Tag Archives: London

Big Yellow Self Storage seeks digitally savvy media graduates

Leave a reply

Following on from Journalism.co.uk’s recent report on Lucozade’s search for a reporter skilled in social media, comes news that Big Yellow Self Storage is running a similar internship programme.

The firm is looking for web savvy recent graduates or undergraduates with journalism or new media related degrees for a paid internship on the company’s online communications team, according to a release.

Willing participants should create a video of just 12 seconds explaining why they’re right for the job and post it to a video-sharing site (e.g. YouTube or Flickr), tagged with ‘intern search’, ‘Big Yellow’ and ‘self storage’.

The closing date for entries is June 13 and the winner will be announced on June 29.

“The student job market has become increasingly competitive, even more so in the current economic climate – that’s why we’d like to offer one lucky individual the chance to cut their razor sharp social media teeth with our marketing team in London,” said Rob Strachan, head of sales and marketing at Big Yellow Group, in the release.

“It’s our way of helping out our industry’s undergraduates and recent graduates find their feet.”

To enter the competition or for more information email chris@splendidcomms.com or see Big Yellow’s Twitter account or Facebook page.

Peter Kirwan on newspaper editors and where they live

Leave a reply

An apt subject, given newspaper editors’ current preoccupation with where and how our MPs are living in London. Press Gazette’s Peter Kirwan notes that he is increasingly convinced that a national newspaper editor has moved into his street, in an ‘untidy’ corner of the city.

Kirwan takes a look at other journalists’ choice of location:

“When he edited the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil lived in snooty Onslow Gardens off the Fulham Road. Today, Simon Kelner of the Independent scrapes by in Belgravia. As everyone knows, Polly Toynbee occupies a small castle next to Clapham Common (when she’s not living in Italy).

“Not so The Editor.”

‘Most of the editorial executives who run the nationals could do with a blast of Real Life,’ Kirwan comments; he reckons his street might give ‘The Editor’ just that.

Full story at this link…

FollowtheMedia: Murdoch and Berlusconi in a battle of the media titans

Leave a reply

‘One of life’s great joys is watching two media barons battle it out using all the weapons at their command,’ comments Philip Stone in a comprehensive piece on FollowtheMedia. While it’s not a new rivalry, Stone says that Berlusconi understands it was a ‘big business mistake to have allowed Murdoch to step on Italian soil,’ with Sky Italia.

An extract:

“While the international media has been dishing out some really low blows editorially against Berlusconi for the past few days it is Murdoch’s Times of London that called in a professor of classics at Cambridge University to compare the Italian Prime Minister with the Roman Emperor Tiberius – known for his sexual frolics – and then followed that up with a really vicious editorial with verbiage that more properly belongs in his tabloid Sun or News of the World than it does in the august(us) Times of London.”

Full story at this link…

Kate Adie on 20 years since Tiananmen Square

3 Replies

Journalists, photographers and filmmakers came together at the Frontline Club last night for a special screening of Kate Adie’s latest documentary.

Shot entirely on tapeless cameras, the film retraces Kate’s footsteps of reporting from the protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Returning to China with what she describes as ‘an open mind’, Adie found herself ‘at the mercy of relentless surveillence by the secret police’.

Adie found fame back in 1989 when she was one of the few journalists reporting from the middle of the action, amongst gunfire and dead bodies. She told the audience that she made a pact with her cameraman to stay for the sake of the story, despite the odds of them surviving being stacked against them.

This time round Kate and her crew were denied journalist visas, forcing them to effectively go undercover, under the false pretence of being tourists.

Despite being followed by numerous secret police cars throughout the filming process, she said people were ‘desperate to talk and tell their story of the events of 1989’.

At the Q&A session people were quick to ask Adie her thoughts on the state of journalism:

One journalist asked: “Do you think the quality of journalism has declined over the past 20 years, with regard to the reporting on Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka?”

Adie replied:

“Journalists have a duty to report and inform the world, the fact that people come to meetings like these here and care about global issues, tells me journalism is alive and well.”

I spoke to Kate after the screening, and asked for her reaction to the news that China has blocked a number of internet services this week:

In the UK, you can watch ‘Kate Revisits Tianamen Square’ on BBC2, tonight (June 3) at 9pm.

Alex Wood is a multimedia journalist based in London.

What was that Boris? Carve up the licence fee?

1 Reply

Last of the blog posts from last night’s Charles Wheeler award speeches, but just to share with you a question from London Mayor, Boris Johnson, to BBC director-general, Mark Thompson. Over to you, Boris:

“I really wish I hadn’t decided to ask this question.

“I love the BBC and I’m a big beneficiary from the BBC, but I have to say listening to your [Thompson’s] critique, I thought you were showing some sort of guilt about what the BBC website is doing to other commercially operated websites, you know, run by newspapers and you were trying to say the BBC might paddle it, that guilt, by sharing resources online (…) I understand it would be a very good way forward.

