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Why is arts coverage so lamentable?

19/10/2015

1 Comment

 
Picture
A Facebook friend posted this letter from an Australian newspaper last week, sparking a lively debate about the relative importance of the arts and sport.
It was, of course, a spurious contest. It would be bonkers to forsake sport for the arts or any other specialist subject. But why should it be either/or?  And why are most of our national newspapers so ambivalent about the arts?
I sat down on Saturday to read the Telegraph's 64-page "Review" section. I use inverted commas because reviewing did not seem to be a major part of the supplement's remit.
At the front end were a series of interviews - all interesting in their own way - with various artists, mostly with projects to promote. At the back was the obligatory TV guide. Nothing wrong with that either.
Critical List
Squidged in the middle were the reviews, heralded by a "front page" wittily entitled "The critical list". This pointed up a handful of presumably important events, numbered from one to five.
Each had a picture, a heading and a paragraph of text. It looks like an index page, hinting at more to come on the following pages. Not a bit of it. That's your lot. An absolute triumph of style over substance (with apologies to design director Jon Hill).

Over the page was a double page spread dominated by a Canaletto and two big ads. This was the critics' "what's on" guide to film, theatre, exhibitions and concerts. These included three films, three plays and three exhibitions, which were allowed 75 words apiece - including the vital where and when details plus plot outlines for those unfamiliar with French Without Tears and Lord of the Flies.
Next up was the music page. One pop and one classical CD review - which were at least given 400 words apiece.
If reading is your thing, you're better served. Past the West End ads, there was a spread on Charlotte Bronte and then reviews of seven books - including Michael Ashcroft's ​Call Me Dave, in case the Piggate story passed you by. Interestingly, each review was accompanied by a little panel telling you how you could buy the book from the Telegraph. There was also a tie-up with WH Smith for the "pick of the week" title and further ads offering the chance to buy an Andrew Marr poetry anthology and Tom Holland's Dynasty - again from the Telegraph.

Pan advert
I'm not suggesting, of course, that commercial considerations had any bearing on the editorial judgments - any more than Pan's appearance as No 1 in the Critical List and its against-the-grain four-star rating (the Times and Guardian gave it one, the Mail and Indy two) had anything to do with this monstrosity of an ad in Friday's news pages.
What I am suggesting is that the coverage was - and generally is - inadequate.
It wouldn't be so bad if there were proper treatment of the arts during the week, but there isn't. The block of pictures below shows all the Telegraph's weekday arts pages from last week. 
​
Telegraph arts pages
It is interesting to note that Booker Prize winner Marlon James features on both Wednesday - the day after the presentation dinner - and Thursday.
In common with the Baftas, the Brits, the Turner Prize and the Mercury Prize, the award for the novel of the year generally manages to leap the fence separating news and features. But this year it warranted only a nib on page 2 of the Telegraph.
Even that was better than the Mercury managed. The 12 nominations for album of the year were announced on Friday morning. Last year, the Telegraph ran a story by critic Neil McCormick and a rundown of the nominees, complete with audio links, on its website. This year? Nothing. Not a word in the paper or online.
Ditto The Times. The Guardian gave the list a full page, the Independent half a page. The Mail didn't manage anything in the paper, but ran a piece about Florence + The Machine online, linked in with "how to buy a shirt like the one she wore at Glastonbury" ad. The Sun was disparaging, saying that the award had become irrelevant and that the judges were on another planet (ho ho), but at least it ran the list.  
Neither The Times nor the Telegraph is known for its love of the BBC, which is running the prize this year, but surely you would have to be an arch cynic to believe the lack of coverage is down to spite.
In his Telegraph commentary bemoaning Ed Sheeran's absence from the nominees last year, McCormick pre-empted Dan Wootton of the Sun in declaring the prize irrelevant, so maybe the paper has taken its critic at his word. 
And maybe he had a point: Sheeran's album x sold 1.7m copies last year But critics above all others must realise that commercial success is not necessarily a measure of artistic merit -  should 50 Shades of Grey have featured on the Booker list of 2012?
Whether you approve of the nominees or not, this cavalier attitude to even the big set-piece events of the arts calendar is extraordinary. Yet it is the inevitable result of not caring about the arts week in, week out. Can you imagine a paper choosing to cover only two football matches in a week - one soccer (sorry), one rugby - as the Telegraph did one classical and one pop CD?
Look again at those ten weekday arts pages, heavily laden with supporting ads. How do they compare with sport? Well, over the same five days, the Telegraph ran 108 sports pages. And as for generating revenue? Last Friday's 24-page supplement had five paid ads.

As I said at the beginning, it's not a case of either/or. Sport is important. But so are the arts. They lift the spirit, they teach us about life, they simply entertain. And for those who believe only in the bottom line, here's a statistical portrait of the UK's cultural landscape last year:
  • 67 million tickets were sold to professional sporting fixtures, of which 
  • 42.8 million were to football matches
  • 311 million books were sold 
  • 157.5 million cinema tickets were sold 
  • 14.7 million tickets were sold for London theatre performances
  • 14.8 billion - yes billion - songs were streamed over the internet
  • 1.3 million vinyl records were sold
  • 55.7 million CDs were sold - which, combined with vinyl, accounted for half of album (or album equivalent) sales
  • 17.4 million tickets were sold for music concerts
  • 3.5 million tickets were sold for music festivals
  • 49 million people visited Britain's 16 national museums and galleries (not necessarily 49 million different people, any more than the 42 million football fans were all different people)
  • 77% of the population either attended or took part in at least one artistic performance.

There are an awful lot of people out there who care about sport. And even more who care about the arts. Editors, please take note.

