Has online news consumption in the UK reached saturation point?

When it comes to predicting trends in the future of journalism, FleetStreetBlues has next to no qualifications. Unlike the Peter Prestons, Roy Greenslades or Jeff Jarvises of this world, we've never edited a national newspaper, taught a journalism class or pioneered reporting in a new medium - and while we write this blog in our spare time, we don't spend all day talking about and writing about where newspapers are heading.

But with that disclaimer, we couldn't help being struck by this story over at the Press Gazette, reporting the latest figures from UKOM/Nielsen on online news readership in the UK.

Unlike the more widely-quoted ABC stats, which cite the increasingly stratospheric figures for the number of unique browsers accessing a website worldwide, the UKOM/Nielsen stats are based, like TV viewing figures, on a poll of a small sample - in this case 50,000 internet users in the UK. And the findings are pretty interesting.

The top ten UK news websites in May were as follows (with unique audience and percentage change year-on-year in brackets).

1) BBC (11.1m; -12%)
2) MailOnline (6.3m); +12%)
3) Guardian.co.uk (5.2m; -2%)
4) Telegraph (5.0m; -7%)
5) Yahoo! News Websites (4.5m; -11%)
6) Newsquest Local Media (2.8m; +12%)
7) Trinity Mirror Nationals (2.6m; +3%)
8) The Sun (2.6m; -15%)
9) MSN News & Weather (2.3m; -23%)
10) The Independent (2.1m; +3%)

Stripped of the easy year-on-year inflation provided by expansion overseas, the figures make sobering reading - as do the rest of the top 40 websites.  The BBC, Guardian, Telegraph and the Sun all have fewer online UK readers this year than they did in 2010.

What does this mean? Well, either certain high profile sites are doing badly, and will be replaced in time by up-and-coming sites (and it's worth acknowledging at this point the rise and rise of MailOnline, among UK readers as well as those overseas).

Or else, more than a decade after the advent of online news, the big shift from print to digital is almost over. Everyone who's interested in reading news on the internet already is.

There are lots of confounding factors to this kind of simplistic analysis, of course. Increasing dominance of social media, for one. iPhones and iPads. The chance of a second life for broadcast journalism promised by 4G mobile networks is another.

But for the last ten years the main commercial strategy for most print publishers has been to grow and grow an online audience, in the hope that it will eventually get big enough to somehow make some serious money. Now the early days of the internet are almost over, that audience has grown, and FleetStreetBlues isn't sure we've yet figured out how it pays journalists' wages.

It's not yet clear what the figures released yesterday by the Times really mean - and there are still lots of unanswered questions about drop-off rates and corporate subscriptions and the like. But suddenly, having 100,000 people actually paying to read you online doesn't seem to be a bad place to be.

Chief Reporter - Watford Observer

Hertfordshire weekly the Watford Observer is recruiting a chief reporter to head up its news team.

You'll need to be a senior reporter and have your NCE already, and it seems they're looking for someone local - the ad asks candidates offer 'a good knowledge of the area we serve'. Driving licence and your own car also a must.

Apply with CV and covering letter to cburke@london.newsquest.co.uk, quoting reference number HR01 632. Deadline Friday 15 July.

Diana at 50

The Media Blog flags up this rather tasteless front page courtesy of Newsweek, which has an article speculating how Princess Di might have been 'chilling with the Middletons' and 'tweeting from Davos' had she lived, written by Tina Brown. Presumably Mr Hari was otherwise engaged...

The Johann Hari apology:'I wouldn't do it again'

So the Independent has decided to brazen it out. Not only are they supporting Johann Hari as he is 'subjected to trial by Twitter' - they're making it a sales technique, ensuring every potential extra customer buys the paper edition before they put the apology online.

The headline ('My journalism is at the centre of a storm. This is what I have learned') and the standfirst ('Johann Hari's professional reputation has been subjected to trial by Twitter. Here he explains what the affair has taught him') pretty much sets the tone of the piece, and as apologies go, it's about as grudging as it gets.

Hari goes to some lengths to deny that he's committed any act of plagiarism or churnalism (which he hasn't), but he does also address the substance of the issue. Explaining why he wrote 'We stare at each other for a while. Then he says in a quieter voice...' before a copied-and-pasted quote, he says:

Where I described their body language, for example, I was describing their body language as they made the same point that I was quoting - I was simply using the clearer words from their writing so the reader understood the point best.

He has, though, after ten years at the Independent and winning multiple journalism awards, learned an important lesson:

I now see it was wrong, and I wouldn't do it again. Why? Because an interview is not just an essayistic representation of what a person thinks; it is a report on an encounter between the interviewer and the interviewee.

But the article ends with a final justification. He's not a lowly reporter, you see. He's a writer.

It depends on whether you prefer the intellectual accuracy of describing their ideas in the most considered words, or the reportorial accuracy of describing their ideas in the words they used on that particular afternoon. Since my interviews are long intellectual profiles, not ones where I'm trying to ferret out a scoop or exclusive, I have, in the past, prioritised the former. That was, on reflection, a mistake, because it wasn't clear to the reader.

Yes it was a mistake Johann - but it looks like you're going to get away with it, and will continue to write 'long intellectual profiles' for the paper which surely just lost what little credibility it had left. On behalf of ferrets everywhere, we're stunned.


UPDATE: Guido Fawkes has, er, copied and pasted the full text of the apology here.

Enough trivial Twittering - the Hari case deserves a serious response

So, our early morning rant about Johann Hari's copy-and-paste interview technique seems to have generated a bit of reaction...

There's too much to sensibly sum up here really, but we would recommend a few links. The story's made it across the Atlantic, and the opening par of this post on the Washington Post site sums up what Hari did wrong better than most. The excellent FleetStreetFox has a brilliant, heartfelt post explaining why Hari has damned all journalists by association. And of course Twitter has done what Twitter does best - part-lynching, part-mocking Hari with the painfully funny #interviewsbyhari meme (you can read ten of the best here).

