Category: The Times

Why is arts coverage so lamentable?

19/10/2015

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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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From job cuts to job ads: a tale of two newspapers

23/12/2014

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There's never a good time to lose your job, but sympathy levels rise when the axe falls around Christmas.
Being sacked in December is guaranteed to put a dampener on the festivities, but if execution is stayed until January, chances are there'll be an overloaded credit card to add to the worries.
Express Newspapers announced in the summer that it wanted to reduce its 650-strong editorial workforce to 450. Staff were invited to apply for redundancy and told that if too few came forward by the end of August, sackings would follow.
In October, parent company Northern and Shell issued annual results showing that it had turned a £5.6m loss to an operating profit of £37m. The print and publishing arm had seen a threefold increase in profits to £33m, but the redundancy programme - which should have been completed two months earlier - would continue.
A further deadline for applications was set at December 15, but that day came and went with the company reportedly still well short of the 200 volunteers it wanted. Journalists now have until January 1 to decide whether to jump or risk being pushed. Should make for some interesting conversations over the turkey.

While Express journalists seem eager to stay aboard, picture staff at the Times appear to be more than willing to jump ship.
Last week's Gorkana jobs register included listings for a news picture editor, two assistant picture editors and a picture researcher. The ad for the top job offers a "competitive" salary for whoever ends up leading a department that is made up of "professional, energetic and creative journalists". It continues:

As news picture editor of The Times, you will be responsible for creating outstanding picture packages for the news, foreign and business sections of the paper, as well as on tablet, smartphone and web. You will ... be required to build working relationships with desk heads, photographers and agencies, while inspiring a team of picture editors and researchers to deliver visually compelling editions across all platforms.
The Times news picture editor will be part of a back-bench team whose aim is to lead the news agenda with great journalism and stunning pictures.

To see such a plum Fleet Street job advertised is unusual, to see four senior posts in the same department up for grabs suggests carelessness somewhere.
The desk was pared down in the redundancy round at the end of 2011 and the past few months have seen the departures of a stream of professional, energetic and creative journalists, including the award-winning photographers Chris Harris and Pete Nicholls.
The picture editor Sue Connolly and her deputy Lizzy Orcutt were invited to apply for redefined jobs, which resulted in Orcutt's departure. Connolly is now also an ex-Times journalist, as are commissioning editor Paul Bellsham, online picture editor Elizabeth Hanna, and several staffers and regular casuals who worked on the home, business and foreign desks.
SubScribe understands that editor John Witherow has firm ideas about pictures and that his choices can be expensive. If the department were to remain in budget economies had to be made elsewhere. Desk staff were asked to reapply for their jobs - with cuts of up to 30% in their salaries. Several decided to walk rather than go through such a process. Hence the recruitment flurry.
The management approach sounds harsh, but it has created openings that may embolden some talented and creative people to take the Express payoff and head upstream from Blackfriars to London Bridge. For those who are more hesitant, the Times ad offers further reassurance:

News UK is a great company full of talented, dedicated and creative people. We are a company which has journalism at its very heart. Our newspapers and associated websites are some of the most powerful media brands in the English speaking world, reaching 30 million people each week...
News UK is a company which thrives on pace. Our people stretch themselves on a daily basis, challenging the status quo to produce the best service possible to our readers and customers. We embrace creativity and initiative and we have some of the most talented people in the industry.
If you want to work for one of the world's most exciting, challenging and creative media organisations then News UK is the place to build your career.

And just in case you were tempted to scoff at the predilection for woodland scenes and ballerinas, it's worth remembering that The Times is the one paper that is putting on sales month by month. It has also emerged from the first half of the awards season with its arms full of trophies.
So it must be doing something right. Even if it's not wo/man management.
As one long-serving journalist not known for a positive view of life in the newsroom said:

The spirit of co-operation between news gathering and news production is better than at any time in my 20 years. I think it's a better paper than when it was filled with dull pics of politicians in suits and pie charts, and the care that goes into assembling it night after night is a credit to all who labour long hours to make it so...
It's a collaborative effort, for which we are well paid (although we'd all like more). We all knew about antisocial hours and tight deadlines before we signed up and have no right to bleat about it afterwards. It's the job. It's what we do. We try to produce the best paper we can within the constraints that all media endure and more often than not, we succeed.

