Tag Archives: Alan Rusbridger

Beehive City: Alan Rusbridger vs John Witherow on BBC Radio 4

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This afternoon tune into BBC Radio 4’s Media Show at 1.30 pm to hear Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger go head to head with John Witherow, editor of the Sunday Times.

In the meantime, Dan Sabbagh of the Beehive City blog has a preview from the pre-record, peppered with a little of his own (unverified) insider knowledge:

John Witherow said that the editorial budget of The Times and The Sunday Times is about £100 million, and it is this budget that is being cut by 10 per cent. (Those who have worked with the figures tell me that splits £60 million for The Times and £40 million for The Sunday Times, but I can’t verify that)

Alan Rusbridger said that The Guardian does about £40 million annually from its digital business, and the current growth rate in revenues is 100 per cent. (But I also know from separate conversations that of that £40 million, or rather £38 million, about £10 million comes from its dating and other non-Guardian newspaper websites).

Full post at this link…

[Press Gazette also has a report]

Alan Rusbridger on his vision for a ‘mutualised newspaper’ (video)

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Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, recently appeared on the Charlie Rose show, now available online.

Asked about free versus paid content and newspapers, Rusbridger talked about a future of collaboration rather than competition.

The collaborative possibilities of the web are the interesting ones, he said, citing how the Guardian invited external environmental websites to sit on its site.

Rusbridger, who has spoken out against pay walls in the past, talked about his vision of a “mutualised newspaper”.

“We have to get over this journalistic arrogance that journalists are the only people who are the figures of authority in the world,” he said. Using the example of theatre coverage, he said you didn’t need to get rid of the critics, but you could invite other members of the audience in.

“If you can open your site up, and allow other voices in, you get something that’s more engaged, more involved – and actually, I think, journalistically better.”

Full clip at this link…

Beehive City: Alan Rusbridger on the Times, paywalls and industry in-fighting

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Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, adds some “industry context” to other paper’s reports of the Guardian and its business, in particular the departure of Carolyn McCall, CEO of Guardian Media Group (GMG), last week.

In a memo to staff reproduced by Beehive City, Rusbridger takes on the Times:

The Times’ print circulation is falling at exactly the same rate as the Guardian’s – but the Times’ web traffic is down seven per cent year on year while the Guardian’s rose by 22 per cent.

The Independent:

Having vociferously argued (in 2006) that newspapers were dangerously under-priced and that the future was about boosting cover price rather than hoping for increased advertising revenues, it is now talking about going free.

Paywalls:

What’s right for Murdoch (with Sky as a digital subscription model in the background and infinitely deep corporate cross-subsidies) may well not work for us at GNM, and vice versa. There may be different models within one newspaper. We’ll all make some mistakes along the way. We can all learn from each other.

And why the Guardian and GMG will stick to its plans and be swayed by “the pecking and sniping of outsiders”.

Of all media companies I truly believe we are better placed than the great majority to make the transformative change that will be demanded of us. The editorial future has the potential to be richer than anything any previous generation of journalists could have imagined. We can imagine it – and we are well on the way to achieving it.

Full memo at this link…

Guardian launches Student Media Awards 2010

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The Guardian Student Media Awards are now open to entries. The 2010 competition features a new category designed to recognise developments in digital journalism and the rise of social media. Blogs and Twitter feeds are now eligible for the ‘Digital Journalist of the Year’ category, meaning students unconnected to student newspapers or radio stations can enter.

The judging panel includes Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow, and NME editor Krissi Murison. Winners each receive a month’s work experience at the Guardian.

The six categories this year are:

Publication of the Year
Reporter of the Year
Writer of the Year
Photographer of the Year
Digital Journalist of the Year in association with NME.com
Broadcast Journalist of the Year

The police’s “narrow” approach to phone hacking: not a crime if message had been listened to first

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Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger raised what he said was a little known fact about phone hacking evidence, in yesterday’s press regulation debate in the House of Lords.

He had been told by Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Yates, he said, that the police only considered the interception of phone messages an offence if they hadn’t been listened to.