1 Comment

Corbyn: all singing from the wrong hymn sheet

16/9/2015

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Corbyn at St Paul#s
Just three days into the new job and Jeremy Corbyn has already had his donkey jacket moment. That boy isn't hanging around.
The Labour leader is in trouble for wearing a jacket and trousers that didn't match to the Battle of Britain service at St Paul's yesterday. Not only that, but the top button of his shirt was undone and his red tie was not knotted right to the neck.
Oh yes, and he didn't sing the National Anthem.
These are the things you need to know about Jeremy Corbyn's activities yesterday.
He also made a speech to the Trades Union Congress, but for today's newspapers, that was almost insignificant when set against his monumental sins earlier in the day. 
corbyn coverage
The response to Corbyn's silence during the singing - especially when he had been in good voice for the Red Flag on Saturday - was predictable. Guess who popped up to denounce him as rude and disrespectful? Good old Nicholas Soames, descendant of the sainted Sir Winston; reliable retired military folk including Admiral Lord West, Colonel Richard Kemp and a couple of ninety-something war veterans; Nigel Farage, who must miss being on the front pages; and media tart Simon Danczuk and some mostly unnamed fellow Labour MPs.
Did anybody in the real world care? Will the non-singing of a song cost Labour a single vote? Or gain one?
The Sun
And what if Corbyn had sung? Well, he'd have been a hypocrite. Look at what the Sun had to say yesterday when it was disclosed that he would kiss the Queen's hand etc etc when inducted into the Privy Council.
Damned if he did, damned if he didn't.
Honouring those who served the country at war is a tricky business for Labour leaders. Consider the flak Michael Foot took over his choice of coat for the Cenotaph in 1983. How dare he pick something warm from his wardrobe instead of trotting off to Aquascutum for a classic number in navy serge?

Michael Foot
Gordon Brown
Clothes do matter. Dressing appropriately is an expression of courtesy to those around you. Gordon Brown was guilty of a repeated insult to his hosts when he refused in 1997 and subsequent years to don formal dress to deliver the Chancellor's Mansion House speech. Foot would have done better to have buttoned up, but the coat itself wasn't scruffy. Corbyn could have gone the extra half-mile and done his tie up properly, but did anyone beyond a hostile Press notice or care that his smart jacket and trousers didn't constitute a suit?
If Corbyn's attire and attitude were disrespectful to Queen and country, how disrespectful to the country were this morning's newspapers?  "You don't need to know about his policies, take it from us they're laughable. So rather than report what he had to say, we'll just mock the way he said it and concentrate on his bad manners."
The Times splash did at least give a fair chunk to the TUC speech, even though the intro and heading were anthem-related and the overall emphasis - as with the Independent - was on a "day of chaos". The Express gave the address a page lead a few pages behind the St Paul's scandal, albeit in "look what he's come up with now" style; the Mail reported it straight in a box on its "Labour Earthquake spread" - and then gave Quentin Letts four columns to lampoon the delivery.
This, however, was the entirety of the Telegraph's reporting of what its splash described as "the first major speech of his tenure":
Picture
Mr Corbyn yesterday travelled to the TUC conference in Brighton where he delivered a rambling speech that called for people to be given unlimited benefits. Just before he took to the stage, the string quartet played a rendition of Hey Big Spender, an apparent reference to his "people's quantative easing" policy.
Mr Corbyn also said the unions would write his manifesto for the next general election, and compared the Government to the fascist leadership of General Franco in Spain.
The story also said that he had forgotten his lines, but the paper forgot, in its outrage over the anthem snub, to say what he had forgotten. The Times let us into the secret -  Corbyn had "forgotten" to say that Thatcher had once described the miners' union as the "enemies within" - but are we sure he forgot? Maybe he just edited it out?
Corbyn's campaign and election bypassed the conventional relationship between politicians and the media and thus enhanced the sense of there being something fresh about him.
There was much Twitter joy over the fact that an aide had put the phone down on The Sun's Harry Cole, but how wise it is to refuse to communicate with the country's biggest selling paper remains to be seen.
Corbyn's win may have been a landslide, but it still came from just a quarter of a million votes from politically engaged people. The Sun is seen by 24 times as many people every day and, much as Corbyn and his deputy Tom Watson may wish to declare war on Murdoch, it would be folly to ignore such a huge constituency if they hope to attain power.
They cannot expect to speak to packed halls week in, week out. Social media are just echo chambers where people follow or interact with like-minded souls and jeer at those with a different outlook. As several commentators, including those on the Left, point out today, Corbyn needs to get to grips with the mainstream media. Shunning Andrew Marr and the Sun is not a strategy that will lead to electoral success.
Morning Star
But the Press, too, must rethink. If people are offended by Corbyn's singalong choices or dress sense, it is fair that they are reported. If his oratory leaves something to be desired, it is fair that that, too, is commented upon. But let's get this into perspective. Those are side issues; the first job of the Press is to report the news, so when a new leader makes his first important setpiece speech, it would be good if newspapers told us what he said rather than what they thought. One paper did that. Yes, that red rag the Morning Star. You can read its dead straight reporting here.
Now let's see what the rest of them make of Prime Minister's Questions.

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Bouquets and brickbats

21/2/2015

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What is the point of an editor? To set policy, steer the ship, provide leadership, go out to lunch. 
Who should an editor serve? The proprietor, the staff, the reader.
All of those. But the key concern in all of this is the reader. Start there and everything else will flow naturally. Understand what concerns the reader - and that means telling them what they need to know as well as what they want to hear - and you shouldn't go far wrong.