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If Nick Parker is guilty, Harding and Brooks are too

10/12/2014

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This is Nick Parker in a Lee Thompson photograph taken shortly after a Hamas rocket attack destroyed two homes in the Israeli town of Sderot.
Parkier is the Sun's chief foreign correspondent and in a 26-year career with the paper he has reported from Lockerbie, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bali and Beslan.
He has not, however, worked for 34 months because he has been suspended on police bail since his arrest in February 2012 in the extended aftermath of the phone hacking scandal.
Today he is a convicted criminal, having been found guilty of handling a stolen mobile phone belonging to the Labour MP Siobhan McDonagh. Sentencing him to three months' imprisonment, suspended for a year, Judge Worsley told him: "You were prepared to behave dishonestly in order to get a story...You over-stepped the line between investigate journalism and breaking the law."
This judgment suggests that any journalist offered information in less-than-straightforward circumstances must gamble on whether it is likely to be of public interest without even looking at it.
That is not the same as making a decision on whether to accept the material by balancing its importance against the risk of prosecution.
In 2009, James Harding and Rebekah Brooks were offered tapes detailing every MP's expenses claims. They looked at them, considered the issue of dealing in stolen goods, and turned them down. The material was offered to the Daily Telegraph, which paid £110,000 for it, and we all know the rest of that story.

Harding and Brooks, who knew the tapes were stolen and that they would have to pay to publish them, were guilty of criminally stupid journalistic judgment, but I have never heard anyone suggest that they were guilty of a crime.
Yet they behaved in almost exactly the same way as Parker:
He knew the phone was stolen, he was told that it contained a text about bribery and he agreed to pay Michael Ankers, the student who had turned up with the BlackBerry, £10,000 if the story worked out.
Like Harding and Brooks, he looked at the material, decided against using it, and returned it to the source.

No one would today argue that the publication of MPs' expenses was anything other than in the public interest. Supposing the stolen (or found on the Underground) phone had contained evidence of MPs being involved in bribery. Would that not also have been in the public interest?

Yet today Parker is a criminal for looking to see if that were the case.
This means that journalists will be ever more circumspect about sources and that a whistleblower with important issues to raise may be shown the door if they don't "look right" or because an editor dares not risk checking out what they have to share.
This Government has promised to look after whistleblowers, but the stream of people sacked or hounded out of their jobs for telling the truth flows unabated.
Michael Ankers was not an honourable source trying to right a wrong, but are we to presume that every young man who says he has a story must be a chancer on the make and reject their material without a single, let alone a second, glance?

In an editor's blog for Press Gazette, Dominic Ponsford draws a parallel with the news that Metropolitan Police held on to 1,700 phone records to which they knew they were not entitled for seven months before returning them. It is well worth reading, which you can do here.

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CEO sacked: what's hair colour got to do with it?

28/11/2014

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Oh dear, another disastrous business chief wrecking the company and waltzing off into the sunset with a bumper payoff.

This one, it seems, blagged her way into the job, cut Thomas Cook's market value by £360m in her brief stay and pocketed £8m for her trouble.
Not quite.

The departure of Harriet Green as the tour operator's chief executive is the main business story in every paper today (apart from the Daily Star). She's also on the front page of the Times, which follows up with a home news story, a business spread and a business commentary.

It is one of those counter-intuitive statistics - like the one about more Poles living in New York (it used to be Chicago) than in any city other than Warsaw - that more business people read The Times than any other national paper, including the FT. So if The Times gives Green that much space we can be sure that it's not just another here-today-gone-tomorrow, pick-up-the-payoff story.

The Mail's headline, taken piece by piece, is accurate. But it gives totally the wrong impression.

Harriet Green did email the Thomas Cook out of the blue to tell him that his company needed her. She was right. It did. She is a turnaround specialist and Cook was in a mess. It had debts of £1.6bn, its market cap was £146m and its share price had fallen to 11p.

