“More than 80 NUJ members in the north east of England are to ballot for industrial action over job cuts,” the National Union of Journalists announced today.
“The proposed Newcastle cuts would mean 18 editorial jobs losses. There was a previous round of redundancies in November last year.”
Journalists at the Trinity Mirror Chronicle and Journal group in Newcastle have notified management of their decision.
Yesterday afternoon in a powerful Guardian exclusive, investigative journalist Nick Davies reported that the Murdoch News Group papers paid £1m to ‘gag’ phone-hacking victims.
Rupert Murdoch, who owns News Group, recently argued he had little influence on his publications’ editorial content; it would be interesting to see how his other UK papers would treat the story about their sister title today.
Let’s see how each of the UK news websites is running the story [as around 9.30 – 10 am]. [News organisations owned by Murdoch are labelled (M).]
Note: Observations correct at time of writing; subject to updates.
The Murdoch empire (source: BBC website / News Corp)
NEWS CORP BUSINESSES
Australasia:
Daily Telegraph
Fiji Times
Gold Coast Bulletin
Herald Sun
Newsphotos
Newspix
Newstext
NT News
Post-Courier
Sunday Herald Sun
Sunday Mail
Sunday Tasmanian
Sunday Territorian
Sunday Times
The Advertiser
The Australian
The Courier-Mail
The Mercury
The Sunday Mail
The Sunday Telegraph
Weekly Times
Watch the Frontline’s event on the media and anti-terrorism legislation here, at 7pm tonight:
Here’s the run-down from the Frontline Club:
An ‘On The Media’ discussion in association with the BBC College of Journalism
How concerned should photographers and journalists be about anti-terrorism legislation that came into force earlier this year making people taking pictures of the police potentially subject to fines or even arrest? A mass picture-taking event outside Scotland Yard organised by the National Union of Journalists earlier this year reflected widespread concerns that section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act would extend powers already being used to harass photographers.Under the Act eliciting, publishing or communicating information on members of the armed forces, intelligence services and police officers ‘likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’ is subject to a 10 year maximum sentence.
The Home Office has insisted that the Act does not target the press but the number of photographers and camera crews who claim they have been prevented from taking pictures has increased.
On the other side of the lens there is growing evidence that Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) are not only collating information on protestors and campaigners but also photographers and journalists who report on demonstrations.
The emergence of video footage following the death of Ian Tomlinson during the G20 protests in April demonstrates how significant images can be.
Claims by Val Swain and Emily Apple that they were unlawfully arrested during the Kingsnorth Climate Camp has again put the spotlight on the issue of police surveillance at demonstrations. And also raises questions about the status of citizen journalists in the eyes of the police.
How much of a challenge to the freedom of the press photographers, freelances of citizen journalists – to bear witness during protests could Section 76 become?
Panel: Peter Clarke, former head of counter terrorism for Scotland Yard
Marc Vallée is a London based photojournalist who is currently working on a long-term project to document political protest and dissent in modern Britain
Turi Munthe, CEO of Demotix, a citizen-journalism website and freelance photo agency
Angus Walker, UK editor, ITV News
Moderator: Margaret Gilmore is a freelance writer and broadcaster and senior research fellow with the leading independent think tank, RUSI, where she specialises in homeland security, covering terrorism and Olympic security
Media Week: Associated Northcliffe Digital to handle online ad sales for Hello!
Media Week reports: “Daily Mail & General Trust (DMGT) has formed closer ties with celebrity title Hello!, having agreed that its digital unit Associated Northcliffe Digital (AND) will handle online ad sales for Hellomagazine.com.”
Why Nick Denton wouldn’t set up shop in UK
From Politico: a report on a panel at the Institute’s Ideas Festival in Colarado, asking ‘What’s the News Worth to You?’
For us Brits, this is the interesting part:
“During the panel’s Q&A, Gawker Media’s Nick Denton sarcastically thanked the American newspaper industry for being so unaggressive, making it possible for ‘thugs’ like him to succeed.
“Conversely, Denton said he’d never set up shop in England. ‘Every single day, those editors get up and try to kill each other,’ said Denton. Not so in the U.S.”
Oh the irony… were the Australian’s subs trying to tell us something?
Australian newspapers aren’t finding it as tough as many of their US and UK counterparts, John Hartigan, the chairman and chief executive of News Ltd, claimed in a speech on Wednesday. Roy Greenslade picked up on the Murdoch-owned Australian newspaper’s report that the nation’s print publications are ‘holding up well’.