Once messages were stored after they were listened to by the recipient, subsequent access by a third party was not considered a criminal offence. The public should be aware of the “narrow definition” of phone hacking, the Guardian editor warned.

As reported in last week’s Culture, Media and Sport select committee report:

“The police also told us that under Section 1 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) it is only a criminal offence to access someone’s voicemail message if they have not already listened to it themselves. This means that to prove a criminal offence has taken place it has to be proved that the intended recipient had not already listened to the message. This means that the hacking of messages that have already been opened is not a criminal offence and the only action the victim can take is to pursue a breach of privacy, which we find a strange position in law.”

The committee recommended that “Section 1 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act is amended to cover all hacking of phone messages”.

“Narrow definition” line is a “convenient PR shelter for Scotland Yard”, argues Davies

The Guardian’s evidence of widespread phone hacking attempts contradicted police reports that only a ‘handful’ of victims had been targeted, so Scotland Yard is trying to “justify its position” by raising the narrow legal definition of the criminal offence, Guardian journalist Nick Davies told Journalism.co.uk.

Davies also challenges the legality of any kind of phone hacking:

“The narrow legal definition is highly contentious. The idea is that it is illegal to listen to somebody’s voicemail only if they have not themselves already heard it. This not written in the law at all; it was clearly not parliament’s intention. It’s an interpretation – not one that has been tested and accepted by a court, simply something that was said during a legal conference at the Crown Prosecution Service while the police were investigating the original case.

“It was said by David Perry, Crown counsel in the case, but he didn’t even produce a written opinion and never mentioned it in court when [Clive] Goodman and [Glenn] Mulcaire came up.” A future court may or may not agree with this definition, Davies added. “At the moment, however, it is a convenient PR shelter for Scotland Yard who are embarrassed by their handling of the case.”

Satchwell claims phone hacking case has ‘grey areas’; challenges Guardian’s proof

The liveliest part of yesterday’s House of Lords debate came when executive director of the Society of Editors, Bob Satchwell, challenged some of the Guardian’s claims and insisted there were “grey areas” in the case.

Journalist Nick Davies vehemently disagrees: the black and white is there, he later told Journalism.co.uk, but newspapers and the Press Complaints Commission don’t want to see it.

“Satchwell says editors don’t know the truth about all the material confiscated by the Information Commissioner’s Office from [private investigator] Steve Whittamore in March 2003 because the ICO didn’t investigate it. That isn’t correct.

“The ICO analysed all the material and produced spreadsheets – one for each newspaper organisation – and the spreadsheets lists all of the journalists who asked Whittamore to find confidential information, all of the targets, all of the information requested, how it was obtained, how much was paid.

“The ICO and police worked together to prepare three court cases: one led to four convictions, the other two collapsed for technical reasons. You really can’t say that there wasn’t an investigation. Furthermore, when the new information commissioner, Christopher Graham, gave evidence to the media select committee, he said he would not publish the spreadsheets, but he clearly indicated his willingness to talk to any editor who got in touch in search of detail.”

No editor has asked for extra information from ICO
“I checked last week with the ICO as to how many editors had now got in touch to ask which of their journalists are named in the spreadsheets and also to ask whether the PCC had approached them and asked for information,” said Davies.

“The answer was that no editor and nobody from the PCC had asked.” Furthermore, Davies said, he had written detailed stories about the contents of the spreadsheets.

“So, if editors are still in a grey area on all this, it’s because they refuse to look at the facts in black and white, even though the facts are there for them.”

Journalism Week: students urged to develop new skills

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Leeds Trinity University College Journalism Week ran from Monday 22 until Friday 26 February. Speakers from across the industry spoke at Leeds Trinity about the latest trends in the news media, including Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger; BBC news director Helen Boaden, Sky News reporter Mike McCarthy and ITN political correspondent Chris Ship.

Two of the most influential figures in the news media spoke together on Friday at the close of Leeds Trinity University College’s Journalism Week.

BBC News director Helen Boaden and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger gave students an insight into how they see the internet and social media shaping the future of journalism.