That was in 2012. Yesterday she left the company abruptly and its share price fell by 18%, wiping - as the Mail reports - some £360m from its value (now nearly £2bn). The immediate assumption of many was that the slump was because of her departure. How would the business manage without its saviour?
Cooler heads suggested that the company results, complete with a warning note on next year's profit expectations, also announced yesterday may have had more to do with the decline.

Is this labouring the point over the headlne? Probably. And I haven't even started on the first word yet. So let's move on to the text.

She sleeps for less than four hours, chose her husband in seven seconds and transformed the fortunes of Thomas Cook within months.
And now, just as speedily, outspoken Harriet Cook has left - with £8m in her pocket.

This is a page three lead. She is an attractive woman who has done something unusual and it's fair for the Mail to tailor the story for its "lay" mostly-female readership. The breathlessness of the intro pars are understandable - and they do at least get across the point that Green had been a success rather than a par-for-the-course big-payoff failure.

The story is written by City Correspondent James Salmon, who sneaks quite a few businessy facts into the lifestyle narrative. The final two pars are jam-packed and along the way he tells us that Green's strategy had involved 2,500 job cuts and the closure of more than 300 travel agencies.

Neither the Guardian nor the Sun pulls its punches in reporting that Green had been sacked, or ousted. The Mail is hintier, pointing out that she had said only last week that there were many things yet to be done.

The paper is not renowned for its approval of women in the workplace and it tends to hold the belief that those who are successful must be strident, demanding, careless of their families and either unfeminine or glamorous wonderwomen.

Green falls into the latter category. In the Mail's book she is a fitness fanatic with a voracious work ethic who needs less sleep than Margaret Thatcher. She spends the week in a five-star London hotel away from her husband - the man she chose in seven seconds but whom she sees at their Oxford home only at weekends. She is in the gym with her former Royal Marine personal trainer at 5.30am and is a devotee of hatha yoga.

We learn her height, that she likes of diamonds and designer clothes - and that fellow board members had become frustrated by the "personality cult" that she had "cultivated with outspoken comments on everything from working mothers to overweight staff".
How much of that would we have been told had a man made a similar unexpected departure?

The bottom of the piece directs us to a commentary in the business section headlined "Why Harriet had to go" in which Associate City Editor Ruth Sutherland's admiration for Green is apparent, even while conforming with the Mail ethos:

One cannot help but wonder whether her flamboyant femininity played a part in her abrupt exit. If that is the case it would be an astonishing display of ingratitude to a woman who, in terms of commercial performance, has outshone many male executives.
Privately, sources say Green has a "highly personal style" that some found difficult to take.
Unusually for a chief executive of either sex she is open about her personal life and her family. Her departure comes just a few weeks after a jaw-dropping interview conducted in the gym of Brown's hotel, a five-star Mayfair hotel, which none of the rest of the board knew about until it appeared.

The interview in question appeared in The Times Saturday Magazine a month ago. Was it "jaw-dropping"? No, it was an excellent read, thoroughly businesslike and balanced. Damian Whitworth talked to Green, to her staff and to her colleagues. To put that whirlwind marriage in context, she says that she chose Graham Clarkson in seven seconds but that he took more than nine months to reach the same conclusion. In other words, like many men and women before her, she took one look and thought "he's the one". They used to call it love at first sight. Nobody said it had to be mutual.

The Whitworth interview is strong - and recent - enough to have formed the backbone of most of today's coverage. All the rivals had to do was add the pejorative verbs and adjectives:

The Guardian was happy to oblige, emphasisng Green's "robust" management style and publishing more tittle tattle than the Mail: colleagues living in fear of her public humiliations; employees receiving dressings-down while her beautician gives her a manicure; "ballistic" demands of her brother, hired as a driver. Allegations which are all denied - after the mud has been thrown and stuck.
Jim Armitage in the Independent couldn't resist having Green "stomping around" in her Gucci heels.

But that, joyously, was that. The Express ran a straight story and a good commentary on its far-back City page. The Sun, too, avoided the clichés. The Times's coverage across the board was exemplary, with some nice work from Dominic Walsh and a charming little panel from Martin Waller on the curse of awards. Green recently won Veuve Clicquot's businesswoman of the year prize and Waller's piece recalls others who fell off the pedestal no sooner than they had been crowned.

