Tag Archives: London

Priest who wrote offensive comments about gay people on blog keeps newspaper column

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The vicar who faced national outrage after he posted offensive comments about gay people on his personal blog will continue writing for the Northern Echo newspaper.

The Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and chaplain to the Stock Exchange, Peter Mullen, has been widely criticized for posts on his blog, including: a poem about gay marriage; a suggestion that proponents of gay culture should have a tattoo across their buttocks; and a call for Gay Pride parades to be outlawed.

Nonetheless the priest will continue to write his column for the Northern Echo, which can be read online.

The Northern Echo’s editor, Peter Barron, wrote on his own blog this week that he had advised Mullen to issue an apology to the Press Association, and that Mullen would be writing another apology in the Northern Echo next week, even though the original comments were not ever posted on the Northern Echo site.

Mullen has now deleted his blog but the offensive comments can be read in this Google cache (via Zefrog).

On a side note, if you now search priest + sodomy, on Google most the results return articles about Peter Mullen. Ironic, that.

Too old to become a journalist: How I started freelancing

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A couple of comments from last week’s post asked how I managed to get work published in the nationals as a freelancer sans training.

Short answer: I had the right story that only I could write at the right time. That’s a lot of rights.

Before my NCTJ I did a couple of brilliant evening courses:

Introduction to freelance journalism and stage two freelance journalism at adult learning college City Lit in Holborn, London.

At the time (2005) it was run by Liz Hodgkinson, who I remember always claimed that you didn’t have to be a particularly good writer to be successful. She also encouraged people to pitch, pitch and pitch – editors could only say no.

My First Pitch

The film, The Devil Wears Prada, about one girl’s gruelling experience assisting the editor of a top fashion magazine in America, was about to come out in the cinema.

The book, on which the film was based, caused a lot of controversy as its author, Lauren Weisberger, had worked for American Vogue editor, Anna Wintour, previously. Weisberger always claimed her book was entirely fictional.

Coincidentally I had just come back from a tough 3-month work experience placement at American Vogue.

I failed to put two-and-two-together, but a girl on the evening course pointed out that I could write about my experiences to coincide with the film’s release.

I thought I’d aim high (you never ask, you never get) so with the help of Liz Hodgkinson’s subbing skills I pitched the following to the Guardian:

Dear K,

The Devil Wears Prada told the unbelievable story of one girl’s baptism of fire
on a glossy fashion magazine but what’s the reality like?

Much worse if my three gruelling months of work experience at American Vogue are
anything to go by!

I wondered if you would be interested in my story to coincide with the film
version of The Devil Wears Prada starring Meryl Streep as the fiery editor and
Anne Hathaway as her long-suffering assistant.

The film is due out in the U.S on 30th June and in the U.K on 27th October. I
have a picture of me and the other interns standing in front of the Vogue logo
at Conde Nast.

My name is Amy Oliver and I’m a freelance journalist.

Best Wishes

Amy Oliver

——-

They politely declined.

Undeterred I pitched it to The Times.

They didn’t know me from Adam and asked me to write a couple of paragraphs on my experiences at Vogue, and also to submit some of my written work.

What do you send in to The Times if you’ve never had anything published? Unbelievably or perhaps naively I sent in a piece on window box gardening and a snippet on why there should be more nasty, abusive greetings cards on the market!

Both pieces I had done as homework for my course. Both pieces now make me cringe to my very core.

They bought it and the story. My first ever piece was a joint front cover for the Times’ T2 supplement (shared with now WSJ style magazine Editor Tina Gaudoin no less) complete with dreadful picture of me fingering a pile of old Vogues.

I was so overwhelmed I think I hid in the corner and didn’t write another word for six months. Not very ballsy hack with rhino skin… more Miss Marple.

No one else could have written that story and a personal experience timed with a current issue is usually the best way to start.

To give another example a woman on the evening course was caught up in the Asian tsunami in 2004 and was planning to write a personal experience for the anniversary.

If you don’t know who to pitch your idea to phone up the newspaper and ask. Be prepared for much sighing and monosyllabic answers from the other end – imagine how many people phone them every day to tell them about typos etc.

