What does a technology correspondent do before he becomes a journalist?

Found an online network for the Jewish community? Launch a search engine for adult porn? Or both as Channel 4 News’ Benjamin Cohen did, starting out at the tender age of 16.

At 4pm (GMT) today on Radio 4, Cohen will discuss his dotcom past – including his stint as an unlikely porn baron and his sale of SoJewish to a newspaper, which he says wasted £1 million – in I Was a Teenage Dotcom Millionaire.

“In the programme he tracks down the investors who lost everything in his ventures and former employees to work out why things went so wrong,” says the blurb and there’s plenty more on Cohen’s whizzkid past – he was at one point higher than Prince William on the Sunday Times’ Rich List – in this Sunday Times’ interview.

Similar Posts:

• Paperhouse: The Telegraph’s ‘financially contrary’ newsroom
• Gannett Blog: ‘Why I’m shutting down this blog’
• Sunday Times: Breakingviews.com in ‘advanced talks’ with Thomson Reuters
• Silicon Alley Insider: Subscriptions only work for porn, says Huffington
• Recovering Journalist: Employees are victims of Tribune’s bankruptcy

Craig McGill from digital communications company Contently Managed worked at Trinity Mirror – at the Sunday Mirror and Daily Mirror from 2000 to 2006 – and has freelanced for The Guardian.

Journalism.co.uk asked him for his comments on today’s announcement that Guardian Media Group is selling its regional news business to Trinity Mirror. His reaction is in full below:

Well, this is just comical – or it would be if it didn’t show the state of hysteria in UK press ownership and the fact that it will probably lead to a loss of jobs.

Firstly, we have Guardian Media Group looking as if it wants to go from being a ‘group’ to just looking after The Guardian because I wonder how much this sale was driven by the £89.8 million loss that GMG made last year.

Secondly, The Guardian is the very title that tells us constantly – almost as much as it goes on about The Wire in fact – that local content is what people want, it’s the future, it’s the killer app that will keep people looking for news.

If that’s the case why are they dumping all their local content creators? Or are they admitting that instead of highly paid professionals, a couple of bloggers can do the job instead? Or do they just want to be London-centric with a stringer or two elsewhere? That’s hardly inspiring in an age of devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. What should readers in those areas do? Go elsewhere?

Secondly, what makes this even more tragic is that they are being bought by Trinity Mirror. Now there’s two aspects to this: one, Trinity Mirror continually says that it has no money and is skint. However, they managed to pull together a £44 million package – including nearly £8 million in cash – that’s hardly my definition of skint. That’s a complete slap in the face to the journalists Trinity Mirror has thrown out over the years and for the miserable pay freezes, small pay rises and ridiculous cost cutting measures that the survivors have endured – all because there was a lack of money. That £8 million could have done so much more in many titles.

To add to that, Trinity Mirror has a record of poor investment in the regions – it chopped the Scottish Daily Mirror from a team of 30 to one over three years, the Daily Record and Sunday Mail titles work wonders with a small budget but are walloped by having to do more with less each year, which lead to the Scottish Sun overtaking them as the best selling daily in Scotland.

This buy smacks of a panic buy – almost as much as it was a much-needed sale for GMG. Who are the losers going to be? The obvious one is the people who have already lost their jobs – more will follow, we can be sure of that. Over time the readers will be losers too as there’s less journalistic competition bringing more stories.

And even at the Mirror’s Manchester office, there must be people wondering what’s going to happen next. After all, does Manchester need two big news hubs? Surely a building merger is on the cards, followed by ’shared resources’ and then ‘merged resources’.

Similar Posts:

• GMG Regional Media chief exec confirms talks without naming Trinity Mirror
• GMG sells regional media business to Trinity Mirror for £44.8m
• Freesheet closures: axe falls on Johnston Press and Trinity Mirror titles
• How-Do: Could GMG sell Manchester Evening News to Trinity Mirror?
• AllMediaScotland: MPs release ‘Crisis in the Scottish Press’ report

Marc Reeves, founder of the newly launched Business Desk West Midlands, blogs on news the Guardian Media Group is to sell Manchester Evening News (MEN) to his former employer Trinity Mirror:

[T]he key questions: what do GMG and Trinity Mirror get out of the deal? For the latter, I think it’s pretty clear. With declining revenues and circulation, another round of consolidation is probably an inevitable strategy for the biggest groups, whose scale demands  that de-duplicating resources and cutting costs are required to counter the exodus of readers and advertisers. There’s also a very handy strategic regional  fit for the Manchester titles alongside Trinity’s existing Merseyside titles.

