In defence of the death knock

A great column in the Scottish Review sees editor Kenneth Roy recount his days as a stringer for the Daily Record, and the first time he ever had to do a death knock.

One evening the Record dispatched me in a taxi to the tiny village of Allandale, between Falkirk and Kilsyth. I am not sure if Allandale exists any longer; it might well have been swallowed up by a motorway. It scarcely existed even then, except as an unprepossessing row of council houses. A young woman of Allandale – about 20 years old, perhaps, a little older than I was myself – had been killed in a road accident and the Record sent me off in search of the collect pic. 

I approached this assignment with disguised dread; to have confided my fears to the chief reporter of our paper, who acted as treasurer of the local stringers' fund, would have been so wimpish as to be potentially career-damaging. The taxi pulled up outside the house and I sat frozen to the seat for a few minutes. The couple inside had just lost their only daughter. How could I do such a thing as I was now expected to do? Many years later, I have still not answered this interesting question to my own satisfaction, but I finally got out of the taxi and knocked on the door of the grieving.

It's a feeling every cub reporter has experienced at one point or another, and what follows next is told well, but unsurprising. Kenneth was welcomed in by the victim's dazed parents, and his errand a success: 'They agreed without hesitation, asking only that the precious photo should be returned as soon as possible.'

But the column ends on a discordant note:

I ask myself how great a stride there is, ethically, between the collect pic and the interception of a dead girl's mobile phone messages. With the collect pic there was consent of a kind; with phone-hacking there was none. One activity was legal; the other was not. But the essential game is much the same: the satisfaction of popular prurience, the pandering to base human desire.

This is, as we've written before, exactly how the general public often see it - but from a journalists' point of view, maybe not quite right. The death knock or collect pic is a horrible job, but a necessary one - and the reason why is that it's not just 'pandering to base human desire' to cover the death of someone who's died, and to include their photo.

Kenneth was door-knocking on behalf of the Daily Record, a national tabloid, so arguably the grieving parents were indifferent to any coverage from that paper. But local papers at least are almost required by their audience to carry what normally is a genuine tribute to victims of accident and crime - and family and friends mind if they do not.

Everyone is different, of course, and in some cases a reporter knocking on the door can be seen as an intrusion. But the family are grieving because of their recent bereavement, not because they have to deal with the local newspaper on top of the police, the doctor, the funeral home and others. And an article in the local paper is often welcomed - one family's press intrusion is another family's mark of respect.

It's definitely not glamorous, and it's not a fun job, but it is necessary. And it's a long way from phone-hacking.

What it's really like to interview a celebrity - in pictures

Ever wondered what the glamorous world of celebrity journalism is really like? Ever dreamed of getting ten minutes one-on-one with your childhood idol - and the chance to write about it afterwards?

Well, wonder and dream no longer. The Lovelyish blog has a 'GIF story' which breaks it down for you - and it somehow perfectly captures the whole experience. Particularly the Steve Carrell face.

The circular firing squad takes aim

First the News of the World, now Piers Morgan. The phone hacking scandal looks set to claim another big scalp.

Forget the quotes which are being dredged up from years ago to try and definitively nail an admission that everyone's favourite former Fleet Street editor knew and/or encouraged phone hacking.

Instead, look at the end of the supposedly damning quote he gave to Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs, of all places, in 2009 - relating not just to phone hacking but taking covert photographs and raking through bins.

A lot of it was done by third parties. That's not to defend it, because obviously you were running the results of their work. I'm quite happy to have to sit here defending all these things I used to get up to. I simply say the net of people doing it was very wide and certainly encompassed the high and low end of the newspaper market.

Love Piers or loathe him, that's surely exactly right. It also sums up the situation on Fleet Street as a whole. 

Just as we predicted back in January, and just like the MPs' expenses story did, the phone hacking story has spiralled out of all proportion.

Whether or not Piers Morgan was personally implicated in the practice - and on this his explicit denial that he has 'never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any story obtained from hacking a phone' leaves him little room for manouevre - the practice, as this Press Gazette story from 2006 shows so clearly, was extremely widespread throughout Fleet Street.

Now, in 2011, through a combination of dogged investigative journalism from Nick Davies, a desire to take down Rupert Murdoch from the Guardian, a thirst for revenge from MPs and silly season hysteria from the general public, we have collectively woken up and decided it is beyond the pale. Hacking the voicemail of poor Milly Dowler and 7/7 victims was of course an appalling and unjustifiable invasion of privacy - and it was such an appalling and unjustifiable invasion of privacy that all the journalistic 'dark arts', which a few years ago, rightly or wrongly, were commonplace on the wink and the nod, have been tainted by association.

Put bluntly, Piers Morgan is right. Hundreds if not thousands of journalists who have worked on Fleet Street, many of whom are still working on Fleet Street, knew about phone hacking and other underhand - and at the time standard - journalistic practices. Not everyone personally engaged in that kind of activity themselves, of course. But whether you work on a tabloid or a broadsheet, you knew about, or if you didn't your colleague knew about it, and your editor almost certainly knew about it. We need to decide now - journalists, MPs, the police and the public - if we really want to hound out everyone involved, and prosecute everyone to the full extent of the law.

Before he switched to gunning for Piers Morgan, the blogger Guido Fawkes took a philosophical view of phone hacking, arguing that in pursuing the story journalists were acting as a 'Circular Firing Squad'. If we keep pulling the trigger, we all go down...

Sub editors and designers - Daily Mirror

The Daily Mirror is recruiting sub editors and artists for casual shifts.

They would prefer some national newspaper experience, but the main thrust of the ad is reassuringly vague: 'If you are bright and talented we would like to hear from you'.

Apply with CV and covering letter to deputy managing editor Aidan McGurran at aidan.mcgurran@mgn.co.uk.

Churnalism gold and the £3 billion superyacht reels in the nationals hook, line and sinker

There are lots of different definitions of what exactly 'churnalism' is.

