MediaGuardian reports that there will be ‘a series of editorial job cuts’ across News International’s tabloid and broadsheet newspapers in the next two weeks and that the group will ‘cut the rates it pays some agencies for stories’. News International refused to comment on the reports.
A former news editor of New Nation – which went into administration last week – argues that there is still a need for ethnically specific newspapers.
“… with mainstream newspapers paying scant attention to stories affecting the black community – and with so few ethnic minority reporters working on those papers – then, yes, we absolutely needed a black newspaper,” Angela Foster writes.
Last night’s discussion at POLIS of the Guardian’s ‘It starts with a village project…’ in the Ugandan village of Katine raised plenty of questions about development journalism and the media’s accountability, and whether media organisations can work in the long term with NGOs and charities.
[See Journalism.co.uk’s Tweeted coverage of the event]
By far the most interesting remarks were made by Richard Kavuma, a Ugandan journalist working for the Guardian on the project for two weeks every month.
Kavuma, who was named CNN Multichoice African journalist of the year in 2007, is caught in the middle between AMREF, the Guardian’s partner in the project, and the paper – a tension he has learnt to live with and not let impact upon what he sees as his purpose as a journalist:
“My own understanding of the media from the elementary classroom is that we are supposed to be the voice of the people. Especially those who do not have the voice to be heard. I saw it [Katine] as an extension of what I was meant to be doing as the media.
“This project is bringing the voice of Katine to a wider interational audience – what they perceive as their problems and how they think the project is helping or not helping them.”
“There have been challenges at the centre of some fairly salient tensions: I’m not trying to become a PR officer, I’m a journalist.
“Traditionally the media is supposed to be a watchdog, we scrutinize things. But the NGOs get money from donors and they’d like to prepare good reports on how much the money has done.”
The Guardian and AMREF have been trying to recruit more local journalists to write for the project, but to little avail, as journalists in the country’s capital are already overworked, Guardian writer Madeleine Bunting added.
As a result Kavuma says his reporting has become something of a novelty and has attracted a great deal of interest. Part of this, which he is too modest to mention, comes from more focus on people-led reporting – a journalistic style not widely used by the Ugandan media:
“The tone is changing and becoming more people-centred [in the Ugandan media]. For example, it’s not reporting about mortality, but writing about a woman who is losing her life for becoming pregnant.
“I can’t claim the credit, but I am part of a new movement, which is putting people at the centre of development reporting.
“In Uganda high politics is seen as selling papers. The issue for the media is to try and spot the high politics in the development issues and writing stories as an issue of not numbers but of people.”
The content site for the project had its highest level of traffic last month with 46,000 uniques, Bunting told the gathering. But, as contributor and Guardian environment editor John Vidal pointed out, it’s not about traffic, the project ‘had to be done’.
Despite its flaws – huge costs, some conflict with partner organisations, slow recruitment of Ugandan contributors – those involved insisted there were invaluable lessons to be learnt from the scheme, which is just a third of the way through.
Kavuma agreed: there are lessons about a journalist’s role and writing as a development journalist; but more importantly there’s an opportunity to educate the public about the development process – how hard/easy it is and the ongoing progress.
A move away from, as Madeleine Bunting said, the traditional reportage of development:
“[S]weep in, show the extent of suffering and say that your cheque will put it all right and actually not got back to check.”
Speaking on the Radio 4 Today programme this morning, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, and the Independent’s first editor Andreas Whittam Smith, expressed their concerns, as well as tentative optimism about the current UK newspaper climate.
“I think we have to face up to the prospect that the first time since the Enlightenment you’re going to have major cities in the UK, in Western democracies, without any kind of verifiable source of news,” said Rusbridger.
“That hasn’t happened for two or three hundred years and I think it is going to have very profound implications,” he said.
Whittam Smith referred to an ‘extremely tough’ environment and said that he was once again being asked on a daily basis whether the Independent will survive.
“The risks to all newspapers are very great,” he said, “[but] the Independent has always been innovative.”
“It has to be innovative again in these circumstances,” he said. Moving into the Daily Mail building ‘is an example of that’ he added. Like other businesses, newspapers will have to ‘share the facilities the customers don’t see’ he said.
He said that people still liked to read print, and that if free newspapers were taken into consideration circulations in the UK are only down by one million: from 14 to 13 million a day.
“People do like the stuff on the printed page – what they don’t like so much any longer is paying for it,” he said.
Rusbridger said that newspaper companies with paternalistic or maternalistic owners would fare better than those ‘with big debt’ and other types of ownership structures.
The Scott Trust [the Guardian’s owner], he said, ‘to some extent protected [the Guardian] from immediate effects of the market’.