For GMG, though, it’s less clear. Does the disposal allow the group to concentrate on the march towards digital dominance  spearheaded by the Guardian brand? Or perhaps GMG has just decided that the ‘cash cow’ role of the regionals simply doesn’t work any more in the new media economy, and it’s better off without the distraction. Whatever the case, my money is on a rise in the number of deals  amongst the major publishers following  the TM-GMG shuffle, as more try to optimise the geographical ’sense’ of their sometimes disparate and accidental portfolios.

The acquisition of the Manchester Evening News by Trinity Mirror – publishers of my old paper the Birmingham Post – has baffled some of my former colleagues.

Why would Guardian Media Group, MEN’s owner, sell the very cash cow that existed only to keep the venerable – and loss making – Guardian newspaper alive?

Moreover, why would Trinity Mirror embark on yet another bout of corporate indigestion as they attempt to swallow yet another acquisition, with all the financial, cultural and managerial angst that goes with it.

I remember (yes dear reader, because I was there) spending many of the early years of this century as part of the team that was charged with incorporating the old Southnews group of weekly newspapers in London and the Home Counties into Trinity Mirror’s southern business.

That October 2000 acquisition came with a £285m price tag for around 60 free and paid-for newspapers (no one bought websites then – don’t you remember the dotcom bubble?). The deal announced this week, in which Trinity Mirror gets the Manchester Evening News, the Reading Post and a stable of other regional titles and websites for less than a fifth of that price. The Southnews deal came back to bite Trinity Mirror, as the early noughties advertising slump forced it to post a considerable write-down against the acquisition just a few years later.

Of course, the very economic foundation of the regional newspaper industry has shifted irreversibly since then, so comparisons are probably unfair.

However, back to the key questions: what do GMG and Trinity Mirror get out of the deal?

For the latter, I think it’s pretty clear. With declining revenues and circulation, another round of consolidation is probably an inevitable strategy for the biggest groups, whose scale demands that de-duplicating resources and cutting costs are required to counter the exodus of readers and advertisers. There’s also a very handy strategic regional fit for the Manchester titles alongside Trinity’s existing Merseyside titles.

For GMG, though, it’s less clear. Does the disposal allow the group to concentrate on the march towards digital dominance spearheaded by the Guardian brand? Or perhaps GMG has just decided that the ‘cash cow’ role of the regionals simply doesn’t work any more in the new media economy, and it’s better off without the distraction.

Whatever the case, my money is on a rise in the number of deals amongst the major publishers following the TM-GMG shuffle, as more try to optimise the geographical ‘sense’ of their sometimes disparate and accidental portfolios.

Full post at this link…

Similar Posts:

• GMG sells regional media business to Trinity Mirror for £44.8m
• GMG Regional Media chief exec confirms talks without naming Trinity Mirror
• How-Do: Could GMG sell Manchester Evening News to Trinity Mirror?
• links for 2008-07-01
• NUJ Release: Vote of no confidence in Scott Trust after regional cuts

Months of speculation about the future of Guardian Media Group’s regional media business is over – the group has announced today it will sell GMG Regionals to Trinity Mirror for a total consideration of £44.8 million.

Within the regionals group MEN Media publishes 22 titles in the north west of England, including the flagship Manchester Evening News; while S&B Media publishes 10 titles in the south of England, including the Surrey Advertiser and Reading Post. Both will go to Trinity Mirror.

Manchester-based TV station Channel M and GMG Regionals Woking titles will not be part of the deal, which is expected to complete by 28 March.

The deal also sees departures for GMG Regionals chief executive Mark Dodson and MEN Media chief executive Ruth Spratt. More significantly it marks the sale of the Guardian’s Manchester roots, as the paper was started in the city on 5 May 1821.

More to follow from Journalism.co.uk.

