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:
You may recall that back in April Nick Davies gave evidence to the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport select committee, for its review into press standards, privacy and libel.
In the course of that session he claimed there was ‘a real will on the part of the PCC [Press Complaints Commission] to avoid uncovering the truth about phone hacking’ and that newspapers still used private investigators: “It is wrong but they are not doing anything about it and that continues despite Motorman [investigation undertaken by the Information Commissioner’s Office into alleged offences under data protection legislation.] All that has happened is that they have got a little bit more careful about it. I actually got to know that network of private investigators who were exposed in Motorman. Years after that I was in the office of one of them and he was taking phone calls from newspapers while I was there.”
The committee chairman, John Whittingdale, said: “We did do an investigation both into Motorman and into Goodman so I do not want to revisit old ground too much”.
The same committee which today announced it will open a new inquiry ‘into the Guardian revelations about the use of illegal surveillance techniques by News International newspapers’ (Guardian.co.uk).
Yesterday Nick Davies’ Guardian exclusive – which reported Murdoch papers paid £1m to silence victims of phone hacking – alleged that the evidence posed difficult questions for the PCC: it has ‘claimed to have conducted an investigation, but failed to uncover any evidence of illegal activity,’ it was reported.
Davies is no friend of the Press Complaints Commission – as reported on Journalism.co.uk before – and used his appearance in front of the committee in April to argue that the ‘PCC’s performance is so weak that it threatens the concept of self-regulation.’
The PCC has stated today, in light of the new reports, that ‘any suggestion that further transgressions have occurred since its report was published in 2007 will be investigated without delay.’
Now, let’s look back at Davies’ comments in the Commons in April (from uncorrected evidence on House of Commons site). Davies laid the bait for us all, but it would seem only he pursued his allegations against News of the World, to secure yesterday’s scoop:
Mr Davies: It is that word that Roy [Greenslade] has just used that is the important one, their independence. They [PCC] are not sufficiently independent to do their job properly; they are not functioning as an independent referee. You could see it, for example, in the way they handled the Clive Goodwin [sic] story. There are newspapers publishing stories all over Fleet Street; there is a whole lot of hacking going on, hacking into mobile phones. They conducted an inquiry which was set up in such a way that it could not possibly disclose the truth about that illegal activity. Why? Why did they not conduct a proper, independent inquiry? It was the same with the information commissioner after Operation Motorman. We used the Freedom of Information Act on the information commissioner and got hold if the e-mails and letters between the commissioner and the Press Complaints Commission. You can see there the information commissioner saying, “Look, we have just busted this private eye. It is horrifying what newspapers are doing. Will you put out a clear warning to these journalists that they must obey the law?” The short answer was, “No, not if we can help it”. You may be familiar with all this —–
Q435 Chairman: We had an inquiry into Motorman.
Mr Davies: Did you have the e-mails and so on?
Q436 Chairman: We had representatives of News International and so on.
(…)
Mr Davies: Also, when he [Paul Dacre] goes into hospital to have operations on his heart, there is always a message sent round Fleet Street saying, “Mr Dacre’s in hospital, please do not report it”. Medical records are supposed to be plundered by Harry Hack with beer on his breath and egg on his tie. It is wrong but they are not doing anything about it and that continues despite Motorman. All that has happened is that they have got a little bit more careful about it. I actually got to know that network of private investigators who were exposed in Motorman. Years after that I was in the office of one of them and he was taking phone calls from newspapers while I was there. It has not stopped; it has just got a bit more careful. It had got so casual that every reporter in the newsroom was allowed to ring up and commission illegal access to confidential information, now they have pulled it back so that you have to get the news editor to do it or the news desk’s permission. It is still going on and it is against the law.
Q446 Paul Farrelly: Do you think the PCC missed a trick with its own standing reputation in not summoning Mr Coulson?
Mr Greenslade: I wrote at the time and have maintained ever since that the Goodman affair was a very, very black moment in the history of the PCC. This man was jailed for breaking the law. His editor immediately resigned but there were huge questions to ask about the culture of the News of the World newsroom which only the man in charge of that newsroom could answer. When I challenged the PCC about why they had failed to call Mr Coulson they said that he was no longer a member of the press. That seems to me to be a complete abnegation of the responsibilities of the PCC for the public good. In other words, to use a phrase Nick has already used, it was getting off with a technicality.