All of which is well and good - but beyond journalists and news junkies gossiping on Twitter, it feels like official reaction has been somewhat lacking. We don't yet know what Johann Hari will write in tomorrow's Independent, but the headline suggests it may not be entirely apologetic. The response from the editor Simon Kelner - that Johann Hari has worked for the paper in ten years and they have not had a single complaint about him misrepresenting anyone - doesn't address the issue at all, but certainly implies Hari won't be heading for the exit. And this jocular blog on the Independent's website completely, and possibly deliberately, misses the point.

Elsewhere too, it's been rather quiet. Journalists don't like writing about other journalists' screw-ups, as a rule, but even the coverage from the MediaGuardian has centred far more on the Twitter reaction to the story than the story itself. The Press Gazette, meanwhile, seems to have decided the story isn't worth covering at all - apparently with Saga magazine launching a new iPhone app and the launch of a website tackling sports churnalism, they just didn't have time.

Perhaps they too believe that this is another internet fad gossipy story, the next Jan Moir Twitter-outrage. But as we wrote this morning, if it is, it really shouldn't be.

For one of Britain's most prominent, award-winning journalists to admit to routinely copying and pasting quotes in the way that he did over a number of years, misleading readers and completely without detection, is a seriously big deal. If the Independent's senior editors had no idea he was doing it, then it surely ought to be a disciplinary if not sacking offence. And if they did know he was doing it...

Johann Hari hits back

Tomorrow's Independent, courtesy of the man who's first with all the front pages, Nick Sutton.

The article's not up yet, but it's going to be headlined 'What I think of the attacks on my professional integrity', apparently. That's not a 'sorry' then...

Fleet Street split over Johann Hari's copy-and-paste interviews

Johann Hari's admission that he routinely adds what interviewees have previously written to interviews, and then passes the additions off as quotes, is going to run and run.

In his response to the accusations, Hari suggested that what he did was considered 'normal practice' on Fleet Street, and some have already come to his defence on Twitter - Guardian writer Tanya Gold, for instance, writing the following:

@brianwhelanhack plagiarism is the theft of ideas, not the clarification of them. None of his interviewees have ever complained.Mon Jun 27 22:35:33 via webtanya gold
tanya7777

Some of her colleagues are less forgiving. Esther Addley, a senior news writer at the Guardian, writes:

.@johannhari101 confess I'm even more astonished by that response. It's dishonest, pure & simple. Also, i'views not there to please i'vieweeMon Jun 27 23:14:20 via Twitter for Androidesther addley
estheraddley

.@johannhari101 also, for the record, I know of no journalist I respect who considers this 'normal practice'. I consider it indefensibleMon Jun 27 23:17:45 via Twitter for Androidesther addley
estheraddley

David Allen Green, legal correspondent at the New Statesman, also sounds unconvinced:

This is @johannhari101's defence of his copy-and-paste interviews: http://bit.ly/kTfdTi. Is he misleading readers by turning text to quotes?Tue Jun 28 06:32:48 via Twitter for BlackBerry®David Allen Green
DavidAllenGreen

Let us know what you think in the poll at the top right - we suspect ultimately journalists who spend their days trying to nail the killer quote may take a dim view. What really matters, of course, is what Mr Kelner thinks...

Independent columnist Johann Hari admits copying and pasting interview quotes

This is astonishing - and if it's not a really big deal, it should be.

In the last few days, a couple of blogs have been scrutinising the work of Johann Hari, the multiple award-winning Independent columnist and interviewer.

A week ago on Friday the political DSG blog pointed out an eerie series of similarities between the quotes in Hari's interview with Toni Negri in 2004, and quotes in the book Negri on Negri, published in 2003.

Brian Whelan, an editor with Yahoo! Ireland and a regular FleetStreetBlues contributor, spotted this and got in touch to suggest perhaps this wasn't the only time quotes in Hari's interviews had appeared elsewhere before. We ummed and ahhed slightly about running the piece based on one analysis from a self-proclaimed leftist blog - so Brian went away and did some analysis of his own. And found that a number of quotes in Hari's interview with Gideon Levy in the Independent last year had also been copied from elsewhere.

So far, so scurrilous. But what's really astonishing is that Johann Hari has now responded to the blog accusations. And cheerfully admitted that he regularly includes in interviews quotes which the interviewee never actually said to him.

To be clear, this isn't just a case of referencing something the interviewee has written previously - 'As XXX has written before...', or such like. No, Hari adds dramatic context to quotes which were never said - the following paragraph, for instance, is one of the quotes from the Levy interview which seems to have appeared elsewhere before.

After saying this, he falls silent, and we stare at each other for a while. Then he says, in a quieter voice: “The facts are clear. Israel has no real intention of quitting the territories or allowing the Palestinian people to exercise their rights. No change will come to pass in the complacent, belligerent, and condescending Israel of today. This is the time to come up with a rehabilitation programme for Israel.”

So how does Hari justify it? Well, his post on 'Interview etiquette', as he calls it, is so stunningly brazen about playing fast-and-loose with quotes that it's really worth reading in full. But here's the gist.

When I’ve interviewed a writer, it’s quite common that they will express an idea or sentiment to me that they have expressed before in their writing – and, almost always, they’ve said it more clearly in writing than in speech. (I know I write much more clearly than I speak – whenever I read a transcript of what I’ve said, or it always seems less clear and more clotted. I think we’ve all had that sensation in one form or another).

So occasionally, at the point in the interview where the subject has expressed an idea, I’ve quoted the idea as they expressed it in writing, rather than how they expressed it in speech. It’s a way of making sure the reader understands the point that (say) Gideon Levy wants to make as clearly as possible, while retaining the directness of the interview. Since my interviews are intellectual portraits that I hope explain how a person thinks, it seemed the most thorough way of doing it...

