Siobhain Butterworth, the Guardian’s readers’ editor, looks at the paper’s ‘rudeness’: the paper published the ‘f-word’ 33 times in 1985, 495 times in 2000 and 843 times in 2007.
Comment is Free: The Guardian is getting ruder
Leave a reply
Tag Archives: editor
Independent.co.uk: Interview with the female editor of the Daily Sport
An interview with Pam McVitie, the new editor of the Daily Sport. That means there are now three women editing titles which rely on scantily clad female content: McVitie, the Sun’s Rebekah Wade and the Daily Star’s Dawn Neesom.
Editor&Publisher: What alternative to AP for US newspapers?
As more newspapers in the US drop their partnerships with the Associated Press, E&P asks if emerging news collaborations, with the likes of the Press Association and Politico, can replace the papers’ long-standing relationship with the agency.
‘A significant challenge’ over at New Jersey’s Exploding Newsroom
Wednesday’s edition of the Exploding Newsroom: Jim Willse, the editor of the New Jersey based newspaper, the Star-Ledger, talks about the future of the newsroom now that the conditions have been met to avoid a sale or closure of the paper.
“We face a significant challenge,” he says.
You can follow the online editor John Hassell’s Exploding Newsroom on Facebook, at the blog, and over at Kyte TV.
Ta-da! Insite goes live – a brand new online research website
Journalism.co.uk is happy to announce that Insite, a new blog designed to bring users tips on ‘slick research, advanced internet research strategies and news about the best tools’, is now live.
First up is an interview with the founder of the new UK-based search engine MSE360, which has attracted praise from both sides of the Atlantic with a three-tier display, clean design and other unique features such as virus alerts.
Insite is the handiwork of Journalism.co.uk’s consulting editor, Colin Meek.
Colin has been working on investigative and in-depth research projects for over 15 years as a journalist and policy analyst, and was founding editor of the online news channel on journalism.co.uk.
Over the last three years he has delivered courses in advanced internet and investigative research.
Since starting as a freelancer 10 years ago, Colin has worked for many clients including Which?, Health Which?, BMJ (British Medical Journal) Knowledge, The Times, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, journalism.co.uk, the Pharmaceutical Journal, the RSPGB and many others.
Priest who wrote offensive comments about gay people on blog keeps newspaper column
The vicar who faced national outrage after he posted offensive comments about gay people on his personal blog will continue writing for the Northern Echo newspaper.
The Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and chaplain to the Stock Exchange, Peter Mullen, has been widely criticized for posts on his blog, including: a poem about gay marriage; a suggestion that proponents of gay culture should have a tattoo across their buttocks; and a call for Gay Pride parades to be outlawed.
Nonetheless the priest will continue to write his column for the Northern Echo, which can be read online.
The Northern Echo’s editor, Peter Barron, wrote on his own blog this week that he had advised Mullen to issue an apology to the Press Association, and that Mullen would be writing another apology in the Northern Echo next week, even though the original comments were not ever posted on the Northern Echo site.
Mullen has now deleted his blog but the offensive comments can be read in this Google cache (via Zefrog).
On a side note, if you now search priest + sodomy, on Google most the results return articles about Peter Mullen. Ironic, that.
BBC’s Nick Robinson admits he toed government line on Iraq too strongly
Yesterday saw the BBC’s economic editor Robert Peston taken to task for his influence on the UK’s economy and his cosy relationship with the government:
The Guardian’s Matthew Weaver is worried that his blog might have too much influence, and the Daily Mash joked that Peston had reached a state of transcendence.
Meanwhile the House of Lords Communications Committee asked a panel of leading political journalists if they thought Peston was setting the reporting agenda.
Another BBC editor whose influence has been much discussed is the corporation’s political editor, Nick Robinson, who last night admitted he had toed the government line too strongly during his reportage of the Iraq War, and admitted that he didn’t ‘do enough’ to seek out dissenting views.
Participating in a debate entitled ‘Political campaigners and reporters: partners in democracy or rats in a sack?’ at City University, Robinson said: “The biggest self criticism I have was I got too close to government in the reporting of the Iraq war.