It can mean mindlessly regurgitating press releases. It can mean unquestioningly running a story someone else wants you to run without checking the most basic of facts. And at its most blatant, churnalism can mean publishing something which is actually untrue, to someone else's commercial or political advantage.

This example appears to qualify on all three counts.

A few days ago the Liverpool-based company Stuart Hughes issued a press release trumpeting the building of the world's most expensive yacht - a 100ft, Italian-built Baia 100 customised with 100 metric tons of solid gold and platinum. Cue a raft of easy, pun-filled news stories in the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Metro and elsewhere, complete with a credit for the company, and striking photos of the gold-plated vessel in action.

The only journalists who didn't buy it, in fact, were those who actually know about boats. IPC Media's Motor Boat & Yachting ran a sceptical story headed 'The £3 billion golden superyacht: real or fake', which raised a number of questions:

Something about the story didn't sit right with MBY. Perhaps it was because the buyer was named only as an "anonymous Malaysian businessman". Or maybe it was because, according to Forbes, only three people in Malaysia have the kind of cash to buy such a boat, and one of them is discounted because she's a woman...

...Then there's the fact that by adding 100 metric tons to the craft's original 80-ton weight, it would be sitting so low in the water (or more likely under it) so as to make it unusable. Renowned motor boat designer Bernard Olesinski even went as far as to say there was only a "1% chance" of the boat being viable.

Normally that would be the end of it, and there's certainly nothing unusual about the specialist trade press turning their noses up at a story that's made it into the nationals. But this time Motor Boat & Yachting decided to go the extra mile, and put a couple of calls in - and yesterday they ran a follow-up, definitively nailing the story as a fake.

The alleged makers of the yacht, Baia Yachts, told Motor Boat & Yachting the pictures splashed across the national press - and still splashed across the national press' websites - were photoshopped pictures swiped from Baia's own website.

Mario Borselli, sales manager at Baia, told MBY: "Who would believe that a boat would have 100 tons of gold on board? They took some pictures from our website without our permission.'

'We will write him a letter asking him to take them down, but we are not thinking to go legal. It's such a stupid story it's not worth it.'...

...'I can't believe people would believe someone would be so stupid to commission this boat,' Mario from Baia Yachts added.

All in all a classic tale of churnalism, and a cautionary tale for journalists everywhere. As Stewart Campbell, deputy editor of Motor Boat & Yachting puts it, 'What I find amazing is that none of the dozens of websites and newspapers all over the world that reported this story ever thought to call or even email Baia Yachts to see if it was true - all their numbers and email addresses are right there on the website. One five-minute phone call was all it took.'

Appalling, yes - but amazing, no. Sadly this is the way journalism so often works - and what's surprising here isn't that a rubbish story has made it into print, but that it's actually been spotted. There are plenty more £3 billion superyachts in the sea.

Has Russia declared cyber-war on the Guardian?

What with Wikileaks and phone-hacking, it's not as though the Guardian hasn't been making enough enemies in high places lately, but now there's a new one to add to the list. King's Place is taking on the Kremlin.

Earlier this year, the Guardian's Moscow correspondent Luke Harding became the first British staff journalist to be removed from Russia since the Cold War, after reporting on allegations that Russia had become a 'virtual mafia state'. (His explusion was briefly revoked, then reinstated again via a limited visa days later). 

Since then he's been working elsewhere, live-blogging from Germany for example, and intermittently updating his Twitter account, @lukeharding1968.

Until yesterday, that is, when - and thanks to the excellent Jon Swaine for spotting this - a virtual clone of Luke's Twitter account (same picture, similar intro, same tweets up until 18 July) appeared under the handle @Iukeharding1968. That's capital I-ukeharding1968 - almost impossible to tell apart. And crucially, the new @Iukeharding1968 account is now pumping out a stream of Kremlin press releases, in English.

Who's responsible? Well, there's a possible precedent with the case of the Independent's reporter Shaun Walker, who earlier this month had his Twitter account cloned, possibly by the Belarus KGB, while covering protests in Belarus. All eyes are now on the other FSB...

Scream 2

If the Sunday Times' cartoon a couple of days ago was eerie, then the cartoon in today's Irish Daily Mail is eerily familiar. Wonder where they got that idea?

Hat tip: Gavan Reilly

The geeks shall inherit the Flat Earth

Yesterday saw the publication of the MediaGuardian's annual beauty parade 'guide to the most powerful people in television, radio, newspapers, magazines, digital media, media business, advertising, marketing and PR'.

As with any of these lists, the MediaGuardian 100 was simultaneously flawed and compelling. But one thing was very noticeable - despite the traditional dominance of print media, and the MediaGuardian's own preference for the bright lights of television, the rise and rise of all things online is now complete.

It's not just that four of the top five represent digital media - Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple - and are all Americans at that. It's apparent much further down the list, with Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes, comfortably in front of the editors of The Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Sun. Not a bad decision, or even a surprising one necessarily - but when you stop to think about it, pretty significant nonetheless.

Obviously there were omissions, those somehow deemed not as powerful or worthy as Caitlin Moran (85) or Lord Sugar (99), and the Guardian being the Guardian, they've set up a comment thread to discuss who should be nominated for the 101st spot. For our money, the obvious omission is one Nick Davies - the guy who broke the phone hacking story, after several of years of trying.

Love him or loathe him - and to be honest, after what happened to the News of the World, there are plenty of loathers out there - you have to respect any investigative journalist who's caused as much trouble in the corridors of power as he has in the past twelve months. If Nick Robinson (29) can make it in, then there surely ought to be room for the man who's done more to singlehandedly alter the shape of this year's power list than anyone else in recent memory.

The eyes of a devil

Ever seen that thing that happens when you take a photo with a flash and the eyes come out all red?

No? Never?