...I’m a bit bemused to find one blogger considers this “plagiarism”. Who’s being plagiarized? Plagiarism is passing off somebody else’s intellectual work as your own – whereas I’m always making it clear that (say) Gideon Levy’s thought is Gideon Levy’s thought. I’m also a bit bemused to find that some people consider this “churnalism”. Churnalism is a journalist taking a press release and mindlessly recycling it – not a journalist carefully reading over all a writer’s books and selecting parts of it to accurately quote at certain key moments to best reflect how they think.

I called round a few other interviewers for British newspapers and they said what I did was normal practice and they had done it themselves from time to time. My test for journalism is always – would the readers mind you did this, or prefer it? Would they rather I quoted an unclear sentence expressing a thought, or a clear sentence expressing the same thought by the same person very recently? Both give an accurate sense of what a person is like, but one makes their ideas as accessible as possible for the reader while also being an accurate portrait of the person.

Let's recap. The Independent's top columnist and interviewer has just admitted that he routinely adds things his interviewees have written at some point in the past to their quotes, and then deliberately passes these statements off as though they were said to him in the course of an interview.

The main art of being an interviewer is to be skilled at eliciting the right quotes from your subject. If Johann Hari wants to write 'intellectual portraits', he should go and write fiction. Do his editors really know that the copy they're printing ('we stare at each other for a while. Then he says in a quieter voice...') is essentially made up? What would Jayson Blair make of it all? Astonishing.

Quote of the Day: 27 June 2011

Dave King, former editor of the Swindon Advertiser, on why, when asked at a management training session to draw his job, he sketched a toilet roll:

'I explained to colleagues that my job every day was not a creative journalist, but instead it was determined by dealing with other people’s crap.'

Flat earth football

Who'd be a football writer these days?

If fans have always felt able to second-guess football managers, then second-guessing football reporters comes as second nature. Sports reporters, like most reporters, have always lived or died by their sources, by their ability to provide the inside track. But in sports reporting even more than general news, the rise of blogs, social media and the internet has ratcheted up the pressure from fans. Suddenly everyone's a pundit.

Birmingham Mail football writer Chris Lepkowski knows all this and more, and he's mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. In a blogpost entitled 'Transfer nonsense, Twitter and the rest', he angrily points out that more than 60 names have been linked with West Bromwich Albion since the end of last season - and just two have signed.

Here how it works, he says:

Mulumbu, subject of a successful £5.5million bid from Fiorentina? No, he isn't. Nor has he been.

That's not to say he won't be one day in the future, but that's guesswork. Which is where a lot of this fuels social media panic, be it on Twitter or on Facebook. 

A couple of websites report it in Italy and then it gets picked up and reported as news by the website branch of a national radio station - this much-listened-to radio station employ their own Midlands' reporters, who would have swiftly put their own web colleagues straight had their opinion been sought. 

And that is the trouble these days. People are in such a rush to break stories that diligence no longer applies. Nobody bothers checking with clubs to see if a story is true. They might check with an agent to see if it's true - in 11 years of working in football I've come across about a dozen agents I really trust - but even then they might not bother.

Social media has not so much changed the way we work, it's shredded the rule book.

His solution, when it comes, is an appeal to let football reporters go about doing what they do best - breaking the best stories they can stand up.

What I can do - as do my Birmingham Mail colleagues - is run stories which I know can be stood up, by several sources. Which is why my colleague Mat was able to run, with some confidence, an exclusive that Alex McLeish was wanted by Villa a full week before it happened. And if that means knocking down a rumour which isn't true, and we know isn't true, then we will do so. Every day if necessary. Sometimes we can slip up. But it won't be through negligence. 

Some of us still are in the news business, not in the market for 'Internet hits' or 'website traffic'.

Lepkowksi's post is a heartfelt, effective and unashamedly old-school rallying call for his fellow sports reporters and editors. It might just have some relevance for the rest of us too.

FIFA chief tries to turn tables on undercover reporters

The Sunday Times has been leading the British media's charge against FIFA corruption for some time now, and today it reveals a new twist. The FIFA vice president suspended over the 'cash-for-votes' tapes hired a private detective - to investigate reporters from the Sunday Times.

The full story's paywalled, of course, but the paper reports:

Reynald Temarii, the then Fifa vice-president, commissioned a secret inquiry on the reporters after the scandal broke. 

Entitled “Project Airtime”, it was written by Jean-Charles Brisard, a French investigator who is better known as an expert on the financing of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda. 

It shows that Brisard researched details of the journalists’ homes, families and work as well as obtaining a private hotel bill. However, his report contains glaring errors

The story goes on to outline the methods of the investigation, which appears to have been quite thorough and involved raking over the journalists' previous stories. However the way the Sunday Times tells it at least, nothing much came up - we're told 'the document on the Sunday Times is strewn with elementary factual errors and misleading statements'.

And the justification for the investigation?

In a statement, Brisard said he was not hired to discredit the journalists but to identify “those responsible for raising allegations against Mr Temarii... and explore their methodology”.

The Sunday Scoop: The 'do you smell bacon' edition

With Wimbledon and Glastonbury in full swing and a two-day heatwave about to get underway, it feels like we're slipping rapidly into summer and heading towards the silly season - and while we're not there yet, that's reflected in part by the headlines in today's Sunday papers.

Olympic ticket problems make the front of both the Sunday Telegraph and the Sunday Times, and while there's plenty of doom and gloom elsewhere - the Observer leads with the cost of old age care, while the Sunday Express and Sunday Mirror go with the Milly Dowler case - there's precious little politics and no clear theme among today's front pages.