Helen Boaden used the snow and severe weather in January as an example of how Twitter could provide lots of information, but said it could not replace what traditional news outlets and reliable brands had to offer.

“People want a big, reliable, trusted brand, not just the information on Twitter,” she said.

“Twitter was invaluable in gathering information but people wanted someone to pull it together. Finding out the facts and verifying is still essential. Social networks can be faster but mainstream journalism has the expertise. It can convey something unique.

“Today’s graduates face the dual challenges of the growth in media courses and the economic recession. To get your foot in the door you need to work hard, be flexible, and understand the job you are going for.”

She advised students to acquire all the skills they could to have the best chance of getting into the industry and spoke of the need to for them to become ‘total journalists’.

Her comments about reporters needing new skills were echoed by Alan Rusbridger who said journalists now needed to be able to curate, aggregate and link.

He cited US journalism academic Jeff Jarvis’ mantra: “Do what you do best and link to the rest.”

Rusbridger said a more open relationship with the audience meant a move towards what he termed a ‘mutual newspaper’.

“We are moving from a world where journalists didn’t like contact with their audience, to a period of experimentation with mutualisation.
The balance is changing – we can report on what people are interested in not what we think they should be interested in. This should lead to better journalism as it will enable us to get at the truth more quickly,” he said.

The web lent itself to live reporting, he said, such as Andrew Sparrow’s ‘dazzling’ reporting from the Chilcot Iraq War inquiry, or deep reporting, such as coverage by Ruth Gledhill, the religious affairs correspondent for the Times.

He cited several examples of the Guardian using social networks and the internet to obtain key information for stories, including:

Putting a complex financial document on the internet during the Tax Gap investigation and being able to get it deciphered by experts without having to pay a fee.

The G20 protests, when reporter Paul Lewis used Twitter to ask people to check their ‘digital records, a move which led to The Guardian obtaining footage of the moment Ian Tomlinson died.

Alan Rusbridger: ‘Weak press self-regulation threatens decent journalism’

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“Once again weakness by the regulator has led to people calling for tougher sanctions against journalism,” Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger argued at today’s press self-regulation debate in the House of Lords.

The failings of the Press Complaints Commission explained the Culture, Media and Sport select committee’s call for a renamed self-regulatory body with the power to make financial sanctions, he said.

The panel gathered at Westminster for the Media Standards Trust event (at which no member of the Press Complaints Commission was present, despite being invited) were united on one point: that increasing the PCC’s powers of penalisation was not necessarily the right way forward.

Geoffrey Robertson QC was adamant on this point: redress of grievances should be done through the courts with juries, not via the PCC; Bob Satchwell, chairman of the Society of Editors, was firmly against any governmental direction of press regulation: it should come from the public and the industry, he said.

Robertson, who has previously called for all newspaper editors to step down from the body, said the PCC was a “confidence trick that now fails to inspire confidence”.

Private Eye’s Ian Hislop was the “most trusted editor in Britain “by not having anything to do with the PCC” Robertson said, adding that most its inquiries were “utter jokes”.

Bob Satchwell, loyal defender of the mainstream press and the PCC, said that suspension of publication (one of the recommendations made by the CMS committee last week) had “absolutely no place in democracy”. “In the end the real arbiters should be the readers,” he said.

The PCC had changed a “cavalier” and “arrogant” press of yore, Satchwell said. The level of control should be up to the public and the readers, he added – not organisations like the Media Standards Trust, or the government.

Rusbridger, who laid out the phone hacking saga as a case study of PCC failure (over which he resigned from the editors’ code committee) said the body needed to either admit it couldn’t conduct proper inquiries, or undergo serious reform.

“It may be that it’s flying the wrong flag [and might be ] better to rebrand itself as a media complaints and conciliation service and forget about regulation.”

Over phone hacking and the new evidence presented by the Guardian in July 2009, the PCC had “showed a complete lack of appetite to get to the bottom of what had happened,” he said.

