Posts Tagged ‘independent’

Johann Hari on exploited interns and workies

January 14th, 2009

The Independent’s Johann Hari has written a great piece blasting unpaid internships. I agree with every point he makes:

This is happening all over Britain’s professions. The wealthy writer (and self-confessed “pushy mum”) Rachel Johnson is admirably honest about it. She says: “The truth is getting a job depends almost entirely on getting work experience, which depends almost entirely on whom you or your family knows … This back-scratching cycle of privilege is the middle-class Circle of Life. So it’s all jolly unfair, frankly.”

Who does this cheat? Johnson says: “All those students who support themselves through university, only to find out when they leave that the glittering prizes have already been handed out, at a ceremony they never knew was taking place, to the undergraduate with the best connections.”

This isn’t just bad for the people who are shut out. It is bad for the professions – and the country. Talent is distributed throughout the population – but we are only picking from a tiny tier, based on their parents’ bank balance. Imagine if the England football team was made up of the sons of the 1966 winners and their mates. How would they perform? Imagine if films could be cast using only the children of actors. How many talents would we exclude?

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Posted in Newspapers, Student Journalism

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BBC HD Test card: Link or be useless!

January 6th, 2009

On the wall in front of me is a big sign that says ‘LINK!’. Underneath, in brackets, it says “It’s what we do”.

It really is. One of my tasks at the BBC is gathering links about what is being written about the BBC’s internet endeavours and rounding them all up into neat little posts. The result of the linking? We get more readers. Loads more.

Another part of my job is preparing guest posts. Before Christmas, I posted this tutorial by Andy Quested on how to use the HD test screen. Today, a couple of weeks later, the story has gone around the newspapers and blogs. Not sure why it took so long, but there you go.

Anyway, I wanted to share how by not linking, sites can really fail in a basic fundamental of reporting: providing information.

Take the treatment of the story on the Independent.

“The famous BBC test card featuring a girl playing noughts and crosses with a toy clown has made a return to the nation’s television screens.

The image is being broadcast on the BBC’s high definition (HD) channel to help viewers set up their HD TV sets.”

That’s the opening two paras, but that’s the sum of the information given. What channels? What time? How do I use the test screen to fix it? How do I need to know if it needs fixing anyway?

No worry, though, because they can solve all that by linking to our post. We know they have read it — as they’ve lifted quotes directly from it.

But there’s no link.

The Daily Mail does it a little better. They don’t link either, but they at least gave us the chance to add the link into the comments of the story. “Find out how to use the test card here,” wrote my colleague Nick Reynolds. Only problem being that the comment is sat gathering dust in big moderation queue in the sky — and I doubt it’ll see the light of day now. So that’s another failed story that doesn’t offer all the available information to the reader.

Then this blog post turned up. Not only is it the first story (of the ones I’ve seen) which mentions the fact the quotes are from our blog entry, but it’s the only one that provides the link to Andy’s post. The story would be useless without it, after all — but try explaining that logic to the newspapers.

The mentality of the Indy and Mail* is obvious. “Why should we link to our competitors?” they’ll argue. And they’ll agree with themselves, wholeheartedly. “If we link to a story, they’ll leave our site and we’ll lose readers,” they’ll decide, without looking even beginning to consider the facts.

It’s clear that, out of my three examples, the best piece of journalism is from the blog. It provides more information, cites its sources better, and links to the instructions so people can find out how to use the information.

* The ‘Indy and Mail’ sounds like a single newspaper, doesn’t it? Well they are in the same offices now, after all…

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Posted in Blogs, Newspapers, The BBC, The Web

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Full text on Guardian RSS feeds

October 25th, 2008

The Guardian has become the first major newspaper to post their articles in full in their RSS feed. Glorious news.

It’s a move that’ll delight readers, but even more importantly, it’ll delight Google. From the Google Reader blog:

This is a huge first step in making more content available in more places, and we applaud the Guardian for taking it.

There is no more important a relationship that an online presence can establish than one with Google.

Now come on, all you others, keep up.

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Robert Fisk, please start a blog!

September 25th, 2008

Pages 30-31 of today’s Independent feature one of the best feature articles I’ve read in a long time. Usually, in a blogpost, I’d link to the article right about now… but it’s not online. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

A couple of days ago I had a bit of a dig at Robert Fisk and his attitudes to online journalism. “To hell with the web,” he said, suggesting a written word in newspaper is more trustworthy and valuable than one on the web.

It’s easy to understand his position. Newspapers are controlled by some very good laws which prevent the publication of libellous and false statements, among other things. At least, that’s what they do in theory (but that’s another debate all together). So it’s fair to see why Mr Fisk would trust newspapers a lot more.

And as for value — I’ve paid a whole quid to read what Fisk has to say. I’d pay nothing to view it online.

But here’s where I am genuinely curious about Mr Fisk’s opinions. As I said in my previous post, the Independent — like most qualities in the UK — doesn’t sell an awful lot each day. Just over 200,000 on average. And not everyone will read everything in the newspaper; especially seeing as Mr Fisk’s feature doesn’t get promoted on the frontpage, or the inside page, or even the front of the World section where it lives. No, the only mention of the article, as far as I can see, is the article itself.