Then you're going to find tomorrow's Daily Star front page truly chilling.

Deputy Editor - Boston Standard

Lincolnshire weekly paper the Boston Standard - the website of which still promises 'all of the explosion latest', after the explosion earlier this month which was surely Boston's biggest-ever breaking news event - is recruiting a deputy editor.

You'll need to have 'effective people management skills' and to have proven yourself in a busy newsroom - the main part of the job seems to be running the newsdesk, as well as supporting the editor more strategically.

Apply with CV and covering letter to the editor, Stephen Stray, at stephen.stray@jpress.co.uk. Deadline Friday 5 August.

Wannabe Hacks looking to pass the baton

It's one of the best, most engaging and most active journalism websites out there. In fact, we like it so much that back in December we crowned it the second best journalism blog in the UK, when we wrote the following:

When the Student, the Freelancer, the Intern, the Chancer and the Detective (since replaced by the Maverick) converged on the Big Smoke to find their fame and fortune, the Wannabe Hacks immediately stood out with a certain sense of style and swagger - and they haven't looked back...

...The question for 2011 of course is whether they can keep up the punishing pace they've set themselves, particularly as some evolve into fully-fledged hackdom and start to get to grips with full-time jobs.

Well, the Wannabe Hacks have indeed kept up that punishing pace, but today they answer that question in full as they reveal they plan to pass on the baton to five new wannabe hacks at the start of the new academic year.

We’re hoping to have five clued-up, switched-on people that are committed to becoming journalists. 

We want a range of different pathways into journalism (that is, after all, what the site is about, the different ways to get into the industry) as we won’t to be sticking with the five roles we’ve currently got (e.g. The Student, The Intern etc). 

We don’t necessarily want five people from London because we realise that journalism exists and flourishes outside the capital. 

We’d like someone who can bring ideas and be creative but can work well within a small team. 

And we’d need people who are 100% committed to the site. That might mean staying up till 1am if needs be to write that piece you promised you’d write and it might mean juggling things with friends to meet the other Hacks for a drink to talk about how the site is progressing. In a busy week we might do 8 hours of hacks stuff (1.5hrsish each week night) so if that’s too much, maybe this isn’t for you.

To be honest, we're a little daunted at the idea that running a successful journalism blog needs to take one and a half hours a day - FleetStreetBlues has seriously been slacking - but the hard work's paid off and helped each of them get a job, which is surely the aim of any wannabe hack. Find out more here.

Team Guardian asks for your support

They've tried print, they've tried online, they've tried running events membership schemes - now the Guardian has hit on a new way to make money. They're asking for your 'support'.

A new article appeared on the Guardian website on Friday outlining all the different ways you can give the Guardian money, but under a very curious headline: 'Six ways you can support the Guardian'.

Now, bear in mind this is essentially a list of services the Guardian wants to sell you. The Telegraph website, for instance, sticks with either 'Offers' or 'Subscriber'. But the implication from the wording on the Guardian site is very different. Forget the traditional exchange of money for goods or services, this isn't about that. This is about getting on Team Guardian, backing the good guys who exposed phone hacking and Wikileaks. Think of it as fair trade journalism.

It's not quite getting out the begging bowl - not quite. But it is subtly and deliberately changing the whole proposition involved in buying a newspaper or joining a newspaper club. It's more, perhaps, like joining a political party or cause. Welcome to the Guardianistas - thankyou for your support.

Will it work? Well, knowing the Guardian's target audience, it seems like a pretty shrewd marketing gimmick, but actually getting the Guardianistas to cough up may be another matter. The Guardian Media Group had operating losses of £33m last year.

Poll result: Reimagining The Scream

We thought on balance the Sunday Times' cartoon was brilliant - most of you were less impressed. Although this reader did have a point...

@fleetstreetblue Insensitive BUT brilliant?Sun Jul 24 18:24:33 via SeesmicSam Burnett
sam_burnett

Reimagining The Scream

The Sunday Times goes with a very dark cartoon on its main op-ed pages today, drawn by Gerald Scarfe - and it's prompted some fierce debate online after criticism from Channel 4 News technology correspondent Ben Cohen, who argued 'mass murder seems more than a little inappropriate for parody'.

FleetStreetBlues doesn't quite agree - we don't really think it's parody, and while undeniably chilling, it might just be the right side of genius - but we're interested to hear what you make of it. Let us know in the poll at the top right, or in the comments below...

Chief Sub Editor - The Times of Malta

The Times and Sunday Times of Malta - both English-language papers - are recruiting a new chief sub.

It's clear from the advert it's a fairly wide-ranging role, incorporating line-management, page layout and a fair amount of rewriting, as many of the paper's writers won't have English as a first language. Ideally they're looking for an experienced chief sub who can start in September - the job comes with a 'competitive' salary and assistance with relocation and accommodation. Interviews will be held in London.

Apply with CV and covering letter to HR director Matthew Naudi at hr@timesofmalta.com. Deadline Tuesday 2 August.

Sun blames 'Al Qaeda' for Norway shootings

Some truly horrific images on the front pages this morning, as newspapers covered the massacre in Norway. 

The full scale of the tragedy and its likely cause only became apparent this morning, of course, and in the absence of hard facts on deadline, papers were forced to risk being out of date - or guess. The Sun guessed. Bad call.

Quote of the Day: 22 July 2011

Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, makes the same point, using the same example, as FleetStreetBlues did two weeks ago, as he argues in The Times that journalists must be allowed to break the rules (paywall):

One recent Panorama uncovered appalling abuse of patients at the Winterbourne View in Bristol. The programme led to arrests and an immediate stop to the abuse, as well as to an overdue national debate about standards and oversight of all care homes. It was a serious piece of work, manifestly undertaken in the public interest. Yet it necessarily involved secret filming and someone posing as a care worker.