This week's Sunday Scoop award therefore goes to the best actual story of the day, courtesy of the Mail on Sunday, which splashes with 'It is no offence to abuse police'. They've uncovered a 'secret' card issued to police constables stating that 'The courts do not accept police officers are caused harassment, alarm or distress by words such as F**K, C**T, B*****KS or W*****S'. It's... political correctness gone mad.

Laura Robson: 'That is not my dad'

So ahead of tennis prodigy Laura Robson's big match at Wimbledon against Maria Sharapova yesterday, the Evening Standard ran a touching feature on how Laura's oil executive father Andrew would be inspiring her from the stands.

Perfect angle, perfect headline, perfect picture. Only one problem...

FYI, Evening Standard - That is not my dad. http://lockerz.com/s/113976300Sat Jun 25 12:00:45 via UberSocialLaura Robson
laurarobson5

Work experience woe: The devil wears Chanel

Another excruciating tale of work experience woe, to join our budding collection. Send yours to fleetstreetblues@hotmail.co.uk.

While at a certain well-to-do fashion/society magazine I was asked to spend a few days in the fashion department. This sounded quite exciting, so I agreed.

The incumbent (now late) fashion director was quite a character indeed and burst into the office to find me, rather unglamorously, organising returns. She immediately demanded to know who I was, then ordered an assistant to fix her lipstick, while she hung out of the window to smoke.

She then demanded that the Chanel tennis dress hanging on the rail be gifted to her. I telephoned Chanel to ask if this was possible. They requested she paid £10 and she could keep it. I thought that seemed rather reasonable (I had my eye on it, in those days it even would have fitted me).

However, £10 was simply unacceptable to the fashion director. She told me that should the editor ask, to tell him she had gone to Chanel darling, and proceeded to flounce out of the office. The telephone rang and the editor's assistant shouted at me to get into his office. I was terrified and calmly asked what was wrong, at which point the assistant realised I was a mere intern.

The following day the fashion director reappeared, armed me with a Polaroid camera and told me to take the photograph of a charity worker close to Westminster University who she wanted her friend to marry because she was simply beautiful. I agreed and trudged off to do so and warn the poor girl that this wasn't just a flattering shoot - this could result in marriage.

Later that afternoon, the fashion director instructed me to order a man's white silk scarf, 1920s in style, as she wanted to give it to Bryan Ferry while she stayed at his house over the weekend. She said to tell the Prada office she wanted it for a shoot, which was of course a lie. I telephoned every fashion house I could find the number for and begged for a scarf but everyone refused.

Later her colleagues told me not to worry, that she'd probably have forgotten all about it. I wasn't convinced and was quite glad to return to the safety of the features desk and do some 'proper' research.

Read all about it: 24 June 2011

It's been a bit quiet this week - but here's some of the things we've been reading while we haven't been writing:

• Ever wondered how they get a photo of President Obama addressing the nation without distracting him from the autocue? Well, it turns out they never have - until now
  
• The Tabloid Watch blog reveals how the Daily Star put the word 'Giggs' in its splash headline for an astonishing 14 consecutive days
  
• Dire warnings of 'significant' job cuts over at the Guardian

• The Press Gazette on why MailOnline may now have more readers than the BBC News website
  
• And finally, really - who puts a photo of their baby in the local paper before they've even given it a name?

Junior Designer - Shortlist

In the world of magazines, Shortlist has scooped a number of awards lately - and if you're just starting out in your career as a designer, this vacancy is a pretty decent opportunity.

You'll need at least one year's experience, with a publishing background and good skills with Mac OSX and Adobe Creative Suite. Experience of VIP would also give you an advantage.

Apply with CV, covering letter and samples of your work to kevin.fay@shortlist.com. Deadline next Tuesday 28 June.

Local paper covers strike by its own journalists

All too often when local journalists take industrial action, all mention of the strike is removed, Pravda-style, from the paper itself. Not at the South Yorkshire Times.

Quote of the Day: 21 June 2011

The Press Gazette's Grey Cardigan on the likely impact at local papers of the NUJ's Cashback for Interns campaign - and why it's probably not a good idea to keep the workie in the cupboard:

The suggestion that we should have to pay these kids is absurd. We hardly have the money to pay our dwindling staff, never mind forking out for the chinlesss, dribbling fuckwit in the corner who just happens to be the son of one of our non-execs. It’s not as if he’s any use. He’s superglued to his mobile phone, speaks like Brian Sewell on acid and it took him three hours to fetch a simple lunch order from Gregg’s. The Bullingdon Club are welcome to him. 

If we’re made to pay ‘interns’, then we’ll simply not bother taking any on. All that will mean is that students who might have talent and who would benefit from a spell in a newspaper office won’t get the chance of that valuable experience. And that would be a shame. Our last three trainees have come from the ranks of the work experience merry-go-round. Our best reporter was similarly discovered.

Old McNulty had a farm

Sunday papers, even the upmarket ones, are always a little prone to chasing the exclusive celebrity angle at the expense of all rhyme and reason - and the following piece of cutting-edge environmental journalism from yesterday's Sunday Telegraph is a case in point.

Wire star Dominic West fears Britain will take up 'shameful' US-style factory farming 

Dominic West, the television and Hollywood actor, has warned Britain is moving towards a ‘shameful’ system of factory farming that will destroy the countryside and create a new breed of superbugs. 

The Eton-educated actor, who stars in hit television series the Wire and films including 300 and Centurion, said US-style 'mega farms' that house thousands of pigs are springing up around the country.

And that, pretty much, is the whole story. WTF?

Sub Editor - Telegraph

The Telegraph is hiring a sub editor on a six month contract.

You'll need to be an experienced sub with a proven track record and multimedia skills, as you'll be working on the iPad edition as well as primarily on the paper. It pays pretty well, £30,000 to £38,000 - dependent, we're guessing, on experience.

Apply via the Gorkana website here.