This week we have seen a prime example of what can be achieved by an effective editor. And a prime example of what can happen without an effective editor.
The Home Office minister Karen Bradley has told MPs that interim measures will be put before Parliament in the next couple of months to stop police and HMRC looking into journalists' phone and email records to try to identify whistleblowers unless they convince a judge that it right to do so.
press gazette
This important move to protect journalistic sources is a direct result of the campaign started by Press Gazette when it learnt that police had gone through Tom Newton Dunn's phone bills to find out who had leaked the Plebgate story to the Sun. 
That story was written on September 2 last year.

Press Gazette soon learnt that this was not an isolated incident and that some forces were using the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to "spy" or "snoop" on journalists. The choice of verb may have been melodramatic, but this behaviour was clearly counter to the freedom of expression provisions enshrined in Article 10 of the Human Rights Convention.

Press Gazette wrote to police forces asking about their practices and was rebuffed by many, who said it was too costly to answer such questions. A petition was started asking the Interception of Communications Commissioner to act, attracting more than 1,600 signatures.
The acting commissioner did, indeed, act even before the petition was presented to him. He, too, wrote to every force in the country and they answered. It later turned out that the Act had been used to obtain information about the phone records of 82 journalists.  
The Mail on Sunday reported that its journalists' phone records had been trawled to reveal sources of the Chris Huhne speeding ticket story - sources that a judge had specifically ordered should remain anonymous. Liberal Democrats made the overhaul of RIPA party policy, the Home Office promised to review the guidelines for its use. 
All of that happened within six weeks of that first Tom Newton Dunn story. 
But when the guidelines were reviewed the draft changes suggested only that a special note should be made where the records to be examined involved people in sensitive professions involving confidentiality - journalists, lawyers, doctors, for example. 
Press Gazette attacked the issue with renewed vigour, encouraging people to respond to the draft before the consultation period ran out. 
The Metropolitan Police were meanwhile refusing to engage with PG, rejecting a Freedom of Information request as "annoying and vexatious" because the website had had the temerity to ask six questions on the subject.
This month the interceptions commissioner submitted his report  to the Prime Minister. He found that  police were not paying attention to Article 10, that they should be told to do so and, as belt and braces, judges should have to approve warrants to look at data in the hope of finding journalists' sources. David Cameron and Theresa May accepted the recommendations, but it was still not clear that action would be taken before the election.
Until today.

Karen Bradley's promise comes just 24 weeks after that first story - an astonishingly speedy and successful outcome for Press Gazette under the leadership of Dominic Ponsford.
Ponsford and his news editor Will Turvill have been nominated for two big campaigning awards for their efforts. They are up against stiff opposition and may not emerge triumphant. But their industry should make some special effort to acknowledge their work - some recognition at the Press Awards would be appropriate - on behalf of their readers: the journalists in this country.
Ponsford is, you see, an editor who understands his readership. He set up the British Journalism Awards to recognise public interest journalism, ethical journalism that makes a difference. He has never condoned bad practice, but he has defended those he feels are being ill-used or made scapegoats by the machines of the state or their employers. 
This is what an editor should be doing.

Telegraph page 10
We can also see what an editor should be doing when we look at the Daily Telegraph. 
The paper's response to Peter Oborne's explosive account of life on the paper since the sacking of Tony Gallagher was at first limp, then pathetic and has now scraped the bottom of the barrel. To use the deaths of two people to smear a rival shows such an extraordinary lack of compassion, sense of proportion and basic news judgment as to beggar belief. Did whoever put today's paper together really believe that this was an issue of such importance that it should appear on the front page? Did they really believe that this was a matter of interest to the readers? Why should the Telegraph's audience be remotely concerned with the working environment of another newspaper group? Or that the Guardian may or may not have changed one headline last July? 
The Telegraph may genuinely have believed that the HSBC story was old, but once a story has traction you can't just ignore it. If the Telegraph thought that the BBC and the Guardian (it's unclear how the Times became included in its triumvirate of 'leftwing Labour soulmates') were rehashing old news for political reasons, it could have written a piece pointing out its own previous coverage of this story. If there were indeed a story to refer back to. Instead it just ignored it for two days and then presented it as one where the villains were HMRC, Miliband, the man in the moon - anyone but HSBC.

Private Eye had written much about the absent coverage before the Telegraph's former chief political commentator and writer of editorials called the paper to account.
Oborne's blog led to appearances on television and radio and was well covered by the Guardian, Independent and Times. The Telegraph wrote nothing. Readers who didn't listen to the Today programme or watch Channel 4 News must, therefore, have been bemused when they encountered a lamentable full-length leader scattering accusations at all and sundry and bleating about the lack of attention everyone had paid to its MPs' expenses scoop. 
Funny that. I didn't notice rival papers scoffing at that story. I do remember everyone scrambling for the Telegraph the moment the first editions came up to see the next instalment and rushing to catch up. I do remember the then deputy editor of the Times, which of course turned down this gem, describing it as "the gift that keeps on giving". I do remember everyone crediting the Telegraph in their coverage. I do remember the industry recognising its work with a shower of awards.
The Telegraph is so confident in its defence of itself that the "news" stories today about the Guardian and Times carry no bylines. Buzzfeed reports that the author of the front-page suicide story was seen arguing with the newsdesk about it. The comment buttons on the website are absent from the stories and from the leader - although readers were able to comment on previous editorials this week on such subjects as Brian the horse and Putin in Ukraine. Does this mean the Telegraph doesn't think readers would have anything to say on the matter (in which case why publish the stories?) or is it afraid that they may not approve of what has been written and how it has behaved?
Peter Oborne accused the Telegraph of a fraud against its readers. Its response this week reinforces the perception that the readers are the last people it is concerned about.  
A strong editor would never have found himself in such troubled waters. But instead of steering this once-great ship to safety, whoever was at the helm ploughed on through the ice floes and straight into the iceberg.  
The Telegraph under Murdoch MacLennan and Jason Seiken has done away with traditional titles in favour of directors of content. Chris Evans is the weekday editor, Ian MacGregor in charge of weekends. We have heard from none of these four men this week.
So the question remains: who is editing the Telegraph?

