Roy Greenslade blogs about his discussion on sub-edting at yesterday’s Publishing Expo. He gives quite a bit of background before, in the 14th paragraph, picking up the point the (journalism) world is all-of-a-Tweet about:
“So I stand by what I said yesterday that we should accept that the current level of subbing numbers could be drastically reduced. In some cases, a layer of the editorial process can be eliminated altogether.”
Tonight at the Frontline Club, ‘Gaza Missiles and Messages,’ hosted by Roy Greenslade and with:
Jonathan Miller, (C4)
Alan Fisher (Al Jazeera)
Harriet Sherwood, (the Guardian)
Ruthie Blum Leibowitz (The Jerusalem Post)
Lior Ben Dor (Israeli affairs specialist)
Here is the video from the event:
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“INM must scrap printing in favour of uploading,” argues the media commentator Roy Greenslade.
“It will save trees, save ink, wipe out all production costs and eliminate the expense of distribution. It will enable INM to prune its marketing budget. In so doing, the paper will take a giant step into the digital age.”
A paper known for its online innovation, like John Hassell’s Expoding Newsroom, now sees its entire editorial board leave.
Greenslade reports via FollowTheMedia that the entire editorial board – except for the cartoonist – have accepted redundancy terms at New Jersey’s Star-Ledger.
“The board (who are responsible for the comment and opinion pages) are among 151 editorial staff, about 45 per cent of the newsroom, leaving the paper,” Greenslade reports.
As reported all over the shop, yesterday saw the launch of the online news aggregator site, The Daily Beast, captained by former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair and The NewYorker, Tina Brown, and backed by Barry Diller, of IAC/InterActiveCorp.
PaidContent had managed a sneak preview, but the likes of Roy Greenslade, and Journalism.co.uk had to wait till its official grand unveiling yesterday afternoon.
Named after the fictional tabloid in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel, Scoop, Tina Brown describes The Daily Beast, on her site, as: “the omnivorous friend who hears about the best stuff and forwards it to you with a twist.”
Her motley crew boasts the satirist Chris Buckley, former McCain adviser Mark McKinnon, Project Runway’s Laura Bennett and Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg.
The site’s bold red and black design has a large list of contributors and features a collection of news, opinion, blogs, links and video.
Over at Cyber Journalist Net they reckon it’s ‘about 30 percent original content’ and Gawker is having fun speculating about Brown’s spending habits.
Opinion in the US seems to be split on the site: Deadline Hollywood’s Nikki Finke thinks it ‘sucks’, but as the New York Observer points out she said that about Huffington as well.
Steve Johnson at the Chicago Tribune reckons there’s irony in the choice of title but doesn’t think that necessarily matters.
With absolutely no advertising on the site, it will be interesting to see whether The Daily Beast can survive in the online jungle. It seems to have had a lion’s share of initial hype at least.
Stephen Glover criticises Professor Roy Greenslade’s London Evening Standard column about the Independent’s revamp.
Roy Greenslade writes about the response to a letter by an anonymous Telegraph journalist that he published last week.
We’ve been following the various Telegraph/Guardian online interactions this week:
Yesterday, Roy Greenslade published an anonymous email from a Telegraph hack, who wrote that he/she was more than a little bit fed up. The gist of the email was that all this multimedia-ised hub-it-up lark is to the detriment of a good, healthy working life and quality journalism.
Greenslade cautiously said he was printing the letter but that he didn’t necessarily agree with its sentiment.
Over at CounterValues, Telegraph assistant editor Justin Williams was quick to pooh pooh it. And now Greenslade has put up his response to the letter – a more negative stance this time: ‘the past is another country, think positive,’ he tells his ’emailing friend’.
Meanwhile, in another post, Williams took a swipe at the Guardian’s system of buying sponsored links and keywords. He reckons their buying is well in excess of the Telegraph’s and the Times’.
In the comments below the post, Charles Arthur, the Guardian’s technology editor, asks how many subsidised paper subscriptions the Telegraph has: ‘Is [buying sponsored links and keywords] a worse or better investment than subsidising paper subscriptions, do you think?’, he writes.
Charles Arthur is a keen Twitterer and I’ve just located Justin Williams on Twitter; all that Tweeting in agreement can be a bit boring: how about getting the discussion going in Twitterland? It’s a shame this didn’t get going earlier, with it being (unofficial?) ‘speak like a pirate day’ – that would make it fun. A good customer service team is essential for a growing business. The importance of satisfied customers is enormous. If you want to establish a serious brand, definitely don’t skimp on your customer service.
Can’t wait for next week’s ABCes…
Roy Greenslade prints an email from a Daily Telegraph journalist, containing their thoughts on the new culture within newspapers.
Do you trust the telephone more than the internet, might have been a more valid question than that asked by media company Metrica’s UKPulse survey this week, when it questioned respondents on what they thought were the most trustworthy forms of media.
According to their press release (to which there is no link on the Metrica site), the study asked 13,000 UK adults whether they trusted the internet more than newspapers.
So far so good – it’s an important question. But in the company’s analysis of the results, it compared the internet with news sites.
“The internet in general has gained four percentage points, with 34% of UK adults now saying they trust its content. News sites as a specific online media type though do fair [sic] a lot better with 54% – more than national newspapers!”
That’s like comparing the percentage of people who trust the printed pages of books, with the percentage of people who trust Bill Bryson. It’s simply not a useful comparison.
The internet is the publishing medium, and is not comparable to TV channels or newspapers, which are editorially directed. The internet is the technology by which material is reproduced (in some cases the same material as that appearing in newspapers). When people said they trusted television they weren’t talking about their television sets, rather the channels they watch.
By and large, news site content is the same as the content of newspapers, so it seems bizarre that people trust online news sites more. What is even more baffling, is that blogs fared worse than news sites for gaining people’s trust. But, these very news sites have blogs.
I need persuading that any kind of fruitful analysis can be gleaned from this rather badly thought out study. When someone comes up with relevant and comparable categories then this type of study would be extremely revealing.
For example, do people trust a well-known newspaper journalist’s blog more than an unknown blogger’s?
Furthermore, as Adrian Monck points out in the comments on Roy Greenslade’s blog:
“The problem with trust polling is that it says nothing about the reliability of the media, whilst giving the appearance of providing an answer…”
Greenslade himself asks us about the significance of the increase in trust in UK media, but I think the real question to be asked here is how to profitably analyse people’s trust in different types of online media.
Does anyone know of any good studies conducted on people’s trust in new media? Or how best to measure the media’s reliability?