Anything you can do...

A long time ago, FleetStreetBlues once worked on a local paper with no local rivals, and it was a miserable experience. Journalists always work best when they're motivated to get the scoop ahead of the other guy - a little friendly rivalry is the lifeblood of most newsrooms.

And so to Croydon, where that friendly rivalry has been very much in display since the launch of the new-look This is Croydon website, powered largely by the Croydon Advertiser.

Central to the new site is a striking rainbow-coloured nav bar, used twice at the top of the page, to flag up wider content offered on the site other than news - sport, forums, jobs, homes, that kind of thing.

And so over to the website of the Croydon Guardian, the Croydon Advertiser's sworn rivals, whose website looks much like it always did - with one striking, rainbow-coloured addition.

No nonsense indeed.

A short break

FleetStreetBlues is taking a short and much overdue break, and will return on Monday 20 June.

Work experience woe: 'Don't you know I'm the fucking star?'

The Wannabe Hacks have kicked off their long-awaited countdown of the top 50 journalism work experience placements - and having set themselves an ambitious target, they've collected a very respectable 76 nominations. Here, meanwhile, we're still wallowing in some wonderful anecdotes of work experience woe - and while the next one isn't necessarily strictly journalism, it's an entertaining tale of working on a BBC light entertainment show.

Send your story today to fleetstreetblues@hotmail.co.uk.

Your series on work experience woe reminded me of the time when I was employed by BBC Wales as an Assistant Floor Manager (AFM). We'd occasionally go to work on Bristol-based shows – not formal work experience, but a great way to extend one's expertise 'on the job'.

On one such occasion, the principal guest on a light entertainment show was none other than Shirley Bassey (or Burly Chassis, as she was affectionately known in Cardiff). Rehearsals that day were particularly difficult – both technically, and because Bassey was evidently in a bad mood, and under-performing.

The lady messed up, and the rehearsal came to a halt, yet again. The Bristol-based Floor Manager (FM), Jeff, passed on a few whispered suggestions from the director. Bassey retorted: "What! Don't you know, I'm the fucking star!"

The studio froze.

Jeff, with immaculate timing, replied: "Well, twinkle, fucking twinkle!", and turned on his heel.

The studio froze again, until the musicians broke the tension by re-starting the song.

That evening, in the BBC bar, I don't think Jeff had to buy himself a single drink!

A hundred not out

Regular readers will know we're huge fans of Pitching the World, the brilliantly written blog penned by a freelance journalist aiming to pitch all 642 magazines in the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook, in an endearingly half-arsed manner.

We're such big fans, in fact, that back in December, when we were in the mood for compiling arbitrary lists, we picked Pitching the World as one of our ten favourite journalism blogs - and here's what we said about it then.

Back in the day, before you ever did your first door knock, wrote your first NIB or covered your first council meeting, there was probably a time when journalism seemed an impossibly glamorous career. Journalists, you imagined, would be free-spirited, independent types, with an enviable way with words, a jet-setting lifestyle, an exploitable expense account and a 'fuck you' attitude which made them exactly the kind of person you wanted to be. 

It probably didn't work out like that, of course. Journalism for the most part is a bit more Paul Dacre and a little less Ernest Hemingway than most of us imagined. But for a bit of pure escapism, you can always turn to the next entry in our list of the UK's ten best journalism blogs - Pitching the World.

Well, that's all still true - but since we wrote that, Pitching the World has been having a hard time of it. He writes a lot about drinking, and living in his Nan's dining room in Boscombe, and fond memories of having sex in bins.

And now, on his hundredth post, he's ready to chuck it all in.

This, I fear, could be my final post. I’ve had enough. Enough of being a writer or a journalist or whatever the hell it is I’ve turned into and I am on the verge of quitting. The reasons are too numerous and complicated to go into, but let it be known that I’ve had enough. Enough enough enough...

I’m either going to go back to painting and building walls for a living or I’m going to get a National Express coach to Paris for £25 and just hang around and try and find my own adventure. I don’t know what I’ll do for money. I’ve thought as far as dancing like a bear in a square somewhere. I know, I know: I’m having a breakdown.

Journalists don't do support groups or self-help, of course. For the most part, even nowadays, we do drinking, but it sounds as though that may not be the solution to Pitching the World's problems, given that he's tried it already, repeatedly.

But he's a colleague - a very talented, brilliant colleague - who's fallen on harder times than any of us deserve, and we'd like to show him a little solidarity. So whatever you're doing right now, we'd ask you to stop, head on over to his blog, and leave a message. Or better yet, if you're a commissioning editor, offer him some work. Or hell, even a job. Anything to keep him from dancing with bears.

Quote of the Day: 13 June 2011

Alistair Campbell, on the fallout from the Sunday Times' made-up John Prescott's quotes:

Of course there is and always has been a role for anonymous quotes in journalism. But whereas it used to be that the balance of probability was that they were genuine, I think these days the balance of probability is that they are not. This is actually another problem for the press and its credibility, about which it seems to want to do little to redress as it continues its hurtle towards increased irrelevance.

Chief Reporter - Chelmsford Weekly News

Newsquest titles the Chelmsford Weekly News and the Brentwood Weekly News are looking for a chief reporter.

You'll be based in Grays in Essex and should be a senior reporter looking for a first step into management. You'll need to be NCE qualified, have a nose for news and crucially 'local knowledge is an advantage'.

Applying looks like a particularly tortuous process, - you need to hunt for the right vacancy on the Echo News website, then download an application form and post it off, quoting vacancy 'VN21'. The place to start, in any event, is here. Deadline Friday 17 June.

Inside A&N Media

The last time we flagged up a blog written by a Daily Mail insider, it didn't go too well. 'Inside the Daily Mail' was taken down within a couple of hours, and all trace of it has now been erased from the web. So there's no saying how long this will last.