Also on this subject:
Peter Oborne quits
The Telegraph strikes back
A layman's guide to the relationship between editorial and advertising
Blurred lines in the native advertising newsroom


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Blurred lines in the native advertising newsroom

20/2/2015

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Newspapers have never been lacking in invention when it comes to titles. Creativity knows no bounds when seeking to soothe the ego of someone being leapfrogged or formalise the advance of the leaper (preferably without any increase in salary).
The clearcut days of a news editor on one side of the desk and a chief sub on the other, each with ranks of reporters and subs doing their bidding, have long passed. We now have heads of this, editors of that plus armies of associate, assistant and executive editors (often with something in parentheses). Who is in charge of the money pages, the head of business, business editor or City editor? Who is the higher ranking, the health editor who writes the stuff or the assistant news editor who commissions him?
Matters have been further complicated by digitally minded folk such as David Montgomery in the regions and Jason Seiken at the Telegraph, who have introduced a hierarchy of heads, directors and publishers of content.
Apart from irritating those of us at a loss to understand what was wrong with calling a story a story there didn't seem much harm in it. It wasn't too hard to grasp the idea of "content" as an umbrella for stories, photographs, videos, graphics and whatever.
This past week, however, has offered new reasons to be fearful. 
Peter Oborne's suggestion that commercial concerns were behind the Telegraph's minimal coverage of the HSBC scandal have been rejected by the paper, first in a company statement and today in a less-than-convincing leader. (The Telegraph is not even sufficiently confident  of its argument to allow online readers to comment, whereas it was happy to accommodate their thoughts on Brian the horse yesterday - 32 comments - and on Putin the day before - 2,462.)
But giving the men in charge double titles - Seiken is chief content officer and editor-in-chief, Chris Evans is editor of the weekday Telegraph and director of content  - does little to cement confidence in the separation of editorial and commercial duties.Other senior staff labour under the labels "director of transformation and talent" and "director of audience development". There are also a couple of deputy directors of content.
There is nothing in these titles to secure the perception that these people's concerns are purely editorial. Evans has "responsibility for output across all platforms digital and print"; that word "output" is worrying not only because of its redolence of factories and conveyor belts, but also because it is not qualified by any journalistic adjective.

Telegraph Spark from Telegraph Bespoke Content on Vimeo.

This nomenclature has been in place at the Telegraph since last year, so what is its relevance now?
Well last week the Telegraph introduced its new Spark "branded content and design division". This data and analysis-driven "creative commercial department" is "where Mad Men meet Math Men," says Spark managing director Matt Cory.
This department will use new tools to analyse data collected from two and a half million readers who have ventured over its metered paywall in the past couple of years "to ensure that TMG are serving the right customer the right content, so that more than one million users a month are driven to engaging branded content across telegraph.co.uk".
We're talking advertising here, of course, and the principles are much the same as those employed by stores offering loyalty cards. The presentation is full of jargon, but Cory is relatively clear in the use of the phrase "branded content".
But then along comes Dave King, executive director of TMG, to proclaim: “The content and product development teams at TMG have fully endorsed everything we are doing at Spark. This will enable us to ensure that Spark delivers content, insight and audience.”
But aren't our editorial wallahs "content teams"? Are there different "content teams" for editorial and advertising? Now the new naming conventions feel more uncomfortable and the boundaries of advertising, native advertising and editorial seem even more blurred.
Tiffanie Darke
What about other newspaper groups? The Digiday website is helpful here because yesterday its Chris Smith took a look at Spark alongside the News UK, Guardian and Trinity Mirror native advertising operations. What News UK's Tiffanie Darke, pictured, had to say was particularly interesting. 
Darke used to run the Sunday Times Style magazine and is now News UK's creative content director and in charge of a design studio called the Newsroom. Before it was set up, she says, the team was swamped because it had to create and sell without much help from the rest of the business "especially editorial". 
“One of the things we wanted to offer was the ability to be nimble around the news agenda. That’s why we called it the Newsroom. As a news publisher, we’ve got the ability to move quick," she says - and that includes having her team sitting in on editorial conferences.

Picture
There’s definitely a realisation among all the editorial staff here that if we want to produce really good commercial content both for our readers and for our advertising clients, we’ve all got to get our hands dirty with it to make sure it’s the best it can possibly be.
There’s no point in selling commercial content to a client and saying, ‘We can do the content better than anyone else because we understand our audience’ if it’s not the actual journalists themselves doing the content.  It has to be the people who write for the readers every day who produce this stuff, guide it and inspire it.
Darke tells Smith that this is one-way traffic and that while editorial staff help the studio, the studio has no influence over journalists producing copy for the paper.
Hmmmm. Is that enough separation? For a start, is it wise to call an advertising enclave the Newsroom when there are three real newsrooms operating in the same building? Doesn't that invite confusion?
More importantly, it's one thing to have Caitlin Moran and Peter Brookes describing their work in a promotional video for the Times, it's quite another to have them produce material to sell an outside product. It's doubtful, of course, that such superstars would be enticed to turn their hands at copywriting, it's easy to see how that task will fall to the lowest-paid most overworked staff.
Commercial interests may not influence editorial decisions and the way stories are written (Former Times editor James Harding once ribbed me for producing a business front page showing Tesco in a bad light, saying: "That's right, Liz. Stick it to our biggest advertiser!" but the page was published unchanged), but surely having journalists producing "branded content" diminishes their standing as impartial observers?
The Telegraph may or may not allow its commercial interests to influence its editorial judgments. If it does, as several people have told Press Gazette and the BBC, it is unlikely to be alone. 
Even if it were, there are other elements in Peter Oborne's tale of woe that will resonate across newsrooms - staffing cuts, slipping standards - and to expect the surviving journalists who are already serving print, web, mobiles and social media, to pitch in with advertising copy as well is to ask too much.