Inside News Corp's codes of conduct

In his evidence session earlier this week, Rupert Murdoch made much of the fact that the News of the World made up only a very small proportion of News Corp's global activities - less than 1% in fact. But he was clear on one point:

Invading people's privacy by listening to their voicemail is wrong. Paying police officers for information is wrong. They are inconsistent with our codes of conduct and neither has any place, in any part of the company I run.

Well, a News Corp employee and FleetStreetBlues reader has been in touch regarding those codes of conduct - and while there is indeed no mention of phone hacking or bribing police officers, we couldn't help smile at the way the pamphlet, which went out to staff in May this year, was illustrated.

Imagine for a second you're the HR person responsible for putting it together, and you're looking for a picture to go with a page on some serious ethical issues, and you're aware of the repeated allegations about phone hacking at the News of the World and you have photos from the whole of the global News Corp family to choose from. Is this really the pic and the caption to choose?

UPDATE: Turns out the HR type definitely has a sense of humour. Check out who's flying the flag for equal opportunities.

Ramsay Street blues, in defence of the dark arts and the footballer expose with a difference: Read all about it

A quick round-up from some things we've seen or been sent in the last few days:

• How much little do local journalists get paid? Jim Oldfield, editor of the weekly South Yorkshire Times, has revealed all - and for a man with 37 years' experience in national and local newspapers, it's really not enough
  
• The Press Gazette has launched a campaign petition to stand up for the 'vast majority of Britain's journalists' who 'work hard to tell their readers the truth under increasinly tough conditions. It's basically a slightly more wordy version of the 'I'm a hack not a hacker' T-shirt - but we love the use of the word 'waspish'
  
• If you've wondered how phone hacking's been going down in Rupert Murdoch's home country, then this is a few days old but worth a read: 'Fleet Street? More like Ramsay Street'.
  
• Over on the Hackery Blog, Jamie Thunder argues in defence of the journalistic dark arts.
  
• And finally, this front page is a couple of years old now, but we saw it on Twitter and it made us smile. It's a red top splashing on a Premiership footballer story, complete with an offer for a 'free tackle pull out' - and it's totally not what you think it is.

Nurse nicked

After two weeks of phone hacking madness, today was the day journalists remembered that news doesn't have to be about newspapers - and with the Greek bailout summit looming and a developing famine in Somalia, not a moment too soon. But the story dominating most of this morning's front pages is somewhat closer to home - the case of the nurse arrested on suspicion of murdering three patients at Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport.

FleetStreetBlues has no idea, of course, if 27-year-old Rebecca Leighton is guilty of what she's suspected of. But we do know that access to her Facebook account has given the papers - broadsheets and tabloids alike -  instant and detailed access to her recent private life, plus the gallery of posed photos strewn across every newsagent in the UK this morning. Here's hoping she's not the next Chris Jefferies...


UPDATE: Most of the papers have closed comments on the online versions of the nurse story - but readers of The Times don't seem overly impressed. 'I didn't realise I'd subscribed to a red top,' says one. 'Now we know where the finest NOTW reporters ended up,' says another. 'Yes, yes, but what do her voicemail messages say?' asks a third. Ouch.

Back to school for the Oxford Mail

In the frenetic, 24-7 world of online journalism, it feels a little mean to flag up a single spelling mistake. But as a sharp-eyed reader points out, there are some words journalists really can't afford to misspell - and this is one of them.

Repeat after us, Oxford Mail. Education, education, education...

Sub-Editor - Metro

Ever wondered how acres of wire copy is fashioned into that free paper you read on the Tube each morning? Well, it's all down to the Metro's team of subs, who rewrite and re-purpose it - and now they have a vacancy.

You'll need to have experience ideally on a national or a large regional paper, good knowledge of Adobe InCopy and preferably Adobe InDesign, and above all you've have to be able to rewrite copy brilliantly as well as edit it.

The salary's up to £32,000, on a twelve-month contract 'with the potential to transfer to a permanent contract'.

Apply with CV and covering letter to opportunities@ukmetro.co.uk. Deadline Monday 1 August.

The Daily Show does Piegate

'Who is Louise Boat?'

Murdoch eats humble pie

The Telegraph goes with the obvious option - but in a frankly ridiculously large font. On Monday The Times set a new record with the size of its front page headline. This story can't get any bigger, can it?

Falling standards at the Telegraph picture desk

When it comes to journalism, FleetStreetBlues does words, not pictures. But from time to time for the purposes of this blog we venture into Paint.net - and it always looks a bit rubbish. Now it turns out national newspaper websites do exactly the same.

A reader alerts us to what has to be one of the most hilariously inappropriate pictures we've ever seen to go with a story online, courtesy of the Telegraph website last week.

The story, bear in mind, was a sober report from the inquest into the death last September of Jimi Heselden, owner of the Segway company, who was killed after reversing a Segway off a cliff.

Slightly ironic, it's true, but given the fact that a man had died surely deserving of a bit of gravitas and straight reporting. Instead of which, the Telegraph's readers got - without any further explanation - the following picture.

As our reader writes:

Budget cuts at the Telegraph leading to DIY graphics? Perhaps a really young summer intern? It could only be enhanced with a stick figure going 'Aaargh!'

The real hackers attack

With all the attention paid lately to journalists phone 'hacking', it's perhaps not surprising that the real hackers have felt left out - and now they've hit back. LulzSec have apparently taken down a raft of News International sites, including The Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun, the old News of the World site and News International itself.

This morning the sites listed above are just down, but before they collapsed entirely readers of the Sun were directed to the spoof news story below, supposedly reporting Rupert Murdoch's death.

Given that they've been able to take down a series of high-profile websites - it's the first hack of a major UK newspaper's website - apparently at will, the technical genius and awesome computer skills of LulzSec is not in doubt. They still can't do apostrophes.

The Times opts for record-breaking headline

Despite the difficult position it's found itself in as a News International paper, The Times has been quietly earning plaudits for its unflinching phone hacking coverage, and this morning was no exception.