Similar Posts:

• GMG Regional Media chief exec confirms talks without naming Trinity Mirror
• Times: Trinity Mirror shares suffer record 28 per cent fall
• Media Release: David Fordham named Newspaper Society president
• New appointment: Ayers is made regional web publishing director at Trinity Mirror Regionals
• Holdthefrontpage.co.uk: No confidence motion for Trinity Mirror Regionals MD

Aaqil Ahmed, the BBC’s head of religion and ethics, has criticised the Sunday Telegraph for the way it presented his comments in an interview. In a BBC blog post yesterday, Ahmed writes that he had given an interview ahead of the Church Of England’s Synod debate and its motion on the issue of religious broadcasting on televisions:

The article appeared on Sunday under the headline “Church is ‘living in the past’ says BBC chief”. Great headline – but the truth lets the story down. The problem is: I am that BBC chief and I definitely didn’t say that. In fact there were a lot of things in the Sunday Telegraph article that surprised me when I read them.

(…)

The Sunday Telegraph article quotes me as saying that the BBC should not give Christianity preferential treatment. The question I was actually asked was whether minority faiths should be treated differently from other faiths – to which I replied that all faiths should be treated in the same way and that I don’t believe in treating any faith differently. It’s all a bit different when you put it in its proper context, isn’t it?

Full post at this link…

Similar Posts:

• Our Man Inside: Al Jazeera’s @moeed on mobile reporters (video interview)
• Correction for Las Vegas Sun site over use of anonymous online comments in article
• Broadcastnow.co.uk: Piers Morgan has no guilt about £2m ITV deal – and wants to double it
• NY Times response to Atlantic article suggesting death of its brand: ‘leaves a lot to be desired from the standpoint of journalism’
• Le Carre-d away: has the author’s alleged desire to defect become fact?

After strong doubts about its viability and existence, the London Weekly did launch as the capital’s latest freesheet. Initial public reaction hasn’t been good. But despite a poor quality print and online product, and its producers’ elusiveness, the title has seemingly managed to attract advertisers. The Help Me Investigate group I set up last week has done some dogged online digging and for the latest task, user JWarren created a list of all the advertisers in the print product: Ticketmaster/Wicked Musical; Big Snow Festival; Seafrance; Southern Comfort; Aloud/Kerrang; Lyric Theatre; Celtic Blue Rock Festival; Zuricom; Envisage Recruitment; and Chisholm and Moore. Why are they backing the project and what do they know about Invincible Media? To join the Help Me Investigate group, email me for an invite or request an invite here.

Blogger James Ball feels that the London Weekly and Invincible Group, with which it is associated, have some questions to answer. He has sent an email to the editorial and commercial teams of the newspaper and to Invincible Group asking these questions.

“Virtually all need answers if The London Weekly wants to win any credibility with its sceptics,” he writes. [Read James Ball's full post at this link]

Here are a few of the questions raised in the letter:

What is the precise nature of the relationship between The London Weekly and the Invincible Group? There is no mention of Invincible on thelondonweekly.co.uk, but the two businesses are run from the same office in Hackney, and share many staff (and web hosting) in common.

Who are the Global Publishing Group? Why is it not registered at Companies House? Has it ever made any previous investments – and why haven’t they received any coverage?

Why has The London Weekly not been registered as a limited company?

Does The London Weekly really have £10.5m backing? Can we speak to the backers?

Ex-footballer Tony Woodcock – who has previously been involved with [Invincible Group founder] GJordan Kensington at awards ceremonies – appeared on ITN as a co-founder of the project. Given his other businesses are registered on Companies House, why isn’t GPG or TLW?

The London Weekly was widely said to be very hard to get hold of on both Friday and Saturday [last week]. Was its print run 250,000? How many were distributed? Who was the printer?

Why does Invincible claim to have offices on the 30th floor of 14 Wall Street – one of the most prestigious business addresses in the world – yet operate out of a monthly-rental office in Hackney? And why, given Wall Street’s location, is the US phone number given based in California?

Where are Invincible Radio’s “millions of listeners”? The site redirects to a free streaming service with fewer than 20 followers.

Is Invincible Magazine still published? Its forum is populated solely by spam and in many categories there have been fewer than five news stories in the last three months.