Oborne quits: the killer quotes and reaction
SubScribe: a layman's guide to advertising and editorial
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Memo to the Telegraph: don't hide your assets

15/11/2014

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Jessica Ennis-Hill
A pretty woman in a red dress is a front-page favourite for certain newspapers, so the Telegraph backbench might have been congratulating themselves on a banker with this shot of Olympic star Jessica Ennis-Hill showing a bit of cleavage. Everyone loves Jessica. She should shift a few papers.
So there she was on the front page that was sent to the television stations and tweeted last night; a shaft of colour at the heart of the stories the Telegraph believes are the most important for us to know about today: the EU and immigration, the murder of Lee Rigby, overpaid footballers. And at the top there was another pretty woman - Jennifer Lawrence in a puff for an interview in the weekly review.
Telegraph front page
Ennis-Hill was difficult to spot, however, on the front page that potential readers doing their weekly shop at Sainsbury's will have seen. She was tucked up in the righthand corner under a big purple sticker.  
In choosing their Saturday reading, our shoppers were expected to decide between home-alone children in the Times, Isis in the Independent, a hospital crisis in the Guardian, VIP child abuse in the Mail - and an advertisement for a dress.
The Times was the last paper to swap advertising for editorial on the front page in 1966. It was a good commercial decision. Now papers are reversing the process with increasing regularity. It is a bad commercial decision.
There is no disputing that newspapers need advertising to survive. In the difficult financial climate of the past six years, businesses have cut back on their promotion budgets and, with newspapers desperate for a bigger slice of the smaller cake, savvy advertisers have been playing hard to get.
Full-page ads are expensive and readers are apt to turn over. A cheaper 33x5 in a broadsheet or a 25x4 in a tabloid means there is editorial on the page to keep the potential customer's attention, yet the ad still dominates. 
So far, so clever. 
With the market on their side, advertisers have become more demanding and we have seen a proliferation of hideous shapes. The worst of these so far have been those where the ad starts top left of a spread, runs across the centre - cutting the editorial in half - and then finishes bottom right.

Telegraph page 18
Today the Telegraph has an advertisement in the middle of page 18, where an editorial picture might be expected to live.
This is an unwise precedent, but at least by the time the reader gets to the page he or she will have bought the paper. 
The far greater sin is to sell the front page. 
Newspapers may be desperate for advertising, but they are even more desperate for sales. Without sales, advertisers won't want to know - or will make increasingly wild demands about what they get for their money. That will in turn make the product increasingly less attractive and everyone ends up the loser: newspaper, advertiser, reader.
The front page is a newspaper's shop window. You'd have thought that was so obvious that it wasn't worth saying. If it pulls down the blinds so that the customer can't get a glimpse of what's on offer, that customer will go elsewhere. No casual reader will buy the Telegraph today on the basis of a monochrome dress ad. 
Jason Seiken wants to rule a digital world and he may have given up on street sales. They may well account for such a small proportion of circulation that the income from the front-page ad outstrips the lost revenue from casual sales.
But a newspaper sells on the basis of its journalism. To hide it under a commercial wrapper is to suggest that it is not valued. And from an organisation that is in the process of decimating its editorial staff, that's a worrying thought.
Editor's blog: Why is it "inevitable" that change equals job cuts?


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How many buses equal one weather computer?

29/10/2014

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Mirror puff
Express puff
The Mirror and Express made rare common cause yesterday with puffs predicting a Hallowe'en heatwave. 
A couple of days of warm weather and we can't help but start comparing ourselves with Benidorm or Benin. At this time of the year, it also means the arboretums are full of photographers competing for the half-page slots that will doubtless be devoted to trees with light streaming through golden foliage.
express
Sure enough, here's the Express's effort on page 11: a couple of children climbing a tree at Westonbirt,  sunrise over Tower Bridge and a 14-par weather forecast.
But what's that little single squeezed between the ads? 
A new £97m Met Office computer will be able to do 16,000 trillion calculations a second and give better warning of extreme weather. This will, the Express says, give a £2bn boost to the economy.
Here we have a development that is likely to influence the paper's newslist for years to come and it is written off in three pars.
And three not very meaningful pars. What does that number of calculations mean? It certainly sounds a lot, but how does it compare with other computers? What sort of calculations? Is it that special or so last century?
How will the economy benefit to the tune of £2bn - and will that be an annual boost or a one-off? 

