Results matching “uk what is the”

Independent.co.uk, relaunched in January 2008, is the latest newspaper website to be brought down temporarily. The site was inaccessible from 10 am to 7 pm on Wednesday. 

The Society of Editors' Executive Director, Bob Satchwell, says that contempt of court legislation in the UK needs to be updated. Legislation in the UK currently restricts the reporting of trials during proceedings to prevent undue influence from the media affecting a case.

However, Journalism.co.uk's Judith Townend reports that, "even if something is reported prior to a case becoming active - namely, after an arrest has been made - the content is still 'live' and easily accessible by jurors online during a trial."

The Society of Editors (SoE) has appealed to two different Attorney-Generals for a review, and in July petitioned secretary of state for justice, Jack Straw, to start the process.

Satchwell says, "There is a need for, "a general review of contempt so everyone knows where we stand." Satchwell is concerned that the UK will get to the stage where the media will be told, "you just can't report anything", which would be "quite ridiculous". He goes on to say, ""The public has a right to know these things and the public must be kept informed. What must be done is a review of the rules."

The Editors Weblog spoke to Ian Cobain, senior reporter and investigative reporter at the Guardian, and he echoed these concerns about contempt of court legislation. Cobain says, "There are so many matters where we feel that we cannot report on them because someone is about to go on trial."

Source: Journalism.co.uk

The British Photographic Council (BPC) has irately reacted in response to the informal meetings between UK press photographers and CO19, the Metropolitan Police's Specialist Firearms Command, that were meant to establish a new pixellation policy that would allow the blurring of firearms police officers in order to protect their identity.

The photographers who attended the meetings mentioned that while they agreed to boost cooperation between the police and the press, it was up to their editors to decide on the blurring of photographs, reported the Press Gazette last week.

According to Journalism.co.uk, Paul Stewart, who spoke on behalf of the BPC, pointed out that it isn't up to the police but up to the editors to decide what to publish or broadcast.

He said, "Once images are recorded, we have no power to delete or confiscate them without a court order, even if we think they contain damaging or useful evidence."

"We are in no position legally or morally to start making demands... but there are welfare and safety issues and, to be fair, the photographers here understood that," said Chief Superintendent Bill Tillbrook, head of CO19.

However Tillbrook expressed concern about the safety of officers, following past occurrences that had criminals ldig up information about officers' identities.

"The guidelines for police clearly state: members of the media have a duty to take photographs and film incidents and we have no legal power or moral responsibility to prevent or restrict what they record," said Stewart.

The Metropolitan Police has assured the BPC that they will not be "issuing guidelines to picture desks across all London papers soon," as was written in the Press Gazette.

Source: Journalism.co.uk, Press Gazette

He may be an investigative journalist by trade, but Guardian (UK) writer Nick Davies is not shy to criticize his own profession. Davies made headlines across the globe with the February 2008 publication of his book, Flat Earth News, a searing indictment of investigative reporting and modern journalism. The book, which details issues such as illegal acts committed by journalists on the job and "churnalism", or barely fact-checked information rehashed from PR professionals and spin-doctors, turned the spotlight on the news industry, launching a debate within the ranks of news professionals about the challenges facing the industry.

Davies is the author of five books, has been named Journalist of the Year, Reporter of the Year, and Feature Writer of the Year. He was also the first winner of the Martha Gellhorn award for investigative reporting in 1999.

To launch our series on the Future of Investigative Journalism and the challenges ahead, the Editors Weblog spoke with Davies to see what all the controversy was about and to ask Davies his views on the future of his profession.

EW: What skills does it take to specifically be a good investigative journalist? How is it different to being a beat reporter or is it similar?

ND: In principle, the skills of investigative reporting are exactly the same as those of any other kind of reporting - because all reporting is investigative, all reporting is an attempt to get at the truth, so the distinction is a false one.

There is a sub-set of reporting where somebody is actively obstructing the reporter's access to information, which means the job will be more difficult and so the skills will be more obvious, but the key difference is not in the skills required but in the time that is required. The beat reporter is liable to be under pressure to produce several stories every shift and, therefore, will be unlikely to have the time to dig into anything which is being deliberately concealed.

EW: How has the business changed over the past 10 years, ie, skills necessary, training, and so forth?

