On Guardian.co.uk, Nick Davies reports: “Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists’ repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.”
I got a peek behind the stage curtain last week, at the University of Westminster / British Journalism Review Journalism in Crisis conference (May 19/20). Geoffrey Davies, head of the Journalism and Mass Communications department, gave me a mini-guided tour of the equipment borrowed for the event – it allowed the live-streaming of the conference throughout; a real bonus for those at home or in the office.
The Journalism.co.uk beat means that we cover a fair few industry and academic conferences, and so we get to compare the technology efforts of the hosts themselves. While Twitter conversation didn’t flow as much as at some events (not necessarily a negative thing – see some discussion on that point at this link) the students’ own coverage certainly made use of their multimedia skills. I contacted a few of the students and lecturers afterwards to find out a few more specifics, and how they felt it went.
“We streamed to the web via a system we borrowed from NewTek Europe, but might purchase, called Tricaster. It’s a useful piece of equipment that is a television studio in a box,” explained Rob Benfield, a senior lecturer at the University, who produced the students’ coverage.
“In this case it allowed us to add graphics and captions downstream of a vision-mixer. It also stores all the material we shot in its copious memory and allowed us to store and stream student work, messages and advertising material of various sorts without resorting to other sources.
“Some of our third year undergraduates quickly mastered the technology which proved to be largely intuitive. We streamed for two solid days without interruption.”
Conference participants might also have seen students extremely diligently grabbing each speaker to ask them some questions on camera (making Journalism.co.uk’s cornering of people a little bit more competitive). The videos are linked at the end of this post.
Marianne Bouchart, a second year at the University, blogged and tweeted (via @WestminComment) along with postgraduate student, Alberto Furlan.
“We all were delighted to get involved in such an important event,” Bourchart told Journalism.co.uk afterwards. “It was an incredible opportunity for us to practice our journalistic skills and gave to most of us a first taste of working in journalism. I couldn’t dream of anything better than to interview BBC director general Mark Thompson.
“We worked very hard on this project and we are all very happy it went on that well. My experience as an editor managing a team of journalists to cover the event was fantastic. We encountered a few scary moments, some panic attacks, but handled the whole thing quite brilliantly in the end – for inexperienced journalists. I can’t wait to be working with this team again.”
A sample of the Westminster students’ coverage:
If you missed the Journalism.co.uk own coverage, here’s a round-up:
Videos from the Westminster University students at this link. Interviewees included:
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, journalist and Freedom of Information specialist, has picked up on the Hansard report from the committee session in April 2009 which heard evidence from Roy Greenslade and Nick Davies. MP Alan Keen used to opportunity to ask who exactly this Heather Brooke was.
From Hansard:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmcumeds/uc275-vi/uc27502.htm
Q484 Alan Keen: There is a woman who has frequently been on television and in the press who appears to me to be a campaigner for freedom of information, an American I think.
Mr Davies: Heather Brooke?
Q485 Alan Keen: Yes. Does she earn a living from this?
Mr Davies: She is a journalist. She is a specialist in freedom of information. I think she is actually British and she worked in America and used their Freedom of Information Act, came back to this country just as ours was about to come into force so wrote a book which is a guide.
Q486 Alan Keen: I have seen her being interviewed.
Mr Davies: You are wondering whether she has some vested interest.
Q487 Alan Keen: Yes, because I have seen her on television being interviewed.
Mr Greenslade: I know her quite well. She teaches the students at City. She is a single interest journalist in the old tradition of having one niche interest and following it to its logical conclusion. She lives, in monetary terms, on the margins.
Heather Brooke now responds:
“It was not without a chuckle at his chutzpah that I saw my detractor was the Member for Feltham & Heston, Alan Keen. With his wife, Ann, the couple are known as ‘Mr and Mrs Expenses'” … Full post at this link…
“Why did it take six days and citizen journalism to shed light on Ian Tomlinson’s death?” Nick Davies asks in today’s MediaGuardian. He examines the role of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) and asks ‘who the media can trust’.
Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre has made his thoughts about Justice Eady, the Human Rights Act and the Max Mosley privacy case against the News of the World pretty clear since giving his Society of Editors speech last year, but today he was given the chance to follow up on Mosley’s own comments to the commons select committee on press standards, privacy and freedom.
(And have his say he was most definitely going to – reminding the committee several times of the length of time they’d given Mosley to speak, until one member asked whether he felt he was being treated differently?)