“I didn’t do enough to go away and say ‘well hold on, what about the other side?’
“It is the one moment in my recent career where I have thought I didn’t push hard enough, I didn’t question enough and I should have been more careful,” he said.
“I don’t think the government did set out to lie about weapons of mass destruction. I do think they systematically and cumulatively misled people. What’s the distinction?
“It was clear to me that Alastair Campbell knew how what he was saying was being reported, knew that that was a long way from the truth and was content for it so to be,” Robinson said.
“They knew it was wrong, they wanted it to be wrong – they haven’t actually lied.”
Politicians ‘actively want to avoid a debate the public wants to have’, he said.
For example, he said, Labour was reluctant to debate the implications of a single European currency.
“[The government] wanted to limit the debate to being the five tests. It wanted to avoid divisions, it simply did not want to enter a political debate,” he said.
The Conservative Party are now doing the ‘exact same thing’, Robinson said.
“They don’t want a debate on whether they will tear up the Lisbon EU treaty, they don’t really want a debate about if they will put taxes up or down, or in what way.
“These are active decisions by politicians to keep you ill-informed, and it is our job as journalists to try to fight against that.”
It isn’t the job of a journalist to ‘pick a constant fight with people in power’, he said.
“I don’t see it as a badge of pride to have endless arguments with politicians, although with Peter Mandelson they usually are.”
Too old to become a journalist: How I started freelancing
A couple of comments from last week’s post asked how I managed to get work published in the nationals as a freelancer sans training.
Short answer: I had the right story that only I could write at the right time. That’s a lot of rights.
Before my NCTJ I did a couple of brilliant evening courses:
Introduction to freelance journalism and stage two freelance journalism at adult learning college City Lit in Holborn, London.
At the time (2005) it was run by Liz Hodgkinson, who I remember always claimed that you didn’t have to be a particularly good writer to be successful. She also encouraged people to pitch, pitch and pitch – editors could only say no.
My First Pitch
The film, The Devil Wears Prada, about one girl’s gruelling experience assisting the editor of a top fashion magazine in America, was about to come out in the cinema.
The book, on which the film was based, caused a lot of controversy as its author, Lauren Weisberger, had worked for American Vogue editor, Anna Wintour, previously. Weisberger always claimed her book was entirely fictional.
Coincidentally I had just come back from a tough 3-month work experience placement at American Vogue.
I failed to put two-and-two-together, but a girl on the evening course pointed out that I could write about my experiences to coincide with the film’s release.
I thought I’d aim high (you never ask, you never get) so with the help of Liz Hodgkinson’s subbing skills I pitched the following to the Guardian:
Dear K,
The Devil Wears Prada told the unbelievable story of one girl’s baptism of fire
on a glossy fashion magazine but what’s the reality like?Much worse if my three gruelling months of work experience at American Vogue are
anything to go by!I wondered if you would be interested in my story to coincide with the film
version of The Devil Wears Prada starring Meryl Streep as the fiery editor and
Anne Hathaway as her long-suffering assistant.The film is due out in the U.S on 30th June and in the U.K on 27th October. I
have a picture of me and the other interns standing in front of the Vogue logo
at Conde Nast.My name is Amy Oliver and I’m a freelance journalist.
Best Wishes
Amy Oliver
——-
They politely declined.
Undeterred I pitched it to The Times.
They didn’t know me from Adam and asked me to write a couple of paragraphs on my experiences at Vogue, and also to submit some of my written work.
What do you send in to The Times if you’ve never had anything published? Unbelievably or perhaps naively I sent in a piece on window box gardening and a snippet on why there should be more nasty, abusive greetings cards on the market!
Both pieces I had done as homework for my course. Both pieces now make me cringe to my very core.
They bought it and the story. My first ever piece was a joint front cover for the Times’ T2 supplement (shared with now WSJ style magazine Editor Tina Gaudoin no less) complete with dreadful picture of me fingering a pile of old Vogues.
I was so overwhelmed I think I hid in the corner and didn’t write another word for six months. Not very ballsy hack with rhino skin… more Miss Marple.
No one else could have written that story and a personal experience timed with a current issue is usually the best way to start.