ND: The big change in the business over the last ten years is precisely the reduction of time available for almost all reporters to do their work. The beat reporter as much as the 'investigative' specialist suffers from this, because so many news rooms have been taken over by profit-hungry corporations who have cut staff and increased output and thereby made it extremely difficult for any of their reporters to work effectively. The required skills have not changed (apart from the minor technical skills of dealing with websites).

The training, however, is in decline along with the industry as a whole, primarily because colleges now train students to fit with the demands of time-starved newsrooms, eg, the quick re-writing of press releases, the recycling of agency copy; and also because colleges set up courses with 'media' or 'journalism' in the title because they know it will attract student numbers even though they have nobody qualified to teach the course, so you have sociologists and literary specialists teaching the skills of a profession which they do not understand.

EW:  Is your job harder or easier with the advent of multi-platform news? Do you see podcasts and video content as useful?

ND: Multi-platform news has tended to make it more difficult for all reporters - beat, specialist, 'investigative' - to do their work because filing for audio, video and print
a) consumes precious time, and
b) dilutes concentration.
And I am not at all sure that our consumers are particularly interested in or attracted to the vodcasts and podcasts that we make available to them. Occasionally, there are stories where the print version is hugely enlivened by video - for example, the passenger video of the scenes inside the Qantas flight which blew a hole in its fuselage last month. But to make the production of audio and video versions a standard requirement for all stories is bad management and highly likely to accelerate the declining standard of our product.

EW: Do you use any of the new technologies in your reporting, ie, video, and mobile? Have these new technologies made your job easier or harder?

ND: As a reporter, I'm not concerned with the way in which my words are used. What I file may go into the print edition or onto the website or be subbed down for emails or mobile messages.

The one way in which electronic technology does impact me is my access to the worldwide web. That is a wonderful research tool, and I use it all the time. It is no substitute for dealing with human sources, but it enormously increases the amount of information that is available in the public domain. Personally, therefore, it has made my working life much easier.

However, for 'beat' reporters or for any reporter who has not been able to negotiate the time to do the job, the web does also represent a threat because it means they no longer have the benefit of a deadline at the end of the day: for most of them the deadline is always here and now because even if the printed edition is not calling for copy, the website is. Time - reporters can't do their job without it.

EW: What are your thoughts on lobby groups, such as the Taxpayers' Alliance, setting up investigative reporting units themselves and sending their articles direct to newspapers?

ND: The danger with funding by lobby groups is clear - that, at best, they will select story subjects and/or angles which suit their agenda and, at worst, that they will inject outright falsehood and distortion directly into them. But not all dangers are realised. I think most reporters would say that if they could find a lobby group which was prepared to back genuine journalism without imposing its agenda, they'd take it in a heartbeat.

The underlying point is that the inherent dangers of allowing corporations to take over ownership of news media are certainly being realised with highly destructive results for truth-telling journalism - and so any alternative is worth considering.

Over the coming weeks, The Editors Weblog will be examining how investigative reporting has been affected by multi-platform publication and the 24-hour news culture.  

Twitter reported this week that it is axing its SMS service outside India, the US and Canada, causing consternation across the Twitter community. Almost immediately after this was announced, reports emerged of IT entrepreneurs taking up the challenge to look for a solution. The Editors Weblog spoke to - we think - the first organisation to launch a solution to the Twitter SMS issue: Twitsms.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

The Editors Weblog spoke to Delia Timms and Jeff Bonnes (the founders of Twitsms) after receiving their email announcing the launch of Twitsms, which was just two days after our posting on the SMS issue. (Our interview with Delia and Jeff follows below.)

Twitsms buys the SMS in bulk in advance to keep costs low. Prices start at 7 pence in the UK and 11 cents in Australia per SMS.
 
The Editors Weblog also contacted Twitter, to find out how it feels about Twitsms and other such services helping out the Twitter fans that have been affected. Twitter has previously acknowledged that SMS is a key part of its service, saying: "We love SMS. The lowest common denominator aspect of this service is a defining part of Twitter."



Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter Inc, told me: "We do not officially endorse any one service. However, we are interested in seeing what the response to these services will be."

There has been a certain amount of annoyance in aspects of the Twitter community about how Twitter have handled this issue, especially following Biz Stone's blog on the Twitter website calling for "perspective" on the issue. Svetlana Gladkova (Vice President of Business Development at Profy) does not sugar coat her views in her blog on Twitter's reaction, stating: "In my opinion, the team over at Twitter has committed quite a number of mistakes in handling this situation."