“Mr Mosley, when he gave evidence to this committee, I was very surprised at the soft time you gave him,” said Dacre.
“For Max Mosley to present himself as a knight in shining armour, proclaiming (…) sanctimonious, self-righteousness is almost a surreal inversion of the normal values of civilised society.”
It’s ‘a bit like the Yorkshire ripper campaigning against men who batter women’, he added.
The ruling against the News of the World and in favour of Mosley made the government’s stance on brothels and prostitution problematic, he said.
While brothels are seen by the government as ‘unacceptable and totally wrong’ and requiring a law to prosecute the people that run them, ‘Justice Eady has said Mosley’s behaviour is merely unconventional not illegal’, said Dacre.
“One legitimises the other,” he said.
The Daily Mail would not have broken the Mosley story, because it is a family paper, he said, even if it had ‘fallen into the paper’s lap’ as one committee member suggested. However, Dacre said he would defend the NOTW’s right to publish it.
Nick Davies
Today’s hearing was also a chance for Dacre to respond to claims made by journalist and ‘Flat Earth News’ author Nick Davies at a committee session on Tuesday.
Summised by the committee chair, Davies said the Daily Mail was characterised by a level of ruthless aggression and spite far greater than any other newspaper in Fleet Street.
“Davies is one of those people who sees conspiracy in everything. Like many people who write for the Guardian he believes he is the only one who can claim the moral high ground,” said Dacre.
“The book doesn’t do himself or our industry any justice.”
The book, he added, had been written ‘without the basic journalistic courtesy of checking the allegations concerned’.
Dacre accepted that there is some ‘churnalism’ of press releases at a provincial and national level – driven largely by poor finances and lack of resources, but said he refutes the charge of the Daily Mail.
“I’d suggest the Daily Mail is both famous and infamous for taking Whitehall and government press releases and going behind them. Certainly our reporters when they get freelance copy make their own inquiries and take them further,” he said.
“Our spending on journalism today is as great as ever, despite the recession. Mr Davies makes a valid point about some areas of the media. I think strong areas of the media, including some of our competitors, are not guilty of this charge.”
In today’s MediaGuardian, City University of New York (CUNY) journalism professor Jeff Jarvis writes that that foundations will not take over newspapers, à la Scott Trust / Guardian relationship. He told Journalism.co.uk: “It is an empty hope for white knights to save news from inevitable change and business reality. But he says: “We’ll see foundation and public support able to fund a decent number of investigations.”
Yesterday, Journalism.co.uk published comments from New York University (NYU) professor, Jay Rosen, and ProPublica’s managing editor, Stephen Engelberg, as well as from Jarvis in a feature looking at the sustainability of ‘lump sum’ funded journalism – they all said that the point was not to look at ‘one solution’ but at a hybrid of funding opportunities (an issue picked up by Julie Starr here.)
US-based ProPublica, funded by the Sandler Foundation, for example, employs full-time journalists to conduct investigations which are then supplied to other media bodies. Journalism.co.uk raised the point with some of the NYJournalism interviewees (fuller features forthcoming) that similar foundation funding is a bit trickier to come by in the UK: just what would a UK version of ProPublica look like and could it be funded?
Would the equivalent of ProPublica work over here? Or, for that matter, something in the mould of Spot.Us, New America Media, the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, or the Center for Public Integrity?
Last week the Guardian’s Stephen Moss mentioned Paul Bradshaw’s new project, HelpMeInvestigate.com in his giant G2 feature on the troubled regional newspaper industry. It’s a proposal not quite on the scale of ProPublica, which has an annual operating budget of $10 million, and it’s seen success so far, making it to third stage of the (American) Knight News Challenge 2009 and it awaits news of further progress.
How about existing organisations in the UK? There’s the Centre for Investigative Journalism with its annual summer school, but it doesn’t run and supply investigations in the way ProPublica does. There’s MySociety which can help journalists with stories, but is not designed as a primarily journalistic venture.
Author of Flat Earth News, Nick Davies, has previously told the Press Gazette (which has just announced its last issue) about his idea of models of ‘mini-media’.
“It may be that we are looking at funding mini-media or a foundation that will give money to groups of journalists if they can pass the quality threshold,” Davies said at an National Union of Journalists (NUJ) event in January, as Press Gazette reported.
“The greatest question in journalism today is what will be our ‘third source’ of funding,” Davies told Journalism.co.uk last week.
“If advertising and circulation can no longer pay for our editorial operation, we have to find this third source.
