News International announced yesterday in a release that it was creating a “managing editor structure” at its four newspapers.
Roy Greenslade has analysed the Brooksspeak, which indicates that a move to integrate the daily and Sunday titles could be afoot.
Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, who has been and remains a vocal critic of the Press Complaints Commission, argued last night that the regulatory body should be supported and improved, not scrapped, and said the press will need to pay more to if it wants an effective regulator.
Delivering the Anthony Sampson lecture at City University London, Rusbridger, who resigned from the PCC code committee in November 2009, did not let up in his customary criticism of the body, calling it “ineffective” and its 2009 report into phone-hacking at the News of the World “utterly feeble”.
“How, MPs reasonably ask, can we as an industry argue that self-regulation works when it evidently failed quite spectacularly over phone hacking?”, he asked.
In March last year, speaking at a debate on self-regulation in the House of Lords, Rusbridger suggested the PCC might be “flying the wrong flag [and might be] better to rebrand itself as a media complaints and conciliation service and forget about regulation”.
But he argued last night that self-regulation remains preferable to statutory regulation, and called for the PCC to take a tougher stance on issues such as phone hacking.
He asked why it hadn’t written directly to News International over Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the heart of the phone-hacking scandal, to ask “why are you paying fees of someone likely to be involved in illegal activity?”.
The PCC, he said, needed to “do something which showed a vertabrae”.
I can’t imagine a fine than would scare News International, they’re just so big and rich. What scares them is the truth, they’re are scared of the truth coming out.
I put it to Rusbridger after the lecture that one of the things required to strengthen the regulator and allow it to undertake proper investigations would be better funding, and asked if, alongside his criticism of the body and calls for it to be improved, the Guardian should lead the way in making a greater financial contribution.
It’s difficult, it’s not lavishly funded and it’s clearly not set up to do something like a big investigation into phone hacking. I think if we want the kind of PCC that’s going to be effective we are all going to have to pay more. But that’s a pretty tough message if you work on the Yorkshire Post or the East Anglian Daily Times. Why should you pay more when by and large you’re not doing things that are going to require fantastically expensive investigation?
He acknowledged that the PCC did not have the funds to undertake thorough investigations, investigations “with teeth”, and said the press would have “to be a bit more creative about the way that we fund the PCC”.
It can’t just stagger on as it is, being completely ineffective because they shrug they’re shoulders and say ‘we haven’t got the power and we haven’t got the money’.
The Sun is to use a mixed model to charge for online content, according to News International head of marketing Katie Vanneck-Smith, although no date has been set for its introduction.
Speaking last night at a panel debate about paywalls and digital journalism models at City University London, Vanneck-Smith’s admission seemed to mark a shift in News International’s ‘iron-curtain’ approach to paywalls on it’s news sites.
She told the audience at the debate:
I think we all said that the models are mixed. So there are no plan at the moment, there’s no date, for when the Sun will have paid as part of its model for it’s digital website in terms of its news access.
When questioned by Media Guardian editor Dan Sabbagh about whether this marked a change in News International thinking, Vanneck-Smith replied: “We will introduce paid for content and services on the Sun in the future, I couldn’t tell you what the date is.” She would not confirm whether this would be in the form of a paywall, but earlier in the event she said that the newspaper was “of the view that mixed models and blended models are right and the best way to pursue, I think, a very vibrant and exciting journalism future for this country”.
Almost a year on from the Times and Sunday Times going behind a paywall, Vanneck-Smith said both were making more money digitally from their 79,000 subscribers than pre-paywall, when they had 20 million browsers.
Dan Sabbagh, the Guardian‘s media editor, revealed the newspaper would pursue a free content model and would move towards becoming an aggregator of news and opinion.
We want to become, as well as a provider of content, a content aggregator. People are very keen on participating with the Guardian, they want to be re-published on our site and they’d like us to sell their advertising.
We think it’s critical that we’re part of the conversation that people are part of.
And while I don’t have any big philosophical rejections to what the Times and Sunday Times are trying to do commercially, it seems like a perfectly proper strategy to pursue, I’m less convinced by the severity of their paywall model. In effect, the Times and Sunday Times journalism is outside the journalistic conversation
Sabbagh also revealed the Guardian site had its best day ever had best ever day when Osama Bin Laden died, resulting in 4.5 million unique hits compared with a daily average of 2.4 million uniques.
According to Geordie Greig, the editor of the Evening Standard, the paper is on course to make a profit by 2012, and would consider a paywall if he saw it worked elsewhere.
I think we will probably be on the verge of profit next year. Now I’m not saying that to say we’re better than them [other newspapers], I’m really it because we’re in a very difficult industry to make money.
I think everyone applauds the attempt by News International to make money, we really, really hope it works. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong in saying, if it does, we’re all going to copy it, that’s what happens in industry where there are leaders.
