Tag Archives: Alan Rusbridger

Announcement of pay cut for Rusbridger and no bonus for McCall following NUJ comments

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The Guardian News & Media (GNM) editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, has made his ten per cent pay cut public, following public comments by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) about Guardian executive bonus payments at a time when cuts are being made at regional newspapers within the Guardian Media Group (GMG).

Earlier this week the NUJ published a full page advert in the Guardian which said there were “devastating staff cuts to service the ongoing expansion of the Guardian – which is losing many millions but still paying executive bonuses.”

An article published today on MediaGuardian.co.uk reports that Rusbridger is not part of the GMG bonus scheme and had last year informed the Scott Trust, owners of GNM’s parent company GMG, of his plans to take a pay cut.

The article states that Carolyn McCall, chief executive of GMG, had told the company’s remuneration committee in January that she would not take a bonus for the 2008-9 year.

“”Ordinarily such information would only be made public when GMG’s annual report is published in the summer. However, as the group’s two most senior executives, and in light of recent comments by the NUJ, they felt it was appropriate to inform the [union] chapels,” a GMG spokesman said.”

As part of the pay freeze announcement in February GMG said that it would not pay financial performance bonuses for the financial year 2008-2009, ‘which form the larger part of overall bonuses,’ it continues.

“But its remuneration committee – which consists of independent directors and the chair of the Scott Trust – decided that bonuses based on the achievement of personal objectives could be paid.”

GMG has suspended its bonus scheme for this financial year, the article reports.

Rusbridger: Major cities in the UK could be ‘without any kind of verifiable source of news’

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Speaking on the Radio 4 Today programme this morning, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, and the Independent’s first editor Andreas Whittam Smith, expressed their concerns, as well as tentative optimism about the current UK newspaper climate.

“I think we have to face up to the prospect that the first time since the Enlightenment you’re going to have major cities in the UK, in Western democracies, without any kind of verifiable source of news,” said Rusbridger.

“That hasn’t happened for two or three hundred years and I think it is going to have very profound implications,” he said.

Whittam Smith referred to an ‘extremely tough’ environment and said that he was once again being asked on a daily basis whether the Independent will survive.

“The risks to all newspapers are very great,” he said, “[but] the Independent has always been innovative.”

“It has to be innovative again in these circumstances,” he said. Moving into the Daily Mail building ‘is an example of that’ he added. Like other businesses, newspapers will have to ‘share the facilities the customers don’t see’ he said.

He said that people still liked to read print, and that if free newspapers were taken into consideration circulations in the UK are only down by one million: from 14 to 13 million a day.

“People do like the stuff on the printed page – what they don’t like so much any longer is paying for it,” he said.

Rusbridger said that newspaper companies with paternalistic or maternalistic owners would fare better than those ‘with big debt’ and other types of ownership structures.

The Scott Trust [the Guardian’s owner], he said, ‘to some extent protected [the Guardian] from immediate effects of the market’.

Both agreed that there would be newspaper casualties in the near future.

Listen to the clip here.

#soe08 Live Twittering from the Society of Editors conference in Bristol

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Here’s the last 30 updates using the Twitter hashtag #soe08 – you will need to refresh the page to watch it update. Alternatively, you can simply follow the RSS feed or, if you prefer just our own fair Tweets from the very able Laura Oliver, subscribe to Twitter.com/journalism_live

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links for 2008-06-26

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Three spheres of relevance for news online

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Today’s a good day to point at three examples of how you can enhance the value of online news by linking it to additional, meaningful and relevant content.

I’m calling them the Three Spheres of relevance, three different approaches to creating news relevance: locally on a news site by bringing related content to a single destination, by using tagged metadata to enable better linking to relevant material and in the newsgathering process itself (stick with me, this might get into seriously tenuous segue territory).

Thomson Reuters has launched a new version of its semantic tagging tool Open Calais that broadly enhances and builds on its first round of development (hat tip Martin Stabe).