Similar Posts:

• The London Weekly exists
• The London Weekly: some unanswered questions
• London Film Festival competition for young journalists
• NME to produce a free online version of its magazine
• Legacy problems for Olympics media centre?

Inspired by the first UK Future of News meet-ups in London, a couple of regional nests have been formed, with the Brighton and West Midlands groups holding their inaugural meetings last night.

• Tweets from the West Midlands (#fonwm) here

Meet-up group at this link

• Tweets from Brighton (#bfong) here

Meet-up group at this link

My colleague Laura Oliver live-blogged some notes from our Brighton event, which featured the Argus online editor, Jo Wadsworth and the Guardian’s software architect, Simon Willison.

Willison, who was the lead developer for the Guardian’s crowd-sourced MPs’ expenses projects, talked about the ups and downs of user-driven information gathering; and about his latest collaborative launch, Wildlifenearyou.com, a project that collects users’ animal photographs for an online wildlife mapping project. Users can rank and identify photographs, building their site profiles. The feature allowing users to pick their favourite picture of two (for example, what’s your favourite meerkat?), accumulated more than 5,000 votes within a few hours.

As Laura notes, a specific version of Wildlifenearyou.com, Owlsnearyou.com launched just a few weeks ago. Getting the site some extra coverage, Owlsnearyou cannily “piggybacked” on the Superbowl hashtag on Twitter by creating “Superb Owl Day”… Geddit?

Willison also told the group about OpenStreetMap, the first free, wiki-style, editable map of the whole world. He said that the project has become adept at responding to crises.

OpenStreetMap was given some high resolution photographs of Haiti, when the earthquake occurred, and the team traced them to create the best digital map of Haiti available. It has become the default map for rescue teams, Willison added.

Read Laura’s full post at this link…

#Bfong group activity (we split everyone into four groups to think up their own crowd-sourced news projects).

Similar Posts:

• UK Future of News gets local
• Future of News meet-up spreads to West Midlands, Brighton and (maybe) Scotland
• PPA Magazines 2008: Channel 4’s Big Art Mob
• GigaOm: User-generated magazine JPG closes down
• Freelancers – how well are you marketing yourself online?

So what format will the first televised leaders’ debates take?

The Guardian today reports that, amid lengthy negotiations, “some of the parties, notably the Liberal Democrats, have been pressing for a BBC Question Time format in which questions are not just asked by an experienced chairman, but also by the audience”.

And it sounds like the BBC host David Dimbleby would prefer something more Question Time, than his Sky News counterpart Adam Boulton.

In an interview with the Independent’s Ian Burrell, Boulton said:

Some of the print comment is seeing this as a bear pit, you will have the leaders and set the audience on them in a kind of Question Time. Certainly my vision is that it will be a very different thing from that.

The problem with those shows is that sometimes you get a common view emerging from the panel – or in the case of Nick Griffin, the panel and the question master and the audience all against one person.

Well, if we get a group thing from the three leaders it will be a disaster. The point is to get them to differentiate themselves from each other in front of the audience rather than circle the wagons against the audience.

But Dimbleby, speaking on BBC Radio 4 Front Row on 26 January, said that he’d like to see an element of Question Time, if not the “whole hog”:

[Listen to interview here]

(…) I would certainly favour – not going the whole hog of Question Time and having a kind of mixed audience asking questions – but the kind of thing you could do – I don’t say it will happen – is to divide the audience into three groups so the viewer knows exactly who they are: Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour and allow those people perhaps to put the occasional question, or applaud (…)  somehow we’ve got to get it beyond the sterility of the American debate, or people will be bored by it and it will be a pity.

Stirring things up a little more, Boulton took the opportunity during the Independent interview to criticise Dimbleby’s handling of the BNP leader’s first appearance on Question Time in 2009:

I have to say that I did feel David Dimbleby got too involved and seemed to be operating as a panellist. I think if I had been doing that I would have tried to move it along so it wasn’t 50 minutes talking about the BNP. I would have tried to have got the BNP talking about law and order, Europe, foreign affairs, whatever.

But Dimbleby, speaking on Front Row last month, defended the style:

[Once it was agreed] it then of course became complicated because if you put the BNP on, people don’t want to talk to him about the post office strike, they want to talk about race, they want to talk about immigration, his views on that. They want to talk about the connections with the Klu Klux Klan, all those things.

