According to the Indy’s Feral Beast, questions raised about executive bonuses at a Guardian News & Media meeting last week ‘were given short shrift’ by editor Alan Rusbridger.
This bit of the post is buried right down, but Hitwise’s latest analysis indicates that:
“…the Guardian currently receives more traffic [via Twitter] than any of its competitors. And not only is its homepage the top recipient of Twitter traffic, but three of its sections (Technology, Comment is Free, and Media) also appear in the top 10.”
The data Hitwise has collected also shows “last week Twitter received more UK internet visits than the homepages of the Guardian, Times, Sun and Telegraph. It also over took Google News UK.”
There are a couple of caveats, however. Robin Goad reports:
A piece by Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian, about the death of the long boozy business lunch. Of note for journalists is this part:
“[An article in the New York Times] reported that even press officers were declining to take out reporters for lunch. Something similar is happening over here, showing how crazy the credit crunch has become. Time was that a journalist was always a good bet for a free lunch, not least because newspaper ethics historically demanded that the journalist did more than just reach for the bill, for fear of being schmoozed. It isn’t like that any more: the media, like everywhere else, is cutting back on expense-account lunches as advertising revenue plummets. Instead of lunch, with wine, business meetings are more likely now to be conducted over lattes or, once the weather warms up, sandwiches in the park.”
So, anyone out there remember when journalists insisted on paying their way in the name of ethics? And do you have any of your own journalistic luncheon tales to tell?
Guardian.co.uk will be available as a new mobile site from March, a release from the publisher has confirmed.
Specific versions of m.guardian.co.uk will be available for iPhone and Blackberry handsets will be released. The decision to launch a dedicated mobile site follows growing mobile traffic to the Guardian, Adam Freeman, commercial director, said in the statement.
Distribution deals for mobile content have been signed with 3 and Vodafone. The site itself will be ad-supported.
Meanwhile the Daily Mail is planning to make its content available on the US version of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader, according to a report from NMA – part of a push to capitalise on the Mail’s growing US audience. The site previously told Journalism.co.uk that its commercial focus remains on the UK, but perhaps this marks the beginnings of an overseas push.
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
Speaking on the Radio 4 Today programme, chair of the Press Complaints Commission [PCC], Sir Christopher Meyer, has disputed the Media Standards Trust’s new published research, labelling it a ‘shoddy report’. (Click through end link for full transcript)
The report has found that the PCC [as reported in Guardian, for example] lacks transparency and ‘commercially significant sanctions’.
Interviewed this morning, Sir Christopher Meyer defended the work of the PCC: ‘the way we organise ourselves is transparent,’ he said.
“They [the MST] don’t come to PCC and they don’t take evidence directly,” Meyer said.
Sir David Bell, who chairs the MST, said “We are more expert on their website than they [PCC] are themselves.”
Bell said the MST will consult the PCC in the second stage of the research.
“There’s a revolution going on in newspapers, the PCC needs to be reformed,” Bell added.
Meyer labelled the report’s findings as ‘statistics of the madhouse’. “We now have record numbers of people coming for advice,” Meyer said. “This has to be seen as a vote of confidence,” he said.
Full audio linked here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7878000/7878472.stm
0845 (Today Programme) from the website:
“Newspapers are regulated by the Press Complaints Commission, a body set up and run by the papers themselves. A report by the Media Standards Trust, an independent charity, says existing press self-regulation is not working. Sir David Bell, chairman of the trust, and Sir Christopher Meyer, chairman of the PCC, discuss the report.”
Ben Goldacre found time for a chat with Journalism.co.uk today in regards to LBC radio legal team’s request that Goldacre remove audio from a radio show concerning MMR vaccinations. Three days ago, Goldacre – Guardian columnist, BadScience.net blogger, Bad Science author, doctor etc. – had posted the extract of a radio broadcast by LBC’s Jeni Barnett on his blog – a piece Goldacre believes ‘exemplifies every single canard ever uttered by the anti vaccination movement.’ He has now removed the offending audio after Global Radio lawyers contacted him to say it was an infringement of copyright. However, bloggers have been quick to upload the audio elsewhere.
Later on, we’ll post back here with a podcast. In the meantime, some of the things Ben Goldacre said during the interview (of which the forthcoming audio is an edited selection – hope to upload by end of afternoon, or Monday if not): Journalism.co.uk has now recorded some new audio, updated since the weekend: listen here at this link.
Goldacre said it was important to have the piece available for public access, and that replication was commonplace on the web; people often use his own blog posts and ideas, for example, he said. ‘Journalists often routinely steal my ideas,’ he said. “I want people to have my ideas. I want my ideas to get around.”
“This episode today, this ‘debate’ if you want to frame it in mawkish terms, is not about the dangers of MMR, it is about the dangers of the media,” Goldacre added.
Global Radio, LBC 97.3 owner, has confirmed that they have been in contact with Goldacre. The official statement says: “LBC 97.3 invites debate and encourages people to share their views as part of London’s Biggest Conversation – which is what Jeni Barnett’s discussion about the MMR injection did. We can confirm that the Global Radio legal team have been in contact with the writer of this blog, as he did not have the necessary permission to post the LBC 97.3 audio on the website.”
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
So, Guardian’s Media Monkey reports a funny URL on an Express story entitled ‘Danger from just 7 cups of coffee a day’:
“(…) mention this after catching sight of the URL at the top of the story, which ends with the immortal phrase ‘utter-cock-as-usual'”
But – the plot thickens – actually it was the work of the Monkey’s colleague, as Monkey updates below the original post. Yes, Dr Ben Goldacre, Guardian columnist among other occupations, lays claim to the mischievous URL. He writes on the Bad Science blog:
“Heh, er, so obviously I’m delighted that my grown up humour slipped unnoticed into the Guardian’s Media Monkey today, but ‘Utter Cock As Usual‘ was not the web address of the Express’s recent story ‘Danger from just 7 cups of coffee a day‘.
“It’s just the web address I cheekily gave it on my blog post two weeks ago. I thought this was fairly well known, but for those who haven’t joined in the lolz, the websites of Express and the Telegraph, at least, let you substitute whatever text you want at the end of their web addresses.”
@journalism_live, amongst others, will be tweeting coverage from today’s Digital Editors Network event and Journalism Leaders Programme Forum hosted by the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN).
There’s a great line-up, including BBC business editor Robert Peston, Guardian blogs editor Kevin Anderson and former LA Times interactive editor Eric Ulken.