Tag Archives: times

Re-tweet rumours: Is the Times and Sunday Times up for sale?

It looks like everyone knows about as much as we do on this one – from Michael Wolff’s tweets alone. On Saturday the Vanity Fair columnist and Murdoch biographer suggested, via Twitter,  that News Corp could be looking to sell the Times and the Sunday Times: “Rumor in London banking circles: Times and Sunday Times up for sale.”

Before long, @michaelwolffnyc’s short message was on the re-tweet circuit:

But if Wolff knows more detail, he’s keeping it to himself for now. Meanwhile he’s asking other journalists if they know more…

@johngapper [Financial Times columnist] Working it right now. Being characterized as “strong rumor among private equity” that Times and Sunday Times could be on block.

@janinegibson [Guardian.co.uk editor] Funny how that happens. Have you heard anything – beyond tweets?

Michael Wolff on Twitter…

NMA: Times pay wall from next spring?

NMA has more details on News International’s pay wall plans – Times Online is reportedly set to introduce the system in Q1 next year, while dates for The Sun and News of the World are undecided.

The Times website will also have a redesign next year as part of the changes.

“A source close to News International said because users will be charged to access the title, the site won’t focus on generating page impressions. It will be overhauled with a focus on a rich user experience, with content easier to find, and building greater user interaction. It’s also planning to run more live debates across the site, such as a recent discussion about the BNP,” writes NMA.

Full post at this link…

The Register/OUT-LAW.com: Times libel ruling is warning for online news archives

The protection offered in libel cases by a responsible journalism defence can ‘evaporate’ if the crucial facts of the case change and web archives of news stories must be changed to reflect this, a High Court ruling from earlier this month has said.

As the Register and OUT-LAW report, the ruling came in a case where the Times continued to publish a defamatory article online about a policeman from the London Met, who was being investigated.

The Times defended the online version of the 2006 article claiming qualified privilege and responsible journalism, but was told that this could no longer apply to the online version of the story after the outcome of the investigation, which found insufficient evidence to take criminal proceedings against the officer.

“The failure to remove the article from the website, or to attach to the articles published on the Times’ website a suitable qualification, cannot possibly be described as responsible journalism (…) It is not in the public interest that there should continue to be recorded on the internet the questions as to [the officer’s] honesty which were raised in 2006, and it is not fair to him,” the ruling stated.

Full story at this link…

A guide to newspapers on Twitter

National newspapers have a total of 1,068,898 followers across their 120 official Twitter accounts – with the Guardian, Times and FT the only three papers represented in the top ten.

The Guardian’s the clear winner, as @GuardianTech’s place on Twitter’s Suggested User List means it has 831,935 followers – 78 per cent of the total. @GuardianNews is 2nd with 25,992, @TimesFashion 3rd with 24,762 and @FinancialTimes 4th with 19,923.

Complete list of national newspaper Twitter accounts

Other findings:

  • Glorified RSS Out of 121 accounts, just 19 do something other than running as a glorified RSS feed. The other 114 do no retweeting, no replying to other tweets etc. (The 19 are the ones with a blue background in their URL and a yes in the last column).
  • No following. They don’t do much following. Leaving GuardianTech out of it, there are 236,963 followers of these accounts, but they follow just 59,797. Are newspapers bringing their no-linking-out approach to Twitter? Or is it just because they’re pumping RSS feeds straight to Twitter, and therefore see no reason to engage with the community?
  • Rapid drop-off There are only six Twitter accounts with more than 10,000 followers. I suspect many of these accounts are invisible to most people as the newspapers aren’t engaging much – no RTing of other people’s tweets means those other people don’t have an obvious way to realise the newspaper accounts exist.
  • Sun and Mirror are laggards The Sun and Mirror have a lot of work to do – they have few accounts with any followers. And they don’t promote their Twitter accounts on their sites. The Mail only seems to have one account but it is the 20th largest in terms of followers.

More on newspaper Twitter accounts:

Some papers publish lists of their Twitter accounts:

Other useful places:

  • Newspaper people on Twitter from mediaUK
  • Newspaper titles on Twitter (inc local) from mediaUK
  • Twitian – a list of people at the Guardian who use Twitter (and their latest tweets), created by Paul Carvill.
  • #followjourn – a daily recommendation service from Journalism.co.uk.

This post originally appeared on MacolmColes.co.uk.

Update: Le Carré’s past – as told on the web

I wrote a post yesterday which looked at how the story of author John le Carré’s alleged temptation to defect to the Russians during his time as a British Intelligence officer (as reported by the Sunday Times) was spreading over the web, despite Le Carré’s lengthy contention with the report.

