Category Archives: Magazines

Current charity auction bid for week’s work experience at Vogue: £7,850

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Anna Wintour, the legendary editor-in-chief of Vogue is offering you the opportunity of a lifetime! Just being near her will make you chic.

Chic, perhaps. Out of pocket, most certainly. For this “opportunity of a lifetime” (read: one week’s work experience at Vogue) will set you back at least the current bid of $12,000 (£7,850).

Now in this instance, and in the unnerving number of instances that have preceded it, the winning bid will be donated to charity. In the current climate it seems unlikely that a mainstream media organisation in the UK would have the temerity to simply charge outright for an internship. But, as this article in the Times revealed in February, should it happen, there will be those willing to pay:

[C]ompanies have sprung up offering UK students the chance to hone their skills by paying for an overseas placement in their chosen profession. Clea Guy-Allen, a London journalism student, paid to work on a newspaper in India last summer. “I paid £3,000. My parents helped out but I used savings. The whole experience was good. I was in India for three months and did learn a lot, but not necessarily from working on the paper.”

How much longer will this practice remain too ethically unsound? With unpaid, full-time internships of three to six months eagerly undertaken by the great recently-graduated, will the media industry slip past that particular point on an already slippery slope?

(Via Mediabistro)

PCC upholds complaint over Rod Liddle’s Spectator post; first ever blog censure

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Just in from the Press Complaints Commission: its first ever magazine/newspaper blog censure – for Rod Liddle’s 92 word Spectator post on 5 December 2009, that claimed an “overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community”. A reader’s complaint of inaccuracy was upheld.

“This is a significant ruling because it shows that the PCC expects the same standards in newspaper and magazine blogs that it would expect in comment pieces that appear in print editions,” said PCC director, Stephen Abell.

“There is plenty of room for robust opinions, views and commentary but statements of fact must still be substantiated if and when they are disputed.  And if substantiation isn’t possible, there should be proper correction by the newspaper or magazine in question.”

[Update: Listen to PCC director Stephen Abell discuss the ruling on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme at this link]

Here’s the PCC’s statement:

The Press Complaints Commission has upheld a complaint about an entry by Rod Liddle in his blog for the Spectator.  This is the first time that the PCC has censured a newspaper or magazine over the content of a journalistic blog.

The piece in question was published on 5 December 2009 and claimed that “the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community”.  A reader complained that the statement was incorrect.

In concluding that the article was indeed in breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice, the PCC recognised the magazine’s argument that the nature of a blog post is often provocative and conducive to discussion.  It was certainly true in this case, for example, that a number of readers had taken issue with Mr Liddle’s claim and had commented on the blog.

However, the Commission did not agree that the magazine could rely on publishing critical reaction as a way of abrogating its responsibilities under the Code.  While it had provided some evidence to back up Mr Liddle’s position, it had not been able to demonstrate that the ‘overwhelming majority’ of crime in all the stated categories had been carried out by members of the African-Caribbean community.

Nor could it successfully argue that the claim was purely the columnist’s opinion – rather, it was a statement of fact.  As such, the Commission believed that “the onus was on the magazine to ensure that it was corrected authoritatively online”.  In the absence of such remedial action the Commission upheld the complaint.

NYT: Inc. magazine experiments with virtual office

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Many journalists must have wondered whether, in this desktop-driven publishing age, they could do their job just as easily from home. The staff of Inc. magazine have put that curiosity behind them this month after editor Jane Berentson gave the go-ahead to produce the an entire edition outside of the office.

The idea began as more of a joke than a serious suggestion, made by senior writer Max Chafkin in conjunction with an article he was researching on virtual offices. The edition hits the stands on April 6.

The production went off without a major hitch, with the staff members using nothing more than readily available technology, including Skype and instant messaging. And Ms. Berentson described Mr. Chafkin’s cover piece, “The Office Is Dead. Long Live the Office,” which is infused with first-person details, as richer and more unusual than it would have been without the experiment.

Full story at this link…

BBC News: Canadian magazine The Beaver changes name – to avoid spam filters

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BBC News reports on how a Canadian magazine, the Beaver, has changed its name after 90 years, because its content was getting blocked by spam filters.

[I]n recent times the magazine’s attempts to reach a new online audience kept falling foul of spam filters – particularly in schools – because beaver is also a slang term for female genitalia.

The publishers of the magazine – now to be known as Canada’s History – also noticed that most of the 30,000 or so visitors to their website per month stayed for less than 10 seconds.

