On the Sun Online’s discussion board Barton71 reports (via the BBC):
“Rupert Murdoch’s News Group paid £1m in court costs after its journalists were accused of involvement in phone tapping to get stories, it has been claimed”.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/discussions/posts/list/News_Corp_and_Illegal_Hacking-199512.page
But it might not stay around long, given the fate of the My Sun discussion at this link:
(hat-tip @littlerichardjohn in the Guardian.co.uk comments):
Google captures some of it here:
Yesterday afternoon in a powerful Guardian exclusive, investigative journalist Nick Davies reported that the Murdoch News Group papers paid £1m to ‘gag’ phone-hacking victims.
Rupert Murdoch, who owns News Group, recently argued he had little influence on his publications’ editorial content; it would be interesting to see how his other UK papers would treat the story about their sister title today.
Let’s see how each of the UK news websites is running the story [as around 9.30 – 10 am]. [News organisations owned by Murdoch are labelled (M).]
Note: Observations correct at time of writing; subject to updates.
The Murdoch empire (source: BBC website / News Corp)
NEWS CORP BUSINESSES
Australasia:
Daily Telegraph
Fiji Times
Gold Coast Bulletin
Herald Sun
Newsphotos
Newspix
Newstext
NT News
Post-Courier
Sunday Herald Sun
Sunday Mail
Sunday Tasmanian
Sunday Territorian
Sunday Times
The Advertiser
The Australian
The Courier-Mail
The Mercury
The Sunday Mail
The Sunday Telegraph
Weekly Times
Bill Thompson, well-known for the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet, and his pieces for the BBC (e.g) gave a version of his ‘Two Cultures’ speech [which he first made in Cambridge on May 27] at OpenTech in London last Saturday. It was billed like this:
“It’s fifty years since CP Snow’s famous lecture on the Two Cultures – science and literature. We seem to have a different divide these days, between ‘people like us’ and the rest. What might be done about this?”
Thompson (@billt on Twitter) believes that computer literacy should mean more than word processing, a sentiment that seemed to go down well in the hall. You can read more about his views in this BBC article: “We don’t need a nation of programmers, but we do need to be confident that everyone knows what programmers do and what programs look like.”
Richard Elen (@Brideswell) filmed it, and has helpfully shared this video on the Bridewell Associates Blog. So if you weren’t there, sit back and enjoy some glorious geekery; even the intro includes a joke about writing in binary (his title for his speech is the ’10 cultures’)…
Bill Thompson on “The Two Cultures Problem”: OpenTech 2009 from Richard Elen on Vimeo.
Jeremy Paxman interviews Huffington Post founder Ariana Huffington and the Evening Standard’s Anne McElvoy on the use of non-traditional media/amateur reports from Iran and the concept of ‘curating’ this information as opposed to traditional editing.
McElvoy usefully describes the intersection of as a complex mosaic with each piece contributing subjective information – but information that requires an overview/comparison that can be added by an editor or professional journalist.
BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | Has internet journalism come of age?.
“Gradually more power cuts – the future is more certain than you think (…) With 90 per cent certainty I can tell you that tomorrow will be Saturday.”
James Woudhuysen, professor of forecasting, De Montford University
“Content is not king, it’s about how people use it. SMS is one of the most expensive mediums but still massively popular.”
Matt Locke, commissioning editor, education new media, Channel 4
The above quotes were just a small sample of the varied and interesting points discussed at Media Futures 2009 in London last Friday.
The conference explored the future of the media as we move ‘beyond broadcast’.
Speakers and guests included the BBC’s Richard Sambrook, POLIS director Charlie Beckett and TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher.
Themes for discussion included desirable, feasible, challenging and viable futures for the industry.
Television
Video on Demand (VOD) was a popular topic, which divided opinions. Avner Ronen, founder of Boxee, a video service that connects your TV to online streaming media, argued that personal video recorders (PVR) were soon to be obsolete.