To give another example a woman on the evening course was caught up in the Asian tsunami in 2004 and was planning to write a personal experience for the anniversary.
If you don’t know who to pitch your idea to phone up the newspaper and ask. Be prepared for much sighing and monosyllabic answers from the other end – imagine how many people phone them every day to tell them about typos etc.
Also be prepared to pitch the crux of your idea over the phone. If they can cut you off without clogging up their inbox they will.
Now perhaps someone can advise me: I was always told to pitch ideas to one publication at a time. I have since met a very successful journalist who blanket pitches and usually sells the same story three or four times over. (I’ll try and get hold of blanket pitcher extraordinaire for an interview)
Do people who freelance already blanket pitch? Have you ever come up against anger from a publication and exclusivity?
This is the second post in Amy’s blog series: Am I too old to become a journalist? Read her introductory post.
Gawker alleges computer cut-backs for WSJ.com staff
So Boris might give out Blackberries (well, ‘blackberry-type gizmos’) to Olympics spectators in 2012, but over in the States Wall Street Journal journalists are finding that their technology allowance is being cut back.
Or so this ‘internal memo’ on Gawker.com would have us believe. Is it for real? Apparently, all WSJ news staff have been told that a new money-saving measure is in place: ‘at its core is the concept of “one person/one machine.’
“If you are an office-based editor, you’ll get a new desktop. If you are a reporter or editor who travels on assignment, you’ll get a new laptop with a docking station, keyboard and monitor for office use.”
That’s what the alleged internal memo reads. Comments below the Gawker article are sceptical: surely the typos in the memo are a bigger story than the computer cuts, writes ‘drunkexpatworker’.
Hmmm. Authentic or not? It seems an odd kind of prank if not: it wasn’t that funny.
DEN: Should local newspapers run press release feeds?
At yesterday’s Digital Editors’ Network (DEN) event at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN), UCLAN’s Johnston Press chair of digital journalism Jane Singer proposed a plan to free up the reporting time of local newspaper journalists:
Rather than re-writing certain press releases from local organisations and authorities, Singer said, newspaper websites could re-publish these releases untouched with their origins clearly marked.
This system should be in place in a designated section of the site clearly marked up as ‘press releases from Lancashire Police’ etc, and could even be a simple link to an organisation’s website or an automated RSS feed of releases.
Journalists at the paper would then have more time to follow-up on the facts behind the releases and put ‘news’ from organisations into context for readers, said Singer.
The idea was welcomed by some in the room, dismissed by others, who felt that republishing press releases could compromise editorial standards, even if the releases were clearly marked as not from the paper’s staff.
Yet others agreed that this could be a time-saving function of websites and help attract readers to the newspaper’s site as a first port of call for all local information.
So which titles are doing this already?
Wrexham’s Evening Leader has a list of links to local authority sites – providing the information on the site, but without the problem, raised by some editors, of running unedited releases from organisations.
The paper has a widget to receive RSS feeds from the North Wales Police website, which keeps it up to date with its latest press releases. Visitors to www.eveningleader.co.uk can follow a link from our navigation bar to find the page, Christian Dunn, the site’s editor, explained to us.
“It was one of our first experiments with embedding a widget on a section of our site. After listening to some of the ideas from the Digital Editors Networking event I’m going to make more of the section and talk to North Wales Police to see if there is any other material we could display for them,” he said.
“I don’t have a problem taking feeds from organisations such as the police and putting them on our site – as long as it’s clear the content is not written or produced by us.”
The Teesside Evening Gazette has its own take on Singer’s idea: its network of postcode-based hyperlocal websites link out to local community groups’ websites and local authority sites. They also link to BBC weather reports, which can be filtered by postcode too, rather than creating their own weather widgets or feeds.
Outside of the UK, the Knox News Sentinel provides feeds of political news and national news straight from the Associated Press and PR Newswire – and clearly labelled as such. While this isn’t specifically local info, it does take the onus off reporters at the Sentinel from having to repurpose this content.
This can’t be an exhaustive list of site’s putting Singer’s idea in to practice, so who else is doing this – in the UK or elsewhere? And does it work for you?