The Mansfield Chad is running a seven-week video series (eight episodes) on retired editor Jeremy Plews.
Plews, who joined the paper as a trainee, was editor for 36 years at the paper and stepped down last week. Below is the first instalment, the work of chief photographer Roger Grayson, sub-editor Peter Hemmett and digital editor Tom Pegg:
We’re reliably informed by Tom Pegg that Jeremy never took a day off sick in his 36 years…
The US paper will partner an as yet unestablished news service, being created by former Star-Ledger managing editor Rick Everett, for local news coverage.
The new organisation is expected to hire around 30 reporters, including college students. The collaboration will boost the paper’s coverage after it lost 151 newsroom staff last year.
It would seem that Roy Greenslade is in a ‘small handful of journalists’ who blog straight-to-screen at the Guardian. Today in the Guardian, Siobhain Butterworth’s weekly column looks at the media regulation debate following the publication of the Media Standards Trust report.
This part, near the end of the article, is particularly interesting, given Roy Greenslade’s comments last week:
“The trust reports that many newspapers are giving journalists responsibility for their own editing and that this is increasing the risk of inaccuracies. Janine Gibson, editor of the Guardian’s website, says this is not true of the Guardian: “The majority of our blogs are edited and subbed before publication. I can only think of a small handful of journalists who blog direct to the web without being either desked or subbed first. We don’t publish news stories undesked and although our journalists can publish pictures direct to blogs, they rarely do.”” Open door, Guardian.co.uk 16/02/09
According to Press Gazette’s report from last week’s Publishing Expo, Roy Greenslade said that he subs his own blog:
“I write my blog every day, I don’t need a sub to get in the way,” said the former Daily Mirror editor turned Guardian blogger.
“I produce copy that goes straight on screen – why can’t anyone else do that? You can eliminate a whole structure.
“It’s not perfect, not how I would want it to be – but the thing is, commercially, we have to do it.” PressGazette.co.uk, 13/02/09
Read the “Future of Newspapers” transcript from Charlie Rose’s show on February 11 at this link…
It features: Robert Thomson, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal; Mort Zuckerman, owner and publisher of the New York Daily News and the editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report; and Walter Isaacson, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute (formerly the editor of Time magazine.)
The Independent reports that an editor and publisher have been arrested in India after they reprinted an article by the Independent’s Johann Hari.
“Ravindra Kumar and Anand Sinha, the editor and publisher of the Kolkata-based English daily The Statesman, appeared in court yesterday charged under section 295A of the Indian Penal Code which forbids ‘deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings,'” the Independent reports.
Canadian title the Financial Post published an apology on its website yesterday for an unnamed reporter’s conduct on Twitter:
An apologyToday, a Financial Post reporter responded unprofessionally to another Twitter user on his personal Twitter account.
While the remarks were made on the reporter’s personal Twitter account, the conversation first began when the reporter was acting in his capacity as a reporter for the Financial Post.
We hold – and will continue to hold – all our reporters to a higher standard in how they address anyone, in any forum.
We apologize for the reporter’s conduct.
The reporter in question seems to be @sirdavid (David George-Cosh) who engaged in battle with marketing professional @aprildunford – neatly summed up by Ian Capstick on his MediaStyle blog.
Dunford has drawn a line under the Twitter furore in a blog post, which remphasises why social media needs social awareness – basic manners apply here too.
Interesting to note in the Post’s apology the blurring lines between personal and private. We’ve seen guidelines set out before about journalists and professional/public profiles on social networking sites for example, but the debate seems to be moving onto Twitter.
Most journalists (or other professionals for that matter) would see this as obvious – don’t have an outburst like that full stop. But where does the personal become the public? The Post makes the connection because this conversation started on a work issue – but is it always that easy to draw the line?
As covered earlier on this blog, there are various tools for tracking and engaging in conversations on Twitter, especially where hashtags are used. But how do you publish a themed Twitter stream on your news site or blog, and what other issues are there to consider?
We have experimented with various tools on this blog in order to stream hashtag-themed Tweets (a post on Twitter) into a blog post. The last attempt used a heavily modified WordPress plugin from Monittor. None have been completely satisfactory.
But why would journalists want to do this? Well, imagine if there is an event on your local beat like a football match or other sports game. People are already Twittering from these events. If they could be persuaded to use the same hashtag, then you have the potential of creating a live Twitter stream on your website – a live commentary but from the point of view of several fans, not just one reporter.
