MediaGuardian reports that it ‘understands’ that ‘some technical staff’ at the Independent and Independent on Sunday “are expected to become formally employed by Associated Newspapers under the two companies’ office sharing agreement.” Full story at this link…
Simon Kelner, managing director and editor-in-chief of the UK’s The Independent newspaper, rubbishes rumours that it might go online-only. Full story…
Media coverage on Al Jazeera English hasn’t always been positive, but since its launch it’s done some interesting things multimedia-wise: launching all its content on YouTube, in April 2007, for example (its English content page can be found here).
More broadly the Al Jazeera network, which includes the Arabic channels, has also not been afraid to try out new technology, with the launch of a ‘citizen-journalism upload portal’ for example.
This week we’ve reported on its video content partnership with the Independent newspaper site. While they’ve tightened up the PR act (no longer in-house, it’s managed by Brown Lloyd James, the same agency that handles press for the Telegraph group) these are newsworthy developments.
Events in Gaza have been a chance for Al Jazeera to experiment and show off its multimedia – through projects showcased at Al Jazeera Labs. Follow Al Jazeera’s head of new media, Mohamed Nanabhay, @Mohamed, on Twitter to find out more.
Particularly exciting is its release of material under a Creative Commons licence, in its 3.0 form – allowing other sites reproduce the broadcaster’s video content as long as they attribute the source.
Today comes further news from the broadcaster: the beta launch of its Arabic and English mobile websites, which will work on any mobile handset with web browsing ability.
“Users only need to bookmark the following web addresses on their mobile, for English news http://m.aljazeera.net/, and for Arabic news http://ma.aljazeera.net/,” a release from the company said.
“The mobile web initiative is one of the key services that is being launched as part of our New Media strategy”, Saeed Othman Bawazir, Al Jazeera’s director of technology, said in the release.
“The aim is to make our content more accessible to new audiences across various new platforms. With the launch of this mobile service, we hope to provide our audience with a customized news browsing experience on the mobile device of their choice,” he said.
This initiative includes ‘delivering video and other content over interactive platforms,’ such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and iTunes, the release said.
Speaking on the Radio 4 Today programme this morning, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, and the Independent’s first editor Andreas Whittam Smith, expressed their concerns, as well as tentative optimism about the current UK newspaper climate.
“I think we have to face up to the prospect that the first time since the Enlightenment you’re going to have major cities in the UK, in Western democracies, without any kind of verifiable source of news,” said Rusbridger.
“That hasn’t happened for two or three hundred years and I think it is going to have very profound implications,” he said.
Whittam Smith referred to an ‘extremely tough’ environment and said that he was once again being asked on a daily basis whether the Independent will survive.
“The risks to all newspapers are very great,” he said, “[but] the Independent has always been innovative.”
“It has to be innovative again in these circumstances,” he said. Moving into the Daily Mail building ‘is an example of that’ he added. Like other businesses, newspapers will have to ‘share the facilities the customers don’t see’ he said.
He said that people still liked to read print, and that if free newspapers were taken into consideration circulations in the UK are only down by one million: from 14 to 13 million a day.
“People do like the stuff on the printed page – what they don’t like so much any longer is paying for it,” he said.
Rusbridger said that newspaper companies with paternalistic or maternalistic owners would fare better than those ‘with big debt’ and other types of ownership structures.
The Scott Trust [the Guardian’s owner], he said, ‘to some extent protected [the Guardian] from immediate effects of the market’.
Both agreed that there would be newspaper casualties in the near future.
“The Independent is to start running video provided by France 24 after signing a deal with the French news channel for English-language content”, MediaGuardian reports.
Roger Alton, editor of the Independent since July this year, has posted his first blog entry on the paper’s site (hat tip to Adrian Monck). In it he asks readers what they want the paper to report on – whether it’s ‘Strictly or the Large Hadron Collider or Britain on the Booze, or Damian Green or all of the above’.
In his post, Alton adds that the paper’s multi-platform operations should be closely related before moving on to the BBC and Sunday night programming:
“What about Sunday night’s telly? Personally, I can’t stand the BBC – I think it is bloated, bureaucratic, ripe for partial privatisation, and astonishingly inept at handling its own problems. But crikey, it does show fantastic TV.”
