing of the News of the World and anticipated creation of the seven-day Sun as a “cynical charade” by the Murdochs.
In other words, far from being a sacrifice, shutting down the Sunday red-top and launching a seventh-day edition of The Sun carries a significant economic benefit. The Murdochs were able to represent themselves as acting decisively and almost altruistically – rather as a farmer might regretfully shoot a rabid dog that has been a cherished family pet. Now it turns out that the dog was old, unloved and expensive to keep, and there is a young puppy waiting in the wings which will be a much better proposition. The whole process has been a cynical charade.
He also argues the case against the launch of a red-top title from Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Daily Mail. After an initial boost for the Mail on Sunday, sales have now slowed, according to August circulation figures, and Glover suggests “Associated would probably be wise to stay away”.
Associated Press has teamed up with 40 newspapers in the US to roll out advertising on the papers’ phone apps and the mobile versions of their websites, according to paidContent.
The rollout of iCircular, a coupon system which focuses on driving customers into their local retail stores, begins today (19 September).
The iCircular feature will be found within newspaper mobile apps on the iPhone. The feature will be available on other formats, such as Google’s Android, later on. It’s HTM5-based, so that will also be available on newspapers’ web and mobile wap sites and ultimately ease iCircular’s transfer to other operating systems. The app will be situated within a special “deals” section on each of the newspapers’ apps and mobile sites.
“It’s essentially an app within an app,” said Mary Junck, chairman of AP’s board of directors’ revenue committee and CEO of Lee Enterprises. “We didn’t want to create an app separate from the newspapers. We wanted something that would be as integrated into the newspapers as a Sunday circular is in the print editions.”
Huffington Post UK has launched The Gauge, a new platform which invites debate around the biggest news story of the day on the Post’s new UK website while harnessing the power of social networks.
The tool also works to produce a visualisation of the results, giving a quick snapshot of the overall standpoint of the online community on any given topic.
Users are invited to “agree” or “disagree” with a daily proposition, and thereafter they’re invited to elaborate. It only takes a second or two to weigh in, and users can post more detailed responses on Twitter and Facebook.
The tool will also help to connect users to the site’s bloggers, through the ability to agree or disagree with their views and click through to see all the posts written by the individual. Users can also submit ideas for their own blog through The Gauge.
Editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post UK, Carla Buzasi, will be speaking at news:rewired – connected journalism on 6 October as part of the “bringing the outside in” panel. On the day Carla will be discussing the site’s strategy for drawing in content from outside its own four walls and how this is then integrated into its own output.