Telegraph
The Telegraph was more enthusiastic about the story - to the extent of making it the splash - and so came up with a little more detail. The new computer would be able to carve the country into 300-metre chunks so that local variations in the weather could be predicted more accurately, a great help when councils need to know which roads to grit or where snow ploughs are going to be needed. 
The Met Office should also be able to predict the weather for the next 24 hours with 90% accuracy. Apparently at the moment it can do so only for the coming 12 hours and to be honest, most of us can do that by looking out of the window.
The Telegraph also tells us about those 16,000 trillion calculations, which seem to suggest that our supercomputer - which has mysteriously not been given an affectionate name yet -  it is going to do a lot of pondering, cross-checking and going through the files, since it is to be fed a mere 106 million observations a day.
The Telegraph also contributes to our collection of pointless comparisons by noting that the computer would weigh as much as 11 double-decker buses. Aren't double-decker buses supposed to be used for height comparison? Have you ever lifted one? No, neither have I. The only person in the country who might have half an idea of what this means is Geoff Capes. So where is he when you need him? Apparently breeding budgies in Lincolnshire.
The Times was also enthused by the October warmth as a source of pretty pictures and it cross-reffed from its Westonbirt picture on 19 to "Met Office supercomputer, page 57". 
Here, on the weather map page, we have a little gem from  Paul Simons. He gets the 16 trillion calculations fact into the first sentence and makes it a little more relevant in the next, saying that this is 13 times as many as the existing computer, making it one of the most powerful in the world. 
I'd still like to know who's at the top of the league. Nasa? Apple? Something in China?
But then comes the hidden treasure: the Met Office got its taste for computer forecasting from the old Lyons Corner House business:

Picture
After the war Lyons wanted to improve its operation and looked at the electronic computers being used by the military in the US. They were so impressed that in 1951 they made their own computer in the UK called Leo I, standing for the Lyons Electronic Office I. This was the world’s first business computer, and one of its early tasks was to collate daily orders phoned in each day from the teashops and calculate the overnight orders and delivery schedules. Lyons even factored in weather forecasts for the fresh produce carried by its delivery vans.
The Met Office showed an interest and Lyons let its forecasters use Leo. They liked it so much that in 1959 they bought their own, which was named Meteor. 
Given our new knowledge about how many trillions of calculations a computer should be expected to do today, we obviously want to know Meteor measured up. According to Simons it could do 30,000 a second.
Five lovely pars and fair play to Simons for keeping this material for his Weather Eye column - but did this story really belong tucked away on page 57?
The Guardian
The Guardian thought not, and gave the story the best show, combining its pretty autumn pictures (including the obligatory snap from Westonbirt) with a page lead that turned the 11 double-deckers into 14 tonnes. There's a nice little panel labelled "Cloud computing" that charts the history of Met Office computers, although it doesn't mention the Lyons Corner House connection. The Guardian also came up with the cutest heading, but it still didn't tell us its name. For that we had to turn to the Independent. 
And the answer is....
Cray@XC40.
I think that needs some work.

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Why is it 'inevitable' that change equals job cuts?

23/10/2014

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#463966413 / gettyimages.com
The Telegraph press room in Fleet Street, 1882


Telegraph journalists have been told that 55 of their number are about to lose their jobs. That is a tenth of the editorial strength and if the cuts are achieved, it will mean that the papers' journalistic staff will have been halved in nine years.
News of the redundancies comes less than a week after the announcement that Jason Seiken was to focus on strategy and finance, leaving the real business of editing to Chris Evans and his weekend sidekick Ian MacGregor. 
Seiken, who has not relinquished his titles chief content officer and editor in chief, has sent a letter to staff that begins:
Picture
I am writing to update you on changes we are making as part of the ongoing editorial transformation.

As I outlined in a letter to staff earlier this month, we must continue to meet the demands of resourcing our digital-first newsroom whilst also responding to the ongoing challenges within our industry.

As a result, there will inevitably be an impact on staff numbers in several editorial areas.
SubScribe would like to ask one question: why?
Why is it inevitable that there will be an impact on staff numbers - a euphemism for cuts - as part of an "ongoing editorial transformation"?
Journalists are known as a cynical bunch and they/we have come to recognise that any change is accompanied by staff cuts. But why is it inevitable? Why do proprietors and their senior lieutenants regard piling more work onto fewer people as an essential element in any reorganisation?
The one thing that traditional news organisations have to their advantage in this era of citizen journalism, blogging and tweeting is trust. The trust that has been built up through editorial expertise. Readers know where the information is coming from and have, over the years, drawn their own conclusions about whether a particular journalist knows what he or she is writing about.
Look at all the material that is shared on Facebook by people who have no idea of its provenance - from security hoaxes to spurious world records and apparently innocuous comments about British life from racist and extremist organisations. How many of us bother to check back on where this stuff comes from? We glance at the post, it's come from a "friend" we trust and if it seems reasonable, we click "like" or "share" to please the friend. 
When we share a link to the Telegraph, the Independent or the Mirror, we have a greater confidence than we do when we pass on a blogpost - even one by SubScribe. And so we should.
But how long will that be the case if experienced journalists are to be replaced by "digital" staff of indeterminate qualifications beyond a knowledge of SEO and social media. It's a dangerous strategy. How refreshing it would be if just one of these revolutions involved investment in journalism rather than in the nebulous "digital".
One thing's for sure, Will Lewis's revolutionary newsroom is going to look a lot emptier.


Telegraph newsroom
Returning to Seiken's letter, he continues:
Picture
As we reduce the overall number of editorial positions we will start the normal information and consultation process. Those who are likely to be most affected will receive further correspondence in the next few days. This will outline the next steps.

I realise this is a time of great uncertainty for you all. I do not want that to continue for any longer than is necessary, but I want the process we follow to be fair and allow time for sufficient consultation. I hope we can complete this initial assessment in just over a week.
A week to bring down the curtain on the careers of journalists who may have spent years with the paper. Yes, that should be fair and sufficient.
If only the Telegraph were a one-off case
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Why did Sunday Telegraph throw away its world exclusive on stranded Yazidis?