The paper had the advantage, of course, of that Whitworth magazine special - which was equally straight down the line. (It even showed gender equality in giving us the athletic preferences of others in the Thomas Cook team, including Green's successor,)

The Times has devoted much space to the disproportionate number of women in top FT companies' boardrooms. The Mail's page three heading aside, today Fleet Street's male-dominated business departments showed that they have moved into the current century. Now all we need is for those old boardroom bores, who might tolerate a roasting from a man but definitely not from a woman, to get with the programme.

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Privacy, security, Google and Murdoch

24/11/2014

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Protecting our privacy is becoming trickier by the day.
This week the Mail has reported that Russian websites are watching British families through their computer webcams and streaming their lives online.
Is this any more or less sinister than GCHQ monitoring our emails and phone calls? Or than police following and keeping dossiers on people not suspected of breaking any laws?
We fret about privacy and security online and update our Facebook status with toothless assertions as to our copyright. But we don't read the T&Cs when we sign up for a new service or app. We allow our computers to remember our passwords, which means we forget them ourselves. We joke about the funeral, dating or slimming ads that crop up on our pages, and become irritated when ads for something we bought online a couple of weeks ago keep appearing. If you're so damn clever Mr Internet, you should know I've got this, and don't need another one.
And when we sign up for a new app or program, we happily "sign in with Twitter" to avoid the faff of having to create another new profile and another immemorable password - thus giving the newbie access to shedloads of personal information just so that we can play Scrabble or Candy Crush with minimum fuss.
"I'd like to join your network," says a LinkedIn email from someone you've never heard of, but who seems to be quite important in their field. If they're grand enough and there are enough shared contacts, we might succumb. Madness.
Last week four people in America started a class action against LinkedIn for sharing information with potential employers - a service the website actively promotes by telling businesses: "Get the real story on any candidate” and “find references who can give real, honest, feedback”.
Away from the computer, we collect "loyalty" cards whose real purpose is not to reward customers for consistent patronage, but to spy on their shopping habits, to conduct market research on the cheap.
It's all pretty frightening. Some might even choose to liken it to Big Brother (Orwell, not Endemol). As The Times did on Wednesday.

This spread, on pages 16 and 17, took a look at how Google was weaving its tentacles through every thread of its users' lives. I have read it several times and have yet to find the quote that makes the main heading, but that may be my failing rather than the paper's. The anecdote that provides the way into the main story is interesting: a couple decide to get married but keep the news as their secret. Before they know it, they are knee-deep in ads for diamonds and honeymoons. They conclude that Google must be monitoring their private chats and decide to remove the company from their lives.
There is no news story to justify this glorified case study, nor indeed, is there evidence to back up the page one write-off:

Google is facing a boycott by a rising number of people who say that they have lost control over the way the internet search giant collects and uses their personal data.

The newly betrothed Janet Vertesi is the only user quoted in the spread, and while she says that friends and family are asking her how to live without Google, that doesn't really warrant the "growing boycott" line.
The newsiest bit of the piece is a Pew Organisation poll that found that 91% of Americans surveyed felt they had lost control of how personal information was collected "by companies such as Google".
This survey of 607 adults was published on November 12. Its purpose was to see how people's perceptions of privacy and security may have changed since the Snowden revelations. The 91% statistic was highlighted as its most striking finding.
Setting aside the fact that the sample was small, let us look at what the survey report had to say on the question of personal information. Indeed, let us reproduce that section in full:

An overwhelming majority of the American public senses a loss of control over how their personal information is collected and used by companies
Beyond social networking sites, Americans express a broader loss of control over the way their personal data is managed by companies. Fully 91% of adults “agree” or “strongly agree” that “consumers have lost control over how personal information is collected and used by companies.” This includes 45% who “strongly agree” and 46% who “agree” that consumers have lost control. Another 6% “disagree,” while only 1% “strongly disagree” with this sentiment.
Those with a college education are more likely than those who have not attended college to “strongly agree” that consumers have lost control, 51% vs. 40%.
Respondents who are more aware of government surveillance programs also express a greater loss of control over how their personal information is collected and used by companies. Those who said they had heard a lot were more likely to “strongly agree” with a loss of control over their personal information compared with those who had heard “a little” or “nothing” about surveillance programs (58% vs. 37%).