Here at the Editors Weblog, we try not to dwell on the negative and focus instead on solutions to our readers' problems; and Delia and Jeff look like they might just have one:

What inspired you to launch this service?

We use Twitter ourselves to keep in touch with friends and family both in Australia and overseas.  Jeff is American and particularly liked Twitter for staying in contact with his friends overseas.  So we understood personally how important it was for some Twitter fans to keep getting their SMS - even if they had to pay a very small fee for it.  Living in Australia we already have to pay fees for our SMS, so it is not unusual for us to pay to get our Tweets too.  We felt Twitter fans should at least have the choice to get their SMS, rather than just being cut-off by Twitter altogether.
 
How did you manage to set this up so quickly?

Experience and enthusiasm. We have built a few other successful internet businesses and have gained valuable experience over the past few years.  So we were fortunate to start out with some knowledge, skills and code. Jeff was able to apply learning from previous projects to speed up the coding for www.twitsms.co.uk. One of our other businesses does messaging and SMS already, so we were one step ahead with this. We were also able to use hardware and hosting from our other internet operations. We crowd sourced the graphic design for a fast turnaround.
 
What technology are you using?

We use Java and a web development framework called Grails. This allowed us to build  a very robust site quickly.
 
Can you explain exactly what arrangement you have established with the mobile companies?

Currently we buy SMS in bulk to keep the cost for users as low as possible.  As the site grows, we will look for ways to reduce costs even further.
 
Have you had any contact with the Twitter team about your project?

No we have not made contact yet, but will in the future. We hope that Twitter is happy that www.twitsms.co.uk and www.twitsms.com.au are keeping their fan-base connected outside of the USA, Canada and India!
 
What have been the early indicators been for Twitsms?

Early business is very strong. We knew there was a solid Twitter community and we knew they were annoyed about being shut off.  But were not sure whether they'd pay for their Tweets. However we have been happily surprised by the immediate interest from Twitter fans. They are more annoyed about Twitter shutting their service down, than having to pay a few cents to get their SMSs. Another surprising aspect for us has been the global interest.  www.twitsms.co.uk has been live for 4 days now and we've had contact from customers in the UK, Australia, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Turkey, Israel, Russia and France (of course!).
 
The use of Twitter itself has been a great springboard for www.twitsms.co.uk.  Twitter is a handy and powerful tool for communicating and getting immediate feedback from customers! It is also an efficient way to keep our customers updated as we are responding to requests and developing new features quickly.
 
What is your competition?

There is one site that has launched in competition and several still 'coming soon'. There has also been one site that has stopped development before they released. We are not worried by competition; we developed www.twitsms.co.uk because it is a service that we needed and wanted to share with the Twitter community.  Being first to market has been great. The feedback and early input from our customers is helping us ensure that www.twitsms.co.uk is the best alternative for the international Twitter community.

Sources: Twitsms, Twitter, Profy

See also:

Twitter reduces its mobile service, ends SMS updates service

 

The Guardian recently spoke with John Wintherow. In his first interview in nine years, the Sunday Times editor discusses the "tactile" joy of the Sunday paper, reading every word of the paper (and other nostalgia) and impersonates the competition. Below follows an edited transcript of what appears on the Guardian's website:

Over the past year, speculation about the future of the longest-serving editor in Rupert Murdoch's UK newspaper empire has mounted as his paper's sales have declined... Highly successful and very low-profile, Witherow is in some ways like his newspaper - admired and respected, but without much fanfare.
 
Declining print sales and online competition have led several newspaper groups to merge the daily and Sunday staff with their online counterparts. News International has ruled out such integration. "We will remain separate entities with separate staff" says Witherow, adding that Sunday titles suffer from integration. There will be no editorial job cuts despite an efficiency drive conducted by the Murdoch-appointed Boston Consulting Group. He is talking to his daily counterpart, James Harding, about how the Sunday can be better "represented" online - the weekly drives a third of timesonline's traffic. Witherow is boyishly enthusiastic about the "tactile" joy of a Sunday read and wonders jokily whether the environmental damage of reading his newspaper online is greater than printing all that paper. "Newsprint still has the same elemental excitement about it - don't you think that?"

