Category Archives: Newspapers

Financial Times: Sunday version of the Sun on hold due to arrests

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Sean Dempsey/PA

The Financial Times is reporting that the launch of a Sunday newspaper “to replace the News of the World” has been delayed due to the arrests of News International journalists at the weekend.

On Saturday (28 January), four current and former Sun journalists were arrested by officers working on Operation Elveden, the Met team looking into illegal payments to police.

The FT reports that a launch date of 29 April had “been set in stone”. Journalism.co.uk heard late on Friday, the day before the arrests, that the launch date had been brought forward.

The insiders said that managers of News International had decided that the adverse publicity surrounding the arrests and the suspension of the four journalists while police inquiries were going on would hamper any possible launch of a new title, which earlier reports said would be called the Sun on Sunday.

The article includes a comment from anonymous insiders, plus an interview with former chief reporter at the News of the World Neville Thurlbeck.

Mr Thurlbeck said that an internal group, the management and standards committee, set up at the direction of Rupert Murdoch to co-operate with a police investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World, had handed over so much material that it had lost control of the situation.

“The staff [of the Sun] have lost trust in their own management because they [the MSC] don’t believe that they know what is contained in the material that the police now have.”

The FT adds that News International declined to comment.

The full Financial Times article is at this link [part-paywall].

News International to launch Sunday version of the Sun on 29 April, sources say

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Sean Dempsey/PA

News International is planning to launch a Sunday version of its popular UK tabloid newspaper the Sun on 29 April, sources have told Journalism.co.uk.

Staff have been secretly working on the new publication since January and it is believed some former News of the World employees (casual and/or full-time) are involved.

News International has declined to comment. After Journalism.co.uk tweeted about the planned launch date last night, the Telegraph’s home news reporter Matthew Holehouse also tweeted that News International would neither “confirm or deny”.

On Monday MP Tom Watson tweeted that a source had told him a “Sunday Sun” was due for launch in April:

Update: Journalism.co.uk heard late on Friday (27 January) that the launch date is to be brought forward.

InPublishing: New chief executive’s plans for Johnston Press

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InPublishing has a revealing interview with Johnston Press’ new chief executive, a former technology boss with no newspaper experience.

Ray Snoddy interviews Ashley Highfield, who was former head of technology at the BBC and later in charge of Microsoft’s online and consumer operations, on his plans for the newspaper group.

It is worth reading the whole interview to find out why Highfield took up the challenge of joining the company, which seen its share price fall from 480p to 5p.

Here are a couple of extracts:

The new Johnston chief executive also points out that while not a newspaperman, he has run two of the largest online news portals in the UK, MSN and BBC online, where he was editor-in-chief responsible for several hundred online journalists.

Then of course there is the money, which included a welcome package of £500,000 worth of seriously deflated Johnston Press shares.

If the new chief executive can conjure up a little alchemy, find a better model for linking the print and digital world and get the share price on the move then he could become seriously rich.

Those however who expected Highfield to come in to Johnston Press and wave a magic digital wand on his first day at the beginning of November have already expressed disappointment.

Highfield insists he has a digital strategy but says it would be “premature” to say in any detail how he is going to implement it.

Highfield discusses content dissemination via iPads and other devices (incidentally, JP title the Scotsman launched a £7.99-a-month iPad edition earlier this week), but was less forthcoming about paywall plans (JP dismantled its trial walls in April 2010).

And what about paywalls and charging for online content?

“Watch this space”, is all Highfield will say but, clearly, increasing digital revenues is a central part of the emerging strategy.

The full InPublishing interview is at this link.

Press Gazette: Neville Thurlbeck tells his part in ‘Jacobean revenge drama’ of hacking

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Neville Thurlbeck, the former chief reporter at the News of the World, has penned a first person account of his part in the phone-hacking saga.

The eloquent Thurlbeck certainly doesn’t hold back in the dramatic stakes:

After years of sitting silently in the wings while a bloody Jacobean revenge tragedy played out on the stage, you probably wonder why I have finally decided to cast myself in a speaking role and stroll briefly onto the stage that bears the corpse of my former newspaper.

As he did in his short statement to the cameras last week, Thurlbeck backs the assertion by News International executives that the evidence was kept from them, claiming there was a “pattern of withholding information”.

Well worth a read, do so on Press Gazette here.

Guardian: Number of possible phone hacking victims close to 5,800, say police

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The number of possible phone hacking victims is now close to 5,800, the Met police have confirmed.

This is 2,000 more than previously stated by the force.

A spokesman for Scotland Yard said:

It is not possible to give a precise figure about the number of people whose phones have actually been hacked but we can confirm that as of today’s date, 3 November 2011, the current number of potentially identifiable persons who appear in the material, and who may therefore be victims, where names are noted, is 5,795. This figure is very likely to be revised in the future as a result of further analysis.

See the full story on Guardian.co.uk at this link.

Jo Yeates’ landlord: media responsible for ‘extraordinary tissue of fabrications’

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Chris Jefferies, who successfully sued eight newspapers for damages after his release. Image: Tim Ireland/PA

Chris Jefferies, the landlord of Joanna Yeates who was arrested on suspicion of her murder but later released, told Radio 4’s Today programme this morning that he was “very disturbed” by the “extraordinary tissue of fabrications” published by the press following his arrest.

Jefferies was appearing on the programme to talk about his work with the Hacked Off campaign to exclude privacy and defamation cases from proposed government reforms to conditional fee agreements (CFAs), otherwise known as “no-win-no-fee” agreements.