Mr Davies: If you say to Coulson, “Come and give evidence even though you are no longer an editor” and if he says, “No” then that is an interesting tactical failure on his part. It is not just the editor of the paper; what about the managing editor? Why not call Stuart Kuttner, the managing editor of the News of the World, who has been there for years and who has a special responsibility for contracts and money? Why not call him to give evidence? There was a real will on the part of the PCC to avoid uncovering the truth about phone hacking.
Q447 Chairman: We did do an investigation both into Motorman and into Goodman so I do not want to revisit old ground too much.
Mr Davies: It is what it tells you about the PCC.
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
On Guardian.co.uk, Nick Davies reports: “Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists’ repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.”
Roger Friedman, the former Fox News columnist who was sacked after reviewing a leaked copy of the last X-Men film, is suing his former employer for a reported £3 million ($5 million) in damages.
Friedman’s dismissal on April 4 was followed by a statement from News Corp, which said the company had ‘zero tolerance for any action that encourages and promotes piracy’, the Guardian reports.
But the writer claims his review was ‘tacitly cleared’ by his editors.
The narrative is familiar to anyone who has followed the broader technology industry for any length of time – new triumphs over old.
The reality, inevitably, is more complex, more layered, more textured.
Certainly change is disruptive, but old technology rarely disappears completely. Rather it coexists with the new.
Just look around your office if you want proof of that.
You may not use the fax machine but someone does, and you’ve certainly sent a letter or made a call on the land line. Communication is not all mobiles, email and instant messaging.
As it is with technology, so it is with media.
And nothing demonstrates the laziness of the ‘winners and losers’ legend more than the domestic news story of the year – MPs’ expenses. Here we have seen the best of old and new media, one feeding off the other.
Let’s retrace our steps:
What was meant to be a public domain story, put there by a hard-fought freedom of information request, turned into an old-fashioned scoop.
The Daily Telegraph acquired the data and did a first class job poring over the numbers and putting in place an editorial diary for the drip-drip of expenses-related stories.
The first fruits of this were splashed across the front of the paper on Friday May 8 and, by my count, the story set – and led – the news agenda for the next 23 days.
To this point it was only a new media story in the sense that the Telegraph was enjoying an uplift in traffic – one in every 756 expenses-related searches led to the site.
But what the paper was offering was fairly conventional fare. It took others to do some really interesting things with it.
A fine example was work done by Lib Dem activist Mark Thompson who spotted a correlation between the safeness of an MP’s seat and the likelihood that they are involved in an expenses scandal.
Elsewhere, there were mash-ups, heat maps and the rest.
And then the deluge. Parliament released its data – albeit in redacted form – and for the first time the Daily Telegraph was in danger of losing ownership of the story to another newspaper.
True to type the Guardian offered the most interactive experience inviting readers to: “Investigate Your MPs expenses.”
Wired journalist Jeff Howe, the man credited with coining the phrase crowdsourcing, will nod approvingly at this development.
According to one definition Howe uses, crowdsourcing is ‘the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open cal’l.
In this instance the Guardian was taking a task traditionally performed by its journalists (designated agents) and outsourcing it to its readers.
Where the Telegraph did its own number-crunching, the Guardian farmed much of it to a third party, us.
So has the Guardian’s crowdsourcing experiment been a success?
On Sunday the paper boasted that almost 20,000 people had taken part, helping it to scour nearly 160,000 documents. So far so great. But by Wednesday, the number of documents examined by the army of volunteers was still 160,000.
With some 700,000+ receipts and other assorted papers to classify could it be that the Guardian’s efforts were running out of steam?
If they were, this didn’t stop its rival from following the lead.
One Telegraph correspondent may have dismissed those engaged in this kind of ‘collaborative investigative journalism’ as ‘Kool-Aid slurping Wikipedians’, but his paper seemed to take a different view.
By the middle of the week, the Telegraph was offering its far-less redacted expenses documents in PDF form and all its data in a Google spreadsheet, while simultaneously asking readers directly: “What have you spotted?”
Both papers – and the wider media come to that – have enriched our understanding of a complex and sprawling story. What started as a proprietorial scoop is now in the hands of the crowd.
Old media and new coexisting.
Jon Bernstein is former multimedia editor of Channel 4 News. This is the first in a series of regular columns for Journalism.co.uk. You can read his personal blog at this link.
It’s fair to say Journalism.co.uk is interested in the media’s coverage of the recent UK MPs’ expenses scandal, so before we start rivalling the number of Telegraph pages published on the subject, here’s a round-up by Malcolm Coles of the best source data, visualisations, analysis and reportage.
A great guide for data-based storytelling too.