According to design editor Jon Hill, the 164-point headline was a new record for Fleet Street's paper of record (the next biggest, for any production geeks out there, was apparently the 160-point 'Yes we can' on Obama's election).

The only problem, of course, is that this story looks like it's going to get bigger and bigger. Is the font size going to be able to keep up?

Intern - Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Ever since it first watched the X-Files, FleetStreetBlues has quite fancied being able to pick up the phone and casually say it worked for 'the Bureau' - and now here's your chance to do just that. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the not-for-profit organisation based out of City University, is running a competition to recruit its next journalist, with a three-month paid internship up for grabs.

To enter, you have to write a 1,000 word article on any topic fitting within one of four areas - Corporate Watch, Health, Human Rights or Open Society.

Send your entry and CV to competition@thebureauinvestigates.com, with 'Competition' in the subject line. Deadline Friday 12 August.

Coming to a cinema near you soon

You won't believe who they've got playing Rebekah Brooks....

Quote of the Day: 16 July 2011

Dorking and Leatherhead Advertiser chief reporter Sam Blackledge, writing in the Guardian, on why local hacks can hold their heads high:

Our profession is in crisis, and it is clear the story is far from over. So-called experts will continue to huff and puff about "the media" needing to be cleaned up. But there are hundreds of creative, honest, hardworking hacks up and down the country putting in the hours to keep local papers going as the Murdoch empire crumbles.

FOI-ing Jack the Ripper and Margaret Thatcher's obit: Read all about it

Here's a few of the things we're reading this sunny Friday:

• How long do you have to wait to FOI the names of police informants? Between 120 and 350 years, apparently - and it's all Jack the Ripper's fault...

• Preparing obituaries for famous people is one of the less glamorous jobs in journalism - all the papers do it, but they don't often talk about it. So this is a collector's item - Brian Whelan, the guy who broke the Johann Hari story, has what would have been the News of the World's commemorative tribute to Margaret Thatcher (who's still very much with us, of course)

• The Harry's Place blog has a long post about a work experience row and claims of diva-like behaviour over at DIVA magazine

• Forget formal journalism training - you can learn a lot just by listening to people who really their stuff. For all journalism students out there, Steve Dyson's page-by-page analysis of the Sunday Sun is well worth a read over at HoldTheFrontPage

• And OK, one on phone-hacking, because we couldn't avoid it entirely - check out Adam Westbrook on the Guardian's apology to the Sun and why journalists shouldn't gloat in other people's failings

One in four MailOnline subs can't count

Journalists of every persuasion are notoriously bad at anything to do with maths. Sometimes they fail to appreciate the statistical complexities of Government economics data or a particularly challenging scientific paper. Sometimes they just get it wrong.

FleetStreetBlues reader and financial journalist Shannon Hawthorne alerts us to a particularly poor piece of number-crunching courtesy of the Daily Mail, which yesterday told us that 'One in four Britons will contract cancer'.

All well and good, until you get to the actual figures.

Figures obtained by Macmillan Cancer Support show 42 per cent of us will develop cancer compared to around 32 per cent 30 years ago.

Time to get the calculators out...

The crackdown begins

We've said it before and we'll say it again - this isn't going to end well.

Until now, the phone hacking story has been every Guardian reporter's wet dream - nailing the News of the World, Murdoch on the run, the police properly investigating tabloid misdemeanors. Now comes the bad bit.

We already know the Press Complaints Commission will go. Roy Greenslade cheerfully expects that the body which replaces it 'will be much the same as the current commission', but that's not necessarily the case - politicians' tails are up, and right now they have a mandate as never before to clamp down on journalism in the grey areas. Will journalists have to take big investigative stories before a committee before publishing them, for instance? That idea's not as far-fetched as it was two weeks ago.

And while for most journalists the Press Complaints Commission is neither here nor there, and so we're not really bothered about what replaces it either, what about this?

The prime minister said he would be consulting Sir Gus O'Donnell, the cabinet secretary, on amending the ministerial code. This would require ministers to "record all meetings with newspaper and other media proprietors, senior editors and executives – regardless of the nature of the meeting". 

Cameron later told Ed Miliband that he would also consult on whether to extend this to journalists. "On transparency, I am consulting on the proposal to make much more transparent what ministers do, including not just business meetings, but social meetings. It is worth asking whether we should go further on meetings with journalists, as the police might want to do."

Recording all meetings with all journalists is an impractical and no doubt fanciful idea - but you can see why Government spin doctors would want it to happen, and even if it doesn't come to pass, the direction of travel is clear. Press officers are going to get more powerful, journalists are going to have less access. Even Guardian journalists.

Leaving Fortress Wapping

You can also watch Colin Myler say goodbye here.

How to sell more newspapers? Use your loaf

Why should you buy the South London Press this week? Well, if you're going to the Lambeth County Show this weekend, there's a curiously practical newspaper giveaway on offer.

The South London Press will once again be at the biggest free family event this side of the river.

Look out for us in the Charities Area, where we will be offering a go on the bouncy castle for the kids, a loaf of Kingsmill bread or a bottle of water with every copy of the paper. And, if it rains, festival-goers will also have the option of a free poncho.

We've heard of lots of newspaper giveaways in our time, but bread and water? Times are hard...

The fall of Johann Hari

FleetStreetBlues was glad to see that Johann Hari was finally suspended by the Independent yesterday. We couldn't help wonder why it's taken so long.

Over the past few days various tawdry accusations have been flying around relating to altered Wikipedia pages and such like, and to be honest we've found it hard to be that excited about whatever dirt investigative bloggers may or may not have managed to uncover.

