“Barclays Bank obtained a court order early today banning the Guardian from publishing documents which showed how the bank set up companies to avoid hundreds of millions of pounds in tax,” the Guardian reports today.
Breaking news from Sky News:
“A court in Baghdad sentenced Muntazer Al-Zaidi this morning.
“Al-Zaidi worked for Al-Baghdadiya television, which announced the verdict, along with the jailed man’s defence lawyer.”
More details here, at Guardian.co.uk.
Martin Belam, of the CurryBet blog, has recently been appointed as ‘information architect’ for Guardian.co.uk. Journalism.co.uk asked him what he’ll be doing for the site…
For those who don’t know what you do, fill us in your background and the new gig…
[MB] I was at the Hack Day that the Guardian’s technology department ran back in November 2008, and the talent and enthusiasm that day really shone. I’ve really enjoyed the freedom of working as a consultant over the last three years, much of the time based either in Crete or in Austria, but the opportunity of coming to work more permanently for an organisation as forward-thinking as the Guardian is being with initiatives like the Open Platform was too much to resist.
So, an ‘information architect’ what does that mean and what are you doing?
Information Architecture has been defined as ‘the emerging art and science of organising large-scale websites’.
All websites have an inherent information structure – the navigation, the contextual links on a page, whether there are tags describing content and so forth. It is about how people navigate and way-find their way through the information presented on a site.
What I’ll be doing at the Guardian is influencing that structure and functionality as new digital products are developed. It involves working closely with design and editorial teams to produce ‘wireframes’, the blueprints of web design, and also involves being an advocate for the end user – carrying out lots of usability and prototype testing as ideas are developed.
Is it a full-time role?
I’m working four days a week at The Guardian, as I still have some other commitments – for example as contributing editor for FUMSI magazine – although already it feels a bit like cramming a full-time job into just 80 per cent of the time!
It’s not happy times for mainstream media brands: where are they going wrong?
I don’t think it is only mainstream media brands that are suffering from the disruption caused by digital transition, but we do see a lot of focus on this issue for print businesses at the moment. I think one of the things that strikes me, having worked at several big media companies now, including the BBC and Sony, is that you would never set these organisations up in this way in the digital era if you were doing it from scratch.
One of the things that appealed most about joining the Guardian was that the move to Kings Place has brought together the print, online and technical operations in a way that wasn’t physically possible before in the old offices. I’m still very optimistic that there are real opportunities out there for the big media brands that can get their business structures right for the 21st century.
What kind of things do you think could re-enthuse UK readers for their newspapers?
I think our core and loyal readers are still enthusiastic about their papers, but that as an industry we have to face the fact that there is an over-supply of news in the UK, and a lot of it – whether it is on the radio, TV, web or thrust into your hand as a freebie – is effectively free at the point of delivery. I think the future will see media companies who concentrate on playing to their strengths benefit from better serving a narrower target audience.
Do you see print becoming the by rather than primary product for the Guardian – or has that already happened?
I think there might very well be a ‘sweet spot’ in the future where the display quality on network-enabled mobile devices and the ubiquity of data through-the-air means that the newspaper can be delivered primarily in that way, but I don’t see the Guardian’s presses stopping anytime soon. Paper is still a very portable format, and it never loses connection or runs out of batteries.
Your background is in computer programming rather than journalism, will the two increasingly overlap?
I grew up in the generation that had BBC Micros and ZX Spectrums at home, so I used to program a lot as a child, but my degree was actually in History, which in itself is a very journalistic calling. I specialised in the Crusades and the Byzantine Empire, which is all about piecing together evidence from a range of sources of varying degrees of reliability, and synthesizing a coherent narrative and story from there. And, of course, I’ve spent most of this decade blogging, which utilises ‘some’ of the journalist’s skill-set ‘some’ of the time.
Whilst I’d never suggest that journalists need to learn computer programming much beyond a smattering of HTML, I think there is something to be gained from understanding the software engineering mindset. There are a lot of tools and techniques that can really help journalists plough through data to get at the heart of a story, or to use visualisation tools to help tell that story to their audience.
One of the most interesting things about working at the Guardian is the opportunity to work alongside people like Kevin Anderson, Charles Arthur and Simon Willison, who I think really represent that blending of the technical and journalistic cultures.
You’ve spoken out about press regulation before; why do you feel strongly about it?
In a converged media landscape, it seems odd that Robert Peston’s blog is regulated by the BBC Trust, Jon Snow’s blog is regulated by Ofcom, and Roy Greenslade’s blog is regulated by the PCC.
At the moment, I believe that the system works very well for editors, and very well for the ‘great and the good’ who can afford lawyers, but does absolutely nothing for newspaper consumers. If I see something that offends me on TV, I can complain to Ofcom. If I see an advert that offends me in the street, I can complain to ASA. If I see an article in a newspaper that I think is wrong, inaccurate, in bad taste or offensive, unless I am directly involved in the story myself, the PCC dismisses my complaint out of hand without investigating it.
I don’t think that position is sustainable.
The last thing I want to see is some kind of state-sponsored Ofpress quango, which is why I think it is so important that our industry gets self-regulation right – and why I believe that a review of how the PCC works in the digital era is long overdue.
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.
Interesting issue flagged up by Jon Pratty yesterday – publishers need to be careful when running archived pieces on their sites, because of RSS feeds.
As part of a series on Guardian.co.uk, the site published a piece yesterday from February 23 1972 headlined ‘IRA kills 7 in raid on Paras’ English base’.
On the site we can see it’s from the archive and the date it was first published, but sites such as NewsNow.co.uk, which aggregate news headlines from RSS feeds, don’t make the distinction.
There’s no label in the RSS feed to denote this is archive material, so to readers of the news on NewsNow, it appears like so:
We’ve seen in other – non-RSS related, but similar – cases, how things can escalate when old news resurfaces such as the United Airlines story.
A flaw with aggregation or the responsibility of a publisher?
In her weekly column, the Guardian readers’ editor, Siobhain Butterworth, takes a look at newspapers’ handling of reader complaints and responses in the age of digital publishing.
She picks out a New York Times case: following the settlement of a libel action brought against it by a Washington lobbyist, the paper published a joint statement, an article from the lobbyist’s lawyers, a note to readers and a report about the settlement.
“What’s interesting and unusual about the Iseman case is that the negotiated resolution of her complaint included space on the paper’s website for her lawyers’ views about the lawsuit,” Butterworth comments.
“Greenslade, a former editor of the Daily Mirror, has become journalism’s very own Terminator,” writes his colleague Simon Hattenstone in today’s MediaGuardian.
Then (a subbed?) piece from Roy Greenslade, on the subs’ ‘fatwa’ he now faces.
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
The Guardian’s Benji Lanyado on his ‘TwiTrip’: a trip to Paris, where he ‘would be at the mercy of Twitter’ The plan was that he ‘would sling questions into the ether’, and Twitter users would send him recommendations. Did it work…? Some ‘Tweething problems’ as Lanyado puts it, but it seems that yes it did. Full story at this link…
Plus: Lanyado’s TwiTrip to Paris will be featured on The One Show, BBC1, tonight (Wednesday) at 7pm.
Today’s the UK government’s ‘Digital Britain’ interim report provided quite a lot to digest, so here’s a ten point link round-up of the most important parts:
and an eleventh: