2007 | static squid

PASSAGE TO INDIAA few years ago I wrote a piece for the Express about the practice of outsourcing jobs, especially to India. Back then, the focus was largely on call-centre jobs but it seemed to me that once the principle was established, it would be bound to spread to other areas and that, unless there were strong physical and geographical reasons why your job had to be done in the UK, it was at risk of outsourcing, I ended the...

BRIXTONOSTALGIAI walked down Atlantic Road at dusk this evening. They were hosing down the market but the fishmongers and greengrocers that open on to the street were still doing brisk business. There was music from a car parked outside the hairdressers, the smell of frying food and, as ever, the sound of sirens. The lights from the shops and station seemed perfect against the darkening evening sky. The Portuguese deli that does...

DEATH OF THE ROCKWhen I was a financial journalist, Northern Rock had a reputation for being a little, well, sharp. The deals they offered to savers and borrowers looked attractive but it generally paid to look below the surface. On one occasion, I recall, they shifted many thousands of customers out of one account into another that paid less interest, without any warning at all. Here's a contemporary account from the Telegraph.Over...

MADELEINE MCCANN AND NEWS

The Madeleine McCann story has become a news phenomenon, holding the interest of the public day after day after day. Even when there is little to report, stories about the McCanns top the most-read lists of online news sites. And when, as over the last few days, there are genuine developments, the Madeleine story is, news-wise, the only game in town. I hope someone at Hitwise or Nielsen produces some analysis of the Madeleine effect on news websites.

It's the same story with newspapers, of course. Here, courtesy of Mailwatch are a few recent front pages from the Daily Mail and the Express.

The 'quality press' has gone to town on the story, too, filling page after page with speculation and, that traditional standby of the broadsheet, articles that hypocritically decry the nation's obsession with the story, while simultaneously fuelling it.

Taken in the round, the media coverage of the case is not a terribly attractive spectacle and it's left many journalists feeling uncomfortable. I was talking to the head of one of the biggest online news organisations a few days ago and he told me that he wasn't at all keen on the blanket coverage of the McCann story and had been trying to scale it back, but the extraordinary level of interest in the story made it impossible.

It feels like a cycle of exploitation; the McCanns using the media for publicity, the media using the story to boost audiences, the public getting some sort of emotional fix out of the rawness and mystery of the tale and its thriller-like narrative drive. I sense it is going to continue at this pitch for a good while yet.

JOBS FOR JOURNALISTSInteresting and detailed post on Mediashift about jobs in journalism. Its key m essage, that print jobs are falling away and being replaced by jobs online, should be familiar to anyone working in journalism in the UK.I've said before that if I was coming out of college now, I would be looking for a job in online journalism, rather than print or TV, not just because there is more work, and more prospects, but...

BRINGING GOOD NEWS ON A FAST TRAIN, BRINGING FAST NEWS ON A GOODS TRAIN...Whatever happened to the Desperate Bicycles? Their Smokescreen single was one of the first, possibly the first, DIY single of the punk era and made a virtue of its cheapness and independence, explaining on the sleeve how simple it was to make and declaiming in the lyrics "It was cheap, it was easy, go out and do it yourself." Others, such as the Buzzcocks...

THE MIRROR RUMBLEDThe Daily Mirror has been caught trying to place a journalist in a salaried job at Tory Party HQ. It seems that the paper's Emily Miller got close to gaining a job at the heart of the Conservatives' organisation but was rumbled during the reference-checking process, in part because officials checked the IP address on the machine that she used to mail her application and found it was a Mirror computer (who knew...

SCRAPING THE BARRELI got a call yesterday from a harassed BBC radio producer asking me to appear on a show which I used to be invited on regularly but haven't heard from for years. "Well, it's August" he explained "and everybody else is on holiday or busy". Funnily enough, I was busy t...

THE DEATH OF THE UNDERGROUNDThinking about poor old Tony Wilson made me muse a bit on whether the 'underground' exists any more. In the punk era, there was an active and thriving national music scene that barely found its way into the mainstream media. Newspapers wrote about punk bands only to excoriate them for being anti-social, rude about the Queen etc; on the radio, you heard them only on John Peel and television, with the...

TONY WILSON RIPTony Wilson has died of cancer aged just 57. He was a big figure in my youth because, as presenter of the ITV local news in the north-west, he gave slots to bands such as the Buzzcocks and the Sex Pistols. It doesn't seem like such a big thing now, but back in the 70s, you didn't see bands of any sort on TV outside Top of The Pops and the Old Grey Whistle Test; punk bands were at the time treated with hatred, fear...

