Tagged: Comment
My Liverpool Daily Post column: Phone hacking is bad, but do we need some perspective too?
I’m lucky enough (though readers of the paper might not agree!) to have a weekly column in the Liverpool Daily Post. It’s a spin-off of my blog on the website, called Outside The Bubble, and is meant to be an outside look on the world of politics.
I’ve covered the phone hacking issue this week, and how, a week on, it’s perhaps time for a bit of perspective. Here it is:
Why accuracy is more important than ever
When I was 18, and just starting out in my first full time job as a trainee reporter, a very wise man who worked in the newsroom said to me: “What’s the most important thing for a journalist to remember?”
“The ‘Who, What, Where, When, Why and How’ rule,” I replied, rather smugly if I remember correctly.
“No, try again,” came the reply.
“Er, make sure you know your law?”
“No.”
“Erm, be able to write a story?”
“No, and be glad for that, because if that was it, you wouldn’t be here.”
“Er, shorthand?”
“Don’t be daft. Think about it, come on.”
“Erm, well, er….”
Local Heroes conference: Sir Ray says something which has been a long time coming
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After the battering the regional press has taken over the past couple of years, maybe it wasn’t surprising that the rallying cry against its critics was issued from what felt like a lead-lined bunker.
A presentation room devoid of natural daylight and which mobile phone signals were not strong enough to penetrate was the venue for Press Gazette’s Local Heroes conference yesterday. The keynote speaker was Sir Ray Tindle, the newspaper owner whose life in the industry is the stuff of legend.
It began by using his £300 demob money from fighting in the Second World War to buy a newspaper in Tooting which was about to be closed after readership numbers fell to just 700. After turning that newspaper around, he sold to ‘one of the bigger publishers’ and got another three newspapers in exchange. Taking his staff with him to his new titles, the rest, as they say, is history.
Sir Ray’s empire now spans the south coast and parts of Wales and is made up of some 220 titles and, now in his 80s, he’s proud to say that he’s actually launched newspapers during the most recent recession, and has never borrowed money to buy new papers. So if anyone was going to stand up and launch a defence of local newspapers, then it was going to be Sir Ray.
So, where now for council newspapers?
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been contacted by a number of council PR officers keen to distance themselves, and their profession in general, from the rogue band of council newspapers which have hit the headlines in recent weeks.
Strangely, these council press officers also write for or edit council publications in their own areas. But they’re keen not to be tarred by the same brush as the likes of Hammersmith & Fulham Council, which believes the best way to communicate with residents is to dress up council press releases inside a newspaper which is designed to give very few clues about who actually publishes it.
All the council press officers I’ve spoken to recently say they need a way to communicate with residents, to share information, but that doing it via a fortnightly newspaper which takes external advertising and indulges itself with what’s on listing, restaurant reviews and gardening features isn’t the right way to achieve that aim.
Brighton Argus short-changed by Council over FOI
Council trading standards departments are, in my experience at least, the most publicity hungry of council departments. If they’re not warning about dangerous toys, then they’re after a good show for their latest crackdown on some dodgy activity.
So it’ll come as no surprise to any council reporter that Brighton and Hove Council was happy to point out it had been making sure supermarkets weren’t overcharging at the tills. Turned out that every supermarket they visited had overcharged.
But for some reason, the council wouldn’t say which supermarkets it had visited. So the Brighton Argus asked for the information under FOI.
The council said no – and now the Argus is submitting an appeal to the Information Commissioner. Good luck to them.
The council’s argument is that all the supermarkets involved are taking action to make sure the overcharging stops. But to me, that’s not the point. If councils want people to believe they are looking after the interests of the public, then they must demonstrate they are doing so.
It’s no wonder so many people feel that supermarkets have the run of councils when stories like this crop up.
Councillor suggests repeat FOI requesters be blacklisted
The issue of rising costs associated with responding to Freedom of Information requests has raised its head again – this time at the Highlands and Islands police force in Northern Scotland.
According to the Aberdeen Press and Journal, a member of the Police authority up there, Lochaber councillor Donald Cameron is concerned about the rising cost of dealing with requests.
The number of FoI requests to the force had increased by 41% and cost £160,000 in the past year. The 2,061 FoI inquiries received by the force in 2009 was almost six times the number submitted to NHS Highland in the period.
According to the paper, Cllr Cameron wondered if any information requested by FoI inquisitors was openly available or “unnecessarily kept back,” adding to the bill.
In other words, if the police were more upfront in the first place, then perhaps requests would fall.
Good idea – then he spoilt it.
A new role for regional newspaper websites when disaster strikes?
The developing disaster in Cumbria over the last 48 hours has, unsurprisingly, led to the emergency services telling people to keep tuned into local TV and radio for updates.