Similarly, it could be used to cover breaking news events, basing the Twitter stream on keywords, rather than a hashtag.
For this to work really well though, we decided several functions needed to be in place:
1. The ability to place a stream of Tweets, based on keyword(s) and/or hashtag(s), onto a web page and for that stream to dynamically update (ie not require a page refresh). Ideally the output to be called by <div> tags, rather than a Javascript insert, to cope with content management systems that reject JS in article bodies.
2. Access to legacy Tweets using pagination. The current tools we use only display the last 10 or so Tweets, with no access on our pages to what has been Tweeted before.
3. The ability for administrators to tag certain Tweets within a themed stream and create a new output on another page. The purpose of this is to allow an editor to easily create a summary of the best Tweets for archive purposes.
4. The ability for moderators to manually exclude certain Tweets from a Twitter stream (for moderation purposes).
5. The ability for users to login and post directly to a Twitter stream, from the page on which that Twitter stream is published.
6. Threading based on @replies (probably the most complex proposition in this list).
There did not seem to be any existing tools that covered even half these bases, so we put out a call on a local developer’s email list. Amazingly, it transpired that a local company in Brighton, Inuda, is currently working on a tool that will eventually tick almost all of the above boxes.
Called SocialPlume, the product aims eventually to become a modestly priced subscription service. Jonathan Markwell of Inuda was keen to stress that they are still some way off a public launch, but in the meantime they are keen to hear from publishers and journalists who might be keen to trial the service alongside ourselves. DM @journalismnews or @johncthompson if you are interested.
We would also love to hear other ideas and applications for this service that you might have (please leave a comment).
“The Philadelphia Inquirer and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have been quietly sharing content for nearly two weeks, exchanging daily budgets and trading even the most high-profile stories,” Editor&Publisher reports.
It’s ‘the latest example of the ever-growing trend of newspapers with no common ownership or JOA trading news,’ according to E&P.
“With the announcement that Newsweek is planning to rethink itself to appeal to a smaller, more elite, but devoted, audience, two themes emerge that are worth considering,” writes Dr Mario R. Garcia.
Firstly, the editor Jon Meacham’s statement that “If we don’t have something original to say, we won’t. The drill of chasing the week’s news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable.”
Secondly, that editorially, ‘Newsweek’s plan calls for moving in the direction of not just analysis and commentary, but an opinionated, prescriptive or offbeat take on events.’
Yesterday saw representatives from the UK’s financial journalism industry give evidence to a House of Commons Treasury Committee inquiry into the banking crisis.
So what conclusions were drawn about the media’s ‘role’ in the crisis?
A fairly resounding ‘it wasn’t our fault’ from the journalists gathered (Financial Times editor Lionel Barber, BBC business editor Robert Peston, Daily Mail city editor Alex Brummer, Sky News’ Jeff Randall and the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins):
While Simon Jenkins said in retrospect he ‘wouldn’t have done it or had it done differently’, some of yesterday’s session echoed Robert Peston’s comments to UCLAN’s Journalism Leaders Forum, when the BBC journalist said there were some lessons to learn from the media’s handling of the situation:
An informative discussion with some of the leading journalists in the UK field, yet why had they been summoned in the first place?
Prompted via a Twitter chat with NYU professor Jay Rosen, shouldn’t we be asking who is saying the media is to blame for the banking crisis in the first place?
One question from the committee to Peston struck me as particularly misplaced in this respect, as he was asked what he thought about being a market force in his own right. In his own words, Peston is just a journalist reporting on the facts and information he receives.
Yes – there are lessons to be learned from looking at whether media coverage of the banking crisis indirectly added to public anxiety about the situation or contributed indirectly to already falling share prices.
But as Lionel Barber pointed out yesterday, it was never the media’s intention to break the banks, but simply to report on the situation. Peston’s stories, the man himself said, were verified reports from close contacts and sources and built on as much information as he could gather.
At the UCLAN event, Peston said the ‘primary responsibility for the global economic and banking crisis does not lie with the media’ – but why is the media having to defend itself. In a feisty exchange, Barber posed a similar question to the committee: why didn’t the government bail out Lehman Bros – this failure could be seen as escalating the crisis just as much as any media role.
It was joked that the only five journalists to have spotted the crisis ahead of time were sitting in the committee room – evidence that there were dissenting voices in a sea of stories about never-ending house price rises.
Evidence that this was an exercise in shooting the messenger