Also be prepared to pitch the crux of your idea over the phone. If they can cut you off without clogging up their inbox they will.

Now perhaps someone can advise me: I was always told to pitch ideas to one publication at a time. I have since met a very successful journalist who blanket pitches and usually sells the same story three or four times over. (I’ll try and get hold of blanket pitcher extraordinaire for an interview)

Do people who freelance already blanket pitch? Have you ever come up against anger from a publication and exclusivity?

This is the second post in Amy’s blog series: Am I too old to become a journalist? Read her introductory post.

New media types among Evening Standard’s 1000 most influential Londoners

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Peter Mandelson had to be a last minute addition to the list because the magazine had already gone to press: being offline seems to be a recurring theme for the London Evening Standard’s 1000 most influential Londoners list, out this evening.

Can we get an online version? Can we heck! After time wasted going round the editorial houses through the Evening Standard switchboard, Brighton-based Journalism.co.uk is getting sent a print version.

So in the meantime (till the print copy arrives) here’s the online media and general media types we’ve spotted on the list of 50 that are featured on the website. And it looks like new media gets a fairly good representation.

The little ‘see new media’ under the names almost had us thinking we could click on links… no chance. Well, we’re not in London; we don’t really exist, clearly.

Shiny Media’s three founders are included – and quoted as being “highly influential in the UK online world”. They aren’t among the very top 50, but you can see a scanned in bit of the list on the Shiny blog.

Media/Online types from the top 50:

  • Nikesh Arora, GOOGLE, EUROPEAN VP: Boss of the internet giant’s most important base outside California, bringing in close to a billion pounds a year in advertising revenue in the UK. Landed Google job after 17 interviews. (New Media, TV & Radio)
  • Jonathan Ive, 41, APPLE, DESIGN GURU: The world’s most influential product designer, involved in the iPhone and iPod. He is returning to British roots, buying a £2.5 million retreat here. (New Media)
  • Mark Thompson, 51, BBC, DIRECTOR-GENERAL: From deception scandals to swingeing job cuts, Thompson has had to weather many storms while rival broadcasters pitch for a slice of the corporation’s income from the licence fee (Television & Radio)

Outside of the big 50 we’ll have to rely on the Guardian’s Media Monkey for information:

“…chief exec James Murdoch, Ashley Highfield, chief exec of the Kangaroo on-demand TV project and, drum roll please, Evening Standard owner Lord Rothermere, chairman of DMGT! Who’d have thunk that thisislondon.co.uk was such a groundbreaker?

Other media bods on the list were Paul Darce, Rebecca Wade, Ed Richards, Mark Thompson, Simon Cowell, Simon Fuller, Nick Ferrari, Emily Bell, Eric Huggers, Evan Davies, John Humphrys, Jay Hunt, Peter Horrocks, Alexandra Shulman and Gok Wan.”

Newsquest to axe 12 jobs

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Newsquest has announced plans to cut 12 editorial positions and make six staff redundant at titles in north and north east London.

The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has attacked the proposed changes: “This is a savage cut to the already overworked, stressed and underpaid journalists that work for these titles,” said Don Mackglew, NUJ assistant organiser, in a press statement.

According to a report from MediaGuardian, the publisher is looking to replace some sub-editing positions with multimedia journalists, who would take responsibility for reporting, sub-editing and uploading multimedia content to the titles’ content management systems.

The NUJ is currently in consultation with Newsquest about the changes, which are likely to involve a number of compulsory redundancies, the union said.

Newspaper Innovation: City AM plans Edinburgh and Manchester launch

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Free business newspaper City AM will launch in the two cities in spring next year, managing director Lawson Munchaster told an industry gathering.

Expected circulation of the title outside of London is 50,000.

New blog series: Am I too old to become a journalist?

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“So you want to be a journalist,” declares the college leaflet or job advice site.

Yes, of course you do but what if you think you might be too old, have no proper training, did not go to Cambridge or Oxford, have no relatives in the industry and all the other clichés people like to trot out? What if you have all of the above but still don’t seem to be able to get a job?