11/8/2014

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jonathan Krohn
The selfie Krohn tweeted from the top of Mt Sinjar
Jonathan Krohn is by any measure an exceptional young man. He published his first political book at the age of 13 and followed it up with a second a year later. In between he made a William Hague-like appearance in front of an American conservatives conference. Now, at the great age of 19, he is reporting from Iraq for the Telegraph and the Economist.
Telegraph 11-08-14
The top of today's Telegraph proclaims in red and black:
Iraq's mountain of death Telegraph reporter is first to witness devastation of trapped families
With such a coup, you might have expected the paper to splash on the report. It is a compelling, but calmly written first-hand account from the top of Mt Sinjar that mostly eschews the first person. There is more than enough meat in the copy to justify the top slot, which is instead given to the Revenue's latest move against wealthy tax avoiders.

Picture
On the dry mountain the Yazidis fight with the goats for the remaining water. In the distance, the lights of Islamic State checkpoints loom menacingly (Krohn writes).
Yesterday those stuck behind Islamic State lines began reporting the group's latest slaughter: hundreds of members of tehir arcane but colourful sect massacred for refusing to convert to Islam.
On the mountain the rumours from their relatives only added to the sense of panic and despair. One man told this reporter...that jihadists had stormed through his village, killing every adult healthy male. Others talked of hundreds of women being abducted. Reports came in elsewhere of women and children being buried alive.
The report continues with a number of quotes from people on the mountain and voices of authority. He concludes with the words of an MP who says: "We have one or two days left to help these people, after that they will start dying en masse."

The Guardian also has a first-person account from Iraq. Martin Chulov reports from Duhok that half the people who had been stranded on the mountain had reached safety via Syria. Unfortunately, the paper doesn't tell us where Duhok is in relation to the mountain or even give it a dot on the map on its inside spread. But again, it is a compelling read, calmly told.
mail 6-7
The Mail, in common with the Independent, i and Sun, carries a piece on its front about the alleged burial alive of 500 Yazidis and the abduction of 300 women. The paper devotes four inside pages to Iraq, including a first-person piece on page 7.

Hang on, didn't the Telegraph have the first Western journalist on the mountain?
Ah, it's the same reporter. Maybe it's a syndicated piece. But the style here is quite different from that in the Telegraph:
Picture
Mount Sinjar stinks of death. The few Yazidis who have managed to escape its clutches can tell you why. 
'Dogs were eating the bodies of the dead,' said Haji Khedev Haydev, 65, who ran through the lines of Islamic State jihadists surrounding it.
On Sunday night I became the first Western journalist to reach the mountain where tens of thousands of Yazidis, a previously obscure Middle Eastern sect, have taken refuge from the Islamic State forces that seized their largest town Sinjar.
I was aboard an Iraqi Army helicopter and watched as...
There is a lot more "me" journalism here; perhaps the Mail wanted something a bit more boastful. But looking closely, it becomes apparent that this is a completely different account. This writer must be really special to produce two separate reports for two British newspapers on the same day - and  with numerous people quoted in each.

A quick google reveals Krohn's youthfulness and precocious background - and a link to a Sunday Telegraph article starting "Mount Sinjar stinks of death..."
Sure enough, it is the selfsame piece published in the Mail today.

The strange thing is that it wasn't printed in the Sunday Telegraph. A few paragraphs have been  woven into a wrap splash for which Krohn is given top billing in a joint byline, but much of the best material, including the comments of the people he met on the mountain, is missing. 
Nevertheless, he was pleased enough  to tweet:

My first ever Sunday @Telegraph feature. And I got to cobyline with @Richard_Spencer! http://t.co/9kpYApS94n

— Jonathan Lee Krohn (@JonathanLKrohn) August 9, 2014
Inside the Sunday Telegraph is a spread that includes the splash turn, a graphic, a commentary from Lord Dannatt, and a good colour piece from Richard Spencer on ageing Peshmergas hoping to protect Erbil from IS forces.
But wouldn't you want also to make more of the one available eye-witness account from the mountain where we had been given to understand tens of thousands faced dying of thirst?

Even today, there is no link to that original despatch from Krohn's later account or from any other report of the day's events. Is this deliberate, and if so why?

And as to the Mail, what was the deal that led it to print the whole of Krohn's first effort, but without the front-page "first man up the mountain" fanfare we have come to expect from the paper?
It may not matter much in the grand scheme of things, but it's all very peculiar.

In the meantime, here's a taste of the 13-year-old Krohn in action: 
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A herd of elephants to stamp on a flea

11/7/2014

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Henry iv in the sow
Mail Page 5
The Daily Mail isn't having a good week. George Clooney has had two pops at the paper in two days and thrown its apology back in its face. Angelina Jolie is reportedly ready to sue over the old video plastered all over yesterday's front page.
The rest of Fleet Street is lapping it up, schadenfreude doesn't come close.
Is this, then, why it has today made such a big deal about a three-par note in the Socialist Worker's Troublemaker column?
Vile, tasteless, inane, disgusting? A page one picture and page 5 lead? It's a bit overblown for a lame joke pointing to the opening of the inquest into the death of 17-year-old Horatio Chapple.
The father of one of Chapple's contemporaries (note, there is nothing to say that they were friends) who says: "That the Socialist Worker thinks the violent death of a child  is a fit subject for humour indicates a level of depravity and insensitivity to the suffering of others which is surprising."
The story is bolstered with a selection of tweets - a retweet by Owen Jones of the Guardian being the cherry on the cake - and the Chapple family history. 