Full post at this link…

PS. Looks like LSE student newspaper the Beaver hasn’t yet given up on its name…

Exclusive to our users: Journalism.co.uk in 3D

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Inspired by Grazia’s new 3D issue of its magazine, we’re proud to reveal a product we’ve been working on for several months minutes: Journalism.co.uk in 3D. Our lead design architect Harriet will guide you through the steps.


Background to magazines and augmented reality here.

RBI sells off furniture titles in US

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Reed Business Information (RBI) has sold its Furniture Today group of titles to Sandow Media, part of private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson.

No financial terms have been disclosed for the deal, which includes Furniture Today, Casual Living and Interior Design magazine, according to a media release from Sandow.

The sale is the latest in a series of deals as part of the piecemeal divestment of a number of RBI’s B2B and trade titles, after the company’s attempt to sell the whole of its magazine publishing arm failed in December 2008.

NUJ’s Journalist magazine gets a makeover

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The National Union of Journalists magazine, has had its first proper redesign for 17 years, under new editor Christine Buckley. The Journalist worked with designers SurgeryCreations to make the publication more “modern, attractive, informative and engaging,” she said.

And from the electronic version we’ve seen, we think it looks rather nice with some good content, including pieces by former Times media editor Dan Sabbagh and former Guardian journalist David Hencke. “We’re keen that the publication produced for the journalists’ union is of the highest standard, since our audience of  media professionals expects a professional magazine,” said Buckley, in a release.

“I’ve sought to make the new magazine reflective of the diverse, active union that the NUJ is, and I intend that it should echo the voices of our members from across the union.”

New York and The New Yorker lead National Magazine Awards finalists

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The American Society of Editors (ASME) has published a list of finalists for the 2010 National Magazine Awards.

Among the 51 magazines nominated in 23 categories there are 20 with multiple nominations. New York and The New Yorker are out in front with 10 each and just behind them is National Geographic with seven. Circulation figures for the finalists range from 3,000 (the Antioch Review) to 5.6 million (National Geographic).

The awards gala will take place at Alice Tully Hall in New York City on 22 April.

See the full list of finalists at this link.

iPhone apps compared – how do news publishers shape up?

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The news industry buzzword of the year so far is just three letters long: “app”. Newspapers, magazines and broadcasters are falling over themselves to grab a slice of the burgeoning mobile app economy, led to a huge degree by Apple’s iPhone.

But how developed is the news and publishing app market in the UK what features are now standard? To find out we examined 36 leading apps on the Apple App Store in detail. The apps are varied in style, origin and purpose, but all present information, news and data to the palm of readers’ hands.

Here’s the spreadsheet in full:

(You can download it here…)

And here are some key findings:

  • Price: 24 of the apps we researched – or two thirds – were free. Six require subscription charges.

  • Multimedia: seven apps have a dedicated photo channel, 13 have a video feed and six have a dedicated audio stream.  Some apps, like the broadcast-heavy ITN, feature much video without a specialist channel.
  • Social sharing: Email is by far the most popular story-sharing tool with a third of apps we looked at offering it. Next comes Twitter which features 15 times and Facebook with 12; 11 had no social sharing tools at all.

  • Search: Surprisingly, only 11 apps had a search feature and just two – Guardian and FT.com – used a system of tags for navigation.
  • Offline reading: Seven offered offline reading.
  • Ads: 17 apps offer display or pre-roll ads – half of those we looked at. The solitary app to offer classified advertising was Kent News, from KoS Media and PageSuite.

What does this show? That the gap between the desktop-based digital publishing world and the mobile web is still wide, despite huge leaps in functionality in the last six months. The Guardian’s app, developed in-house with back-end help from 2ergo, is a clear leader by offering a mixture of text, audio and pictures, offline reading/listening and an intuitive content tagging system.

But though that app is priced at £2.39 and has had more than 100,000 downloads and counting, it has no advertising and currently no video. As Guardian News & Media digital content director Emily Bell told me recently, the plan is to launch more apps in the near future, rather than look at more ways of monetising its flagship app.

Only 11 apps we looked at have a search function. But does that matter? Mobile, on-the-go readers checking football scores on their phones while on the bus don’t care what happened two months ago.

However, that is assuming that readers will come back every day – what if readers only care about news on Africa your app hasn’t published anything on it for last week? What will readers do? Go somewhere else.

It’s food for thought for a growing sector and don’t forget – this is all before the iPad touches down, which could set off an apps arms race of its own…

Patrick Smith is a freelance journalist and event organiser, and formerly a correspondent for paidContent:UK and Press Gazette. He blogs at psmithjournalist.com and is on Twitter.