I have just started a fast-track NCTJ course at Lambeth College in London at the grand old age of 28 and before that I was freelancing without any proper training.

When I finally decided to become a journalist I had loads of questions. Everything from whether to do a course, what ‘off the record’ really means and whether my hoovering to working ratio was slightly unbalanced as a freelancer.

Everyday the Journalism.co.uk forum is peppered with similar questions – well, maybe not the hoovering one – from would-be journalists.

This blog series isn’t designed to tell you what to do to become a journalist. Instead it will chart my progress through the 18-weeks of what is turning out to be utter boot camp – 2 hours per night shorthand practice anyone?

Any work experience I do will also be covered as will networking events with views and opinions from seasoned hacks and the gruelling task of actually getting a job at the end of it.

Hopefully it will dispel some of the myths surrounding the NCTJ and whether you truly need it to succeed – the industry from a rookie’s point of view – and be an agony aunt of sorts to questions like ‘help, I want to be a journalist, but don’t know where to start’.

Amy Oliver has been meaning to become a journalist from about the age of 5, but got slightly sidetracked by the possibility of earning money. She has been freelancing since 2007 and in that time has written for The Times, The Guardian, You magazine, Vogue, Vague Paper as well as local newspaper Bridport News in her hometown of Bridport, Dorset.

She has just started a fast-track NCTJ course at Lambeth College and blogs about her experiences as a slightly mature trainee and not going down the conventional route into journalism. She lives and works in London.

AOP: Today’s television ‘may not be worth sitting still for’, says US author Clay Shirky

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Even children can’t concentrate on television anymore, says Clay Shirky, the US-based internet educator, consultant and author of ‘Here comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations’.

In his speech at yesterday’s AOP Digital Publishing summit Shirky told an anecdote about the four-year-old daughter of one of his friends watching a film: “[S]he jumps round behind the TV and [starts] rooting around in the wires, looking for the mouse.”

Today’s television ‘may not be worth sitting still for’, but the computer is for everything.

The problem for media professionals is that the industry still holds the perception that everyone sees publishing in the same way, he explained.

But, he said, citing the example of Flickr, material may be ‘in public but [it’s] not for the public. The cost of putting something out in public has fallen so low.’

“This is a reversal of the usual pattern,” he said. ‘Gather and share has been the usual pattern [of publishing] since time immemorial’, but now grouping comes first.

He split his talk into three categories: the sharing culture of Flickr; the collaborative nature of Wikipedia; and the collective action of internet groupings, citing the use of a Facebook group to force HSBC to reverse its decision on withdrawing students’ interest-free overdrafts.

These examples, he said, show the ‘the environment that’s coming’ and a need to re-think the model’.

“If you wait to hear what the business model is you will hear that your competitors have perfected it,” he said.

Shirky compared today’s media trends to London’s 17th-century gin craze: at first people didn’t know what to do with what they were consuming, but they then learnt how to share, collaborate and collect.

“The action is where people are going after the consumers. Not just consuming, but producing and sharing.”

LinkedIn Europe managing director talks about forming new publishing partnerships

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You can watch an online interview with Kevin Eyres, managing director at LinkedIn Europe, at the AOP site.

He is talking to them ahead of next Wednesday’s AOP Digital Publishing Summit in London, where he will talk about LinkedIn’s existing and future partnerships with publishers.

“We feel very strongly that communities are gonna be part of the publishers’ future,” he said.

Eyres says that the professional network site, on average, attracts one member every two seconds.


Guardian blogger calls for other London bloggers

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One of the Guardian’s newest bloggers, writer Dave Hill, is to use the platform to promote, and interact with, other external blogs.

“Blogging offers the chance to fill the void,” London blogger Dave Hill writes at his new Guardian.co.uk home.  In an attempt to nourish connections with other bloggers, he’s asking for people to send him their favourite London blogs.

Prior to this blog he blogged at London Mayor & More, and his other blogs Clapton Pond and Big Britain are still active.