A wasted opportunity? I’d say so.

Robert Fisk’s blog would be brilliant. Stunningly written features like today’s would feature every so often, and short, snappy anecdotal entries about his travels would go inbetween. He could be uploading photos, videos, whatever he pleases.

And we all know it would be brilliant. One of the best. We know we could trust it — the ‘Fisk’ brand is perhaps one of the strongest in journalism. I’d be an instant fan, and so would many more. Thousands more.

Just wait til Digg gets a hold of Mr Fisk’s work. And Matt Drudge. And the rest of the blogosphere. It has the potential to be seen by millions.

I’m sure Mr Fisk got into journalism for the same reasons we all did. To make money. Ha, I’m kidding. We all know the only reason we do this is because we believe we can, with the power of media, change the world. I’m truly baffled that such a brilliant journalist can snub the best way to get his work out there to the masses.

Mr Fisk, if by some form of internet wizardry you read this, I’d like to request that you start a blog. It’s very simple… start here. If you’re too busy, I’ll start it for you.

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Posted in Blogs, Newspapers, The Web

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Labour conference across the web

September 23rd, 2008

We often see breaking news coming into its own on the internet — there is no better place for it — but sometimes it’s good to see the other side of the journalism world: the diary story.

Gordon Brown’s speech today at the Labour Party Conference, in Manchester, was dubbed the ’speech of his career’. Which is perhaps a step down from Obama’s ’speech of his life’. Life or career? There’s something rather British about the difference in semantics there. Anyway.

We all knew it was going to happen, so how did it play out across the ‘net?

Sky News Online rigged up their fun ‘CoverItLive‘ system which, it seemed, was specifically designed as some sort of vitriol bucket, catching every instance of Labour hate imaginable. ‘Cheryl’ was doing a cracking job of giving running commentary — but this was perhaps wasted. I — and everyone else in the UK — could just watch it live on the BBC’s iPlayer (or, indeed, Sky’s live player. But it was nowhere near the same quality as the Beeb’s). Maybe Sky should consider getting some experts in to participate with these live miniblogs. Guido Fawkes?

The BBC did their usual. And I’m glad they did. As the public-funded broadcaster, they need to just be a platform. No space for ridiculous, over-the-top and uninformed opinion a la Sky. As expected, the live coverage on the BBC News channel was tip top, a good, reliable live stream available online.

While we’re discussing the BBC, it became an ongoing gripe that they kept on suggesting that some of Brown’s comments were aimed at David Miliband. For a media organisation that is so intent on cutting out spin in politics, it seems odd to me that they insisted on towing that particular line.

Twitter was surprisingly quiet. Perhaps in a sign that the micro-blogging site hasn’t really come of age in the UK just yet, there were very few (according to Twitter’s search function) instances of ‘Gordon’, ‘Brown’ or ‘Labour’. I follow 138 people on Twitter, and often the people I followed appeared in the global feed. In the UK, at least, Twitter is a very small community, and should not be overestimated.

The Guardian had a great blogpost providing what they called ‘instant reaction’. Written by Andrew Sparrow — who bears an uncanny resemblence to David ‘Not running for leadership’ Miliband, look! — he didn’t make use of fancy-pants software like Sky, but instead just repeatedly edited a standard blog post with timed updates. It worked well. Special marks to Andrew for his interaction with his readers — it’s great to see a journalist dipping into the comments thread on his posts. It should happen a lot more often.

The Independent had no such web-focused coverage. Their leading piece is this monstrosity of an article that is impossible to read on a screen. I’m sure the article is very good, but at 2,281 words, it’s about 1,800 words too long.

The Times had this cool little word count thingy. A nice touch, but ultimately useless. It tells us nothing we don’t know already. Fun though. On a slightly unrelated note, it does feel like The Times’ site is looking a little dated these days, particularly their blogs.

The Telegraph. Speech coverage FAIL. What in God’s name is this? Quite possibly the most useless piece of video I have ever seen on a lead story. “We need to know what’s going on,” spouts the journalist in the piece. Yes we do. So why aren’t you telling us? We know what a journalist does, thanks. The Telegraph’s video is edited together like a crappy internal training video. Not what I’ve come to expect from one of the best producers of online video news in the UK. Utterly rubbish.

Let’s make this an awards ceremony.

The award for best coverage goes to: BBC

Now while they did nothing special online other than the usual, the live BBC News channel stream offered by far the best quality of broadcast and analysis.

The award for worst coverage goes to: The Telegraph

A un-related video and a one-man band blog do little to interest me. This is all about what the country thinks.

Experimentation award goes to: Sky News

If they can dip in some experts into their online chats, I think they’re onto a winner.

My personal thoughts on the speech…

I thought it was terrific. I’m no Labour supporter, but Gordon Brown did a mighty fine job out there today.

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Posted in Blogs, Multimedia, Newspapers, TV, The BBC, The Web

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