Tag Archives: Independent

Newspaper Innovation: History suggests Independent’s i may face rough seas

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Newspaper Innovation looks at the Independent’s plans to launch a new 20p daily newspaper and considers its sources of inspiration, including Portuguese newspaper i (as mentioned by Journalism.co.uk on Monday).

This paper was launched in May 2009 with a print run of 100,000. Cover price was €1 – so more expensive than the Independent’s ‘i’ and also with more pages. The paper is published by Sojormedia Capital, owned by the Lena Group.

Since launch, however, the paper got in serious troubles, as the public demand for the paper was less than expected. Editor Martim Avillez Figuereido left the paper after disagreements with the management.

The post also considers the fortunes of similar “lite” newspapers, such as Welt Kompakt, Chicago’s RedEye and Red Streak – and suggests that the Independent’s plans might not be plain sailing.

Full post on Newspaper Innovation at this link…

Independent launching new ‘quality’ daily

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Independent Print Limited will launch a new daily newspaper, i, according to reports – first mentioned by the Guardian on Friday.

i, which will be produced by the Independent, will target “readers and lapsed readers” of quality newspapers and offer a digested read of the day’s news and analysis for 20p.

Says the Independent:

[The paper] will combine intelligence with brevity and depth with speed of reading, providing an essential daily briefing.

Full story on Media Week at this link…

Interesting to note the existence of another newspaper under the same name: Portugal’s i.

Subs’ Standards: A sub-editor’s defence of Wanky Balls

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Following yesterday’s post on the perils of wikipedia as source material, Fiona Cullinan takes a look at sub-editing errors from a sub’s perspective and takes issue with those who simply brand it “lazy journalism”.

There’s such a thing as “lazy commenting” too, she says, and plenty of reasons other than laziness that can cause such errors, funny as they may be.

Full post on Subs’ Standards at this link…

Newspaper magnate Lebedev: “I should be ready to go to jail”

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He likes to eat papaya for breakfast, wants to set up an investigative journalism foundation and wakes up every morning prepared for arrest – welcome to the world of newspaper billionaire Alexander Lebedev.

Speaking to the Sunday Times for its ‘A Life in the Day’ feature, Lebedev, says his ownership of three British newspapers – the Evening Standard, Independent and Independent on Sunday – prompted some “absurd” suspicions at the start.

When I bought the Evening Standard and the two Independent titles, people thought I was some kind of Trojan horse for the Russian government. That’s absurd. I bought them because I truly believe in newspaper and a free press. An independent press that holds those in power to account is a vital part of a democratic society.

In fact he claims his “dream” now is to set up a foundation that will finance journalistic investigations into international corruption.

The free media can change the world. My idea is for some of the biggest titles around the world to pool resources to uncover the schemes and money flows used to sustain massive corruption.

But, he warns, life in the media elite is a risky business.

I sleep like a log and rarely dream. But as a big businessman in Russia who sees things differently from those in power, I tell myself every night and every morning that I should be ready to go to jail. The risk is always there.

Robert Fisk: ‘Journalists have become prisoners of the language of power’

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From a speech given by Robert Fisk, The Independent’s Middle East correspondent, to the fifth Al Jazeera annual forum on May 23:

Power and the media are not just about cosy relationships between journalists and political leaders, between editors and presidents. They are not just about the parasitic-osmotic relationship between supposedly honourable reporters and the nexus of power that runs between White House and state department and Pentagon, between Downing Street and the foreign office and the ministry of defence. In the western context, power and the media is about words – and the use of words.

It is about semantics.

It is about the employment of phrases and clauses and their origins. And it is about the misuse of history; and about our ignorance of history.

More and more today, we journalists have become prisoners of the language of power.

Fisk goes on to discuss the words and narratives inherited by journalists when reporting on conflict and war, and how this affects the media’s ability to challenge those in power if it is speaking the same language.

Full text of speech at this link…

Independent integrates article comments with Twitter and Facebook

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The Independent has installed a new commenting system on its website in the shape of Disqus – the same as we use on Journalism.co.uk no less.

The system allows users to login to leave a comment using a Disqus profile, but also, and more importantly, with their Twitter username and password, Facebook login or OpenId identification.

With the Twitter and Facebook logins there’s also the option to share your article comment via these sites.