He still receives a weekly call from Rupert Murdoch, typically on Saturday evenings. "It's always been the same," he says. Unlike his counterpart at the Sun, Rebekah Wade, Witherow wasn't called to give evidence in the recent House of Lords inquiry about the influence of the media titan on his titles but he has always been "open" about it, he says. Does Murdoch suggest what the paper should be covering? "No ... he just likes to know what's going on. The conversation is invariably about world economics."

...One of the biggest criticisms of recent years is that the paper breaks fewer stories than it did. Even the first two issues of the relaunched paper failed to deliver a knockout scoop. "Ideally we would have liked something bigger but you can't always organise it that way," Witherow concedes. The conservative paper has instead landed big interviews with the former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and French first lady Carla Bruni.

A former foreign and home news reporter, Witherow sounds a little nostalgic for the fiercer competition of the 1980s and accepts that "generally Sundays on the news front are not as strong as they were" then. Staff and former colleagues suggest that he is far from complacent. One calls him "absolutely relentless", regularly berating editors if he felt their sections could improve. And Witherow does admit that there's something in a rival newspaper every Sunday that he wishes he'd had.

He denies that the Sunday Times is going downmarket in a bid to beat the Associated titles or the top-selling Saturday Telegraph and instead suggests there must be something for everyone in the paper. "He knows the Sunday Times reader better than anyone else and, annoyingly, he is always right," says Will Lewis, who spent three years as Witherow's business editor before going on to edit the Telegraph.

Despite a reputation as a tough perfectionist, Witherow is relaxed, thoughtful and funny during our interview - even doing impressions of rival newspaper executives. His public image seems largely derived from his failure to grant many interviews - "are they a useful thing to do with your time?" - and from the contrast with his predecessor Andrew Neil. "Both he and Dacre are in the same mould," says Hinton. "They're old school in that way and don't hang around on TV ... You can't get him to go out for lunch after Wednesday. He is a very, very involved editor."

Witherow used to read every word of the enormous newspaper before it went to print. "I tried to do it for a few years and went cross-eyed," he laughs. "It drove me bonkers, not because of the content but just demands of time." Now he signs off every front cover and reads three main news sections before publication.

Source: Journalism.co.uk

Google has announced last Wednesday the launch of its Knol feature, a website dedicated to providing user-generated articles on a range of topics, similar to Wikipedia. 

Jack Schofield, a Guardian blogger, warned that Knol may harm the media industry since writers not only have the chance to sidestep editors but also be able to earn money from the ad revenues on their pages.



A "knol" or a "unit of knowledge" will offer articles on a wide range of topics, written by experts on those subjects. Individual knols will be treated like web pages, indexed in Google's search engine.

"The ultimate goal is: we want to improve search," said Cedric Dupont, Knol product manager.

The difference between Knol and Wikipedia is that the latter has anonymous articles that are edited a multitude of times, reported the Guardian. Knols stress authorship, according to Dupont.

Knols may be edited if the author opts for the "moderated-collaboration" mode, but he or she has the right to chose what changes may be made, reported ZDNet UK.

Google partnered with the New Yorker magazine to let authors add cartoons from the publication to their knolls, ZDNet UK wrote.

Source: CyberJournalist.net, The Guardian, ZDNet UK

The Telegraph's revamped website is to be revealed within the week, focusing on redesigned news, sports and travel sections, aiming to boost speed and reliability. Like The Guardian, the Telegraph chose to gradually restructure parts of its site, instead of a complete makeover in one go, PressGazette.co.uk reported.

"We weren't really looking for a seismic change because what we have found with web design projects is that it's a fine balance between improving the experience but not losing your users who have got used to the previous design," said Ed Roussel, Telegraph Media Group's digital editor.

The redesign includes horizontal navigation that features vertical menus to magnify the amount of space available for the content.

Meanwile, article pages will have links to related stories from the Telegraph's archive, that are found using Autonomy Corp's search feature.
 
The paper's site is to function with the eScenic content management system, allowing for different revamped sections to be unravelled steadily.

Source: PressGazette.co.uk

Back in 2001, the Guardian newspaper asked, "Where have all the women gone?", and it is a question that has plagued the editors of leading British newspapers for the past two decades as only 41% of women - 10.3 million - read a daily UK newspaper (October to March 2008).
 