We realised the audience would come, as indeed they did – it was a London audience – with a whole load of questions on race so we stuck with that. I did a lot of work with the producers on chapter and verse on everything that Nick Griffin had said.

I thought we did it the right way and I think it worked well.  [The fact that] in the end something like 10 million people saw that programme – either when it went out or afterwards, is the vindication of it.

Similar Posts:

• #BBCQT: BBC Analysis – ‘Who’s afraid of the BNP?’
• Reuters.co.uk: Put your questions to David Cameron via Twitter now
• Last night’s Question Time: should Will Lewis get a knighthood?
• Poll: Was the BBC right to invite BNP’s Nick Griffin onto Question Time? #bbcqt
• Paul Bradshaw, Twitter and the art of predicting the interview

US-based site StinkyJournalism.org has picked out its top ten ‘dubious polls’ for 2010. The winner…? Fox News Network for a poll that showed how 120 percent of the public were thinking – “and this did not include an additional 15 percent who weren’t thinking!”

Full post at this link…

Similar Posts:

• Top 10 ‘Dubious Polling’ Awards mark ‘risible and outrageous pronouncements’
• Daily Mail gypsy/NHS poll on The Now Show
• Twitterers claim victory over loaded Daily Mail gypsy poll
• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – creating online polls
• PCUK/Harris Poll: Print copies may help build online subscriptions

A useful exercise is taking place on the other side of the world: Margaret Simons, a freelance journalist, media blogger and lecturer is investigating freelance rates in Australia. So far she has gathered over 100 responses to her first post, ‘Journalists should not work for free – so tell me what they are paying’. She promises to write up the results soon – we’ll link to them on this blog, when she does.

Full post at this link…

Here was the original plea:

[1 Australian dollar = 0.56 British pounds]

I think it would be useful to find out what different freelancers are getting paid by our mainstream publications. Here’s what I know:

Fairfax broadsheets start by offering .60c to.70c a word these days, but can be pushed higher if they want you badly enough. Section editors are adept at getting around the bean counters’ rules.

The Monthly still offers its $1 a word, which was princely when that magazine started, and still handsome.

I hear the RACV magazine pays well for both words and photos.

What do others know? Let’s share the market knowledge. Contributions to margaret@margaretsimons.com.au. Anonymity will be preserved.

Similar Posts:

• France magazine editor writes for Times Online
• Hellomagazine revamps health and beauty section
• Freelancers – how well are you marketing yourself online?
• Condé Nast launches monthly GQ iPhone app
• The Media Business: Journalism start-ups are just one part of the future of news

Great presentation from Mashable on ‘The future journalist: thoughts from two generations’. Created for Mashable’s NextUpNYC event the presentation was part of an on-stage discussion between Sree Sreenivasan, a professor and dean of student affairs at Columbia Journalism School, and his former student and Mashable contributor Vadim Lavrusik, which looked at the skills need by the journalist of the future, their approach to the business side of journalism and their use of social and multimedia:

Similar Posts:

• Columbia Journalism School report proposes tax changes to boost US journalism
• Journalism students as entrepreneurs
• Columbia Missourian: Journalism students advised to buy iPod Touch or iPhone
• NYMag.com: ‘Columbia J-School’s existential crisis’
• Sunderland survey results: What do journalism students want from their training?

A legal case dating back to 2006 involving a musical trio, the Gilettes, their agent and an Italian restaurant in Leeds could have a significant impact on the use of fair comment as a defence in UK libel actions.

In the case, which will be brought in front of the Supreme Court, the Gilettes as claimants have had two applications for a defence of fair comment by their agent 1311 events struck out.

Explains the Guardian:

It will be the first study of the issue by the country’s highest legal authority since the law lords looked into it almost 20 years ago. Media organisations hope it will clear away a tangle of legal complexities around a defence which many claim has become increasingly difficult to mount in recent years: that an opinion is not libellous if it is based on fact, is in the public interest and is levelled without malice.