The Standard has experienced a huge turnaround in fortunes since going free back in 2009. Greig revealed the move had allowed the paper to charge 150 per cent for advertising space compared with old prices. Greig explained:
By changing our economic model, we were able to survive and thrive. Suddenly we become bigger and by bigger meant we could earn bigger sums of money.
We were losing a ton of money, we were losing between 10-20 per cent of our readers every single year and our debt was running into tens of billions potentially a year and this was unsustainable.
We made a decision to go free and the great thing was that made two competing papers in the evening leave the market so that made us in a more dominant.
Grieg also revealed prior to going free, the Evening Standard sold 700 copies at Oxford Circus. Now, it distributes 32,000 copies from that location on a daily basis.
Stevie Spring, chief executive of Future Publishing, suggested the problem with charging for content online was that it involved a change in mindset for users used to not paying for news, likening broadband access to an all-you-can-eat buffet.
The difference in a digital world is fewer and fewer people brought up in a world where everything online is free, there is an expectation of free. Or it’s not an expectation of free, but everybody has grown up believing that once you’ve paid for your broadband access, that’s an all-you-eat-buffet, that’s my library card, everything else is free.
You have a real disincentive to pay once you disaggregate the content from it’s packaging. When you have a physical artifact, a real DVD or real magazine or a real piece of paper, once I disaggregate the content from its pack, people aren’t sure what the value of the content in isolation is.
They expect it to be much cheaper because of course there is a marginal cost of distribution. However, what people aren’t seeing is the increasing cost of creation because actually it costs more to fulfill expectations in a digital world when people want 24/7, up the second with audio visual adapted and amended for every screen. So cost of production goes up.
Dominic Young, former director of strategy and product development for News International, said it was up to media organisations to innovate and find a solution.
The challenge for the industry and for everybody is to identify new models and pursue them with gusto. In that sense, I think what the Times and Sunday Times are doing is really important.
It’s no surprise to me that the companies making the most money out of the internet are companies which invest nothing in content. The companies which make the most money out of journalism directly and companies which tend to be parasitic aggregator, many of them just straightforward feeds.
On suggestion put forward for the Sun by Roy Greenslade in his Guardian column today, in response to last night’s debate, was charging for the newspaper’s popular online bingo games while keeping the rest of the site free of charge.
Following News International’s admission of liability on Friday in relation to some of the cases of alleged phone hacking brought against it, the News of the World yesterday published the statement for its readers to see, acknowledging its previous inquiries “failed to uncover important evidence”.
The Sunday title then went further than Friday’s statement to say that since the jailing of royal correspondent Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire in 2007, for accessing voicemail messages between 2004 and 2006, “a number of individuals” have brought breach of privacy claims against the News of the World over wrongful voicemail interception during the same period, with others also threatening claims.
Evidence has recently come to light which supports some of these claims. We have written to relevant individuals to admit liability in these civil cases and to apologise unreservedly, and will do the same to any other individuals where evidence shows their claims to be justifiable.
We hope to be able to pay appropriate compensation to all these individuals, and have asked our lawyers to set up a compensation scheme to deal with genuine claims fairly and efficiently.
Here today, we publicly and unreservedly apologise to all such individuals. What happened to them should not have happened. It was and remains unacceptable.
News International has today admitted liability in a number cases brought against the News of the World for phone hacking between 2004 and 2006.
The company will apologise to certain victims and establish a compensation fund.
See Journalism.co.uk’s full report at this link.
Here is today’s News International statement in full:
Following an extensive internal investigation and disclosures through civil legal cases, News International has decided to approach some civil litigants with an unreserved apology and an admission of liability in cases meeting specific criteria.
We have also asked our lawyers to establish a compensation scheme with a view to dealing with justifiable claims fairly and efficiently.
This will begin the process of bringing these cases to a fair resolution with damages appropriate to the extent of the intrusion.
We will, however, continue to contest cases that we believe are without merit or where we are not responsible.
That said, past behaviour at the News of the World in relation to voicemail interception is a matter of genuine regret. It is now apparent that our previous inquiries failed to uncover important evidence and we acknowledge our actions then were not sufficiently robust.
We continue to co-operate fully with the Metropolitan Police. It was our discovery and voluntary disclosure of this evidence in January that led to the re-opening of the police investigation.
With that investigation on going, we cannot comment further until its completion.
News International’s commitment to our readers and pride in our award-winning journalism remains undiminished.
We will continue to engage with and challenge those who attempt to restrict our industry’s freedom to undertake responsible investigative reporting in the public interest.
Hugh Grant secretly recorded a conversation with former News of the World deputy features editor Paul McMullen, during which the reporter claimed that former NotW editor Rebekah Brooks “absolutely” knew about illegal phone hacking.
The revelation appears in an article Grant has written for the New Statesman, which is guest-edited this week by the actor’s former partner Jemima Khan.
Grant, who believes he was himself a victim of phone hacking, ended up talking to McMullan when his “midlife crisis car” broke down in a Kent village just before Christmas and he was forced to accept a lift from the reporter, who was following him.