Both agreed that there would be newspaper casualties in the near future.
The Arab-language news wire, Al Sharq, will be launched in the first quarter of 2009.
Based in Qatar, the service will translate up to 15 stories a day for use by other media organisations in the Middle East.
TechCrunch’s announcement that it will break every embargo it agrees to has caused something of a stir amongst PR and journo bloggers alike.
TC’s Michael Arrington explained the good, the bad and the ugly side of embargoed news releases:
“A lot of this news is good stuff that our readers want to know about. And we have the benefit of taking some time during the pre-briefing to think about the story, do research, and write it properly. When embargoes go right, we get to write a thoughtful story which benefits the company and our readers.
“But there’s a problem. All this stress on the PR firms put on them by desperate clients means they send out the embargoed news to literally everyone who writes tech news stories. Any blog or major media site, no matter how small or new, gets the email. It didn’t used to be this way, but it’s becoming more and more of a problem. As the economy turns south, PR firms are under increasing pressure to perform and justify their monthly retainers which range from $10,000 to $30,000 or more. In short, they have to spam the tech world to get coverage, or lose their jobs.”
Increased competition in the journalism industry is causing more and more embargoes to be broken, argues Arrington, creating ‘a race to the bottom by new sites’ and a climate in which, he says, TC can’t operate.
Certain ‘trusted’ companies and PR firms will continue to have their embargoes honoured by the site, but the hope is that by disregarding the rules firms will have to be more selective with who they break news to and clamp down on those repeat offenders breaking embargoes.
Arrington will also be posting a blacklist – now topped by TC – listing all firms and publications involved when an embargo is broken.
ReadWriteWeb has come back on Arrington’s decision, saying it will honour embargoes. While the site agrees that the press should get better at respecting them, RRW says embargoes give more outlets a chance to cover a story, providing multiple perspectives for readers.
“They give multiple blogs a chance to review a technology in depth, instead of making it a race (…) Embargoes lead to more total coverage than exclusives (…) Exclusives are the tactic of people with weak products and of reporters who compete better in bullying than in writing.”
Journalism.co.uk receives its fair share of embargoed news and releases – and has never knowingly broken any, because we want to cultivate good relations with tipsters, companies and PR firms.
This doesn’t mean we’ll cover everything that gets sent our way. We also know other journalism news sites will be getting much of the same info and agree this can make it more of a race to get the news out.
But from our perspective: we have two full-time journalists, so having good contacts with companies and PR is vital to our expanding our newsgathering.
However, as a twittered reply from @Daljit_Bhurji, founder of Diffusion PR, suggests, does the old-fashioned embargo model really work for online?
Reporting on our specialism – as I’m sure is the case with many other subject-specific publications – it’s increasingly apparent that the organisations/titles/companies we write about are becoming their own news sources. e.g. have their own press office, press release feed, blog/write about their own developments.
Sending an embargoed release about this info to us later isn’t a great help. Most of the time I’d rather learn about it if it’s covered in a blog-style like the BBC Editors blog or Guardian’s Inside blog.
We’re then free to dig deeper into that news if needs be and are given a direct line to the people behind it; or pass it on through another of our channels like Editors’ Pick.
Holding back the news tide with embargoes seems to go against the way information and news spreads online through links, official ‘leaks’ (as referred to above), blog networks etc.
What’s more it’s not just quote-unquote journalists covering news releases any more – is the industry expecting other writers and bloggers online to respect embargoes? It goes against the grain of the web.
Are embargoes redundant in the online age?
Guardian News & Media (GNM) has introduced location-based, third party ads into podcasts and audio content.
The ads are relevant to a listener’s location and time.
Siobhain Butterworth’s weekly column looks at the use of graphs by the paper’s designers and journalists. Where have they gone right and wrong?
The Guardian is conducting a feasibility study in the Manchester area as part of possible plans to launch a series of community news titles.
Alan Rusbridger, the paper’s editor-in-chief, has said it is too early to say if the scheme will go ahead.
Former head of mobile strategy for News International (NI), Andrew Bagguley has been hired as a consultant for Guardian News&Media (GNM), as the title begins its move into the mobile market.
Bagguley left NI in August following a reorganisation of the publisher’s digital arm. He helped The Sun and News of the World launch mobile websites and implement QR codes for mobile advertising.
After two years at NI Bagguley has just started at GNM, a spokeswoman for the group confirmed to Journalism.co.uk.
“We want to benefit from his experience launching mobile for News International so he’ll be working closely with our in house teams to formulate our plans,” she said.
GNM currently offers news alerts via text message and a version of Guardian.co.uk for PDA, SmartPhone and BlackBerry devices.