A&N Media News is a new blog written by a decidedly disgruntled journalist, aka 'Mike Hack', over at A&N Media, publishers of the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday, the Metro and Northcliffe Media's regional titles. It's two posts old so far, with the first one a withering blast of invective aimed squarely at senior management, whom he blames for 'the elimination of the majority of DMGT press plants and the removal of Northcliffe’s local distribution operations'.

This has contributed to the situation where once great local papers now print overnight with no possibility of informing their dwindling readership of anything up to date. This has lead to them being little better than fish and chip wrapping before they hit the streets and the readers do notice... and vote with their feet.

The blog is billed as 'published at an internet cafe near you', so we can only assume that the anonymous writer is fully aware of the wrath that's about to descend upon them. Check it out while it's still there.

Anyone for tennis?

Conspiracy theory of the day goes to the following email which arrived, as these things do, out of the blue on Friday.

It would need to be confirmed, as I'm not sure. But Dave Cameron is at Queen's watching the Nadal vs Tsonga match next to a guy in a mack and shades who looks a bit like Andy Coulson!

To repeat, I'm not sure if it is actually Coulson, but if he is, you would've thought he'd be the last person Dave should be hanging out with in public!

Now you'd think that checking out this kind of scurrilous rumour would require an extensive contacts book and a Deep Throat inside the Queen's Club. But it turns out Google pretty much has it covered.

There's a video for a split second here, and then the photo below.

On balance, we're not sure if it's Mr Coulson either, and in fact it's almost certainly not. But if it is, then the shades and mack with an upturned collar are a nice touch. You read it here first...

That Asda be a mistake

First, a disclaimer - this isn't new. It's actually a page from the Daily Mirror in 2008, but for some reason it went viral yesterday. (Given that Father's Day is next week, who knows, it could be a bit of Asda astroturfing?)

In any event, it's still worth a re-run, as a classic advertising fail. Every good journalist knows about the wife-beating question. Now ad departments do too.

Deputy Art Editor - Nuts

Now this job sounds like fun - an opportunity to work on an 'art desk that tattoos pigs, sets fire to layouts and makes headlines out of dead sharks. (There's probably also lots of breasts). Yes, Nuts is recruiting, and they're looking for a deputy art editor.

You'll need to be an experienced, creative, senior designer, with first class photoshop skills and Adobe Creative Suite know-how. You'll also need an HND, degree or equivalent in design.

Apply with CV, covering letter and examples of your work to recruitment@ipcmedia.com.

The Jemima Khan backlash continues

So Jemima Khan wasn't exactly expecting Fleet Street to cheer to the rafters after her appointment as the Indy's new associate editor.

ps. I know I'm v lucky to get this gig. Any snarky comments make me want to try even harder to be an asset to my favourite paper. #dreamjobWed Jun 08 15:19:11 via webJemima Khan
Jemima_Khan

But even so, it's fair to say that many already in her new-found profession have been rather unimpressed. Take this widely-retweeted jibe from the Guardian's Sarfraz Manzoor, for instance, or the comments over at the Press Gazette.

And now this, from one very angry FleetStreetBlues reader:

Heard about Jemima Khan becoming Associate Editor of the Independent. What a complete and utter farce. She gets the gig on the back of guest editing the New Statesman for a week?! What sort of message does this send out to hardworking journalists across the country who have spent years perfecting and honing their trade?

'Don't bother slogging away and working hard at your trade. Make sure you are born into a wealthy family with lots of connections, pretend to edit a magazine for five days and there you go - one of the most coveted positions in UK journalism on a plate.'
Furthermore, it's the Independent and the New Statesman - two publications that continually scream out about the lack of social mobility and opportunities for graduates in this country. Talk about practising what you preach... Pure hypocrisy.

An absolute joke. Another example of the complete lack of meritocracy in journalism.

Yours,

An incredibly disillusioned journalist

Journalism? Anyone Khan do it...

FleetStreetBlues would like to offer its heartfelt congratulations to Jemima Khan on her new job as associate editor at the Independent. Proof positive that if you're willing to make some sacrifices, get the right qualifications and put the hours in, the big breaks in journalism are there to be had.

Oh, wait a minute...

Work experience woe: Smack junkies, bagpipers and stalking Sean Connery

The second of our submissions on memorable work experience placements comes from 'Clark Kent', a young Scottish journalist. If you've got an anecdote - long or short - which you'd like to share, email us at fleetstreetblues@hotmail.co.uk.

I had a week of work experience at the Edinburgh Evening News a couple of years ago and then got invited back to do some paid work for a while afterwards.

The first week of this I was sent out quite a few times. Firstly to a public toilet in the Grassmarket, said to be popular with Buckfast drinkers and smack junkies (didn't find any there).

Then I was sent to the Royal Mile because we'd been told some bagpipers were rebelling against a recent council-imposed ban on them performing there (didn't find them either).

I was then sent to the Caledonian Hotel (the Caley is to Edinburgh what the Savoy is to London) because Sean Connery was staying there and we'd heard that the fire alarm had gone off there and Sean had been forced to stand in the street in his T-shirt and boxer shorts in the rain with the other guests until the fire brigade had given them the all-clear.

I was told to ask anyone I saw going in or coming out of the hotel if this happened and if they had spoken to Sean whilst it was going on (We were hoping he'd said something like: 'I'm going to kick the pish out of the bashtard who shet thish off'). I was also given advice on what to do if I met 007 himself. I waited outside the hotel in the rain for three hours with a photographer and spoke to 30-odd people, none of whom would confirm the story. Eventually I though 'sod it' and went back to the office.

On my walk back though I met two pipers sticking it to the man and got a page lead out of it so I suppose it wasn't a totally wasted trip.

Features Editor - NME

Legendary music magazine NME is hiring a features editor.