But we feel he missed the best bit. As Crikey.com.au flagged up in its daily newsletter, there was something a little odd about a print headline in the paper on July 2 (helpfully highlighted here by Mumbrella.com.au – hat-tip @BlackAdder). This, courtesy of Crikey:
Also see Crikey’s comments on the speech / report here (registration required):
And links and commentary from Mumbrella here.
Oh, and you can ‘Marc the deth of newpapers with this stilish Crikey tee shiort. Avilable now fom the Crickley shop.’
Made-up news bylines: does it matter?
Martin Moore, director of the Media Standards Trust, picked up a Private Eye story mentioning that seven regular sports journalists for the Telegraph are fakes.
Using the opportunity to plug the MST’s recently updated Journalisted.com as a research tool, he reckons ‘it would appear to be true.’ Read Moore’s post in full for his thoughts and concerns:“Even if one accepts that, in an age of print, this was a common and recognised inside practice, does that make it justified? And, in the age of blogging, linking, transparency, and of the importance of cementing the brand of your journalists? Isn’t it time it stopped?”
But does it matter and what’s new about that, a couple of the commenters ask, below the piece.What are the pros and cons of bylines? Is a byline a helpful mechanism in the checks and balances process anyway? Does a legit byline help decrease the level of agency-lifted copy? Some of the UK’s best journalism is un-bylined after all (the Eye, the Economist etc.).PageSuite lands 40 title publishing deal with bizjournals
UK based digital publishers PageSuite have landed a deal with America’s largest publisher of metropolitan business newspapers, American City Business Journals. The company will launch of all 40 of their bizjournal titles online, using PageSuite as their provider.
Bizjournals cover 40 industries, distributed across 41 cities and their websites have more than eight million unique visitors per month. “Our production teams have found the software to be very flexible and user friendly,” commented Eric Mick from bizjournals, in a release.
PageSuite already publishes digital editions for some of the world’s biggest newspapers including Metro Canada, Metro UK & Ireland, San Francisco Examiner, Express Newspapers, The Guardian Weekly & Brazil’s largest daily newspaper Zero Hora.
Jon Bernstein on hyperlocal: Five steps to kick-start the local news revolution
The strength of hyperlocal is also its weakness – disparate projects in far-flung places.
But here’s the thing. What works in KW1 – the business model, the editorial proposition – is likely to work just as well in TR19.*
So we have a choice. Wait for exemplars of the form to rise up, then copy and adapt, or give the whole process a hand by collating, sharing, talking and learning. Right now.
Let’s do the latter. Here’s a quick and dirty call to action:
1. Find out what’s out there
In the United States they are doing just that.The City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism has invited ‘bloggers, independent journalists, website publishers and entrepreneurs’ to complete a survey so it can ‘gather information and innovative ideas from across the country’.
“We want to bring facts, figures, and business analysis to the debate over the future of journalism,” it states.
Where’s the equivalent effort over here?
I’m told that there are voices in Ofcom, the media regulator, who want to collate information about all of the little community newsletters and bigger sites which could now be called hyperlocal.
If that’s the case, it’s time to get moving. Oh, and we’ll have some of that US data when it’s ready, too.
2. Share ideas
Good practice, sound business models, strong feature strands and story hooks are not geographically-defined. So share, feed off each other, beg, borrow and steal.Talk About Local is a good start. More, please.
3. Share resources
Can you apply the franchise model to the hyperlocal? For some the answer is a definite yes.Again Talk About Local offers a possible lead with its plan to seed 150 sites in deprived areas nationwide.
Paul Bradshaw and Nick Booth’s Help me Investigate, is another service with franchise potential.
As is Mapumental.
This is a MySociety.org concoction and, like Help me Investigate, is a recipient of 4iP seed funding. Mapumental is postcode-based tool that brings together publicly available local house price and transport data and mashes it up with a ‘scenicness’ rating .
MySociety is also responsible for FixMyStreet. Both are centrally-built pieces of software with a hyperlocal application.
Integration is the key.
4. Share content
Like franchising, syndication is another old media model that has a home in the brave new world of hyperlocal.And there is a commercial opportunity for those who create usable aggregation models.
Take Outside.in which has just launched a service in the United States it claims ‘will allow users to quickly create a mass amount of hyperlocal news pages’.
Outside.in is coming to the UK, but why isn’t a UK start-up doing this for the UK market? Perhaps one is. Time to make some noise.
5. Engage government
There’s a crisis in the public service provision of local news. If you want proof just look at the horse-trading between ITV and Ofcom. It’s a perfect opportunity for the government to think laterally.Yet despite the warm words – and suitable use of new media lingua franca – in last month’s Digital Britain report, Lord Carter and co failed to put anything radical in train.
