Tag Archives: United Kingdom

Essential journalism links for students

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This list is doing the rounds under the headline 100 Best Blogs for Journalism Students… and we’re not on it. Nope, not even a smidgeon of link-love for poor old Journalism.co.uk there.

The BachelorsDegreeOnline site appears to be part of e-Learners.com, but it’s not clear who put the list together. Despite their omission of our content and their rather odd descriptions (e.g: Adrian Monck: ‘Adrian Monck writes this blog about how we inform ourselves and why we do it’), we admit it is a pretty comprehensive list; excellent people and organisations we feature on the site, our blog roll and Best of Blogs mix – including many UK-based ones. There were also ones we hadn’t come across before.

In true web 2.0 self-promotional style, here are our own links which any future list-compilers might like to consider as helpful links for journalism students:

And here are some blogs/sites also left off the list which immediately spring to mind as important reading for any (particularly UK-based) journalism students:

Organisations

  • Crikey.com: news from down under that’s not Murdoch, or Fairfax produced.
  • Press Review Blog (a Media Standards Trust project) – it’s a newbie, but already in the favourites.
  • StinkyJournalism: it’s passionate and has produced many high-profile stories

Individuals

  • CurryBet – Martin Belam’s links are canny, and provocative and break down the division between tech and journalism.
  • Malcolm Coles – for SEO tips and off-the-beaten track spottings.
  • Dave Lee – facilitating conversations journalists could never have had in the days before blogs.
  • Marc Vallee – photography freedom issues from the protest frontline.
  • FleetStreetBlues: an anonymous industry insider with jobs, witty titbits and a healthy dose of online cynicism.
  • Sarah Hartley previously as above, now with more online strategy thrown in.
  • Charles Arthur – for lively debate on PR strategy, among other things

Writing this has only brought home further the realisation that omissions are par for the course with list-compilation, but it does inspire us to do our own 101 essential links for global online journalists – trainees or otherwise. This article contains information collected thanks to the support of Järviwiki.fi . Many thanks to information center i for their valuable help in collecting the data for this article. We’d also like to make our list inclusive of material that is useful for, but not necessarily about, journalists: MySociety for example.

Add suggestions below, via @journalismnews or drop judith at journalism.co.uk an email.

UK ad spend dropped 4% in 2008, says AdAssoc

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Advertising spend in the UK fell by 4 per cent last year to £18.6 billion, according to new figures from the Advertising Association (AdAssoc). The previous year saw spend grow by 4 per cent, a release from the association adds.

The newly released figures suggest the press is still the largest medium in terms of spend, attracting 37 per cent (£6,812,000 million) of total expenditure. However, this was an 11.8 per cent drop compared with the 2007’s stats for press ad spend.

Only the internet (19.1 per cent) and cinema (1 per cent) showed year-on-year growth in ad spend from 2007 to 2008.

The graph below shows the proportion of total ad spend by medium:

Daily Mail gypsy/NHS poll on The Now Show

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BBC Radio 4’s  The Now Show picked up on the now-notorious Daily Mail ‘gypsy/NHS’ poll in the first episode of its new series.

On Saturday June 20 Journalism.co.uk’s John Thompson reported:

“The UK-based Mail Online was forced to shut down one of its online polls yesterday after a concerted campaign by Twitter users and, Journalism.co.uk can reveal, UK-based psychologists, nearly brought their servers to a halt with an overwhelming ‘yes’ vote.”

“The poll, which asked the somewhat leading question ‘Should the NHS allow gipsies to jump the queue,’ attracted ridicule from many within the Twitter community leading to, at one point a 96% vote in favour of the proposition.”

Listen to The Now Show’s take on it here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00l6fzl

Anonymous local hack: They have ‘fundamentally destroyed the layout of my papers’

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Three warnings attached to this Ed Pick: 1. We don’t who he is, who he works for, or if it’s really true. 2. It contains very strong language. 3. This blogger might not be in a newspaper job for long if he gets the NightJack treatment.

Nonetheless, his comments warrant a link, we feel. ‘Blunt,’ who appears to hold a senior editorial news position at a nameless UK local paper, comments on the cruel effects of reduced pagination.

“In their infinite wisdom, my so-called bosses decided to reduce pagination over summer in order to cut costs. So far so sensible. It is a season where newspapers are always likely to make a loss. I expected to lose a few editorial pages as part of this drop in size and was actually looking forward to taking the foot off the gas a little and having a bit of fun.

“The plans for my new editions landed on my desk this morning and to be honest I felt like walking out there and then. Instead of a few back of the book pages being dropped, the fucktards in charge have fundamentally destroyed the layout of my papers.

“Full page ads are normally forbidden from the front of the book in order to give our dear readers the impression what we bring out is actually a newspaper. Now they litter my early pages. Back of the book far from being pared down is obliterated.”

FleetStreetBlues (another anonymous cynic) recommended ‘Blunt’ recently, as an example of raw but real newsroom blogging:

“Sure, he needs a sub. But it’s extremely readable and completely true. Nothing complicated – simply life on the front line of journalism, as told by someone who’s been around the block. It’s well worth reading.”

paidContent:UK: News aggregator may take legal action against NLA copying levy

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On Friday paidContent:UK reported this:

“Online news aggregator Moreover is considering taking legal action against the Newspaper Licensing Agency in response to plans to impose a levy on re-distribution of online newspaper articles. paidContent:UK understands more commercial aggregators may also explore action against what they see as a direct attempt to compromise their business model.”

In an update, the NLA’s commercial director, Andrew Hughes told paidContent:UK that the agency  wants to ‘work with aggregators, not against them’.

