Tag Archives: United Kingdom

#newscycle – day one, Brighton to Dover

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Day one of @journalismnews owner @johncthompson‘s epic 11-day ride from Brighton, UK to Oslo, Norway in aid of @JournoCharity (Journalists’ Charity), @CR_UK (Cancer Research UK) and @GistSupportUK.

Journalists – watch the video and listen to the audio about the great work of the Journalists’ Charity. And learn more about my ride.

I will be braving hills, rain, wind, punctures, sore muscles etc so please make it worth my while by sponsoring me as generously as you can afford.

Today’s ride covered 77 miles with 3374 feet of climbs.

This was one of two legs of my journey I was not looking forward too (the other is day nine in Denmark). On practice runs, I has tried part of the route so already knew what to expect in the way of hills from the Sussex and Kent Downs.

So I planned an early start in order to get an early night ahead of the mad o’clock ferry journey the next day. When I rose at 6am my heart sank when I saw the weather – trees bending in the rain and grey rain clouds in the sky. Like late autumn/early winter.

So it was with little enthusiasm that I finally set off at 7am having procrastinated for an hour.

Luckily the wind was in my favour and I made good early progress for the first 30 miles or so. Apart from some nasty side gusts channelling up some streets nearly knocking me off my bike.

I planned to break for a proper lunch someplace nice but ended up picnicking in an alley next to a corner store in Hamstreet at about the 54 mile mark.

When I finally saw the English channel again my spirits lifted. But still some climbing to be done including one hellish stretch up a barely navigable and steep coastal path where I mostly had to carry my bike luggage and all. Bikeroutetoaster has a somewhat different idea to me at times as to what constitutes a rideable cycle path!

Injuries from that episode include nettle skins, barked ankles on pedals, and skin contusions from thorny bushes.

My bar bag which is stuffed full has an unfortunate effect on the handlebars when dismounted causing the bars to spin widely round. This happened a couple of times badly scratching my cycle frame down to the metal where the brake lever impacted on it.

The wind also nearly blew off my handmade charity and flag stickers on my rear panier. Will need to tape those down tonight.

Finally arrived in Dover around 2:30 and settled in to a very pleasant B&B close to the ferry port.

After much searching finally found a passable seafood restaurant on the coast with sea views and overlooking the ferry port. Seems I had more of an appetite than I thought causing the waiter to comment on how quickly I polished my dinner off.

Food not bad but microwaves should be banned from ALL restaurants. Bread and butter pudding should be crunchy on top! A crime akin to warming scones in a microwave!

Still, better than the McDonalds I almost considered although that probably would have ticked the right boxes for fat, protein and calorie intake.

Enjoyed watching an arctic tern dive fishing on the shore and the ferries entering and leaving the port. As the ships emerged from the harbour mouth they listed alarmingly as they caught the full force of the wind. Think I might leave breakfast until Calais.

Bought a couple of beet root juice booster shots on a colleague’s advice. Sound disgusting but if they get me through a couple of rides then it might be worth it. Will wait until I’m off the ferry though!

Finally a couple of more sponsorships today. Still more than £500 short of target for the Journalists’ Charity though. At the current rate of a fiver a go (which I know to be generous in these cases given how little junior and most freelance journalists earn) I’m going to need another 103 donors!

I was thinking about creating a Klout list of @JournoCharity #newscycle journalists. Lists seem to get journalists very excited and it would be nice to honour those who demonstrably care about their colleagues rather than just their egos!

Vince Cable versus Rupert Murdoch – the animation!

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Another classic animation from Next Media Animation .tv, this one illustrating the Daily Telegraph’s sting operation on Liberal Democrat MP Vince Cable, who is currently the secretary of state for business innovation and skills in the UK’s Liberal Democrats/Conservatives coalition government.

Two undercover reporters from the Telegraph, posing as constituents, managed to record Cable stating in reference to Rupert Murdoch‘s attempted takeover of BSkyB: “I have declared war on Mr Murdoch and I think we are going to win.”

What format for the political leaders’ TV debates?

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So what format will the first televised leaders’ debates take?

The Guardian today reports that, amid lengthy negotiations, “some of the parties, notably the Liberal Democrats, have been pressing for a BBC Question Time format in which questions are not just asked by an experienced chairman, but also by the audience”.

And it sounds like the BBC host David Dimbleby would prefer something more Question Time, than his Sky News counterpart Adam Boulton.

In an interview with the Independent’s Ian Burrell, Boulton said:

Some of the print comment is seeing this as a bear pit, you will have the leaders and set the audience on them in a kind of Question Time. Certainly my vision is that it will be a very different thing from that.