To be fair, the Mail is not alone in hunting this particular fox. The Telegraph was also outraged enough to put the story on page 5 under the heading "Outcry after socialist paper mocks death of Eton boy in bear attack". 
It quotes the same clutch of tweets and then adds this to the mix:
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The article is even more remarkable, given that Charlie Kimber, the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, is reportedly the Old Etonian son of a baronet
Reportedly? Reported by whom? Either he is or he isn't. If he is, then it is germane to the story. If he isn't, it shouldn't be there. It is a  fact (or rumour) that should have been checked before it got anywhere near appearing in print. The Telegraph is a national newspaper, for heaven's sake, not the Upper Bumbling Weekly Bugle.*

The Mirror, Independent and Huffington Post have all reported the "outcry", even though when you look at Twitter, there were surprisingly few people crying out. Owen Jones single-handedly doubled the number of tweets when a hundred or so people retweeted his retweet.
It has also been the subject of discussion on Jeremy Vine's Radio 2 programme and on Radio5Live.

For heaven's sake. It was a tasteless comment with a crass headline best ignored.
The Socialist Worker sells about 10,000 copies in a "bumper week", according to Ian Burrell, the Independent's media expert in an article after the death of Thatcher last year. 

Ten thousand. In a bumper week.

  • The Mail  sells 1.7m copies a day and has 11m readers online
  • The Telegraph sells 515,000 with a further 3m online readers
  • The Independent reaches 1.5m online
  • The Mirror reaches 2.5m online 
  • The Huffington Post has 84 million users
  • Jeremy Vine is Britain's most popular radio news programme with more than 7m listeners a week.
  • Radio5Live has more than 6m listeners a week.

Bet the Chapples are thrilled to see that they have such universal sympathy and support. 
For that was, of course, the Mail and Telegraph's intention, wasn't it? They weren't just setting out to show that "socialists are nasty bastards". Were they?

*SubScribe can't be sure, but thinks the Telegraph may have muddled Charlie Kimber with Hugo Charles Kimber, son of  the late Sir Timothy Kimber and brother of Sir Rupert Edward Watkin Kimber, the 5th baronet Kimber. Hugo is seven years younger than the Socialist Worker chief.
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Playing catch-up after the main event

10/7/2014

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For comedians, timing is everything. For newspapers, timing can mean nothing.
When Marco Rodriguez blew the whistle on Germany's dissection of Brazil at 10.47 on Tuesday night, the presses had already printed tens of thousands of newspapers. Some held back editions, but no sports editor will have felt that their Wednesday paper had done the match justice.
Newsdesks, too, will have wanted to get in on the action - they'll have gone into yesterday's morning conferences with schedules full of ideas for follow-ups.
It's what happens when you're a journalist. "No show without Punch", someone once teased me when I went scuttling into work on a day off when a big story broke. We all want to play, to feel part of the main event. Hands up any Fleet Street journo who waited for the phone to ring before turning up when Diana was killed.
The hardest part is accepting that you aren't needed, that the caravan has rolled on without you.

Fourteen million people are said to have watched the Brazil-Germany game; thirty-five million tweets were posted about it. By the time this morning's papers were delivered, the best part of 36 hours had passed since the match had ended, another semi-final had been decided, we were all looking forward to Germany v Argentina. Would readers want to look back?
The Mail was convinced they would. It put Mick Jagger on the front and said that Brazilians were blaming him for the defeat. He was, we suddenly discovered, known in Brazil as a jinx. There was a spread in the news section - more on Mick, some jokes lifted from the web and a full page of Max Hastings on "the awesome (and chilling) genius of the Germans".
Enough? Not a bit of it, there was a further "superb World Cup pullout" labelled "the match that rocked the world" in the heart of the paper - eight pages of punditry, oversized pictures and more jokes from the internet.

The Mail has never been one to worry about being late with a story if it thinks it's good enough to interest its readers - today it catches up on the Times's tax investigation, for example; the SubScribe pictures and spreads blog predicted that it would come back and beat the rest when it missed the Peter Blake Albert Hall mural. It did. So I would hesitate to say that this was OTT, but it felt it.
To be fair, Mick made an appearance right across the street. The Sun, which got a cute splash with a good head from a chef who bet a fiver on the result and came away with £2,500, quoted Jagger as saying he was prepared to take the blame for the first goal, but not the rout. Good on him and good on the Sun. The Jagger story was the lead on the 4-5 spread, complementing another two pages in sport. Job done, time to move on.
That seemed to be the standard response. The Times ran to six pages in its World Cup supplement, but for most it was a couple of pages in news with a bit of rioting and a bit of cultural commentary,  plus a couple more in sport. The Telegraph offered extra value in its news half-page with a panel on previous examples of the Jagger jinx, plus a delightful Matt cartoon.
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For a view of the Brazilian Press click on the picture
But the Mail's rivals had catching up of their own to do, starting with that Angelina Jolie video. The Express and Mirror both took the same approach: celebrating the actress's achievements since the film was made. Neither mentioned the Mail and the Express declined to offer directions to the video online, which meant that for new readers starting here it will all have seemed a bit odd - why were they suddenly running Jolie's life history?
That's where the difficulty lies when the internet is light years ahead of the old inkies. How much should you assume the readers know? If you think they know (chances are they've seen the story on your own website as well as everywhere else),  why tell them again? And if they don't, you owe them some basic background. So those who left the Jolie non-story alone were probably wisest.
There was one Mail story, however, that almost everyone took delight in reporting: that correction and apology to George Clooney.
When a rival has to eat humble pie, there are always those who ready savour that other dish that's best served cold.
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    Liz Gerard

    Liz Gerard

    New year, new face: it's time to come out from behind that Beryl Cook mask. 
    I'm Liz Gerard, and after four decades dedicated to hard news, I now live by the motto "Those who can do, those who can't write blogs". 
    These are my musings on our national newspapers. Some of them may have value.

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