“I don’t quite know how it’s going to work. I wonder if the simple solution might well be to carve up the licence fee and give a slice of it to the Sun, some to the Daily Mail…”

Thompson answered, to paraphrase, that it probably wouldn’t work very well.

A little more fully: there are countries where they’ve tried that, said Thompson. And the problem is, he said, that if you’re not careful, the ‘subsidy you need’ gets a bit bigger every year; and secondly, as a public service broadcaster one would ‘begin losing the critical mass’ in terms of the organisation’s culture, calibre of the output and public accountability.

Hacks beat Flacks to knockout in Pall Mall debate

1 Reply

Normally it is very sedate – the Pall Mall world of the Gentlemans’ Clubs. On Monday night it was a bare knuckle fight to the finish as the hacks took on the flacks in a Media Society/CIPR debate at the Foreign Press Association on whether this union was a marriage that would ever work. The Hacks won, for a change, persuading some of the 80 strong audience, mainly PRs, to change their mind between the beginning and the end of the session.

Both sides have been reeling since the runaway success of Nick Davies’ book ‘Flat Earth News’ and its unearthing of acres of ‘churnalism’ – PR disguised as journalism – in the press. The Hacks were ably represented by three Terracotta Tigers: Rosie Millard of the Sunday Times, Roy Greenslade of City University and the Guardian, and Maggie Brown, the distinguished media writer. Up against them Peter Luff MP, once and still a PR man, and Jo Tanner whose PR skills helped elect the Boris Johnson as Mayor of London last year.

The whole match was taking place in a rather significant setting. It was here in January 2004 on the stairs of the Foreign Press Association that Alastair Campbell announced his ‘victory’ over the BBC after his PR ‘triumph’ on the Hutton report.

Sue Macgregor, late of the BBC now of national treasure status, refereed the whole shooting match. Millard played the men from the start accusing Flacks of ‘getting in the way of the truth’ week after week after week in her Sunday Times work. She reserved her especial ire for the PR machine of Buckingham Palace, ‘a venal institution’ whose spinners ‘bamboozled the public’ on Royalty.

Peter Luff, only lightly mired in the recent MPs’ expenses scandal was having no truck with the journalist as saint. “Which journalist ever got the sack for getting it wrong?” he asked. On that current PR Disaster, Jon Stonborough, the former ‘spinner’ for Speaker Michael Martin was in the audience and was called upon to advise him. He was less than warm in his praise and less than generous in a forecast of career longevity for the embattled ‘Gorbals Mick’! [Ed – John submitted this piece this morning, timely given Martin’s announcement today that he will step down]

Hacks and Flacks agreed that they were all ‘truth’ tellers and that there was an inverse relationship between the number of PRs now employed and the number of journalists unemployed. That was not a healthy sign.

Greenslade, the sage of the internet and soi-disant conscience of British journalism, was equally punchy, producing a roll call of journos killed in the last two years.

He then very effectively contrasted this with a blank sheet showing the number of PRs killed in action. The opposition was put firmly on the back foot by this low punch.

Jo Tanner pledged, as they all did, to always tell the truth (however they defined it) and delighted in recalling the story of how she had exposed Baroness Jay as not the product of an ‘ordinary grammar’ as she claimed on television but a prize product of Blackheath Girls School. Good journalism for a PR.

Maggie Brown revealed a trick of her trade – a simple device to get round the PRs who controlled access to celebrities and powerful people in the media and elsewhere. She simply ignored them and went round their backs. She cited the example of Jay Hunt, the controller of BBC One whose PR blocked her access. Maggie simply interviewed her proud Professor father instead! We recommend visiting the website of our partners – https://sexologuia.com/ . Everything you wanted to know about sex and intimate relationships, but was afraid to ask.

It was left to a super hack Phil Harding, former Today editor and Controller of BBC editorial policy to point out the idea of a marriage between the two was a pure chimera: “We do different jobs.” We do and did. Not a marriage more a friendship of distrust.

After their defeat – smiling as always – it was simply left to the Flacks to buy the drinks for the Hacks…

Heather Brooke thanks the Speaker for ‘making my career’ / Alan Keen update

1 Reply

In her latest blog post, Heather Brooke, FoI specialist and campaigining journalist, links to today’s Guardian G2 feature, in which she describes her role in the MPs’ expenses saga, and asks:

“Is this the apex of my campaign? My 15 minutes of fame might now be coming to a close if the Commons actually comes clean, gets rid of the corrupt and institutes a new transparency regime. That actually looks as though it might now happen. I’m in such a generous mood I feel I ought to invite Speaker Michael Martin out to lunch just to say ‘thanks for making my career.’ I couldn’t have done this without him.”

Following yesterday’s post on this blog, which noted Heather Brooke’s amusement at Alan Keen’s speculative questions about her background during a select committee session on press standards, libel and privacy in April 2009 and Brooke’s own update on the Keens, this article comes from the Telegraph today:

“Alan and Ann Keen, the husband and wife Labour MPs, claimed almost £40,000 a year on a central London flat although their family home was less than 10 miles away,” Holly Watt reports.