Genevieve Roberts, a former features writer and reporter for The Independent, now an advertising planner for McCann Erickson on the Evening Standard account, told me: "Almost every newspaper is trying to appeal to female readers. In crude commercial terms, females are the main shoppers in more than 50% of households, and advertisers want to appeal to people who shop so they have the opportunity to buy their product."

This is the crux of the issue, advertising is now more than ever driving the bottom-line of newspapers, and it is crucial that newspapers attract the right demographic to appeal to advertising agencies and businesses.

Without female readers, the advertisers will look elsewhere.

The Glossy Magazine Approach

Newspapers are tackling this problem in two distinctly different ways: the glossy/gossip magazine approach and the female interest approach.

Daily Mirror
(From July 2007 to December 2007: Female = 43%)

Daily Mirror Editor Richard Wallace has discretely changed the focus of the newspaper from the traditional male-orientated tabloid to appeal to women who buy popular weekly gossip magazines.

Andrew Higton, a sub-editor at The Mirror, told me that this marketing approach has involved a significant change in culture for the staff. Editors, reporters and sub-editors are often told to make copy more "female-friendly". This new approach is applied at all levels, for example, when President Nicolas Sarkozy of France visited the UK, subs were told to focus much of the story on Carla Brunei's outfits.

The Daily Mirror's shift towards the glossy magazine style has also involved changing the look of the whole newspaper in an attempt to make it more visually appealing to the female market. The newspaper has now gone full-colour, redesigned its features pages, covers female issues such as family life and children, and it contains more celebrity-focused pictures alongside the news stories.

Daily Express

This is also the approach that Richard Desmond's Daily Express is following. The newspaper is using its experience in the magazine market (Richard Desmond is the proprietor of the increasingly popular weekly glossy magazine, "OK!") to attract women readers. It is also the path that several of the new free daily newspapers are following, such as The London Paper, which regularly features celebrity stories on its front page.

The Female Interest Approach

Daily Mail

However, Helen Lewis, sub-editor at the Daily Mail, said to me that she is not so sure that the glossy magazine route is correct. She told me, "The problem lies in conflating 'female interest' with 'celebrity story', and although it's been a successful formula, I think it's one that's coming to the end of its usefulness in terms of shifting copies."

The Daily Mail is the most successful newspaper in the UK in terms of attracting female readers. In 1995 (Jan to Dec) 49% of its readers were female, in 2006 (Jan to Dec) this had grown to 52% and the figures for 2007 show that it had held onto this 52% demographic. The Daily Mail enjoys more female than male readers. However, it has not completely gone down the celebrity gossip/magazine style. Undoubtedly it does feature these kinds of stories, but it balances this with news stories and a style proven to attract female readers. According to the National Readership Survey, women care about news - it being their "main reason for purchase" - but they like to be told pretty briskly what has happened, but not what it all may or may not mean. The survey also indicates that British women are turned off by sport and are not too keen on finance.

A quick glance at the Daily Mail after reading this data shows how the Daily Mail has struck the right balance to appeal to the female demographic.

Genevieve Roberts told me during an interview on this issue: "In the UK, the Daily Mail has the highest percentage of female readers, and unsurprisingly, this increases its appeal for advertisers."

The Times
(From July 2007 to December 2007: Female = 42%)

The Times deliberately targets females with its T2 supplement magazine, just as the Guardian (from July 2007 to December 2007: Female = 46%) targets females with its supplement magazine, G2.

These magazins are not aimed solely at women, but The Times' chose to advertise to females when it re-launched the supplement, indicating the importance of female readers to this publication. In a £1m-plus campaign, they targeted a cross-section of women: professionals, housewives and mothers.

Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal Online appears to agree with The Times and the Daily Mail's approach for attracting female readers. In May of this year it launched a new section aimed at a female audience, however, it is also not going down the glossy magazine route. WSJ Online executive editor Alan Murray told Reuters, "Our experience has shown us that there are a lot of business and professional women out there who crave not just fashion and beauty advice, but an intelligent news-oriented community where they can share experiences and swap ideas."

Early indicators point to the Female Interest Approach as having the most success, but only time will tell which strategy works in the long run. The battle lines have been drawn in one of the world's most aggressive newspaper markets, and it is certainly a battle that other editors will watch with interest.

Sources: Newspaper Marketing Agency, Brand Republic, Reuters