After his release Jefferies successfully sued eight newspapers – the Sun, Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, Daily Mail, Daily Star, Daily Express, Daily Record, and the Scotsman – for damages. Two of the titles – the Sun and the Daily Mirror – were also successfully prosecuted by attorney general Dominic Grieve for contempt of court.

Jefferies told the today programme that during his time in custody he had been unaware of his treatment at the hands of the press, which had caused Grieve to issue a warning to all news outlets over possible contempt.

The landlord said that the press had had “a field day” with his reputation and said he had “become a household name for all the wrong reasons”.

Arguing against the proposed CFA reforms, Jefferies claimed that there is “absolutely no question that I would not have been able to take the action I did against the newspapers” if no-win-no-fee agreements were restricted. He went on to say that access to justice would be “undoubtedly denied” to victims of libel or privacy intrusion if reform went ahead.

I think there is absolutely no question that I wouldn’t have been able to take the action that I did because at the moment, one is able to take out a conditional fee agreement and that means that the lawyer’s success fees, which are a percentage of the total legal costs of taking the action, will be paid by the other side and one won’t be responsible for those.

Because these cases can be dragged out over considerable periods of time, particularly if they go to court, then legal fees are astronomic. One couldn’t begin to potentially expose oneself to the risk of having to pay tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds in advance.

Precisely for that reason I felt I had no other course but to take the legitimate action that was recently concluded against the eight newspapers.

Jefferies’ solicitor, Louis Charalambous, said after damages were awarded that the newspapers were paying them “knowing that once the conditional fee agreement rules are changed next year victims of tabloid witch hunts will no longer have the same access to justice.”

Yeates neighbour, Vincent Tabak, was convicted of her murder last week and sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in prison.

NUJ invites News International journalists to meeting

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The National Union of Journalists is due to hold a meeting tomorrow (Wednesday, 2 November) to discuss the recently announced cuts to editorial within the Times and Sunday Times, which is open to member and non-member freelance, casual and staff journalists at the publisher’s titles.

Last month the Times announced it was to cut around 100 staff from the newspapers’ editorial workforce, with the bulk of those said to be to casual staff. It was also confirmed that 20 compulsory redundancies are due to be made from full-time staff at the Sunday Times, which is cutting 30 per cent of its casual editorial workforce.

Following this announcement the NUJ set up a meeting, which is open to any staff who wish to seek advice. It will be held from 1 to 3pm at the Captain Kidd pub, 108 Wapping High Street, E1W 2NE. The union has also invited representatives of the company’s in-house union NISA to attend if interested in working with the NUJ.

Guardian on using Gaddafi corpse images: ‘Complaints arrived within the hour’

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The use of the image of Muammar Gaddafi’s corpse in coverage of his death caused much controversy earlier this month, as newsrooms across the country made decisions about which images to use and with what prominence. At the time newspapers and broadcasters swiftly sought to explain the reasoning for their decisions to their audience, with the BBC’s Steve Herrmann issuing a statement to say the BBC News site would be “working on ways to ensure that we can give appropriate warnings on our website when we think images from the news are especially disturbing”.

And the debate continues, with the Guardian’s readers’ editor Chris Elliot yesterday questioning the way in which the newspaper had used the images of Muammar Gaddafi’s corpse after it emerged he had been killed.

In a column published yesterday Elliot revealed that almost 60 readers wrote to him or the letters page to complain about the use of the images “as gratuitous, exploitative or triumphalist” while others posted criticisms online.

Elliot concludes that while he agreed with the decision to publish at the time, he is now “less convinced” about the manner in which they were used.

The scale of the photo on the newspaper front page of 21 October and prominent picture use on the website took us too close to appearing to revel in the killing rather than reporting it. And that is something that should feature in our deliberations the next time – and there will be a next time – such a situation arises.

Interestingly he added that in 2006, when the Guardian published images of Saddam Hussein after being hanged, it received more than 200 complaints.

However the Guardian’s media commentator Roy Greenslade does not agree with Elliot, arguing that “it was a valid journalistic response to this most extraordinary of news stories to publish the picture and to publish it big on the front page”.

It was news – gruesome, grisly, ghastly (choose your own shock adjective) news – and the images told a story of brutality and mob chaos that could not be explained in words alone.

NYT: Saddam Hussein ordered killing of Observer journalist, records show

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Transcripts of recordings published by the New York Times reveal that Saddam Hussein personally ordered the execution of Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft, who was hanged in Iraq in 1990.

The transcript of a conversation between Iraq’s former leader and the country’s then-foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, reads:

Hussein: We will execute him during Ramadan, in Ramadan, as punishment for Margaret Thatcher.

The documents, which were seized by the US military during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, were yesterday released by the Conflict Records Research Center, a US government archive.

The case of Bazoft, an Iranian-born freelance journalist who worked for the Observer, drew worldwide attention at the time, and the British government appealed for clemency.

The Guardian has more on Bazoft and states:

It appears that even if Bazoft had had British citizenship at the time of his arrest, this would not have saved him.

The document archive reveals the conspiratorial mind-set of Hussein, according to the NY Times, and demonstrates that the Iraqi leader believed Bazoft was an “Israeli spy working for the British”.

The New York Times states:

Even in an age of WikiLeaks, such a detailed record of a foreign leader’s private ruminations is rare.

Phone hacking: Follow Les Hinton’s evidence to MPs

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Former News International and Dow Jones chief executive Les Hinton is giving evidence to MPs on the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee this afternoon.

You can follow his appearance, which he is making via video link from New York, here on Parliament TV.