This isn't about character assassination, it's about basic standards of journalism, and what's truly extraordinary is that the Independent didn't suspend Hari the second he willingly admitted copying and pasting quotes into interviews. That they took such a relaxed approach to such an obvious breach of basic journalistic standards - and let him file his column as normal last week - is appalling, to be honest. On Twitter yesterday, Simon Kelner appeared to suggest that it was new accusations which prompted the paper to take action. Voluntarily admitting to the wholesale lifting of quotes was clearly not enough.

The real questions from the whole Hari affair - questions which thanks to the phone-hacking scandal are unlikely to be asked - are about wider journalistic failings. Did anyone else at the Independent know that not everything he filed from an interview had actually been said in that interview? And, given the support Hari received from some parts of Fleet Street - all columnists and interviews, not reporters, of course - where else does this happen?

And as for Hari? Personally, we can't help feeling a sorry for a colleague who's reached such a career low, but he had an immensely privileged position in an ultra-competitive industry and he blew it. The Telegraph reports today that his email autoreply says he's away 'for a few weeks'.

'I'm catching up on work after a tumultuous week, and then I'll be out of the country on an assignment so please forgive me if I'm tardy – I'll read and reply to messages when I return,' it adds.

When? If you return...

Quote of the Day: 12 July 2011

The Daily Show's resident Englishman John Oliver, attempting to explain the unlikely role of Hugh Grant in the phone-hacking scandal to a disbelieving Jon Stewart:

That's right. The guy who got car-head from an LA road prostitute is now the moral compass of my nation.

Pandora's box

Where does the story go from here?

If this was your bog-standard, garden-variety national scandal - ie, one which didn't involve journalists door-stepping other journalists - then the obvious aim would be to widen the story. Never mind just phone hacking, what other dodgy story-gathering techniques have journalists been using? And never mind News International, what other newspaper groups have been guilty of using them?

Until yesterday, the story was focused exclusively on the News of the World. But a sharp-eyed reader who dissected the Sunday Times at the weekend noticed the following in a phone-hacking Q&A.

Have other newspapers indulged in hacking?
Yes, and more information about this may yet emerge

Yesterday, of course, the Sunday Times and the Sun were caught up in the story, with the Guardian's investigation duly expanding the scope of the alleged ethical breaches to include blagging and contraventions of the Data Protection Act. The story has now a momentum of its own, with MPs in particular keen to stick the boot in.

As long as it remains a story about News International, though, we're in (just about) familiar territory. There's one beleaguered company under pressure, a publisher and a chief executive to focus attention on and a clear narrative expected. If anyone else's name gets dragged in, all bets are off.

The anonymous blogger inside A&N Media, who's back, for the time being at least, draws our attention to What price privacy now?, a report from the Information Commissioner's Office into the 'unlawful trade in confidential personal information' from way back in 2006.

It included the following paragraph on how suppliers of information work:

Suppliers use two main methods to obtain the information they want: through corruption, or more usually by some form of deception, generally known as ‘blagging’. Blaggers pretend to be someone they are not in order to wheedle out the information they are seeking. They are prepared to make several telephone calls to get it. Each call they make takes them a little further towards their goal: obtaining information illegally which they then sell for a specified price. Records seized under search warrants show that many private investigators and tracing agents are making a lucrative business out of this trade.

Separately, elsewhere in the report there is a table of the use of private investigators by various publications:

There's no suggestion of course that any of the publications listed above have done anything wrong - this is simply a table showing use of private investigators.

But imagine, for a moment, that the story does spread beyond News International.

Imagine that alleged breaches of journalistic ethics are not somehow confined to people who work or worked for Rupert Murdoch.

Imagine that instead of this being a story about some appalling instances of phone hacking and the Guardian's attempt to take down News International, it becomes a much wider debate about whether journalists should ever be able to bend the rules, go undercover or work in the grey areas. What happens then?

The name's Murdoch, pronounced...

So tomorrow's Financial Times front page has a little subbing glitch in it, and by little we mean glaring, and by glitch we mean howler.

Can you tell what it is yet? Let's zoom in a bit.

Hat tip: Simon Ricketts

Quote of the Day: 11 July 2011

The FT's Robert Shrimsley, on why he'll never get to be played by Robert Redford:

Journalists in America are widely respected; in Britain we’re right down there with estate agents and MPs. When Americans start talking about freedom of speech they are defending the US constitution; when British journalists do it, they are demanding the right to tell you who’s sleeping with Ryan Giggs.

So while American journalists are often heroic leads in movies, the best we Brits can hope for is a cameo as a drunken, morally compromised hack. On the rare occasion that a British journalist is depicted in a flattering light, he’s invariably about to be murdered by the security services.

Ten must-follow journalists on Twitter

Way back when, FleetStreetBlues was proud to be a Twitter refusenik, and we still have some doubts - as a way of gauging reader opinion, for instance, it's embarrassingly self-selecting.

But as a way to communicate with journalists, it's pretty much unrivalled, seeing as most of you lot are on it. We're fast approaching 3,000 Twitter followers, and we follow almost as many back, giving us a unique insight into the working and social lives of Britain's media elite. You watch a lot of X Factor.

Over the coming weeks we're planning to do some kind of index of UK journalists on Twitter, possibly updating the list we compiled back in 2009, which is beginning to look pretty dated. But to begin with, we thought we'd pick out ten journalists from the 2,351 we currently follow. They're not necessarily the most authoritative, or most influential, or most anything really - this is a highly subjective list - but when scanning through thousands of tweets they're the names we always look out for.

• Nick Sutton - Editor of BBC Radio 4's The World at One, The World This Weekend and What The Papers Say, Nick has carved himself a niche on Twitter and has rapidly gained thousands of followers by becoming the first person to Twitpic the front pages of tomorrow's papers. 