There’s no surprise in this – it’s been the norm for years. When something happens, be it snow causing road and school closures, through to weather events of the magnitude we’ve seen in Cumbria over the last two days, the emergency services have found TV and radio an instant way to broadcast information to communities which need such information.
But over the last 48 hours there’s been another source of instant information – from the websites of the local newspapers. The Cumberland News, News and Star and co have been using Coveritlive to relay information to users as soon as they get it.
And crucially, they have also responded to questions and information from many of the 4,000-plus people who logged in over 36 hours.
Regular readers of this blog will know I’m a massive fan of Coveritlive as it is, but I think the work done by the sites in Cumbria demonstrates just how vital a newspaper/website operation can be in times of crisis.
The Darlington Experiment 2.0: A case study for newspaper “pride” campaigns?
One of the more contradictory aspects of life in a provincial newsroom is that while it’s ok for those in the newsroom to speak critically of the patch they cover, as soon as someone else does it, they’re often heading for the front page.
On one hand, reporters will grumble about the lack of shops/cinemas/parking/people who smile, but turn any critical comments from high-profile folk into “shock horror, how dare they” pieces.
At the same time, many newspapers have campaigns which aim to instill a sense of pride in the community – a way of celebrating positives about an area, which often launch shortly after the latest focus group has reported back that readers feel too many negative stories appear in print. And advertisers often say something similar.
But reporters up and down the UK will know full well that in many cases, when they vox pop about a town or city they live in, the majority are quick to find fault with it, or laugh at the amibitions of councillors locally to improve the area’s image.
I suspect if the same questions were asked at a hyperlocal level, people would be more positive when answering the question: “What do you think of where you live?”
A tale of three headlines – and why SEO isn’t killing headline writing
“The internet” is accused of killing many things: Newspapers, the Royal Mail, book shops, the music industry – you get my drift.
And to that list of well-known complaints add this one from some prin journalists: “The internet is killing headline writing.”
That was basically the point made by columnist Maxwell Cooter in the latest edition of the NUJ magazine Journalist.
I know a lot of people roll their eyes when they hear the NUJ being referred to in the same sentence as online journalism, and there’s been a lot of discussion around the NUJ’s current investigation into “new media” to use the phrase it still uses.
I’m not going to touch on that investigation here – the comments have come thick and fast on Twitter from people who have articulated their thoughts much more effectively than I could … and in 140 characters too!
Anyway, back to Maxwell’s column (which I’d link to if I could find it online).
In his column, he laments what he sees as the end of an era where “writing a headline writing used to be a straightforward job; difficult but straightforward: sum up the story in a few succinct words, and if it included a clever – no maybe not-so-clever – play on words, so much the better.”
These days, he added: “Today’s subs have to consider two imperatives: key word search and search engine optimisation. The old fashioned witty, punning headline is heading for the scrapheap. What counts now is a headline that merits top ranking in its online searches. The trust dictionary has been replaced by Google Analytics or perhaps Google Zeitgeist.”
He concluded: “This scientific approach and calculating approach leaves little room for the sound of language or the richness of English phrase-making, let alone wit or humour. It’s composition by the rules – rather like making love by following a sex manual.”
You get the drift. It’s all summed up neatly in the standfirst which says: “Journalists writing headlines are doing it for Google, not the readers.”
What’s the value of a first person piece in an online world?
About a fortnight ago, Jo Wadsworth blogged about some of the age-old traditions in newsrooms, one of which was the old ritual of making the trainee reporter dress up or do something stupid “for the sake of a good read.”
Anyone who has progressed through the ranks of a newspaper will know what I’m talking about, and have their own horror stories to share, and that’s excatly what Alison Gow and I did today while stuck in a traffic jam on the A38 going into Birmingham.
For me, it’s back to 2000 and the original Harry Potter hype: On the grounds that I allegedly looked vaguely like Harry Potter, I was sent to a primary school near Accrington to discuss the book with local children.
By discuss the book, what I actually mean is be made to dress up to look like Harry Potter, have lipstick applied to my head in the abscence of a scar above my eyes, and then vox pop pupils at this school about the book. For good measure, the paper even sent a piece to HoldtheFrontPage with quotes from me to boot.
It made page three of the paper, and my parents loved it. They even bought pictures of me dressed like Harry Potter. But who else did it appeal to? I was new to the patch, so no-one knew me. Was it a good read? Heck, I was a trainee reporter so I suspect it wasn’t. Did it make readers sit back and think the paper in question was essential to their daily routine? Again, probably not.
This was nine years ago – a time when convincing yourself you were delivering a newspaper the audience wanted was based on little more than the news editor’s hunch, and the ability for senior managers to gather in conference and reflect on what a good job they’d done.
But surely if instant access to page impressions per stories, time spent per page and return visitors to articles has taught us one thing it’s this: the readers really don’t care about us at all. So therefore, surely the first person piece should be a thing of the past.