The problem with those shows is that sometimes you get a common view emerging from the panel – or in the case of Nick Griffin, the panel and the question master and the audience all against one person.

Well, if we get a group thing from the three leaders it will be a disaster. The point is to get them to differentiate themselves from each other in front of the audience rather than circle the wagons against the audience.

But Dimbleby, speaking on BBC Radio 4 Front Row on 26 January, said that he’d like to see an element of Question Time, if not the “whole hog”:

[Listen to interview here]

(…) I would certainly favour – not going the whole hog of Question Time and having a kind of mixed audience asking questions – but the kind of thing you could do – I don’t say it will happen – is to divide the audience into three groups so the viewer knows exactly who they are: Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour and allow those people perhaps to put the occasional question, or applaud (…)  somehow we’ve got to get it beyond the sterility of the American debate, or people will be bored by it and it will be a pity.

Stirring things up a little more, Boulton took the opportunity during the Independent interview to criticise Dimbleby’s handling of the BNP leader’s first appearance on Question Time in 2009:

I have to say that I did feel David Dimbleby got too involved and seemed to be operating as a panellist. I think if I had been doing that I would have tried to move it along so it wasn’t 50 minutes talking about the BNP. I would have tried to have got the BNP talking about law and order, Europe, foreign affairs, whatever.

But Dimbleby, speaking on Front Row last month, defended the style:

[Once it was agreed] it then of course became complicated because if you put the BNP on, people don’t want to talk to him about the post office strike, they want to talk about race, they want to talk about immigration, his views on that. They want to talk about the connections with the Klu Klux Klan, all those things.

We realised the audience would come, as indeed they did – it was a London audience – with a whole load of questions on race so we stuck with that. I did a lot of work with the producers on chapter and verse on everything that Nick Griffin had said.

I thought we did it the right way and I think it worked well.  [The fact that] in the end something like 10 million people saw that programme – either when it went out or afterwards, is the vindication of it.

Radio documentary tracks careers of London College of Printing photojournalism graduates

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Miles Warde tells the story of a group of photojournalism graduates from the London College of Printing from the 1990s who set out to witness world events and, in some cases, lost their lives in the process (hat tip @rosieniven).

Overexposed is available on iPlayer in the UK only (without using some cunning and illegal trickery) for another 10 days.

Also check out the Guardian’s 100 years of great press photography.

#DataJourn: Royal Mail cracks down on unofficial postcode database

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A campaign to release UK postcode data that is currently the commercial preserve of the Royal Mail (prices at this link) has been gathering pace for a while. And not so long ago in July, someone uploaded a set to Wikileaks.

How useful was this, some wondered: the Guardian’s Charles Arthur, for example.

In an era of grassroots, crowd-sourced accountability journalism, this could be a powerful tool for journalists and online developers when creating geo-data based applications and investigations.

But the unofficial release made this a little hard to assess. After all, the data goes out of date very fast, so unless someone kept leaking it, it wouldn’t be all that helpful. Furthermore it would be in defiance of the Royal Mail’s copyright, so would be legally risky to use.

At the forefront of the ‘Free Our Postcodes’ campaign is Earnest Marples, the site named after the British postmaster general who introduced the postcode. Marples is otherwise known as Harry Metcalfe and Richard Pope, who – without disclosing their source – opened an API which could power sites such as PlanningAlerts.com and Jobcentre Pro Plus.

“We’re doing the same as everyone’s being doing for years, but just being open about it,” they said at the time of launch earlier this year.

But now they have closed the service. Last week they received cease and desist letters from the Royal Mail demanding that they stop publishing information from the database (see letters on their blog).

“We are not in a position to mount an effective legal challenge against the Royal Mail’s demands and therefore have closed the ErnestMarples.com API, effective immediately,” Harry Metcalfe told Journalism.co.uk.

“We’re very disappointed that Royal Mail have chosen to take this course. The service was supporting numerous socially useful applications such as Healthwhere, JobcentreProPlus.com and PlanningAlerts.com. We very much hope that the Royal Mail will work with us to find a solution that allows us to continue to operate.”

A Royal Mail spokesman said: “We have not asked anyone to close down a website. We have simply asked a third party to stop allowing unauthorised access to Royal Mail data, in contravention of our intellectual property rights.”

#FollowJourn: @NeilDurham/deputy editor

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#FollowJourn: Neil Durham

Who? Deputy editor of GP and Independent Nurse

What? Currently deputy editor of  GP, a weekly newspaper for UK family doctors and Independent Nurse, a leading magazine for primary care and community nurses which is published twice a month. Both are publications of Haymarket Medical Media.