Hari Kunzru, who wrote a review that referred to the Sunday Times report, in Saturday’s Guardian, has left a comment:

For the record, I wasn’t aware of Le Carré’s objections to Liddle’s interview. My review was filed before the letter was printed in The Times. I’m not surprised. Even from Liddle’s quote the inference that Le Carré ‘almost defected’ is hard to draw.

So either the Guardian Review’s editor didn’t know of Le Carré’s complaint either, or it was a conscious decision to leave it as Kunzru wrote it.

It does seem to suggest that complaints or letters published post-coverage don’t really rectify a situation. It’s lucky that Le Carré aka David J.M. Cornwell enjoyed the Calvados and Liddle’s ‘erudite and perceptive’ conversation, or there could have been rather more costly repercussions for the Sunday Times.

Le Carre-d away: has the author’s alleged desire to defect become fact?

This, in Saturday’s Guardian, in Hari Kunzru’s review of John Le Carré’s latest book, ‘A Most Wanted Man’:

In a recent interview Le Carré was asked if he ever considered defecting. “Well, I wasn’t tempted ideologically … but when you spy intensively and you get closer and closer to the border … it seems such a small step to jump … and, you know, find out the rest.” Though this has been reported as some sort of tabloid confession (“I was tempted to defect, says spy novelist Le Carré”), it seems primarily interesting as a key to his fiction, whose central concern is the exploration of the metaphorical borderland occupied by the proponents of any polarised conflict.

The Guardian, September 27 2008

Perhaps surprisingly, no mention of the fact that Le Carré says that his quotes were out of context, as this lengthy letter to the Sunday Times pointed out. Le Carré writes that his interviewer, Rod Liddle, chose not to use a tape recorder and  subsequently misrepresented him that he was misrepresented in the interview and this article:

… he [Liddle] failed to encompass or indeed record the general point I was making about the temptations of defection.

Lord Annan, I ventured in our conversation, had declared that four years of Intelligence work were as much as any sane man could stand. I painted for Mr Liddle the plight of professional eavesdroppers who identify so closely with the people they are listening to that they start to share their lives.

It was in this context that I made the point that, in common with other intelligence officers who lived at close quarters with their adversaries, I had from time to time placed myself intellectually in the shoes of those on one side of the Curtain who took the short walk to the other; and that rationally and imaginatively I had understood the magnetic pull of such a step, and empathised with it.

John Le Carré, Times Online, September 20 2008.

Presumably the Guardian Review’s editors and the writer, Hari Kunzru, were aware of Le Carré’s problem with Liddle’s interview and chose not to mention it, although Kunzru does refer to the tabloid-like sensationalisation of the interview.

A Google search for John Le Carré brings back reviews for his latest book, but if you search “john le carre + defect” it’s possible to see how far the Sunday Times reports have spread… The AP reported it as the Sunday Times did, and then it went far and wide of course.

Will Le Carré’s consideration of defection go down in the history books, with no reference to his complaint?

France magazine editor writes for Times Online

The editor of Archant-owned France Magazine, Carolyn Boyd, has been commissioned to write a monthly article for the Times Online travel section.

Hoping to attract interest in her own magazine, the article links to the magazine’s website and its subscriptions page.

“I’d written for them before I joined France Magazine, so it’s a great way of carrying on the relationship and promoting the magazine at the same time,” she said.

France article

Traffic soars to Times Online blogs

Global page views of Times Online’s blogs rose past the 2.5 million mark in May this year, according to figures from the publisher – an increase of 500 per cent compared to May 2007.

The graph below shows the overall growth of its top performing blogs. Daniel Finkenstein’s Comment Central and Paris correspondent Charles Bremner’s Le Blogue are shown to perform consistently well, while The Game blog and Money Central (no doubt spurred by the recent economic downturn) have increased in popularity:

The site’s top 10 blogs in terms of global page views in May this year were:

    The Game Blog 562,835
    Money Central 552,941
    Comment Central 541,598
    Alpha Mummy 170,862
    Fanzine Fanzone 136,760
    Charles Bremner 114,884
    Formula 1 103,607
    Snakes and Ladders 94,202
    Mousetrap Technology 88,496
    Red Box 85,96

    As you can see the top three account for the majority of the blogs’ traffic. Figures for TimesOnline’s page views from May’s Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) report suggest the site recorded 117,826,926 page impressions. These stats therefore suggest blogs accounted for roughly 2.12 per cent of the site’s total page views.