Most Americans support greater regulation of advertisers and the way they handle personal information
Even as Americans express concern about government access to their data, they feel as though government could do more to regulate what advertisers do with their personal information; 64% believe the government should do more to regulate advertisers, compared with 34% who think the government should not get more involved.
Support for more regulation of advertisers is consistent across an array of demographic groups. However, those who have a college education are more likely than those who have not attended college to support more government intervention (69% vs. 58%).

So there it is. The word "Google" does not appear.
The Times story goes on to say that Google spent more in donations to midterm political campaigns than Goldman Sachs and that its financing projects aimed at finding a cure for Parkinson's and a pill to beat cancer. It might also have mentioned that it is running an Ebola appeal in which it gives $2 for every dollar donated.
Much is made, as might be expected, of the "don't be evil" motto and the big picture panel and sidebar focus on exotic parties, tigers, Stevie Wonder - as though young men anywhere in the world who found themselves with riches unimagined might behave differently.
The analysis in the outside column mentions tax avoidance and the search results suppressed under the "right to be forgotten" rule - without mentioning that this is happening as a result of the failure of Google's appeal against a European ruling. Yes, it's censorship. But it's also obeying European law.

What many Times readers must wonder when they come across this spread is "What's this all about?"
There is no doubt that the pervasiveness of Google is troubling. It is a subject worthy of proper consideration. The whole question of our privacy needs looking at in depth. But this isn't it.

Google is the biggest player in the game and the knives are out. Earlier this month an organisation called Public Citizen published a paper called Mission Creep-y, which also addressed the company's growing influence. The video below shows a television discussion of that research.

All of this comes as Google tries to reach agreement in a four-year-old antitrust battle with the EU. European regulators were concerned about the way search results were appearing and in February the company appeared to have reached a settlement. But rivals, politicians and publishers were unhappy and on September 23 the competition commissioner Joaquin Alumunia announced that he had told Google that it had to come up with a better offer on how it would change its practices or face formal charges.
Funnily enough, News Corp's chief executive Robert Thomson had written to Alumunia a couple of weeks earlier urging just such a course of action. Google, Thomson said, was a platform for piracy. It was an "egregious" aggregator that was "willing to exploit its dominant market position to stifle competition".
Google swiftly responded - and here is the FT's presumably impartial take on the spat.
News Corp wasn't taking any risks, and last month James Murdoch joined in during a session at the Mipcom television conference in Cannes:

I think there’s no question that they can do more. A lot more. Certainly Google’s not right in saying they’re doing more than anyone. That just isn’t true. The problem with Google… Actually, let’s not personalise this. The problem with search-driven discovery, if the content is there and it’s illegal and you’re just selling clicks as a big ad network, you have eery incentive for that illegal programming to be there… That’s fundamentally not really good enough.

If James was being "diplomatic", Dad has made no bones about his opinion of the "parasitic, content kleptomaniac plagiarists" of Google, not least in series of tweets over the years:

NSA privacy invasion bad, but nothing compared to Google.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) August 17, 2014

"Please expose Eric Schmidt, Google " etc. Just wait!
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) October 13, 2013

Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) January 14, 2012

In the current European campaign, it's not quite clear whether the problem is tax avoidance or market domination - neither topics on which News Corp can reasonably speak without pots and kettles being mentioned - but what is obvious is that the Murdoch company is uncomfortable with Google's spreading influence. Possibly rightly so. But it is worth noting that the Thomson and Murdoch interventions are concerned not with personal privacy - as the Times spread is - but with Google's perceived advantages and practices as a business rival.

The German publisher Axel Springer is equally unenchanted with the boys from Silicon Valley. In April its chief executive Mathias Döpfner published an open letter to Google chief Eric Schmidt in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung saying he was afraid of Google, and accusing it and Facebook of having a "totalitarian mentality like the Stasi or other secret police in service of a dictatorship". It wanted, he wrote, to create “superstate that can navigate its floating kingdom undisturbed by any and all nation-states and their laws”.
In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review this week Döpfner identified a divergence of opinion between America and Europe. The Americans thought Europeans were backward-looking and failed to understand that the tech economy was based on data.
Europe, he said, knew from history that total transparency and total control of data led to totalitarian societies.