• Jon Swaine - A Daily Telegraph reporter who worked on the MPs' expenses scandal, Jon now has the prized title of New York correspondent, and his tweets cover both sides of the pond

• David Ottewell - News editor and head of politics at the Manchester Evening News, David offers local journalist tweeting combined with national commentary

• Guido Fawkes - OK, so not a traditional journalist for what he would call the 'Dead Tree Press', but hugely influential. Guido's blog is the number one source of Westminster gossip - and his Twitter feed offers more of the same in 140 characters

• James Ball - A scarily young journalist who's already moved from Wikileaks to the Guardian, James offers insight into data journalism, personal knowledge of Julian Assange and comprehensive coverage of trains on fire

• FleetStreetFox - Since she started blogging a couple of months ago, FleetStreetFox has taken off, and is fast heading towards the book deal she's determinedly chasing. But she's been tweeting much longer than she's been blogging, and boasts almost 25,000 followers, which practically makes her Fleet Street's Stephen Fry. A journalists' journalist - as shown by the #hackandproud hashtag she started as the News of the World was in meltdown last week

• Jack Schofield - A Fleet Street veteran, Jack covered IT for the Guardian from 1983 to 2010, and continues to write pieces for them as well as blogging for ZD Net and writing for PC Pro, among others. He curates an eclectic and amusing set of links on all things technology

• Simon Ricketts - Formerly at the Daily Mail and the Independent, now at the Guardian, Simon tends to eschew high-brow news commentary in favour of deadpan jokes and wry one-liners. Which is what Twitter is best at, right?

• Paul Waugh - Formerly of the Evening Standard, now editor of PoliticsHome.com, Paul is the archetypal lobby hack and very, very good at what he does

• Dave Lee - Another scarily young journalist over at the BBC, Dave's Twitter strapline boasts that he 'loves the news like Ron Burgundy loves San Diego', and he does. Great news and sports commentary, snippets of life at the BBC and some reliably awful jokes

As we say, a personal list, and we've tried not to be too obvious. Now let us know who we've missed in the comments.


UPDATE: There were, of course, many excellent tweeting journalists who we left out - but the one we really didn't mean to omit was Neal Mann, aka @fieldproducer. A 'social media junkie' who works for Sky News, Neal's Twitter feed is an indispensable guide to news as it breaks throughout the day. Follow him now.

Editor - Greenock Telegraph

Scotland's oldest local evening newspaper, the Greenock Telegraph, is looking for a new editor.

As our man north of the border writes, you'll have some big shoes to fill - the previous editor, Wendy Metcalfe, has returned to Canada for a senior managing editor job after a three-year stint which saw the paper win Campaign of the Year at last year's Scottish Press Awards and shortlisted for a number of others.

You'll need to have 'effective' people management skills plus a great track record in publishing at both a strategic and an operational level. In return, they're promising an 'excellent' salary and benefits package.

Apply with CV and covering letter, stating your current salary, to headoffice@cfpress.co.uk. Deadline Friday 29 July.

Thank you and goodbye

Quite simply, we lost our way. 

Phones were hacked, and for that this newspaper is truly sorry. 

There is no justification for this appalling wrong-doing. 

No justification for the pain caused to victims, nor for the deep stain it has left on a great history. 

Yet when this outrage has been atoned, we hope history will eventually judge us on all our years.

Read the full goodbye here.

Read all about it: It's the end of the World as we know it edition

Extraordinary - and for most right-thinking journalists, appalling - events yesterday, although to be honest FleetStreetBlues' first thought looking at today's papers is that it's yet another day of newspaper headlines about newspapers, of journalists writing about journalists. The readers might be wondering if we've forgotten about them...

Here's a round-up of some of the best reaction:

• Andrew Gilligan writes in the Daily Telegraph on how the enemies of a free press are circling in the wake of the phone hacking scandal
• David Higgerson takes the Twitterati to task, arguing that social media power should still come with responsibility
• News of the World showbiz editor Dan Wootton, writing before the announcement that the paper would close, on why the current staff did not deserve to suffer for the sins of their predecessors
• Regardless of how you feel about the Guardian - and it's not exactly flavour of the month among a lot of grunt reporters right now - Roy Greenslade is always worth a read. His piece on the front of today's paper is headlined 'Hacks pay the price of hacking, but the News of the World had lost its way'
• And finally, you've seen the headlines in the nationals, and the Daily Telegraph's was probably the pick of the bunch. But what about further afield? Here's a bold effort from the Northern Echo.

Sun splashes on 'World's End'

Phone hacking leads the front page of the Sun. At last...

The return of Johann Hari

Other than Nick Davies, who must be feeling on top of a very flat world this evening, it's hard to think of anyone who's done better out of the News of the World's downfall than wayward Independent columnist Johann Hari.

A byword for questionable journalism last week, Hari's sins have been all but forgotten in the much bigger furore over phone-hacking - and after writing an apology immediately after the event, he's sensibly stayed very quiet.

But on Tuesday evening he broke cover to speak at a pre-arranged event on free speech (video above) at the Royal Institution in central London. FleetStreetBlues reader Emma Rubach was in the audience - and this was her take on it.

Essentially Mr. Hari started with a big mea culpa (I felt sorry for him - he was cringing a lot, possibly because his editor was compering the whole thing) and then proceeded to woo the audience with a rabble-rousing performance about the threat to free speech from religious fundamentalists.

After a self-imposed Twitter silence of more than a week, Johann tweeted a link to the video of his speech above earlier, and it's clear that with all eyes on Wapping, he's very much hoping the matter is now closed. Let's just pretend it never happened, eh?

Walking the line

Day four and it's official: all journalists are scum. This is what it felt like to be an MP.

Let's start with a moral absolute. There can be no defence, of any kind, for breaking into the voicemail of a murdered 13-year-old schoolgirl. There can be no defence either for hacking the mobile phones of the victims of a terrorist attack, or the family of servicemen killed in action. It goes without saying that the fact that private investigator Glenn Mulcaire's notes listed these numbers does not automatically prove that the phones were all hacked - but if they were, and it seems certain some were, then that was really, truly awful.