“I suspect that place by place and case by case, the answer to the question will be different, a matter of wrapping up whatever package of cash is possible, using donations or grants or sponsorship or micropayments from foundations, rich individuals, local councils, businesses, NGOs, universities – anybody who can understand that the collapse of newspapers is not just about journalists losing their jobs but about everybody losing an essential source of information.
“And in an ideal world, central government would lead the way by setting up a New Media Fund to provide seed money to help these non-profit mini-media to establish themselves and to find their particular third source.”
So could a third source-funded model work? And what shape would it take? It’s a question Journalism.co.uk will continue to ask. Please share your thoughts below.
Saturday saw around 150 gathered for the National Union of Journalists’ (NUJ) job crisis summit, part of a union-wide campaign against job cuts and pay freezes in the industry.
Speaking at the summit, Flat Earth News author and journalist Nick Davies called upon journalists to be ‘whistleblowers on our own newsrooms’:
“We need to tell the public the impact of the job cuts on newsgathering,” he said in a report on the NUJ website.
“The public must know that the corporations have taken over the newsrooms and ransacked them for profit and that is why readers have lost trust in us.
“We need to improve the status of journalists. We are not trusted; we are not liked, because we are misperceived. The best known people in journalism are people like Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre, who have brought us into disrepute.”
Exposing flaws in managements’ running of newsrooms and putting state aid into the hands of journalists and not corporations would help provide a practical solution to a financial problem, he added.
The union will launch a campaign of lobbying MPs and local authorities, protests and possible industrial action, legal challenges to staff cuts and workplace issues, and a public debate of the situation.
The meeting called on the NUJ’s general secretary, Jeremy Dear, to meet with employers on a national level, and speak with ministers about media ownership regulation:
“This meeting believes the economic model practised by media employers over recent years – a sub-prime media market – is dead. It is scoops, quality editorial content, strong images and an engaged readership which will see media survive and flourish not retrenchment and soaring executive pay,” a motion ruled by the meeting said.
“This meeting further believes that light touch media regulation and the weakening of media ownership laws has led to an unhealthy consolidation of media ownership.
“Many media owners continue to show they have no coherent strategy that can secure a viable future for media in print, broadcast or online.”
Also discussed: chapels must include freelancers, casuals and contributors in activity and agreements surrounding cutbacks.
The summit also acknowledged the wider global crisis in the industry and pledged to work with both other UK industry unions, such as BECTU and UNITE, and international representatives.
The Liverpool regional papers, the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, continue their comprehensive coverage of the Rhys Jones murder trial using Cover It Live technology, which allows the reporter to feed back detailed information about what is happening in the courtroom.
The liveblog of the Rhys Jones trial is currently on standby, but should be going again at 14.30 today. The Rhys Jones coverage can also be viewed together on one page.
For ease of reading back through, it would be good to have the live court coverage more clearly marked with dates and days of trial in the left hand margin next to the times.
On October 9 the Liverpool Daily Post’s editor, Mark Thomas, asked for feedback, but it seems none has been offered.
It’s an impressive feat, which has been going since October 9, and brings up questions of modern day court reporting: it will be interesting to see if it enters the public panel discussion at this week’s POLIS debate at LSE. They’re debating ‘Respect for Contempt: Keeping Speech Free and Trials Fair’.
With a panel that includes Maxine Mawhinney from BBC News 24 as chair, and contributions from Joshua Rozenburg (Legal Affairs Editor, Daily Telegraph), Jonathan Kotler (US Attorney and USC Annenburg School of Journalism), Mark Haslam (partner, BCL Burton Copeland, and Nick Davies (Guardian, author of Flat Earth News), it should make for an interesting set of much-needed discussions.
As we’ve blogged before, Nick Davies’ recent book, Flat Earth News, uses findings from a specially-commissioned team of researchers at Cardiff University to show national newspapers’ dependency on press agencies.
After an investigation of 2,207 domestic news articles and their sources over two random weeks, the research team reported that 60 per cent of ‘quality print-stories’ (carried by the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Independent, the Daily Mail and the Times) came wholly or largely from a combination of PR releases and news agency copy.
The dangers of dependency on wire copy were illustrated on journalist Jo Wadsworth’s blog this morning: she describes how yesterday her site’s biggest hits and highest comments were on ‘several month-old stories about Premiership teams,’ which can be viewed here.
It looks like it was a technical error (she blames gremlins for playing havoc with the paper’s PA national football feeds), but it shows how manual checking on automatic feeds can never be replaced.