It's a powerful role for a 'passionate and knowledgeable new music fan with expert editing and writing skills, great music industry contacts, highly efficient planning skills and endless brilliant ideas'. Previous magazine or online experience is a must.

Apply with CV, covering letter and a detailed plan of five features you'd run in NME next week to recruitment@ipcmedia.com. 

Every cut you make

We've heard plenty about the outrageous demands of superstar newspaper columnists before, but can the following really be true?

News reaches FleetStreetBlues' ears of a highly-paid writer on a major national who is so precious about her copy that she demands - and is allowed - to watch online while the poor subs go to work on her 2,000 words of blather to ensure it fits the space. What's more, she's free to intervene when she sees some editing she's not happy with. What would Giles Coren say?

Quote of the Day: 6 June 2011

Former Northern Echo editor Peter Sands' first editor, Robin Thompson, on the uselessness of the overwritten drop intro:

'Remember Peter, this is newspapers. The only walk of life where the orgasm comes first.'

News Editor - Lancashire Telegraph

The Lancashire Telegraph, a two-edition daily, is hiring a news editor.

You'll need to be a qualified senior with newsdesk experience, preferably on a daily, and will need a 'wide range of newsgathering and leadership skills'.

(They're also recruiting a political reporter, if the news editing role doesn't suit).

It's a ridiculously convoluted application process - write 'with a CV for an application form' to the editor's secretary Tracy Cunliffe at tracy.cunliffe@lancashire.newsquest.co.uk. Deadline Monday 4 July.

Work experience woe: 'I spared a page three girl's modesty'

As promised, here's the first of a number of cracking anecdotes we've had in from journalists paying their dues on work experience - and it's clearly not all vox pops and NIBs. Send yours in today to fleetstreetblues@hotmail.co.uk.

First day doing working experience at a certain red top tabloid I was taken to a nearby studio to have my photograph taken (thankfully not for page three) but to wear a paper hat and hold a paper fan made from the front page to illustrate how readers could keep cool during the current summer heat wave for the price of the paper.

I also spent a day in charge of the starfish sparing the modesty of a wannabe page three girl and another keeping a former lover of James Hewitt happy while hair and make-up accidentally melted her fake hair extensions. 

It was an eye-opening experience!

MailOnline still can't count

Oh dear. Yesterday we pointed out a small error in a MailOnline story about a Facebook invitation to a 16th birthday party that got a bit out of hand - they said that 15,000 people had turned up unexpectedly, instead of the still-remarkable 1,500 who actually did. This morning, they've corrected it. They corrected it wrong.

As is made clear repeatedly further down the story and in the photo captions, 15,000 people responded to the Facebook invitation, and 1,500 - not 15,000 - actually turned up. Suddenly those 66 million unique monthly browsers is looking a little, well... are they sure?

There were a lot of them, anyway

It's become a staple story of the internet age - teenager invites some friends round to a party, those friends tell their friends on Facebook, and before you know it a small suburban semi has become Party Central for the whole county. The Daily Mail has a classic example today - only, as one sharp-eyed reader points out, they can't seem to make their mind up about how many people turned up.

The event also attracted 100 police officers, apparently. Or who knows, it may have been 1,000...

The Sunday scoop: Ryan Giggs 'had affair with brother's wife'

The Sunday Times' piece on star academics forming an alternative to Oxbridge is a pretty decent story, and we're reliably informed that the much-missed Sunday Sport boasted a picture of 'up Pippa Middleton's skirt', which surely suggests the much-missed red top is back to its, er, best.

But the clear winner of this week's Sunday scoop award has to be the News of the World once again, for its front-page story alleging that Ryan Giggs had an eight-year affair with his brother's wife (if you don't pay for the NOTW, you can read the gory details over at MailOnline).

Is it true? We couldn't possibly say. Is there a public interest? Almost certainly not. But then that ship's probably already sailed...

Roger Boyes reclaims his name

Remember Roger Boyes? Roger is the highly-regarded, prize-winning Berlin correspondent of The Times who achieved internet notoriety last year after his byline appeared, somewhat unfortunately, on a piece about the Vienna Boys' Choir sex abuse scandal.

Well, today he writes a piece for The Times (paywall of course) in which he explains how he took on a 'reputation management company' to clean up his Google profile.

It seems to have worked, too - Google Roger Boyes now and his Wikipedia profile appears top, shorn of any references to his most read work. There's even a Youtube video to help with a crafty piece of SEO.

The result: good news forces out bad, a kind of digital exorcism. So it has set me up with a Facebook page, created a swanky new website (rogerboyes.co.uk), signed up for LinkedIn, put up a biographical YouTube video. The next stage will be to use blogs and Twitter to post links to these sites. And hey presto! The smutty jokes will largely disappear from view.

So far, so good - but Roger's far from satisfied, lamenting a little pompously that he's had to let 'strangers into my life in order to shield a modest professional reputation'.

Here’s the hitch though: I never wanted to join Facebook. Now I am signed on (and have no access to it), accumulating friends who presumably have been put up to it by the reputation managers. It’s not me, it doesn’t feel like me. And the YouTube video, though duly positive, just looks daft. So it seems that the only way I can fight the lasting effects of my Twitter ambush is by exposing myself more online.

Exposing himself more online? A slightly unfortunate turn of phrase...

'Polly, put Kettle on'

In the wake of the Polly Toynbee tea tale, our appeal for your stories of work experience woe have yielded a few nice little anecdotes already, which we'll be running over the coming days - and if you'd like to send one in, anonymously if you wish, the email's fleetstreetblues@hotmail.co.uk.

But before that, we couldn't help but think this comment from one of our readers in the national press deserved a bigger audience.

Talking of Toynbee and tea, the story goes that Martin Kettle used to sit at an adjacent desk. The newsdesk would take childish delight in phoning Ms Toynbee to say: "Polly, put Kettle on." 