BBC BREAKING NEWSThe BBC has taken to littering its news programmes with phrases such as 'The BBC has learned...' and 'The BBC understands....' to indicate that its journalists have the inside scoop and have broken a story. This is something that has been borrowed from newspapers and its recent prevalence seems to date from this memo stemming from the BBC's failure at the last Royal Television Society awards. More exclusives is...

BAD MOOD MUSICCan someone stop Nick Robinson using the phrase 'mood music'? He said it at least twice this morning on the Today programme, reporting on the Brown-Bush summit. Where did this stupid phrase come from and why has it become a BBC buzzwo...

INSULTING THE LOWER ORDERSI don't know Danny Cohen, the whizzkid controller of BBC3, so I have no idea if the amusing Secret Blog of a TV Controller is an accurate spoof or not. However, Media Guardian, ever respectful of the feelings of powerful TV executives, today reports that it is 'nasty', 'spiteful' and 'devoid of wit' and gives Cohen ample opportunity to insist, unconvincingly, that he pays little attention to it (if that's...

MIRROR STUNT BACKFIRESSo a couple of Daily Mirror journalists are caught smuggling a fake bomb on to a train, 'to test security' - or, more truthfully, to generate a cheap splash. The Mirror is bleating because they were arrested under terrorism legislation, had their houses searched etc.Papers have been pulling stunts like this for years, claiming that they're helping to expose security loopholes, and patting themselves on the...

RDF, THE QUEEN AND A REMARKABLE SHARE PURCHASEHere's the latest story on the toils of RDF, bringing with it some good news for beleaguered Stephen Lambert, the creator of the misleading 'Queen hissy fit' trailer. But read it closely and with a cynical eye and an interesting sequence of events emerges.Here's the Media Guardian take:RDF's share-price slumped by 16.7% on Friday to 192p, after announcements by both the BBC and ITV...

WHERE WAS PAXMAN?Peter Fincham, the controller of BBC1, looked pretty shifty on Newsnight tonight, as he tried to explain the Queen and Leibowitz cock-up, blustering, rambling and several times holding his hands in front of him in a protective/defensive gesture."As controller, I take responsibility," he said, as if he was bravely shouldering the blame for something that was not really his fault. In fact, it was he who fronted...

WEIRD BBC BABY PICTURES

Above is one of images that have run on the bbc.co.uk home page today promoting some vulgar and catchpenny-sounding programme called Fight for Life. As you can see it is some sort of giant baby or foetus, rendered for some reason in blue and semi-transparent so that you can see its bones, internal organs and so on. I've show it small: on the site itself, it runs across the full width of the page: a real monster.

The other baby, which was on the site this morning, was brown and its massive face was seemingly pressed against the monitor, like a fishy alien thing. The pictures are about four times the size of the normal bbc.co.uk promo and the overall effect is highly disquieting. Has a madman taken over the bbc home page? What is going on?

WEB STATSHere's an interesting post from Inksniffer, aka John Duncan, once managing editor of the Observer. He's delved into the thorny and opaque world of web stats and come up with some interesting conclusions.His contention is that Internet metrics substantially exaggerate the importance of the newspaper web audience. His arithmetic, which seems unimpeachable, demonstrates that, for example, the Guardian, generally hailed as...

SIR SALMANDoes Salman Rushdie deserve a knighthood for his writing? Probably not - or at least no more than several other unknighted authors. Rushdie is an important writer, though not to everyone's taste, and his early work such as Midnight's Children and Shame is his best. His later work is pretty ordinary.But think back to 1988 and the publication of The Satanic Verses and the fatwa that was announced against Rushdie. Remeber...

NEWSPAPERS: THE COLLAPSE CONTINUESNot much to say about the latest catastrophic newspaper circulation figures except that the decline is turning rapidly into a collapse. Which will be the first paper to cease publicati...

POKEDLast night I attended a Media Society dinner in honour of Jon Snow. It was an altogether pleasant occasion, rather like a memorial service except that the subject was bouncing around being jocular, instead of lying in a box. The food was pretty good too. Peter Snow was the compere and short speeches were made by the likes of Helena Kennedy, Alan Rusbridger and the great Charles Wheeler.There were a few digs at the Mail on...

