Director’s Blog

This is a five minute email interview I did for Alix Abi-Aad, a journalism student at Leeds Trinity. I do quite a lot of these so I thought it was worth posting one for a change. Kinda practicing the preaching.

Alix Q: Firstly, with the rise of social networking and blogs, there are an increased amount of citizen journalists. Do you think this poses a threat to professionals?

“No – it’s an opportunity. CJ provide vast amounts of material for free for journalists. This is a massive boost for newsgathering. Any other industry would be laughing all the way to the bank if this happened. Plus the public engage in vast amounts of interactivity on forums, comments etc providing even more free material for journalists.” (more…)

Yours for £2 a week

From the Garden of Eden to Jonestown, humans have dreamed of ideal walled communities. If only we can shelter from the winds of reality, so goes the myth-makers, we can create a space to live our lives the way that we want. In that sense, The Times’ pay-wall plans are positively utopian.

I have nothing in principle against pay-walls. To get a price you have to define the good for which you are charging. Subscription has a long and honourable tradition in journalism of providing a relatively secure and stable source of cash to pay hacks. Alongside advertising it worked a treat. Although the success of the latter meant we in the UK neglected the former in favour of casual sales. (more…)

The sun came out briefly as I emerged from the latest excellent Oliver and Ohlbaum briefing on media industry trends, but it was still very cold and wet. It seemed the perfect metaphor for their predictions.

If you want all their data – and it is sumptious and stimulating – then you must pay, but here are some of the highlights they revealed to the assembled analysts . Of course, I am most interested in what they said about news which was surprisingly optimistic but challenging.

O&O’s great quality is that they combine audience research and intelligent economic analysis with a deep knowledge of the sector but this is an objective framework rather than a prescription. And they accept that they can’t build in all the variables – that is up to the media practitioners and the politicians. But for me, this was the central statement from O&O’s Mark Oliver for anyone looking for guidance on the commercial business model for media over the next five years:

“Price discrimination is the key. You have got to find an intelligent way of getting more from some people, not everybody. So, for example, some people will pay for content on mobile that they won’t pay for on TV.”

Looking at newspapers and Online news the O&O analysis was mildly optimistic in that it seemed to support the viability of a mixed package of subscription, micropayments and paywalls. (more…)

How do you moderate comments on a website without reducing free speech? Joanna Geary from The Times online @timesjoanna  is sick of being accused of gagging readers because they don’t put every abusive or banal reader comment up on the website.

Anyone who looks at the comments on news/comment websites like The Guardian’s Comment Is Free will recognise how fragmented and uncivil the ‘debate’ can be. Trolls are the worst problem, but Joanna points out that on a busy site, sheer repetition is just as big a barrier to a coherent thread. (more…)

It is sunny in Sweden

Throughout my career I always avoided the liberal journalism cliche of going to Sweden to show a British audience how something should be done. ‘Here in Stockholm…’ was a phrase that never crossed my lips. Sweden and Scandinavia in general is a wealthy, culturally distinct exception to most rules.

So it’s not surprising that Swedish media is not experiencing the existentialist angst and real economic pain running through most of the Anglo-Saxon journalism industry.

The Swedish media association’s boss told me that 2008 was a record year for income. Sales and advertising have only dipped as the Global Crash hit, but not catastrophically. Commercial TV revenues are being diluted but that’s because the number of operators is increasing. So why worry if you are in the land of pickled herring? (more…)

Last December, the Press Complaints Commission teamed up with Polis to organise a seminar about how suicide is reported by the media. The idea of holding a discussion to bring together journalists, academics, regulatory bodies and those with specialist knowledge of mental health issues stemmed from the spate of suicides in and around Bridgend earlier that year, and the widespread public debate the media coverage of those deaths generated. 

Almost a year on from that, what has happened? While the debate may have quietened down considerably, it has definitely not come to an end, and there have been a number of important developments.   Catherine Speller from the Press Complaints Commission reports here on what has been happening.

Reporting Suicide: Any Progress? by Catherine Speller (PCC)

The first piece of concrete action following the Polis seminar was the publication in March this year of new, practical guidance for editors and journalists. For the first time, a dedicated briefing note on the topic was included in a handbook published by the Editors’ Code of Practice Committee which explains individual parts of the Code in more detail, and the thinking behind key PCC rulings. (more…)

The Sun newspaper’s decision to back the Conservatives after supporting New Labour for 12 years is a blow to Gordon Brown’s chances but only marginally. It is also a curiously Old Media gesture from a title that has shown some skill at adapting to the new media environment.

It reminds us that many years ago, before Tony Blair and the blogosphere, a newspaper like The Sun could claim to have swung a tight election.

Of course, my academic colleagues will point out that voters make their minds up on a range of factors. They would characterise the role of newspapers as (more…)

BBC: stop building?

Yesterday was a good day to have lunch with BBC Director General Mark Thompson. Before we could tuck into BBC catering’s offering (privatise that Mark) he proudly showed us the new wing of Broadcasting House tucked behind Nash’s church and the original BBC building in Portland Place. £800 million plus of new real estate (partly to replace Bush House) that is so big that the BBC have had to work with London Transport to make sure that it doesn’t collapse the Underground tunnel that runs beneath.

Is this what BBC Trust Chairman Michael Lyons had in mind when he said that the BBC had grown too big? Or is it the   (more…)

Man of mystery

Is Rupert Murdoch’s plans to charge for news content a stroke of predatory genius, a desperate act of asset-stripping or simply a bold gamble?

Rupert Murdoch has built more journalism businesses than most people over the last few decades. He saved the Times group, put the Sun and Screws on top of the tabloid pile, and brought the UK it”s first top quality independent 24 hour news channel. And that is just in Britain. So while he’s sacked a lot of people and closed down some newsrooms over time, he is someone who has invested in journalism as well as profited from it.

So what is he up to this time?

All news groups are going through a storm (more…)

It is a kind of irony that the campaign to save the Observer has taken off on Twitter. It’s the first time that the venerable Sunday newspaper has had any online impact.

The plans to close the title discussed at the Guardian Media Group’s lovely new modern HQ in Kings Cross have caused a storm in liberal media-land way beyond the real importance of this institution. Newsnight, for example, devoted a major film and a two person discussion to the threat of closure, alone. I bet they wouldn’t do that for the actual demise of, say,  The Express or Sunday People (or ITV).  Arguably, The Observer is neither a major commercial nor journalistic enterprise.

Much of the outcry has focussed on the fact that The Observer is very old and quite liberal, rather than what it offers editorially and as part of GMG. It feels a bit like those campaigns to keep open a stately home that no-one visits anymore.

I think there is a case for closure – or at the very least, to merge it into the Guardian as a 7-day operation.

The Observer suffers from the same problem (more…)