We’ll be keeping an eye on Alton’s blogging progress, but in the mean time, what do you want him to write about? Cover prices, front page designs or even *Saturday* night telly…
Hardly a surprising reaction but here’s what the National Union of Journalists has said, in reaction to the news that 90 jobs will be cut at the Independent, the majority of which are editorial positions:
“The scale of today’s announcement will have come as a massive shock to our members at the Independent,” the NUJ’s Head of Publishing Barry Fitzpatrick said.
“Journalists’ confidence in management at the moment is shaky at best, and far below what we would expect when entering into negotiations over any major restructuring.
“The public boardroom disputes have done little to reassure staff or readers concerned about the future of the titles.
“We need to see clear guarantees that there will be no compulsory redundancies. We will also be looking for plans from management as to how the health and safety of staff who remain will be protected.
“Our members already complain about their workloads and, as the company attempts to produce quality papers on just three quarters of the staff, the company has a duty of care to protect its employees from work related stress and we will hold them to account for their responsibility,” Fitzpatrick said in an NUJ statement released this afternoon.
The NUJ will meet the company on Thursday November 20.
Naming Baby P and his mother is not about giving into a hysterical Facebook campaign group; this is about confronting the reality of the online age.
I can’t link to it here, because it would be breaching reporting restrictions, but I know Baby P’s name, the baby’s mother’s name and the name of her partner.
So does anyone with even a little bit of Google cache savvy about them: it’s on a BBC report from 2007. Google cache preserves a page even if, as the BBC has done, original articles have been removed.
As the Independent reported, Facebook groups have published the details, despite the court order not to.
My argument is not about revealing the names for justice, it is about having a law which can actually be enforced.
If it had been reported abroad, on non-UK websites, they would be not be held accountable under the UK Contempt of Court legislation. Court orders, such as the one in this case protecting the names of the defendants, are simply not feasible in the web age.
I believe that whatever ensures fair trials without prejudice, protects the innocent people involved in the case (other people connected or in the family, for example) is necessary, and if keeping the names secret does that, then that should be done: I certainly won’t be joining any Facebook group to force their disclosure.
But it should be done in such a way where they really are secret, which has not happened in this case:
Jason Owen’s name is known; the mother’s name has also been previously published and is reachable with a quick search; the baby’s photograph is in the press.
One of the Facebook groups has a description reading: ‘For sum [sic] reason the press have seen it fit not to reveal the sick people who killed this poor helpless child.’
The press has not chosen to keep quiet (they certainly would print the names if they could); they are bound by law not to. But what happens when the wider community who have not been taught about reporting restrictions and contempt of court choose to publish, using blogs and social network sites?
I imagine that most people in that community, and wider geography, knows who the family are. Last night’s BBC Panorama showed that the research team were able to access things the mother wrote on social networking sites.
Yet the names cannot be disclosed by the British press without contravening the Contempt of Court Act. This means that disclosures are made through people who aren’t necessarily so concerned about, or even think about, media ethics or face any kind of editorial process.
As I reported in September, Bob Satchwell from the Society of Editors believes the legislation is out of date and redundant, as do many others.
Orders, such as those under section 11 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981, for example, allow a court to ban publication of specific information, in addition to statutory reporting restrictions. But how on earth to enforce this in an online world?
This is starkly proven in the case of Baby P.
It’s time to readdress our laws, as Satchwell has urged the Attorney General, and make trials really fair.
Postscript: I’ve just found Martin Belam’s blog post, which makes a similar point, and also focuses on the ‘sheer scale of useage of the internet’ in the UK as compared to 2000 when Victoria Climbié case was reported, for example.
This rather exposes my high-level research methods for our Smart Moves column, but thought it was funny.
Yesterday’s Cision Media Bulletin reported that:
Katy Guest has joined The Independent newspaper as Deputy Literary Editor … and The Independent Magazine Rhiannon Harries has started as the Editorial Assistant.
So this morning, I dropped them both an email to find out more so I could write a little nib for our site. Rather swiftly two emails came back: both along the lines of ‘new job, what new job?’ In fact, Harries hasn’t changed her job at all, and Guest tells me she has been deputy literary editor for 18 months.
Not quite so up-to-date job news then…
In an interview with MediaGuardian, the Independent’s editor, Roger Alton, said that he will not be recruiting any more journalists on the title despite the increase in its cover price to £1.