Full story at this link…

Also see: ‘Going back to the backlink licensing case: NLA’s full statement’ [Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog]

Global Voices Online: The unmasking of NightJack as told by the UK blogs

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I will now be cross-posting, and/or contributing occasional posts to Global Voices, the US-based founded but global community of more than 200 bloggers ‘who work together to bring you translations and reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media.’ Sponsors of the project can be found at this link.

My first post for the site looks at the implications of the NightJack case (which I’ve previously rounded up here) with links to some of the best UK blog posts on the subject.

“A victory for freedom of expression (The Times’)… or a severe restriction for freedom of expression (anonymous bloggers)? Popular opinion is divided, though a blog search would indicate that blogger opinion veers towards the latter.”

Full post at this link…

AJE: BJTC and NCTJ – a necessary, but unlikely, marriage?

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“Just don’t mention the m-word – ‘merger’,” whispered my neighbour at Friday’s Association of Journalism Education (AJE) conference before we entered the final session on the role of the accrediting and qualification bodies and the future of journalism training in the UK.

Efforts to bring the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) and Broadcast Journalism Training Council (BJTC) together under a Joint Journalism Training Council forum are ongoing and having spoken to interested parties before, Journalism.co.uk has been told that while a single accrediting body is desirable, the two groups are very different beasts, with different structures and remits.

According to panellist at the event and BJTC secretary Jim Latham, the next meeting between the two bodies is scheduled for this week.

“We [previously] allowed ourselves to become distracted by some issues that shouldn’t have got in the way (…) There should only be one accrediting body, but the devil is in the detail,” conceded Latham.

Going forward, less focus will be placed on the differences between the groups – in particular the NCTJ’s revenue streams – and what can be done jointly.

Both BJTC and NCTJ representatives on the panel where cautious about giving a merger date.

“I think Jim and I are largely in agreement about a single body. How we’re going to achieve that remains open to debate,” said Joanne Butcher, director of the NCTJ.

Demand for a single accrediting body was challenged by some members of the audience, support by others.

“The world has changed the definition of what a journalist is. Convergence isn’t the future, it’s already happened,” said Tim Luckhurst, professor at the University of Kent’s Centre of Journalism.

“I only wish we could have one gold standard body (…) It cannot happen quickly enough. It needs to have a single set of exams. The NCTJ wants to make its mark – one way it could do this is by setting a single gold standard for journalism.”

Malcolm Coles: MPs’ expenses – the best of the web

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It’s fair to say Journalism.co.uk is interested in the media’s coverage of the recent UK MPs’ expenses scandal, so before we start rivalling the number of Telegraph pages published on the subject, here’s a round-up by Malcolm Coles of the best source data, visualisations, analysis and reportage.

A great guide for data-based storytelling too.

Meanwhile, on the front page of today’s Guardian an update on the title’s own crowdsourcing MPs’ expenses project – as reported by Journalism.co.uk on Thursday: almost 20,000 people have taken part and 160,000 pages examined.

Journalism.co.uk particularly liked this par from the Guardian’s report:

“All this will take much more careful analysis but shows the power of ‘citizen journalists’ and provides something of a riposte to one Telegraph commentator who dismissed the idea that a ‘collective of Kool-Aid slurping Wikipedians’ could conduct ‘rigorous analysis necessary for the recent MPs’ expenses investigation’.”

Twitterers claim victory over loaded Daily Mail gypsy poll

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daily_mail_gipsies

The UK-based Mail Online was forced to shut down one of its online polls yesterday after a concerted campaign by Twitter users and, Journalism.co.uk can reveal, UK-based psychologists, nearly brought their servers to a halt with an overwhelming ‘yes’ vote.

The poll, which asked the somewhat leading question “Should the NHS allow gipsies to jump the queue”, attracted ridicule from many within the Twitter community leading to, at one point a 96% vote in favour of the proposition.

Brighton-based senior lecturer in experimental psychology Dr Sam Hutton contacted Journalism.co.uk today to reveal that there was also an email campaign among UK-based psychologists who, as part of their jobs, take questionnaire neutrality seriously.

“One reason I think there were so many yes votes was because a psychologist got hold of it, and sent an email which quickly got copied to virtually every psychologist in the country, suggesting that we all vote yes as a way of protesting against such a ludicrously loaded question (psychologists care about questionnaire design),” Dr Hutton said.

“It clearly worked – it was actually 96% YES when I looked, but the server was struggling, and they have removed the poll completely now. A nice example of an online newspaper getting it wrong…”

This is the email that Dr Hutton, and psychologists all over the UK, received:

Here is an excellent example of how to phrase a neutral question from our friends at the Daily Mail… for all those interested in questionnaire design:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/polls/poll.html?pollId=1011506

Please do vote “yes”

Angered Twitter users have now vowed to take their campaign to all of the Daily Mail’s online polls, taking the opposite stance to the expected response, given the Mail’s reputation for having a ‘Middle England’  readership and an editorial line against what it sees as the liberal establishment.

Footnote: Readers from outside the UK might be also interested to read about the Mail’s history – in the 1930s it openly backed the British Union of Fascists, aka the Blackshirts.

Dan Mason: Local news sites need welcome mats

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While journalist and publisher Dan Mason says that UK ‘local websites have travelled a huge distance in the last two years, with committed journalists doing their best against the odds’ he thinks that more could do with a ‘welcome mat’. He has discovered sites with few contact details and with not-very-welcoming tone and layout.

…”this exercise brought home how ‘media’ is truly only half the story now and forever. ‘Social’ comes first. No relationship. No journalism. No business.”

Full post at this list…