The Nazi system and the socialist system were based on total transparency. The Holocaust happened because the Nazis knew exactly who was a Jew, where a Jew was living, how and at what time they could get him; every Jew got a number as a tattoo on his arm before they were gassed in the concentration camps

So there are plenty who take issue with Google's trajectory. Whether it becomes News Corp and its papers to question other businesses that are dominant in their markets, that want to drive competitors to the wall or that don't pay their fair share of taxes is for others to debate.
But as an observer of journalism, I found The Times's out-of-the-blue spread unsatisfying. The associated leader was quite restrained, emphasising the point that people do have a choice whether to use Google. Maybe John Witherow was not entirely comfortable with the note struck by his master's voice, yet felt obliged to beat the corporate drum.
There is a big issue here to be tackled journalistically, but it requires an overarching approach and heavy investment in personnel and money - both resources in short supply.
Who can look at the entire question of privacy, personal security and surveillance without being accused of having a vested interest?
Someone needs to.

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Did The Times lose its nerve after Cumberbatch?

11/11/2014

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When Benedict Cumberbatch announced his engagement to Sophie Hunter in the Times BMD columns last week he was as much congratulated for his class and style as for his forthcoming nuptials.
The Times, however, was mocked for "throwing away" the story in two
paragraphs on page 20.
This was, SubScribe was very reliably informed, not an oversight or a lack of understanding of the story's news value, but a deliberate decision presumably intended to show a similar level of style and class.
What a shame, then, that the paper seems to have been cowed by the masses into running a page 6 basement today on Geri Halliwell's forthcoming marriage to Christian Horner, who runs the Red Bull Formula One team.
It's a far less interesting story, but perhaps the paper felt it was worth making more of this one because it was the second celebrity engagement in a week and could be used to reinforce the perception that the Times is still the place to make important announcements. Others who have used the classifieds, it reports, include David Mitchell and Victoria Coren and the actor Eddie Redmayne.
In the Battle of Cool, I'm afraid the Mitchells and old Spice don't really match Redmayne and Cumberbatch. Perhaps the Times could try to present itself as the place for biopic Oscar candidates.
Editor's blog The Times scooped by itself? Don't you believe it

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Times scooped by itself? Don't you believe it

5/11/2014

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Scoop of the day appears on page 57 of The Times and occupies just ten lines of space.
The formal announcement of Benedict Cumberbatch's engagement to the director Sophie Hunter delighted Twitter, especially rivals who chose to mock the Thunderer for missing its own story.
It didn't. There was also a picture story on the "summaries" page, with a cross-reference to the BMDs.
SubScribe is delighted to learn that it was not a miscommunication, but deliberate.For far from being a blunder this was cute editing.
The summaries pages (which just happen to have been invented by a website editor not a million miles from SubScribe Towers) are among the most read of the paper. They're almost as quick to digest as nibs, but they're just that little bit longer and there are pictures to draw you in.
So the story was certain to be spotted, but it was not so obvious that rival night desks would see it and catch up.
They will all go mad on it tomorrow, of course, and the Times will reap the publicity because they will all make a fuss of how the betrothal was announced - and probably carry ragouts.
The Times will meanwhile have had a 24-hour start on the rest of the pack. So what will be most interesting is what it comes up with tomorrow.

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How many buses equal one weather computer?

29/10/2014

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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.

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?

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:

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 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 arts coverage so lamentable?

Bouquets and brickbats

Blurred lines in the native advertising newsroom

From job cuts to job ads: a tale of two newspapers

If Nick Parker is guilty, Harding and Brooks are too

CEO sacked: what's hair colour got to do with it?

Privacy, security, Google and Murdoch

Did The Times lose its nerve after Cumberbatch?

Times scooped by itself? Don't you believe it

How many buses equal one weather computer?

Liz Gerard

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