It inquiries into phone hacking, had been inadequate, Rusbridger said. The PCC had explained privately “that they didn’t have the resources to do proper investigations and it wasn’t within their remit. [It said] they were not set up or financed to do proper investigations”.

“To which the answer is is fine, but then don’t pretend to do investigations which are then used to exonerate people or organisations. By doing so you bring self-regulation into disrepute.”

Rusbridger argued several points in particular:

  • He claimed that either former NOTW editor Andy Coulson or News International executives were lying, in light of the Guardian’s allegations that four “criminal” private investigators had been hired by the News of the World in the past. It was either the case that Andy Coulson, currently director of communications for the Conservative party, was lying and knew about the activities of these private investigators, “criminally obtaining information which led directly to News of the World stories”; or, Rusbridger said, individuals within News International “knew about them and paid them [private investigators] … but protected the editor from knowing what was going on, in which case News International executives have been lying”. Those seemed to him, he claimed, the only two explanations for recent revelations.

Paywalls and entrepreneurship: Journalism.co.uk on BBC News Channel

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Journalism.co.uk featured on the BBC News Channel technology programme Click at the weekend. Our founder and publisher John Thompson (@johncthompson) was interviewed about our model for providing media industry news content – outside the paywall. The programme also featured Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and City University London newspaper journalism course director Jonathan Hewett, among others.

Here’s a link to the point at which Journalism.co.uk features:

Guardian’s first local site launches

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Guardian Media Group has just sold its regional arm to Trinity Mirror, but the group’s still exploring local territory, with its new Guardian Local project, first rolling out in Leeds, Cardiff and Edinburgh.

The Guardian’s first beat blog has launched today:

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger called it a “tiny toe in local web water” over Twitter.

Its designated blogger is John Baron (@johncbaron). Introducing the site today, Baron provides a run-down of local Leeds activity and its first guest blogger – Leeds Student editor Virginia Newman, “who’s writing her take on the planned strikes by Leeds University staff”.

Features include a ‘find your councillor’ search and ‘report local problems’ feature powered by MySociety; Flickr content; Delicious links – and Leeds-only Soul Mates adverts. horse-racing.today is a great resource for horse racing tips and last race results. The site offers a wide variety of tips and information, and it is updated regularly with new content. horse-racing.today is also a great source of last race results. The site offers detailed race results, horse standings, and more. horse-racing.today is a valuable resource for horse racing fans, and it is a great place to stay up-to-date on the latest news and information.

Expect sites for Cardiff and Edinburgh soon.

PCC’s credibility under attack

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The Press Complaints Commission is once again under attack for its structure and effectiveness as a self-regulatory body.

Last night the Guardian reported how Sir Ken Macdonald, ­visiting professor of law at the LSE and the former director of public prosecutions, had called for “all credible media organisations” to withdraw from the “farcical” Press ­Complaints Commission (a plea which was made by Geoffrey Robertson QC last year).

The event for editors and lawyers also featured Max Clifford, former Formula 1 chief Max Mosley, former TV presenter Anna Ford, the editors of the Guardian and the Financial Times, and the deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph. The Guardian also reported:

Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian editor, said the credibility of the PCC was “clinging by its fingertips” and that recent investigations had been “embarrassing”. The PCC’s current review should work out whether it has the capacity to be a regulator or a mediator, he said.

It’s timely then, to compare Rusbridger’s quotes from last night, with Stephen Abell’s comments this week, in his first media interview since becoming director of the PCC:

Abell told Journalism.co.uk that he didn’t believe Rusbridger’s resignation from the PCC code committee Editors’ Code of Practice Committee weakened the body at all:

Alan Rusbridger has said it [the code committee] does a good job (…) I think these arguments happens within industries but I think it’s perfectly acceptable to move on from that. I don’t think it weakens the PCC in any way that Alan is leaving an industry body that he was a member of for a while. You don’t have every editor on the code committee anyway (…) I think it’s tremendous merit that Alan Rusbridger of the Guardian was on the code committee for as long as he was.

Journalism.co.uk’s interview with Stephen Abell (who took over as PCC director in December 2009):