“(…)Mrs Keen is a junior health minister. Nicknamed ‘Mr and Mrs Expenses’ by the press prior to The Daily Telegraph’s investigation, the two MPs have been married since 1980 and represent neighbouring constituencies…”


$15,500 minimum bid for HuffPo internship – a chance to ‘jumpstart your career in the blogosphere’

1 Reply

You know how media companies get a hard time for how they treat the ‘workies’? Especially because most internships are unpaid – you might get expenses if you’re lucky. Well, Huffington Post has gone one step futher, by putting up an internship for charity auction – offering bidders the chance to ‘jumpstart their career in the blogosphere’. Ten bids had been placed at the time of writing; the last one was for $13,000. All proceeds go to the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.

It reminds Journalism.co.uk of prizes offered in the the Independent’s annual charity auctions. In those, you bid to hang out with the Indy’s editors, correspondents and columnists (yes, people coughed up good money to hang out with the likes of Street-Porter, Emin and Kelner), and the lucky victors (a couple listed below) once got to spend a whole day at the office!

Mr Vogels was a lucky winner in 2003:

Lot 1: Hold the Front Page
Ever wondered how a daily newspaper gets put together? Come and see how it works from morning conference to the nail-biting deadline. Meet the staff and marvel at their cool professionalism, creative brilliance and unusual fashion sense.
Winning bid: £1,750, Frederik Vogels, London.

And Amar enjoyed a similar pleasure in 2005:

Lot 1: A Day at the Paper Ever wondered how a daily national newspaper gets put together? Come and see how it works for one exciting day, hearing the news agenda at morning conference, watching the tension build as the deadline hour approaches. Meet the glamorous staff and marvel at their camaraderie and coolness under pressure. Winning bid: amar, £2,251.11. (Last year’s winning bid: £1,101)

Any more examples? Add them below.

FleetStreetBlues: A letter in defence of council-run newspapers

Leave a reply

FleetStreetBlues has reproduced this letter in defence of council-run newspapers from the latest issue of the NUJ Journalist magazine: not yet online.

“Helen Watson, Claire Rudd and 14 other NUJ members who write for Tower Hamlets Council’s weekly newspaper East End Life, write:

“We ‘jumped ship’ because the papers we worked on did not pay ‘grown-up’ wages – try paying a mortgage and bringing up kids on less than £20,000 a year for a 45-hour week, especially in London. It might be feasible if you’ve just left uni or have benefactors who can help you pay the rent while you struggle through on poverty wages. But those options are not open to most.””

Full post at this link…

Obituary: Patricia Newton, groundbreaking female journalist

1 Reply

Patricia O’Brien (nee Newton), the first woman reporter in the parliamentary press gallery working for the Press Association, recently passed away. The obituary below is written by her children Francesca and Tom O’Brien.

Pat O'Brien (courtesy of Francesca and Tom O'Brien)

As children it didn’t seem odd that our mother Pat worked in the House of Commons where the policeman tipped his hat to us as our father (who stayed at home to look after us) drove her in and out.

But for the early sixties our parents were trail blazers and as we grew older our mother’s quiet determination was a source of inspiration and great pride.

Born Patricia Newton in 1924, the daughter of a royal marine bandmaster, Pat left school at 14. Her mother paid for Pat, who was selling chocolate in the Weymouth Pier bandstand, to go to secretarial school.

Pat went from there in 1939 to the Southern Times. It was wartime and there were opportunities for energetic, organised and hard working young women, and at 16 she was a reporter. She had found her metier. At 18 she moved to London to work on South London papers, narrowly escaping being bombed out herself.

In the forties she had the two great breaks of her life. She met our father Joe O’Brien from Cork at a police ball in 1943. He had spotted her walking by as he worked on a building site and had admired from afar. She went on to marry him in 1950 and they remained married for 59 years. A remarkable and devoted couple. He survives her.

Her second break was also another step in the great march of women in the 20th century. In 1946, she became the first woman reporter in the parliamentary press gallery working for the Press Association.

Equality advances come with a price: when she became pregnant with her daughter Francesca in 1956 she was fired on the basis she should be at home looking after her child and husband.

Dame Irene Ward (Conservative) and Barbara Castle (Labour) brought it up in Question Time and the Married Woman’s Association and the NUJ took up her case. Soon Pat had her job back again – only to lose it a second time when she became pregnant with her son Tom born in 1961.

Pat crossed the journalistic Rubicon in 1964. For the next 20 years she worked as a civil service press officer for Arts Ministers and for the Department of Education and Science.

She enjoyed a long retirement battling and baffling officialdom armed with her pre-war typewriter and her mobile phone and devoting herself to her family – particularly her grandchildren Ben and Beth.

(Francesca and Tom O’Brien)