There's no 'but'. None of what follows is intended to excuse the phone hacking allegations revealed this week. There is no excuse.

It is worth noting though some of the moral ambiguities involved in much of what journalists do.

The outrage behind the allegations published this week stems almost entirely from the nature of the victims. There's nothing new about the fact that phones were hacked by tabloid journalists - what's new is that they targeted not only celebrities and politicians, for whom it's sometimes hard to feel much sympathy, but ordinary people who had been the victims of the most appalling crimes, for whom it's impossible not to feel sympathy.

In other words, there's a clear distinction between what the general public is outraged at (harassing people who deserve our sympathy) and the crime (hacking into voicemails). The current anger, advertisers' boycott of the News of the World and widespread media coverage are to do with the former, rather than the latter.

Ask yourself this. What would the average man in the street be more outraged about? Journalists knocking on the door of a murdered teenager's family and asking if they wanted to give an interview? Or journalists hacking into Rupert Murdoch's phone?

We're guessing it would be journalists knocking on the door of a murdered teenager's family - but that's not the crime. Journalists regularly knock on the doors of the recently-deceased - it's an unpleasant but necessary part of the job - and so long as they do so politely, respectfully and leave if asked, that's what they should do. On the other hand, hacking Rupert Murdoch's phone is clearly illegal, regardless of what nuggets of pressing public interest you might uncover.

Lots of journalists walk in legally and ethically grey areas when it comes to how they practise their journalism, and sometimes with good cause. Should the Telegraph have sent undercover journalists to meet Vince Cable? Should the Independent still employ as its top columnist a journalist who has admitted copying and pasting large parts of interviews? Even the Observer has faced questions in the past over the use of private investigators.

Likewise, every day journalists across the country have to carry out, legally and as part of their job, tasks which members of the wider public find unpalatable, if not immoral. The death knock is one example. Reporting claims made in court which besmirch the reputation of a murder victim's dad - the same murder victim's dad, in fact - is another. There are more.

The point, then, is that journalism involves a lot of grey areas. The phone hacking story has rightly been widely reported this week because it involves alleged behaviour which is clearly wrong both legally and morally. But trying to extrapolate in any direction from the specifics of this story to a wider point about the state of journalism today is a dangerous game, and logically flawed.

Yesterday, amid the general hack-bashing, FleetStreetBlues was asked a couple of times if we could name one real reason why journalists could be #hackandproud. Well, we'd refer to you a case entirely different from this week's repugnant phone hacking allegations - but one which at first glance also appears to be morally on the line.

It involves a reporter who smelled a story going undercover, lying about his CV to falsely obtain a job, covertly and no doubt illegally filming the most vulnerable people in society, then standing by and doing nothing as they were submitted to the most horrific physical and mental abuse.

The resulting BBC Panorama film was one of the best and most effective pieces of investigative journalism we've seen in recent years.

Because this piece will inevitably be seen as a defence of phone hacking, we'll say it one more time: some things are black and white. The phone hacking we've heard about this week was entirely wrong, morally appalling and absolutely without justification. But not all journalists should be held responsible for the crimes of a minority. Once you get beyond the shocking specifics of phone-hacking, a wider debate about media ethics gets very complicated, very quickly. And a lot of journalism, good and bad, lives in the grey areas.

Hack and proud

Respect to Fleet Street Fox for starting this one off - a welcome antidote to the current hysteria sweeping Twitter and the internet, if not the real world. Time to stand up and be counted...


UPDATE: Hard to believe we have to clarify this, but apparently we do. The idea is that the journalists tweeting #hackandproud are proud of being journalists, not proud of the fact that a small subset of journalists have hacked phones. As we said, hysteria...

Reporter - Kent & Sussex Courier

Northcliffe Media title the Kent & Sussex Courier is recruiting a senior reporter.

You'll need to have your NCE, but as ever the main thing they're looking for is a 'track record of breaking exclusive, off-diary stories'. You'll be covering a 'vast and newsy patch' including Tunbridge Wells, Sevenoaks and Tonbridge. Leafy.

Apply with CV and covering letter to the editor of the Kent & Sussex Courier, Ian Read, at editor@courier.co.uk. Deadline Friday 22 July.

Quote of the Day: 6 July 2011

The Times' editorial on 'The Practice of Journalism':

Before today, The Times, which, like the News of the World, is owned by News International, has taken the view that it ought not to comment on the issue of phone hacking. We have sought to report the story straight, in good faith, without taking any editorial view. A supportive line invites the accusation of speaking from the party script. A critical line is easily written off as a deliberate, insincere attempt to create distance from the story.
But anyone who has serious faith in the public purpose of journalism has to record his or her dissent from the behaviour that has now been alleged.

I'm a hack, not a hacker

Blood is in the water, the sharks are circling. For Guardian types the next few days are going to be all about a crusade to bring down Rupert Murdoch - but as they try to do so, journalists' stock is going to sink ever lower. Questions will be asked in Parliament. Abuse will be hurled in the street. The country is about to descend into an orgy of self-righteous hack-bashing. Be dressed for the occasion.

The eighteen-word job ad

In journalism, it's well known that brevity is a virtue - but this is taking it to extremes. Behold, in all its glory, the eighteen-word job ad.

Award-winning political magazine, Holyrood, is seeking a journalist.

Apply, with a letter and CV, to editor, Mandy Rhodes.

To which there's not much more we can add really, except that Holyrood is based, of course, in Edinburgh, and is targeted at Scottish politicians. Mandy Rhodes' email address is mandy@holyrood.com. The deadline is Friday 25 July.

Engaging Sun headline has certain ring about it

So the editor wants to lead on Ashley and Cheryl yet again - he wants to ask her to marry him again - and you're fresh out of things that rhyme with 'Cole'. What headline do you go with?

That'll do nicely...