As reported by the Guardian yesterday: “Guardian Media Group is set to report an operating loss for the financial year to the end of March, the company said today.”
Guardian News & Media will reports a loss of about £35m in the year to the end of March 2009.
The Guardian has had its four-year campaign for the release of information about misbehaving members of the judiciary rejected by a Freedom of Information (FOI) tribunal.
The paper had been working on the request since 2005, reporter Rob Evans told Journalism.co.uk in March, and was challenging ‘secret justice’ and asking for a more accountable judiciary.
“We are trying to create a precedent for this kind of information to be released. In the past the government has always kept it as a kind of secret. They have always been very reluctant to release information about naughty judges,” said Evans as the case went to tribunal.
But today the tribunal, led by David Marks QC, ruled in favour of Justice Secretary Jack Straw and suggested that releasing information on when judges, magistrates and coroners had been disciplined could be disruptive to courts and the legal process.
The tribunal was ‘”impressed” by the Ministry of Justice’s argument that judges were entitled to a “reasonable expectation of privacy”‘, according to a report in the Guardian.
“This is an outrageous decision. Judges are highly paid public servants whose conduct in court and, to an extent, out of court must be above reproach,” Evans told Journalism.co.uk today.
“It is fundamental that the public should know how complaints against judges are resolved and the reasons why particular judges have been reprimanded or sacked. Why is Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, covering this information up? He seems to have learnt nothing from the MPs expenses’ debacle.”
The ministry has said it will be more open about the sacking of judges in the future as a result of the Guardian’s campaign. However, taking the full FOI request any further would entail high court action – an expensive procedure.
We’re still experimenting with neater ways to present Twitter conversations – without having to do time-consuming cut-and-pastes – but a Tweader conversation at this link shows recent tweets between Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger and MP Tom Watson.
A screen grab of the conversation in chronological order below. Tom Watson thinks the paper has gone ‘OTT’ in its editorial content on Gordon Brown. Rusbridger is amused by the notion of ‘Labour readers’.
Here are thoughts from Tony Hirst, one of the first adopters and success stories for the Guardian’s Open Platform, on what the OP’s DataStore is and is not doing, in terms of data curation (or gardening). He asks:
“Is the Guardian DataStore adding value to the data in the data store in an accessibility sense: by reducing the need for data mungers to have to process the data, so that it can be used in a plug’n’play way by the statisticians and the data visualisers, whether they’re professionals, amateurs or good old Jo Public?”
Hirst has a number of queries in regards to data quality and ‘misleading’ linking on the Guardian DataBlog. In a later comment, he wonders whether there is a ‘data style guide’ available yet.
If you’re not all that au fait with the data lingo, this post might be a bit indigestible, so we’ll follow with a translation in coming days.
Related on Journalism.co.uk: Q&A with Hirst, April 8, 2009.
paidContent:UK learned that the Guardian is near to dropping its Thursday Technology supplement. It is, paidContent:UK confirmed, after speaking to Guardian News & Media (GNM):
“The online counterpart, which is updated through the day, will continue, however, and Technology may yet be merged with MediaGuardian. The move is thought to be due to worsening tech ad spend but also the fact that many readers, naturally, are online natives with a voracious appetite for tech news throughout the week.”
NB: paidContentUK’s publisher is a wholly owned subsidiary of GNM.
Organ Grinder reports on how the Guardian’s tongue-in-cheek liveblogging of Saturday’s Eurovision contest was reported by Scandinavian media.
The perils of liveblogging? Norwegian, Danish and Swedish titles took some of the blog’s teasing comments as the Guardian’s official line, with their humour lost in translation (but leading to some highly amusing headlines…)
Happy Birthday to Media Guardian, 25 years old on May 14. In this week’s supplement we learn what each of the writers were doing in 1984: Emily Bell was doing her A-Levels; Stephen Armstrong was still at school; Peter Wilby was education correspondent for the Sunday Times. And long before Media Monkey was even a twinkle in Mr Monkey’s eye – Monkey Jnr is a youthful nine years old, apparently.
One of the features to mark its anniversary examines the shift in the type of newspaper content:
Peter Wilby asks: ‘How did readers know what to think in 1984?’
“Once you get over the minuscule, blurred pictures and the lack of colour, the first thing that strikes you about the newspapers of that year is the paucity of opinionated columnists. The finger-jabbing, red-faced anger of today’s commentariat, the passionate, omniscient certainty with which they declare opinions, scarcely existed 25 years ago.”