Carter’s defence is that this report was a sprawling undertaking and wasn’t designed to mandate government.
If so, someone needs to pick it up in Whitehall, but also in county halls up and down the country.
Rather than fund me-too freesheets that threaten to kill off local newspapers, local authorities would be better advised to help provide the infrastructure for hyperlocal.
It’s time to free your data for postcode-based applications, create a support system for local citizen journalists and use those soon-to-be-thriving platforms to promote the uptake of online public services.
Enough of the action plan. Go create.
(*That’s John O’Groats to Land’s End, postcode fans. Well, near enough.)
Jon Bernstein is former multimedia editor of Channel 4 News. This is part of a series of regular columns for Journalism.co.uk. You can read his personal blog at this link.
Newspapers: Turn off your RSS feeds
This is a cross-post from Malcolm Coles’ personal website:
The latest subscriber figures (see table below) show that, apart from a couple of exceptions, it’s time for newspapers to turn off their RSS feeds – and hand over the server space, technical support and webpage real estate to their Twitter accounts.
The table below shows that only three of the nine national newspapers have an RSS feed with more than 10,000 subscribers in Google Reader. And most newspaper RSS feeds have readerships in the 00s, if that.
Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips has 11 subscribers to her RSS feed (maybe there’s hope for the UK population yet …).
Despite having virtually no users, the Mail churns out 160 RSS feeds and the Mirror 280. All so a couple of thousand people can look at them in total.
The other papers are just as bad. And while the Guardian has a couple of RSS readers with decent numbers (partly because Google recommends it in its news bundle), it has more feeds than there are people in the UK…
Top three RSS feeds at each newspaper
They didn’t all have three that showed up:
Switch to Twitter instead
I suggest newspapers switch to Twitter instead. Twitter’s advantages over RSS include:
- Wheat vs chaff – As a reader, you can see which stories other people are RTing and are therefore popular.
- Context – There’s space in 140 characters for newspapers to give some background to stories as well as the headline (well, there is for those that don’t just stick the first few words of the standfirst after the headline).
- Promotion – Followers can RT newspaper stories, promoting the paper – they can’t do this with elements of an RSS feed.
- Tracking – Stories’ development can be tracked on Twitter – you can’t usually tell what’s changed in an RSS feed.
- Conversation You can take part in a conversation on Twitter. People only talk to their RSS feed when they swear at it. The journalists behind the story can tweet, too.
Newspapers agree with me
As I say, despite poor subscriptions for many feeds, papers pump out RSS feeds as if there’s no tomorrow – the second column in the table below shows how many feeds (rounded) that each paper has. Erotic Porn and Passionate and Sensual Sex Videos EroticaX EroticaX.org features intimate scenes of passionate, erotic sex. Watch the sensual side of hardcore porn as your favorite pornstars have real, intense orgasmsBut despite this, it’s clear some papers agree with me – and have already given up on RSS feeds and no longer actively promote them.
No visibility
The Mail, despite its 160-odd feeds, only mentions them in its footer.The same is true of the Sun.
On the page but hardly visible
The FT’s RSS link does at least have a logo – but its buried at the bottom of the right-hand column on each page.The Telegraph shows relevant RSS feeds on pages – but they’re buried in a different way: above a banner ad that no one will ever look at.
Even the Guardian, which lets you mash up your own RSS feeds (hence the 000,000s in the table), hides details of its feeds under an unusual term ‘webfeed’ in the far right of its header.
The Times still has an RSS link in its main header menu on its news page. On other pages it’s at the bottom. And it mentions Twitter on its pages much more than RSS.
Visible – but not doing them any good
The Independent is alone in listing RSS feeds on its main category pages – although that doesn’t seem to get it many subscribers.The Mirror has an RSS link next to its search box, although it took me ages to find it. Does this count as visible – it’s not exactly intuitive…
And the Express has a link and a logo prominently in its header. But as the Express doesn’t update its website often (or at all on Sunday), I guess that’s why no one subscribes. And some of its RSS feeds appear to be garbage – check out its theatre one…
Caveats about the data
After you’ve started writing something about newspapers, you’ll eventually discover that Martin Belam has already written about it. Having just noticed his Top 75 British newspaper RSS feeds as I was researching Google Reader’s market share, I figured I’d just repeat his caveats about his own data as they apply to mine too:
- Subscribers don’t necessarily ever read anything.
- Numbers quoted by Google vary wildly.
- Newspapers have problem with the same feed on different URLs. To quote Martin: “If the papers themselves can’t work out how to set one canonical URL for their content, why should I?”
- Google Reader search is not great. There may be missing feeds.