SCOOP!Credit to Iain Dale for being first to the news that Andy Coulson is the Tories' new spin-doctor. In general, I think journalists overvalue the importance of being first to a story (it matters a lot to them, but not that much to their readers) but you'd expect either a lobby correspondent or a News International employee to be first to the draw on this o...

BLOODY FOREIGNERSInteresting report from Comscore showing that the majority of traffic on British newspaper websites comes from abroad.The Daily Mail gets 69 per cent of its users from overseas, the FT 85 per cent, the Independent 73 per cent and the Guardian 58 per cent.It's encouraging news for British journalism that it has resonance around the world. As Comscore points out, some of this traffic doubtless comes from expats....

BAD VIBES AT THE BONNINGTONBonnington Square is a rather special part of south London, with an extraordinary atmosphere and a rare community spirit. I'm spending a fair amount of time wandering round there as I am trying to buy a house in the area, so far without any success.Anyway, Bonnington Square and Vauxhall Grove that runs off it are lovely. In Vauxhall Grove sits the Bonnington Cafe, a charming vegetarian cafe. I had a...

LIES AND LIE DETECTORSThe Portuguese police investigating the disappearance of Madeleine McCann say they have no grounds to arrest or charge Robert Murat. This has not deterred the British press from their dogged pursuit of the man who they have nominated as "prime suspect" in the case.Today the Sunday Express reports on its front page that Murat has refused to take a lie detector test. The inference many will draw is that he...

SWEATING ON"Hansen sweated on Lineker in 1986 but now they just want to talk a good game" is the headline from a piece in the sports section of today's Guardian. It made me think about this phrase "sweating on", which is generally used as a synonym for "being in a state of uncertainty and apprehension about" as in "City sweat on Weaver's fitness" or, I suppose, "Mourinho sweats on Terry's groin".It's quite new, I think - at least,...

SELF-INTERESTED, SECRETIVE MPsNothing seems to motivate MPs like self-interest - look at the pension arrangements they have awarded themselves, if you don't believe me. More evidence came today in a vote on a grubby little private members' bill to exempt MPs from the Freedom of Information Act, put forward by veteran Tory David McLean (who has refused to appear on radio or TV to debate the issue). The bill was passed by 96 votes...

MORE BBCRod Liddle in the Spectator wittily points up the BBC's unspoken cultural and political assumptio...

HEWITT AND THE SMOKING HOSTAGE"It was deplorable that the woman hostage should be shown smoking. This sends completely the wrong message to our young people," Patricia Hewitt was quoted as saying about the television coverage of the Marines captured in Iraq. It is a quotation that seems to sum up a kind of New Labour health-faddist bossiness and has been trotted out repeatedly since - by Simon Hoggart in the Guardian, by Jonah...

JOURNALISTS AS DETECTIVESRobert Murat, the Englishman currently under investigation over Madeleine McCann's abduction was dobbed in by a Sunday Mirror journalist, on grounds that seem vague, at best."He was very vague about his background. When I asked him he wouldn't give his surname or tell me where he lived. He wouldn't give me a phone number and he was vague about what he did for a living."Time will tell whether or not the...

BBC BIAS?Jane Garvey and Peter Allen lift the lid on the mood at Broadcasting House when Tony Blair was first elected ten years ago. Inevitably this has been grist to the mill of those who claim that the BBC is institutionally biased to the Left.For what it's worth, I think that's a highly simplistic view.1. Hard though it is to remember, the mood around the country was pretty euphoric, the morning of Blair's election. It would...

THE PRESS AND MADELEINE MCCANNFollowing the coverage of the Madeleine McCann case, it is hard to feel very proud of British press. There is something nauseating about the endless speculation, the conflicting theories, pored over by the press with unseemly relish. The stories about paedophile gangs are particularly distasteful, given that they seem to be little more than poorly-sourced speculation.Almost as unpleasant are the...

ANOTHER KIDNEY?A few years ago I wrote a piece in the Spectator, arguing that individuals should have the right to sell their kidneys, if they wanted to. There is a long waiting list for these organs, so why not offer incentives to individuals to donate?Since that time, the government has passed the Human Tissue Act 2004, making it unambiguously illegal for anyone to sell one of their organs and this week came the first successful...

ABCHere's the latest newspaper ABC circulation figures, as reported in Media Guardian. The accompanying story is headlined "Sales of all quality dailies down", a statement clearly borne out by the figures in the table, which shows, inter alia, the FT down 1.76 per cent month on month.Yet here's Press Gazette's take on the ABC figures, as far as they affect the Financial Times - circulation up for the sixth consecutive month, apparently....