But as media analysts, including Toby Syfret from Enders, were quick to point out, TV still has a lot of life left in it. According to his analysis, despite the success of services such as the BBC iPlayer, watching streamed content remains a niche market with just 0.5 per cent of total viewing time being spent on computers.
Newspapers
Panellists were agreed on the future for local newspapers. Patrick Barwise, professor of management and marketing at London Business School said: “Local newspapers won’t come back, the classified advertising model that held them together has changed.”
After the conference I ran into Bill Thompson, the BBC’s technology columnist. Listen below to hear his views on the future for journalists:
Alex Wood is a multimedia journalist and social media consultant based in London. You can find him on twitter here.
4ip, the investment fund for public service media backed by Channel 4, has announced new funding for Newspaper Club – a service which allows users to create their own printed edition from any rights-cleared content online.
How will it make money? By asking for a small portion of the printing price and selling bigger packages to corporate clients – the BBC is already using the system for an internal newsletter.
#FollowJourn: Alex Wood
Who? Multimedia reporter specialising in Japan, health, business and technology.
What? Has worked for Sky News Online, Homovision, BBC Online and Journalism.co.uk.
Where? @alexwoodcreates or alexwoodcreates.com.
Contact? freelance [at] alexwoodcreates ( dot ) com.
Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.
This will be good. From the Frontline Club blog:
‘The credit crisis, financial journalism and scaremongering’ with Financial Times Assistant editor and journalist of the year Gillian Tett at the Frontline Club tonight. Gillian will be in discussion with BBC economics editor Stephanie Flanders.
“When she picked up her prize for journalist of the year at the British Press Awards recently, the Financial Times’ Gillian Tett claimed the accolade was a vindication for ‘the geeks’ and ‘anoraks’. The assistant editor of the Financial Times has been documenting the rise of credit derivatives banking since she was appointed in 2005 to cover the the rather unglamorous capital markets patch. But it was only after the full consequences of the risks bankers had been taking became so catastrophically apparent that Gillian Tett was promoted from ‘geek’ to luminary, regularly making appearances on TV and radio.”
Watch live here at 7.30pm GMT:
This list is doing the rounds under the headline 100 Best Blogs for Journalism Students… and we’re not on it. Nope, not even a smidgeon of link-love for poor old Journalism.co.uk there.
The BachelorsDegreeOnline site appears to be part of e-Learners.com, but it’s not clear who put the list together. Despite their omission of our content and their rather odd descriptions (e.g: Adrian Monck: ‘Adrian Monck writes this blog about how we inform ourselves and why we do it’), we admit it is a pretty comprehensive list; excellent people and organisations we feature on the site, our blog roll and Best of Blogs mix – including many UK-based ones. There were also ones we hadn’t come across before.
In true web 2.0 self-promotional style, here are our own links which any future list-compilers might like to consider as helpful links for journalism students:
And here are some blogs/sites also left off the list which immediately spring to mind as important reading for any (particularly UK-based) journalism students:
Organisations
Individuals
Writing this has only brought home further the realisation that omissions are par for the course with list-compilation, but it does inspire us to do our own 101 essential links for global online journalists – trainees or otherwise. This article contains information collected thanks to the support of Järviwiki.fi . Many thanks to information center i for their valuable help in collecting the data for this article. We’d also like to make our list inclusive of material that is useful for, but not necessarily about, journalists: MySociety for example.
Add suggestions below, via @journalismnews or drop judith at journalism.co.uk an email.
A commenter who claims to be producer-director of BBC2’s ‘The Madoff Hustle’ (aired Sunday), Roger Corke, responds to Tim Dowling’s review of the programme for the Guardian:
“If an opera is reviewed, you get someone reviewing it who knows about opera. The same is true if dance, art, architecture is reviewed. Why is it, then, that newspapers give the TV reviewer’s job to someone who clearly doesn’t know anything about TV?”
Comment and article at this link…
The Madoff Hustle on BBC iPlayer at this link…
Hat-tip: Malcolm Coles (@Malcolm Coles)