John Gapper’s column on FT.com asks whether it is time for the Ochs-Sulzberger family to sell the New York Times. No, Gapper says: “They would be crazy to cap their run of poorly timed transactions by selling in the trough of the recession, amid mayhem in the industry.”
As part of the commentary he also makes this claim:
“Meanwhile, it [the New York Times] produces more original stories than most rivals put together. The UK’s Guardian is another paper that has built a global brand from what was a regional paper, but it relies more on cut-and-pasting (or aggregating) from others.”
Emily Bell, director of digital content at Guardian.co.uk responds in the comments: “It is a pity an interesting piece was spoiled by such a sloppy and inaccurate piece of reporting,” she says. We have reproduced an extract from her lengthy comment below (yes, cut and pasted):
“John, in your column you asset [sic] that the Guardian has grown its online audience primarily by aggregating and cutting and pasting other people’s stories. This is demonstrably not true. If you look at our site on any given day (www.guardian.co.uk), you will I am sure find stories which are either from a wire feed (rather as the FT uses) or which reporters have picked up from other sources, again as does the BBC, FT, Times , even sometime the hallowed NYT. But this is not the core of what we do and it is certainly not how we have grown our audience…”
“(…)We have built our traffic on a higher investment in original multimedia journalism than most if not all of our peers. We have an active policy NOT to routinely aggregate high-grossing showbusiness, celebrity or ‘weird’ stories from elsewhere, which is common practice among some newspaper websites.”
And Gapper quickly responds (Journalism.co.uk wonders what is happening to journalism: shouldn’t they be in the pub by now on a Friday evening?):
“In fact, I don’t assert that. What I wrote was:
“”Meanwhile, it [the NYT] produces more original stories than most rivals put together. The UK’s Guardian is another paper that has built a global brand from what was a regional paper, but it relies more on cut-and-pasting (or aggregating) from others.”
“So I am comparing the Guardian’s ratio with that of the NYT, not claiming that the Guardian contains more aggregated than original content. I do not believe the latter, and would not write it.”
Bloggers and journalists discussed their shifting roles and relationships in the context of online political blogging at Monday’s Voices Online blogging conference at City University, organised by the Next Century Foundation.
Blogging is improving the quality of journalism by forcing reporters to be more honest about their sources the Guardian’s senior political correspondent, Andrew Sparrow, said yesterday.
Sparrow said that traditional journalistic secrecy had become ‘hard to justify in the blogosphere’ because readers act as ‘particularly aggressive sub-editors’.
“There’s an expectation that you will be more upfront about your sources, and that’s a good thing,” he said.
“In a conventional news story, you can never own up to doubt. In a blog, it’s perfectly acceptable to say what you know and what you don’t know.”
Sparrow also suggested that political bloggers have raised the bar of competition for traditional news organisations.
“I don’t see myself as part of the blogging community in the way that Paul Staines or Nick Fielding are,” he said. “I view blogging as a tool that we use [at the Guardian] for our mainstream journalism. But I worry if the amateurs are doing it better than we are.”
However, in an earlier panel, Paul Staines questioned whether drawing a distinction between ‘journalist’ and ‘bloggers’ is still relevant.
“How long is it before we stop asking that question?” he said. “With converging digital platforms, there may no longer be a difference.”
Sparrow, who has previously reported on the political arena for the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, said that he had been frustrated by ‘the limited way you could tell stories’ in traditional print media.
“The internet has an immediacy that you don’t always get in mainstream media. I like the commentability, but it makes many journalists uncomfortable,” he said.
He added that digital media has improved the range of sources available to journalists. “Once, you might have had to spend the morning ringing ten people to find out what they thought about something, whereas now, you can subscribe to ten RSS feeds,” he said.
However, Sparrow also said that the Guardian ensures its blogs ‘report in accordance with its journalistic values and the public interest’, and acknowledged that the wider blogging community ‘survives on subjectivity’ which is at odd with traditional journalistic notions of balance.
But Mick Fealty, creator of the Slugger O’Toole blog and who also blogs at the Telegraph and the Guardian sites, insisted this did not compromise the quality and integrity of blogging. “The journalists who make good bloggers are the ones who know they’re only interjecting into a larger conversation. There is a value in being challenged,” he said.
“Truth is more useful than balance. One truth at a time is enough.”
Journalism.co.uk reported live from the Voices Online Blogging conference 2009. Follow @journalism_live on Twitter for updates from a wide array of media events.
“Guardian News & Media is looking to cut about 50 editorial staff by the end of the year as part of a plan to reduce editorial costs by £10m,” reports MediaGuardian.