SCOOPSI wasn't a reporter for very long, thankfully, since I wasn't very good at it but I've worked with a few people who really were. What they all had in common was being highly organised, obsessive about reading every document they could get their hands on, tenacious in following up leads and good at building rapport with useful contacts.These are not skills that are necessarily valued in modern journalism, which focusses increasingly...

ONLINE LIBELThe long-running scrap between Gina Ford, a parenting expert, and the website Mumsnet has finally come to a close. In brief, a group of people on the Mumsnet messageboards took agains Ford and posted a variety of disobliging comments about her. The comments could be read, apparently, as suggesting Ford has 'unpleasant or unhygienic' personal habits or that she 'straps babies to missiles and fires them into South Lebanon'.A...

NEW BUSINESS BOLLOCKS (1) and (2)(1) "Sit down with"People used to have meetings but nowadays they "sit down with" each other. "I need to sit down with you to understand...." is the contemporary version of "can we have a meeting about....". The phrase is supposed to invest the mundane activity of sitting in a conference room discussing performance figures with the ceremony and import of an international summit (see below). Whenever...

MICROSOFT, YAHOO! AND TAKEOVER TALKOn, then off again. Reports on Friday that Microsoft was seriously thinking about buying Yahoo! lasted a single day before being fully and authoritatively denied. However, that day was enough to see Yahoo! shares soar by 15 per cent or so, with billions of dollars changing hands. The New York Post claimed the 'credit' for the 'scoop'.Now this could simply be a case of a journalist taking a flyer...

RUSBRIDGER AND HIS SECRETARIESAlan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, has attracted a fair amount of comment for the generous salary he is paid, and for the £175,000 bonus he received at a time when his paper is, frankly, struggling. The suggestion is that he is becoming a bit grand, rather too much the sort of fat cat that his paper likes to criticise.Now I notice that the Guardian is advertising for an 'assistant PA to...

BROWNE STUDYThe fact that Lord Browne is gay is not a matter of public interest and normally a newspaper would have no justification for revealing the fact. However, Lord Browne has been accused of lavishing BP shareholders' funds on his Canadian lover (allegations that he denies) and in order for this tale (which is clearly in the public interest) to be told, his sexuality had to be revealed.There are often calls for a privacy...

DEGENERACY AT HARRY'S PLACEHarry's Place is absolutely one of my favourite blogs. Its team of writers are generally informed, humane, intelligent and realistic (personal favourites Brownie and David T). The debate in its comments boxes is sometimes amusing and often informative, featuring points of views from around the world. I look at it most days and comment there from time to time.However, when the topic is Israel/Palestine,...

MANCHESTER CITY IS LIKE A NEWSPAPERFootball clubs, like newspapers and restaurants, tend to be run as dictatorsships with a single dominant figure (the editor, the proprietor, the manager, the chariman, the chef, the owner) telling everybody else what to do and succeeding or failing based on his judgement. Kelvin Mackenzie's Sun and Brian Clough's Nottingham Forest were two examples of the same phenomenon - a driven, charismatic...

SHARPThe redesigned FT print edition looks nice enough. It turns out to be the work of my old boss Richard Addis. It is hardly revolutionary though, which is presumably why, in an interview with Roy Greenslade, Lionel Barber, the FT's editor, refers to it as a 'refresh'.Barber also mentions that one of his goals was to make the FT appear 'sharper', which immediately took me back to my newspaper days. Whenever we redesigned, refreshed...

RUDE BLOGGERSThought-provoking piece by Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times about the pitfalls of blogging. The key insight is that the more anonymous we are to each other, the less considerate we are likely to be. Many bloggers simply refuse to acknowledge that there is a problem with the tone of much online debate; I think they're wrong, for the reasons set out in Appleyard's piece.The dominant convention on the web is for users...

MORE ON THE NUJ BOYCOTTThe call for the NUJ boycott of Israel has become worldwide news and has, in some quarters, been seen as a manifestation of media bias against Israel and Jews generally. I think this is wrong, not least because only 66 members of a union of 40,000 voted for the motion. Granted they were delegates who spoke for their branches but I suspect in few cases had members specifically discussed this motion.The NUJ...

NUJ AND PAY AND RATESMartin Stabe links to Paul Bradshaw who reports that the NUJ is to investigate profits in the new-media sector, with a view to ensuring that journalists get a fair slice of the cake.The money generated from internet advertising is going up in leaps and bounds. Yet, as Martin says, some publishers continue to plead that it is hard to make money out of the weband use this as an excuse to underpay journalists.However,...