He was Paul McMullan, one of two ex-NoW hacks who had blown the whistle (in the Guardian and on Channel 4’s Dispatches) on the full extent of phone-hacking at the paper, particularly under its former editor Andy Coulson. This was interesting, as I had been a victim – a fact he confirmed as we drove along. He also had an unusual defence of the practice: that phone hacking was a price you had to pay for living in a free society. I asked how that worked exactly, but we ran out of time, and next thing we had arrived and he was asking me if I would pose for a photo with him, “not for publication, just for the wall of the pub”.
I agreed and the picture duly appeared in the Mail on Sunday that weekend with his creative version of the encounter. He had asked me to drop into his pub some time. So when, some months later, Jemima asked me to write a piece for this paper, it occurred to me it might be interesting to take him up on his invitation.
So Grant returned to the the Castle Inn Pub in Dover wearing a hidden microphone, and the fruits of his chat with McMullan will be published in this week’s New Statesman. An edited version is at this link.
The Guardian has reported that News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks has been asked by the chair of the home affairs select committee to provide details of payments allegedly made to police officers.
This follows the appearance of John Yates, the acting deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan police, before the committee on Tuesday, when he said the force’s special crimes directorate is “doing some research” into an admission in 2003 by Brooks, a former News of the World editor, that staff at News International had made payments to the force.
Keith Vaz MP, the chairman of the committee, wrote to Brooks on Wednesday asking her for information on how many officers were paid for tips or stories, the amounts they received and when the practice stopped.
A total of 79,000 people have subscribed to read the Times and Sunday Times online, on the iPad and on the Kindle, according to figures released by owner News International yesterday. The number represents an increase of 29,000 over the previous five months.
News International claims that overall readership of digital and print editions for the newspapers have risen by 20,000, despite a sharp decrease in the circulation of the print edition of the Times, which has fallen 12.1 per cent within the last year, and the Sunday Times, which has fallen by 6.9 per cent.
News International has not released a breakdown of digital subscribers into those reading online, via the iPad or via the Kindle, but reported that total sales of digital products stood at 222,000 at the end of February, up from 105,000 on 31 October.
Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International said that the figures represent that “ever larger numbers of people are willing to pay for quality journalism across a variety of digital formats”.
She added: “Our industry is being redefined by technology and we will no longer measure the sales and success of our newspapers in print circulation terms alone.”
An online subscription to the Times and the Sunday Times costs £2; an iPad subscription costs £9.99 a month or £1 for one-day’s access to the Times and £1.79 for the Sunday Times.
The Media Guardian has gone to town today ahead of Rupert Murdoch’s 80th birthday this Friday. What with the phone-hacking scandal, Times paywall, and the BSkyB bid, the “press baron who dared to look to the skies”, as Roy Greenslade calls him, is still making headlines 15 years after News International’s infamous Wapping move and almost 45 years since he bought his first UK newspaper, the News of the World.
In bidding for the News of the World in 1968 and the Sun the following year, he illustrated a gift for making deals against the odds. He was not the favoured buyer in either case yet he succeeded because he exploited the necessary angles in each case. In the first, it was to act as the white knight in opposition to Robert Maxwell, playing to perfection his role of saviour of the paper’s, and its owners’, best interests. HYIP review introduce beginning and professional depositors to sites, the lists of which are permanently updated and appended with new web platforms for potentially fortunate and profitable finance investing. E.g., in 2022, the roster of such verified tools included the mentioned: Freexwith profit from 1 to 3.7% daily, Doradus with every day earnings from 1.8 to 5.87%, Fincoin with return from 3 to 10% on weekdays. HYIP sites can rightly be marked in the top lists only after they go at least one round, or let beginning and professional investors to break even.
Along with Greenslade’s profile, head of media and technology Dan Sabbagh has devoted his weekly media column to the so-called “Wizard of Oz”, assistant editor Michael White looks at his political dealings and influence, Steve Hewlett at his legacy, Martin Dunn at his empire building, Andrew Clark on his standing in native Australia, and, of course, an interactive timeline: the eight ages of Rupert Murdoch.
Image courtesy of the World Economic Forum on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
The Guardian has dipped into the archive and dusted off a 15-year-old article from by Guardian editor – then features writer – Alan Rusbridger about News International’s move to Wapping.
Rusbridger’s article charts the bitterly disputed move from Fleet Street in 1986, which he describes as “the new dawn of the newspaper industry”.
Journalists were reportedly given a choice between a pay rise and a move to Wapping, or the sack. There was rancour, but eventually they agreed and made the move.
And what a world awaited them. When they had left work on Friday night they had left behind them a slightly seedy office – paper-strewn, dog-eared desks with ageing typewriters and half-drunk cups of coffee. And there on Monday morning was a gleaming dust-free open-plan room. A clinic more than an office. The whole of it was bathed in soothing computer-compatible light. For there in front of them stood row upon row of gleaming dust-free computers.