Meanwhile, on the front page of today’s Guardian an update on the title’s own crowdsourcing MPs’ expenses project – as reported by Journalism.co.uk on Thursday: almost 20,000 people have taken part and 160,000 pages examined.
Journalism.co.uk particularly liked this par from the Guardian’s report:
“All this will take much more careful analysis but shows the power of ‘citizen journalists’ and provides something of a riposte to one Telegraph commentator who dismissed the idea that a ‘collective of Kool-Aid slurping Wikipedians’ could conduct ‘rigorous analysis necessary for the recent MPs’ expenses investigation’.”
Andy Dickinson from the Department of Journalism at UCLAN sums up today’s announcement in this tweet: ‘Telegraph to drip-publish MP expenses online’.
[Update #1: Editor of Telegraph.co.uk, Marcus Warren, responded like this: ‘Drip-publish? The whole cabinet at once….that’s a minor flood, I think’]
Yes, let the data war commence. The Guardian yesterday released its ‘major crowdsourcing tool’ as reported by Journalism.co.uk at this link. As described by one of its developers, Simon Willison, on his own blog, the Guardian is ‘crowdsourcing the analysis of the 700,000+ scanned [official] MP expenses documents’. It’s the Guardian’s ‘first live Django-powered application’. It’s also the first time the news site has hosted something on Amazon EC2, he says. Within 90 minutes of launch, 1700 users had ‘audited’ its data, reported the editor of Guardian.co.uk, Janine Gibson.
The Telegraph was keeping mum, save a few teasing tweets from Telegraph.co.uk editor Marcus Warren. A version of its ‘uncensored’ data was coming, but they would not say what and how much.
Now we know a bit more. As well as printing its data in a print supplement with Saturday’s newspaper they will gradually release the information online. As yet, copies of claim forms have been published using Issuu software, underneath each cabinet member’s name. See David Miliband’s 2005-6 expenses here, for example. From the Telegraph’s announcement:
Details of what’s included but not included in the official data at this link. “Sensitive information, such as precise home addresses, phone numbers and bank account details, has been removed from the files by the Telegraph’s expenses investigation team,” the Telegraph reports.
So who is winning in the data wars? Here’s what Paul Bradshaw had to say earlier this morning:
“We may see more stories, we may see interesting mashups, and this will give The Guardian an edge over the newspaper that bought the unredacted data – The Telegraph. When – or if – they release their data online, you can only hope the two sets of data will be easy to merge.”
Update #2: Finally, Martin Belam’s post on open and closed journalism (published Thursday 18th) ended like this:
“I think the Telegraph’s bunkered attitude to their scoop, and their insistence that they alone determined what was ‘in the public interest’ from the documents is a marked contrast to the approach taken by The Guardian. The Telegraph are physically publishing a selection of their data on Saturday, but there is, as yet, no sign of it being made online in machine readable format.
“Both are news organisations passionately committed to what they do, and both have a strategy that they believe will deliver their digital future. As I say, I have a massive admiration for the scoop that The Telegraph pulled off, and I’m a strong believer in media plurality. As we endlessly debate ‘the future of news™’ I think both approaches have a role to play in our media landscape. I don’t expect this to be the last time we end up debating the pros and cons of the ‘closed’ and ‘open’ approaches to data driven journalism.”
It has provoked an interesting comment from Ian Douglas, the Telegraph’s head of digital production.
“I think you’re missing the fundamental difference in source material. No publisher would have released the completely unredacted scans for crowdsourced investigation, there was far too much on there that could never be considered as being in the public interest and could be damaging to private individuals (contact details of people who work for the MPs, for example, or suppliers). The Guardian, good as their project is, is working solely with government-approved information.”
“Perhaps you’ll change your mind when you see the cabinet expenses in full on the Telegraph website today [Friday], and other resources to come.”
Related Journalism.co.uk links:
The Guardian has launched a new crowd-sourced experiment: ‘Investigate your MP’s expenses’. More to follow from Journalism.co.uk soon.
Extracts from the Guardian press release:
“The Guardian has today launched a major experiment in crowdsourcing following the publication of thousands of MPs’ receipts by the House of Commons.
“The Guardian has uploaded all of these documents to its own microsite, Investigate your MP’s expenses, allowing members of the public to interact with and analyse the data; an impossibility on the government’s website.
“For every document for every MP, users of the site will be able to: add narrative on individual expenses; highlight documents of interest; tell us how interesting that receipt is and provide a context for each receipt; help us by entering the relevant expenses figures and dates on each page.”