Full story at this link…

Similar Posts:

• Libel, privacy, the ‘chilling effect’ and NGOs
• Personal comments detract from original MMR / LBC debate
• Photo Attorney: Who is right in the Fairey vs AP Obama photo case?
• Update: Jacob Zuma still pursuing case against Guardian
• Blog08: The never-ending journalism vs blogging debate continues…

“Based on our experience of publishing on the web for 15 years, paywalls don’t make sense,”says Mark Contreras, senior vice president for newspapers at US publisher E.W. Scripps Co and chairman of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA).

In this Forbes.com interview, Contreras refers directly to Scripps’ own experiment with a paid for sports website in Knoxville: “When we took the paywall down, the traffic ballooned and so did its revenue.”

Instead, growing revenue from circulation is preferable and a return to the 1940s newspaper industry model of 60 per cent of revenue from advertising and 40 per cent from circulation is happening, he suggests.

Audience is up. Our subscriber churn has never been lower. Today we have the most stable circulation base we’ve ever had. It’s generating, on a per-unit basis, more than it has in a long time. In some cases double digits.

Full interview at this link…

(Hat tip to @jayrosen_nyu)

Similar Posts:

• NYTimes.com: Interactive graphic – ‘bad news for newspapers’
• AdweekMedia’s US magazine ‘hot list’: Economist and Elle take top spots
• The Observer: ‘Painful decisions’ about what it can print as advertising revenue and circulation fall
• InPublishing survey: ‘Behind the turnover figures, the industry is essentially still in profit’
• Nieman Journalism Lab: Google developing micropayment system in pitch to newspapers

In the video below of a talk he gave last week, Sir Harold Evans takes apart the current state of the newspaper industry and journalism, from praising Rupert Murdoch’s management of the Wall Street Journal to the problems with journalism schools. Well worth watching:

Full story at this link…

Similar Posts:

• NYTimes.com: Two years on at Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal
• TheDailyBeast: Ex-WSJ assistant publisher on paid online content – myths and facts
• Talking Biz News: Dow Jones restructuring
• EditorsWeblog: Emerging nations favour mobile internet access
• Columbia Journalism Review: Identity crisis at the Wall Street Journal?

WebMediaBrands chairman and chief executive officer Alan Meckler was so frustrated with Twitter’s slowness in dealing with his complaints over ‘Sqwitters’ (Twitter username squatters) parked on some of his brands that he publicly aired his grievances – on Twitter.

WebMediaBrands is a US media behemoth that is probably best known in the UK for its ownership of MediaBistro, an online community for mostly US-based media professionals. Meckler did not mention which of his brands are being squatted on, but @learnnetwork and @semanticweb are both WebMediaBrands and currently inactive with only a handful of followers.

Twitter expressly forbids username squatting in its terms and conditions so it seems likely that Meckler will get his way, but the subsequent minor spat that broke out following his Tweet (see screengrab below) rather neatly encapsulates the clash of cultures on the web described by Dr Aleks Krotoski in the first two episodes of the BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution:

The founding father of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, believed his invention would remain an open frontier that nobody could own, and that it would take power from the few and give it to the many. Now, in a provocative, strongly authored argument, presenter Aleks Krotoski will re-assess utopian claims like these, made over many years by the digital revolution’s key innovators – and test them against the hard realities of the emerging web today, exploring how the possibilities of the pure technology have been constrained, even distorted by the limitations of human nature.

PS interesting skunk fact: skunks can spray up to 4-7m in a favorable wind, although they are usually only accurate for up to about 2m.

Similar Posts:

• Tracking Twitter – kind of like keywording
• FT.com: BBC Trust expenses cover Sky subscriptions
• Hearst to close four magazine websites?
• (Probably Not) The Daily Mail: Fake Daily Mail Twitter account renamed as DMGT applies legal pressure
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk

Dhiren Katwa, senior news editor at Asian Voice, spoke at the Coventry Conversations series on Thursday about the possibility of the BBC’s Asian Network being scrapped in the face of strategic cuts. He said Vijay Sharma, head of the Asian Network, has been “in hiding” over the current situation.

The Asian Network’s audience fell by 15 per cent to 357,000 in the third quarter of last year, and is expected to struggle for survival after director-general Mark Thompson’s forthcoming strategic review of BBC programming.