Jack Riley, digital media editor at the Independent, explains in a blog post that the new system has been trialled on the site’s sport section for the past week and has improved the level of “constructive debate”.

We’re encouraging people to use credentials linked to their personal profiles not just because openness and accountability are great, fundamental things which underpin good journalism as well as good commenting (and why should the two be different?), but also because by introducing accountability into the equation, we’re hoping the tone and standard of the comments will go up (…) It’s about first of all letting people authenticate their commenting using systems with which they’re already familiar (in Facebook’s case, that’s 400 million people worldwide and counting), and secondly, it’s about restoring your trust in our comments section, so that some of the really great submissions we get on there rise to the top, the bad sink to the bottom, and the ugly – the spam and abuse that are an inevitable adjunct of any commenting system – don’t appear at all.

Independent journalist attacked while investigating voting fraud

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A journalist investigating voting fraud in the UK was attacked yesterday while on a reporting job.

Jerome Taylor was repeatedly punched and kick by the group of attackers, who approached him in Bow, east London, where Taylor was looking to speak to a local election candidate about allegations of postal vote fraud.

He describes the ordeal in an article on Independent.co.uk today:

I don’t know how long it lasted – it was probably only a minute – but it was a long minute. I don’t remember them saying anything as they did it. The first noise I was aware of was the beeping of a car horn and a woman screaming.

The noise brought a man out of a nearby block of flats. With little regard for his own safety he waded in and defended me until my attackers ran away.

Full story at this link…

Independent apologises for ‘seriously defamatory’ headline

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Independent News & Media has apologised for a “seriously defamatory” headline on a comment piece by blogger and writer Zoe Margolis published in the Independent on Sunday [see background here]. In a correction published on its site today, the newspaper said:

On 7 March 2010, we published an article by Zoe Margolis. In part of the first edition of the newspaper and online, this article carried the headline, “I was a hooker who became an agony aunt”. This was written by the newspaper not Ms Margolis. We accept that Ms Margolis is not and never has been “a hooker” or otherwise involved in the sex industry. The wording of the headline was a mistake and seriously defamatory of Ms Margolis. We offer our sincere apologies to Ms Margolis for the damage to her reputation and the distress and embarrassment which she has suffered.

Independent publishes Trafigura story correction

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The Independent published a correction yesterday concerning its front page story from September 2009 ‘Toxic shame’, which contained claims of individuals who alleged they had been injured as a result of illegal dumping of waste in the Cote d’Ivoire by a Trafigura ship:

The article stated that claimants had been maimed and wrongly suggested that, due to the settlement, claims of more serious injuries including miscarriages would not be tested in the High Court case. In fact such claims had already been withdrawn earlier last year. A joint statement issued by both parties in that case said that independent experts have been “unable to identify a link between exposure to the chemicals… and deaths, miscarriages, still births, birth defects … or other serious and chronic injuries”. The story featured the photograph of a woman with a severely scarred face, a condition which Trafigura says, and we accept, cannot therefore have been caused by the waste. We are happy to set the record straight.

Full correction at this link…

Trafigura and its lawyers Carter-Ruck were at the centre of last year’s super injunction debate after Carter-Ruck abandoned an attempt to prevent the Guardian from reporting a parliamentary question about the company.

In December the oil trader ended its legal dispute with BBC Newsnight. The programme agreed to: apologise for allegations made about waste dumping in Côte d’Ivoire on air and pay £25,000 to a charity of Trafigura’s choice, as well as legal costs.

The Indy’s new wall

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Independent.co.uk has a new wall, but it’s not of the Murdochian sort. It’s a News Wall displaying free content.

“It’s basically just a different way of presenting content. It simply pulls in new stories which have pictures attached and presents them,” editorial director for digital, Jimmy Leach, told Journalism.co.uk.

“It’s an aggregator of our own content, but trying to be an engaging one. Partly different presentation and partly, to be honest, an SEO play, giving the spiders something to crawl over,” he said.

Meanwhile, one of his colleagues, Pandora diarist Alice-Azania Jarvis,  isn’t entirely convinced. But what’s it for, she tweeted. Leach replied: “It’s a wall. It has news on it. It’s the News Wall. C’mon, what else do you need?”

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