Where? @NeilDurham on Twitter.

Contact? neil.durham [at] haymarket.com

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura [at] journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

Sidewiki: some journalistic questions for Google

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Sidewiki (noun): a browser sidebar that enables you to contribute and read helpful information alongside any web page (source: Google.com)

or…

Sidewiki (noun): an attempt by our online colonial masters to own all of the comments on our websites (source: Andrew Keen)

On this occasion Jeff Jarvis would not do what Google is doing: the CUNY journalism professor and WWGD? author is worried. He can see some potential dangers for the development of Sidewiki, launched by Google yesterday. His commenters share their thoughts too, in a split conversation between the BuzzMachine comments thread and the Sidewiki (you’ll have to take the plunge and install it if you want to see how that looks). Jarvis says:

“This goes contrary to Google’s other services – search, advertising, embeddable content and functionality – that help advantage the edge. This is Google trying to be the centre. Quite ungoogley, I’d say.”

Sidewiki has the potential to be great for freedom of speech but what about the nastier side? Publishers no longer have control of the look of part of their site. Google has tested the application at news organisations it says – testimonials here – but it’s still developing its technology, and asking for feedback.

Some initial thoughts, then. The main concerns for journalists and news organisations might include:

1) Will it lose money for news sites?

Andrew Keen, writing for the Telegraph, comments:

“Sidewiki is a brazen attempt to own the Internet. What Sidewiki would do is replace/supplement the Telegraph comments section on this page with a Google comments page. So all comments on the internet would, in theory, be owned by Google (which, presumably, they could sell advertisements around – thereby eating into my salary).”

2) What happens about libel?

Google publishes its programme policy here, at this link.

‘Keep it legal,’ it says (and it will report us to the ‘appropriate authorities’ if we don’t).

“If you believe that someone is violating these policies, use the ‘Report Abuse’ button within Sidewiki.  We’ll review your report and take action if appropriate.  Just because you disagree with certain material or find it to be inappropriate doesn’t mean we’ll remove it.  We understand that our users have many different points of view, and we take this into consideration when reviewing reports of abuse.  Although not all reports will result in removal, we do rely on our users to tell us about materials that may be violating our policies.”

Have fun with that Google!

Here are a few questions about the legal aspect from Jo Wadsworth, online editor at the Brighton Argus, for whom comment moderation is part of her job:

“How long does it takes to get abusive comments removed? Where’s moderation criteria? Can site switch it off? Can trolls be banned?”

Meanwhile, SEO consultant and blogger Malcolm Coles is having a play… This morning, he says, he was finding it hard to resist the temptation to be the first to sidewiki the home page of UK newspapers. But someone else got there first.

Please add your own thoughts and questions. In the Google Sidewiki – to your left, via Twitter (@journalismnews) or in the comments…

PCUK/Harris Poll: Print copies may help build online subscriptions

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The final day of paidContent:UK’s paid-for content survey conducted by Harris Interactive, shows a little more consumer willingness to pay, if a newspaper is chucked in too:

“While only five percent of people who read a news site at least once a month told us they would pay for online access, when you throw in a free or discounted subscription to the printed paper, that rises to a combined 48 percent…”

Full survey at this link…

PCUK/Harris Poll: Readers want to spend as close to nothing as possible for online news

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Perhaps unsurprisingly – given Monday’s results indicating that only five per cent of 1,188 users polled by paidContent:UK and Harris Interactive would pay for their preferred news website – people do not want to spend very much either.

“When asked the maximum amount they would be prepared to pay, respondents who read a free news site at least once a month gave us the lowest possible amount in each category – annual subscriptions under £10, a day pass costing under £0.25 and per-article fees of between 1p and 2p.”

Furthermore, PCUK’s Robert Andrews reminds us to bear in mind ‘that most of these readers said they did not want to pay – their answers suggest they may pay even less or not at all’.

Full PCUK findings at this link…

BroadcastNow: Ofcom warns ITV could lose £64m a year on regional news

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Ofcom has warned that the ITV network will be facing a loss of up to £64m a year by 2012, if it has to continue providing regional news bulletins, reports BroadcastNow.co.uk.

“The regulator indicated its support for establishing independent news consortia to deliver localised news across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.”

(…)

“The Digital Britain report released earlier this year also called for independent news consortias to take over the regional news slots on ITV, suggesting that the groups could comprise of existing media organisations and be funded by the surplus from the Digital Switchover fund.”

Full story at this link…

Related:

Last week John Hardie, ITN chief executive,  called for separate contracts for replacement ITV regional news services to be issued for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – ie. a single contract for the whole of England (via MediaGuardian).