Katwa, a member of the Equality Council of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), said he thought it would be a shame for the Asian Network to go, but added that he didn’t believe the BBC should be specifically broadcasting to minority groups. He told the audience that “with the Asian Network working within a silo, it’s promoting or contributing to segregation rather than integration”. He said that the solution is to embed minority targeted elements of the BBC more firmly within the corporation.

When asked about the network’s fall in ratings, Katwa said commercial competitors such as Sunrise Radio had contributed to the network’s struggle to reach it’s young target audience, but put its current problems largely down to “a lot of internal issues”.

Caroline Thomson, the BBC’s chief operating officer, told the House of Lords Communications Committee on Wednesday that the idea of one network serving the UK’s entire Asian community wasn’t the right way to represent such a large and diverse audience.

Katwa echoed her assessment in his talk, and suggested that “the BBC Asian Network needs to be embedded within the BBC as a corporation with more faces from black and Asian backgrounds.”

Sharing Katwa’s view, broadcast journalism lecturer and founder of Coventry Conversations John Mair added: “There is no role for something separate or segregated, it should just be part of the mainstream. Not ‘now Radio Four’s Asian hour’, every hour should be Asian hour”.

Similar Posts:

• Paul Gambaccini: BBC Radio 1 fails to recognise its ‘incredible responsibility’ by keeping Moyles in a job
• Press Association opens up data to BBC developers
• MediaGuardian Radio Reborn 2008: industry jobs not under threat from networked content
• Washington Times: Times to launch radio show for investigative work
• Guardian: BBC News head tipped as director of audio and music

Last August, amidst all the speculation over the Observer’s future, we reported how academics and business figures were threatening to cancel their subscriptions to the Sunday newspaper, following the decision to axe Simon Caulkin’s Observer Management column. Guardian News and Media never re-instated Caulkin and a letter of complaint from nearly 100 leading authors and academics went unpublished.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Observer did not later report how the Work Foundation had named Caulkin columnist of the year at the end of January. As noted by Private Eye in its latest issue (1255): “Newspapers usually trumpet awards their writers win. But the Observer and the Guardian were strangely silent…”

Philip Whiteley, management author, blogger and editor of the Human Capital Forum, who spearheaded the Caulkin complaint, has now launched a new campaign: for more effective coverage of management in UK media.

“It is also a reaction to the feeble coverage of the Kraft-Cadbury merger in mainstream newspapers in which business journalists repeatedly refused to put any tough questions to the Kraft or Cadbury leadership on the very high risks and integration costs that mega-mergers involve,” he said.

Whiteley believes that in reporting the Kraft-Cadbury merger, journalists focused on finances and the offer price rather than management challenges.

“The error common to the banks and the Kraft-Cadbury affair is to imagine that the management task, even though it is responsible for delivering the vast bulk of the returns from investment strategies of banking employees, or take-over activity respectively, is still bizarrely regarded as a junior matter, not front-page material,” Whiteley argued in a recent blog post, criticising both the Financial Times’ and the Telegraph’s coverage.

The new management project will collect blogs and other web news sections and launch a ‘blog of blogs’ – “a summary from the management blogosphere”.

Whiteley will circulate this to the Human Capital Forum’s database (16,000 subscribers) on a monthly basis, with the possibility of extending that to the databases of all participants.

“The aim is to provide more critical coverage of governance and management in the public and private sectors,” Whiteley said.

He cited a comment left on his blog, as another prompt for the new network:

“There was a time when papers like the FT and others had the expertise and inclination to dispel the myths of uttered corporate statements. Alas, no longer. The institutions that were supposed to be ever vigilant and fearless are now content to simply cover the passing parade. One has to read the right blogs and the right books to get any sense of objective insight into what’s going on. A real shame.”