It's probably not true, but it ought to be.

From our correspondent in Kigali, sort of

When you're a foreign correspondent, being on the spot means everything - and newspapers and news wires are always quick to highlight wherever possible that they have a man or woman on the ground. But this Bloomberg story on a call for free speech legislation in Rwanda is a curious one:

To contact the reporter on this story: Heather Murdock in Kigali via Nairobi

Graham Holliday, a foreign correspondent who actually is based in Kigali, is unimpressed:

How can a reporter be "in Kigali via Nairobi"? - see byline - http://bloom.bg/jAUfZbFri Jun 03 05:55:29 via TweetDeckGraham Holliday
noodlepie

A quick search suggests it may be pretty standard practice at Bloomberg - sometimes, it seems, the reporter's not even in Nairobi, as this story filed 'in Nairobi via Johannesburg' suggests. Anyone at Bloomberg care to fill us in?

Reporter - Goal.com

Here's a rare opportunity in the ultra-competitive field of football journalism. Football website Goal.com is hiring a reporter.

No specific qualification requirements, but you'll need a 'proven track record in breaking stories' and a bulging contacts book. You'll also need to be based close to London.

Apply with CV and covering letter to write@goal.com.

The FleetStreetBlues shop is now open

Regular readers will know that ever since we set this blog up, we've been trying - in a decidedly half-arsed kind of way - to figure out a way of making it pay. And today we can proudly present our latest Big Idea - the FleetStreetBlues shop.

It's fair to say it's still very much a work in progress, and we've only just begun to come up with a couple of designs. (If you have any more ideas - or better yet, you do this kind of thing for a living - give us a shout).

But if you want to publicly challenge the superinjunction culture, identify yourself as a journalist to passing helicopters or simply show your support for the 'Can't write, won't write' campaign while drinking tea, now's your chance. Well, it's a better than a paywall...

Simon Cowell has a Mark Twain moment

Ever wondered what it would be like to read your own obituary? Well, if Simon Cowell happens to catch sight of the Daily Star's front page this morning (and let's face it, he probably won't), he could be forgiven for doing a double-take...

Quote of the Day: 1 June 2011

Hollywood actor and newly-minted privacy campaigner Hugh Grant, from a BBC interview back in 2003.

When I think about actors I know, I’d much rather hear about who they’re shagging than what film they’re doing next.

(Hat tips to both the Press Gazette's Axegrinder blog and Natalie Peck, who's pretty sure she spotted it first and reckons the Press Gazette owes her an acknowledgement. We can't say either way - and who can claim credit for anything on the internet, anyway? Although we can't help noticing that the previous Axegrinder post - again with no apparent attribution - looks a little something like this...)

Tales from the tea boy

Guido Fawkes had a telling piece of tittle-tattle on the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee yesterday (who apparently gets paid an impressive £2,300 a week...)

A reader of his blog wrote:

'When I was glorified tea boy on the Andrew Marr show, Toynbee was the only person who ever made me remake her cup of tea. ‘What have you done? Far too much milk. Could you make me another please.’ Just what you want having been up since five on a Sunday morning.'

There are currently lots of worthy projects underway aimed at improving the lot of those doing journalism work experience. The NUJ, of course, is hoping to claim unpaid workies back pay with its 'Cashback for Interns' campaign. The Wannabe Hacks, meanwhile, are currently drawing up a list of the 50 best journalism placements. But here at FleetStreetBlues we figured we could be a lot less worthy - and have a lot more fun - by simply encouraging you to have a bit of a moan.

We've all done work experience; we've all found it a bit rubbish. So what we want to hear from you is the most thankless task you've ever had to do while you weren't getting paid for the privilege - be it a fussy tea round, vox pops in the rain or transcribing the world's dullest interview.

Email us your tales of woe at fleetstreetblues@hotmail.co.uk - with or without details of the place you were working - and we'll publish the best over the next couple of weeks. Anonymity guaranteed.

Dullard and Mycock: for all your PR needs

Yes, we realise that making cheap jokes about PRs' names is childish, juvenile and completely immature. Fun, too.

In any event, we'd like to thank the reader who emailed us yesterday pointing out that the press office of a major UK charity currently boasts a pair of rather unfortunately-named PRs working side-by-side. (We'll spare their blushes by omitting the link, but we promise, this is definitely for real).

In any event, if you get a call from A. Dullard or her colleague A. Mycock later today, please try not to snigger. It's not big, and it's definitely not clever.

Trainee reporter - Grimsby Telegraph

The Grimsby Telegraph is recruiting a trainee reporter.

The key thing about many local paper trainee vacancies is whether they absolutely insist on an NCTJ qualification - and in this case, while completing a pre-entry course is desirable, it's apparently 'not essential'. You will however need 'a hunger to do the job'.

Apply with CV and covering letter to the editor, Michelle Lalor, at jenny.shipley@gsmg.co.uk. Deadline Monday 11 June.

That was the month that was: May 2011

It was all about superinjunctions in May 2011 - and that was reflected in the top ten most-read stories on this blog.

1. Who is NEJ?

2. Journalist faces jail for naming footballer subject to injunction on Twitter
3. Ryan Giggs photo leads Metro front page
4. 'Bin bagged'
5. The Sunday scoop: The Sunday Herald fronts up big time
6. Daily Star Sunday reveals list of injunctions
7. 'Osama bin Wankin'
8. Quote of the Day: 8 May 2011
9. Giggs gag clears the front pages
10. One hell of a byline

FleetStreetBlues is read by thousands of UK journalists every week - including almost 2,500 who follow us on Twitter, 586 on Facebook and 175 on email (to sign up, fill in the box on the right-hand side). If you'd like to reach that audience, get in touch today at fleetstreetblues@hotmail.co.uk. We're very affordable.