Open Calais has made publicly accessible a piece of internal software used by Thompson Reuters that automatically reads content and creates relationships between different articles, news pieces and reports based on the businesses, places, events, organisations and individuals mentioned in them.

External developers have been encouraged to play with the technology to create an additional level of metadata for their own sites that could offer users a more sophisticated level of additional content around news pieces and blog posts by relying on automatically generated semantic links rather than more rudimentary manual or algorithmically created versions.

The second round of development two has brought WordPress plugins and new modules for Drupal to allow developers to more easily integrate metadata into the applications and third-party tools they are building.

As part of round two, Thomson Reuters has also launched Calais Tagaroo, a WordPress plugin that automatically generates suggested tags for bloggers that want to incorporate additional relevant content to their posts.

This weekend has also seen the launch of New York Times’ Olympics blog, Rings, as a destination where readers can get a plethora of Times content about the Beijing games. The blog is the latest edition to the Times’ Olympics sub-site.

In addition to covering the sporting competition the blog – like the Times’ sub-site – draws in reporting from Times’ sports, foreign and business desks, as well as taking pieces from bureaux in China.

Compare this with the Olympics destination the BBC is running for the games. It could easily draw sporting coverage together with relevant material from the news pages but it has chosen not to make that link and instead leave its users to drift off elsewhere to find out about the other issues surrounding the games. It doesn’t make the most of pulling all the relevant and related material togther in the way the Times does with its blogs and sub-site.

The final example of news organisations working on relevance comes before any of that content is even written.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger told the Press Gazette that as part of the newspaper’s adoption of an integrated print and digital news production process reporting staff would abandon the traditional newsdesk structure to instead ape the set-up of Guardian.co.uk reporting staff and be rearranged into subject-specific teams or ‘pods’ to allow closer working between reporters and the ability file for both the web and the print edition as the story demands.

Press Gazette: Rusbridger says integration of Guardian and Observer will ‘unlock creativity’ of staff

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The independence of the Guardian’s three national titles – Guardian.co.uk, Observer and Guardian in print – will not be compromised by the integration of the news production process across the titles, editor Alan Rusbridger told the Press Gazette.

Rusbridger claimed that combining the titles would ‘unlock the creativity’ of his staff but that the distinct voices of each title would remain. Senior editors met with staff last week to discuss the future of the newspapers as it integrates its production processes.

Rusbridger attacks Chinese ‘censorship’ as Tibetan riots quelled

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Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has written to the Chinese ambassador in the UK attacking China’s censoring of foreign news websites – including Guardian.co.uk – in the wake of the Tibetan riots.

Mr Rusbridger asked for the ambassador’s assistance in unblocking his website back online and ensuring that access to it remained free of interference.

“As you will be aware, the blackout has coincided with media coverage of the recent unrest in Tibet, forcing the conclusion that this is an act of deliberate and wholly unacceptable censorship,” wrote Mr Rusbridger.

“We are dismayed that Beijing should curtail international press freedom, particularly in Olympic year.”

The move comes in the wake of a violent crackdown on protests in Tibet by Chinese authorities that have also attempted to block the media from reporting what was going on.

Tibetan exiles say at least 80 protesters died in the clashes as reporters were being forced to leave.

The Foreign Correspondents Club of China reported that as many as two-dozen reporters have been turned away from or forced to leave Tibetan areas and government censorship of the internet and television broadcasts was also hampering journalists’ work.

“Reporting interference is not in the interest of the Chinese government which is trying to show a more open, transparent and accountable image to the world,” said FCCC President Melinda Liu, in a piece carried on the FCCC website.

“Such interference is not in keeping with reporting regulations adopted during the Olympics period – and is especially not in keeping with the international community’s expectations of an Olympic host nation,” added Liu.

Writing for the Telegraph.co.uk Richard Spencer claimed to have been ordered to leave the Tibetan town he was staying in by local police (Spencer also points to some bloggers who are managing to get information onto the net about the crackdown)

The Honk Kong Journalists Association (hat tip Roy Greenslade) is also reporting that journalists from at least six Hong Kong media organisations have been placed under escort and ordered out of Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.