Remember the Papua New Guineans suing Jared Diamond and the New Yorker for $10 million in damages? Background at this link.
Damages have been raised from $10 million to $45 million.
Last week, attourneys for Diamond and Advance Publications filed their answer to the lawsuit in New York state court, denying all of the defamation allegations.
The court trial date is yet to be set.
Mark Watts, one of the candidates campaigning for the NUJ Journalist magazine and website editorship, has issued a statement to 19,000 of the union’s members claiming to ‘expose’ another candidate Rich Simcox as a member of the NUJ Left, arguing that this section of the NUJ ‘is trying to hijack the union from its members’.
However, scepticism over whether Simcox’s allegiance was much of a secret has already been raised by Jon Slattery on his blog:
“Watts names the NUJ Left candidate as Rich Simcox. But is this such a shocking revelation? Simcox told me when I revealed he was standing in the election on September 3 that he had the support of the NUJ Left and I reported the fact here in the second paragraph of the story.
“Watts, however, alleges that Simcox has not revealed his NUJ Left backing in his election material. His email ends dramatically: ‘Lance the boil. Save the NUJ’. Simcox told me today: “I didn’t realise it was such a secret. It comes up fourth when you Google my name.”
Journalism.co.uk has contacted Rich Simcox for a response to Watts’ statement, in the meantime, please leave your thoughts below this post. What questions would you like to ask Watts or Simcox?
We’ve created a special section of our bulletin board for you to quiz the would-be editors on their plans for the union title and why they should take the helm. It’s already very active, with numerous responses from six of the eight candidates. Add your question by posting a new topic on the forum at this link or by emailing us at laura or judith [at] journalism.co.uk.
Mark Watts statement as follows:
Some chilling observations on the idea that good content will out in the current industry downturn from (now former) Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl, after publisher Conde Nast announced the magazine’s closure.
“It was a magazine that depended on luxury advertising, unlike many of the epicureans. Most of our competition gets a lot of different kinds of advertising. Our main categories were travel, automotive, financial, jewellery – that all went away (…) I guess at a certain point the company decided that advertising wasn’t coming back. I wasn’t privy to those discussions,” Reichl told the Observer.
She goes on (suggesting perhaps too much distance between the magazine’s editorial and commercial teams?):
“I did know that this was bad, but on the other hand our circulation had never been better. The editorial product was a big hit with the readers, and I did not anticipate this.”
Community Care has once more challenged the Sun’s attitude to social workers following an invitation from the General Social Care Council to its annual conference to the paper’s problem page editor ‘Dear’ Deidre Sanders.
According to a blog post from workforce editor Daniel Lombard, Community Care forum users were outraged by the move, arguing that the views of Deidre’s employers would prevent the two parties from working together. Some called for the invitation to be revoked.
The agony aunt responded with an article for the magazine’s site in which she outlined her commitment to improving the sector and using her clout within the newspaper industry to build bridges.
But according to Lombard, her mention of the baby Peter case in the piece undermined the agony aunt’s intentions:
“It was a clear and convincing argument – until the arrogance of her employers seeped into an otherwise sensible contribution to the debate (…) Was it really necessary to once again seek to justify her employer’s misguided attack on the profession in the wake of the baby Peter case?”
ComCare’s campaign to improve media coverage of social work, Stand Up Now for Social Work, was launched partly in response to the Sun’s coverage of baby Peter’s death. The newspaper ran a petition calling for every social worker who had been involved in the case to be sacked and prevented from working with children again. Readers were encouraged to contact the newspaper if they knew any of the social workers involved, community editor for Community Care, Simeon Brody, told Journalism.co.uk back in March.
The magazine also recently ran a survey of journalists to gauge their knowledge of social work in the UK. Sixty-eight per cent of respondents thought that a care worker was a social work post, while 37 per cent said they didn’t know if social work was better today than 15 years ago.
The US-based National Magazine Awards are adding 12 new categories to the original 22 so that online magazines can receive the awards. The new categories will reward work in mobile media, interactive tools, podcasting, video and community.
The National Magazine Awards, which will be presented in April 2010, have been running since 1966; winning one is considered the industry’s top accolade. The digital awards are to be given out at a different ceremony to the others, however: a lunch during an online magazine conference in March. Sid Holt, the chief executive of ASME insisted that they will still be as prestigious as the rest of the awards, according to the New York Times.
The Digital ‘Ellies’ (named after the Alexander Calder ‘Elephant’ trophy) categories include: General Excellence, Digital Media; Mobile Media; Design, Digital Media; Photography, Digital Media; News Reporting; Blogging; Regular Department or Section; Multimedia Feature or Package; Interactive Tool; Podcasting; Video; and Community.
SubHub, a system for niche magazine publishers and individual writers to charge for online access to their content, has received first-round venture funding.
According to paidContent:UK’s report, this brings the total investment in the company to $1.2 million since it was set up in 2004 ‘in between the original and current paid content trends’.
Bloomberg will acquire BusinessWeek magazine from McGraw-Hill Cos, it was announced yesterday. The terms of the arrangement were not made public, but ‘knowledgeable sources’ said the price is between $2 million and $5 million, reports BusinessWeek.
The BusinessWeek sales process has had ‘plenty of turns’ over the last three months, paidContent comments. It charts the sale to Bloomberg though its archive of links.
In a pre-emptive attempt to fill the gap that will be left when Conde Nast closes luxury food publication Gourmet, a collection of (predominantly North American) food and drink journalists have launched a new site.
Zester Daily will cover ‘all aspects of what we eat and drink’, according to a press release.
The site has been set-up by former LA Times writer Corie Brown and plans to create a network of professional contributors.
Most interestingly, the site says: “Zester Daily uses an innovative financial model, in which every writer is invested in its success.” The release suggests that, while the site will be primarily advertising-funded, writers will take part in some form of revenue-share. “[M]embers are rewarded based on their reputations and their ability to find an audience for their work,” says the release.
If you’re looking for something to raise a smile on a Tuesday afternoon (or any other day of the week for that matter), Journalism.co.uk would like to point you towards the blog takeaweirdbreak, which is collecting a fantastic array of funny – and almost unbelievable – headlines reportedly from Take A Break magazine.
Some choice favourites:
“My giant tongue wouldn’t stop growing”
“I snogged a swan!”
Following on from Peter Kirwan’s Wired.co.uk article on the move away from journalism and journalists in business magazine publishing, TechCrunch reports on consumer mag publisher Hearst’s new site, LMK (or ‘Let Me Know’).
Using semantic filtering technology the site will aggregate and filter content to create curated topic pages – each with its own freelance editor and designers. The best sources for each topic, e.g. college football, are selected by the editing team and then the technology takes over.
So far, sports topics seem to be dominating the launch – can such semi-automated pages work for breaking news and other news areas?