Human Capital Forum has listed some online management resources here: http://www.humancapitalforum.com/links/index.php

Similar Posts:

• City A.M.: Capital Ideas group makes bid for Observer
• Journalism Daily: Academics boycott Observer, theblogpaper’s launch and AOP conference
• Guardian appoints roles in new editorial ‘pods’
• Academics threaten Observer boycott: the letters in full
• JLPF: Tweets from the Digital Editors Network and Journalism Leaders Forum

These are the latest editorial and media job opportunities from this week on Journalism.co.uk’s jobs board:

Experienced Structure Finance Reporter
Bloomberg News seeks an experienced structured finance reporter in its London office. The reporter will be responsible for stories about structured products, including those tied to interest rates, stocks, commodities and currencies.
Salary: competitive + benefits
Bloomberg
City of London, England, England
>>more

Emerging Markets Editor
Bloomberg News is seeking an experienced real-time financial news Editor to join the Emerging Markets team in London.
Salary: competitive + benefits
Bloomberg
City of London, England, England
>>more

Principal advisor – editorial
With proven journalistic and in-house corporate experience, for a leading international mining group.
Salary: DoE
Rio Tinto
London, England
>>more

Speed desk reporter
The successful applicant will produce breaking news stories under real-time deadline pressure and write stories that are clearly written and comprehensive
Salary: Competitive + benefits
Bloomberg
Dublin, Republic of Ireland
>>more

Stocks editor
Bloomberg News seeks an editor to shape European stock market stories. The successful candidate will have considerable editing and reporting experience at a newspaper or news service.
Salary: competitive + benefits
Bloomberg
London, England
>>more

Chief reporter
Financial Adviser, part of Financial Times Business, has a vacancy for an ambitious, enthusiastic chief reporter who can deliver high-quality financial services stories.
Salary: DoE
Financial Times Group (Financial Adviser)
London, England
>>more

Editorial assistant
We are a small online media agency that owns and runs three successful websites in the financial services industry and we are looking for another great mind to lend us a hand in the fast-paced day-to-day running of the business from our Maida Vale hub.
Salary: Expenses paid internship (£5700 pa)
Bridging and Commercial Ltd
London, England
>>more

Sub-editor
Haymarket Media Group, one of the worlds most respected private publishers of magazines and websites is seeking a sub-editor.
Salary: Negotiable
Haymarket Media
Teddington , England
>>more

Features editor
Pro Publishing Ltd are seeking an experienced features writer to join national consumer magazine Utopia Kitchen & Bathroom.
Salary: DoE
Pro Publishing Ltd
Colchester, England
>>more

Editor
Classic Car Weekly (CCW), the newspaper which is both the mouthpiece of the classics scene and the number one location for buying and selling classic cars, has a vacancy for an editor.
Salary: DoE
Bauer Media
Peterborough, England
>>more

News editor
New Media Age is the UK’s only weekly news title covering the interactive marketing and media sector. An opportunity has opened up to join an expanding magazine and website covering one of the most dynamic and growing industries.
Salary: DoE
Centaur Communications Ltd
London, England
>>more

Listings writers
If you have the makings of a razor-sharp sub-editor with bags of enthusiasm for TV and radio, we have a permanent and a six-month vacancy for listings writers based in Ealing, west London.
Salary: £19.5K
Red Bee Media
London, England
>>more

Energy correspondent
A great opportunity for an experienced energy correspondent to join this prestigious portfolio of business intelligence tools, produced to the highest standard in order to support the finance sector.
Salary: On application
Formula Won
Central London, England
>>more

Sports Correspondent
You’ll be a key member of a busy team of broadcasters working across all outlets breaking and reporting on major sports news stories for all outlets.
Salary: DoE
BBC
London/Salford Quays, England
>>more

Journalists/writers
Fixedia, a networking site for media professionals, is recruiting freelance writers/journalists based in various locations around the world.
Salary: Competitive
Fixedia Group Limited
International, All
>>more

Online reporter – EU
IntraFish Media, the world’s leading provider of news to the global seafood industry, is seeking a dynamic and talented EU-based online reporter for its flagship Web site, IntraFish.com.
Salary: DoE
IntraFish
London, England
>>more

To sign up for free as a jobseeker, please go to http://www.journalism.co.uk/113/

To sign up as an advertiser, please go to http://www.journalism.co.uk/75/

Similar Posts:

• Eleven new journalism and media jobs on Journalism.co.uk
• New editorial and media job vacancies on Journalism.co.uk
• This week’s new jobs in journalism and the media
• Twelve new journalism and media jobs this week on Journalism.co.uk
• Eighteen great new media jobs added to Journalism.co.uk this week