BOYCOTTING ISRAELSo here's my union, the NUJ, voting to boycott Israel. A few thoughts:1. How feeble and irrelevant. What difference will it make to anything?2. The motion was passed on a vote of 66 to 54 out of a union of some 40,000 people. Democratic?2. Why does a journalists' union need to have a foreign policy? How is it going to help low-paid journalists, or help deal with the transition from print to new media - the two...

MORE BBC BACKGROUND MUSICTonight on the News at Ten, an item on CCTV cameras soundtracked to "Stars of CCTV" by Hard-Fi. When did the BBC start doing this? W...

TABLOID vs BROADSHEET*In the circles in which I move the prevailing view is that tabloid journalists are dimwitted and amoral, while those working on broadsheets are clever and sophisticated, and those who work on the Guardian are the cleverest and most sophisticated of all, as well as being highly moral, too. All a bit irritating, to me at least, since I worked on a tabloid for a few years - and I've met a fair few Guardian journalists...

SEPARATED AT BIRTH?

The BBC is running an old picture of Patrick Moore on its front page today. This is what he looked like. I remember watching him in the Sixties but I don't recall him looking so fiercely impressive.

Looking at the picture I was reminded of another figure from my TV youth, Lord Charles (that's him on the left).

Could they possibly be related?

BBC NEWS BACKING MUSICTonight's BBC News at 10 had a report on the legacy of the slave trade in Britain by Clive Myrie. Every so often during the report there was a bit of atmospheric jazzy saxophone and some bluesy piano, as if we were watching a feature film or a drama series. Backing music on the news? I know the BBC is trying to be more accessible but isn't it all a bit, well, dumb?I mean, where do you stop? A blast of gangsta...

BBC AND 9/11I don't believe the many 9/11 conspiracy theories that float about the Web. However, this video is truly startlingIt shows BBC coverage of 9/11 with a reporter announcing that the Salomon Brothers building at Ground Zero had collapsed. Thing is, the building is clearly visible over her shoulder as she speaks. Even odder is that the transmission is cut after a few minutes - apparently this was the moment that the building...

RUDE AND POINTLESS COMMENTSRoy Greenslade reports on an interesting debate about comments on blogs and articles."During my City University lecture on Monday I was extolling the joys of participation between journalists and readers in the new digital environment when several hands went up. The students were amazed at my largely benign view of the opportunity the net has provided for people to post comments on newspaper websites....

ON OR OFF THE RECORD?Andrew Turnbull, the former senior civil servant who gave Gordon Brown a kicking in the FT today, is embarrassed. Not surprising, really, since he has in the past deplored civil servants who make critical comments about politicians, yet he now finds himself all over the news for accusing Gordon Brown of "Stalinism". What he meant was"Gordon is a bit of a control freak" rather than "Gordon killed millions of...

TV ON THE RATESThe Government has announced that the digital TV switchover will begin in October, whereupon old-style analogue sets will become redundant. It also re-iterates that the taxpayer will cough up so that people over 75 get digital boxes fitted for free. Why, though? Free electricity, water, gas or even food, I could understand but TV is hardly a necessity to life or a basic human right. Why should the government hand...

TROUBLE AT T'GUARDIANIn September 2005 the Guardian was proudly trumpeting that its circulation was over 400,000 for the first time in two or three years, following its shift to the Berliner, small-size format.Nearly a year and a half later official circulation figures, published today, reveal that the paper's sale has fallen to 364,491 - a drop of 10 per cent since the Berliner relaunch, leaving the paper barely 100,000 a head...

NEW TORIES?Tory back-bencher Patrick Mercer speaks his brains on racism in the army. What's astonishing is how blithely unaware he was that 95 per cent of the population would find his words repugnant.No doubt the Tories are knee-deep in spin doctors and media training but some things you simply can't change.Update (1) commenter Daniel Pendike has taken umbrage at my 95% figure: having read some of the comment on blogs, messageboards...

TITTLE-TATTLE, BRIANTransfer rumour stories are a staple of sports pages yet, as any fan knows, the ratio of fact to speculation is tiny. Most fans take these tales with a large pinch of salt and enjoy them simply as tittle-tattle and rumour. Newspapers tend to treat them in the same light and don't always require very high standards of proof for a "Player X is considering joining Club Y" tale.In fact, though, a story claiming...

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