Wordblog

The Pulitzer Prizes are pernicious and chasing them distracts newspapers from their real challenge of engaging a readership that is drifting off to TV and the internet. That anyway is the view of Gawker’s Nick Denton.

Pulitzers “won’t save an industry which is experiencing double-digit annual declines.” The British Press Awards on the other hand are “lacking in respectability” but,

…the British newspaper industry is in much more robust health. To be sure, circulations are in gradual decline. And standards of journalism are as sloppy as ever. But newspapers such as The Guardian have a much greater share of the online audience than their American counterparts. And the papers, while lacking much of the worthy reporting that wins Pulitzers, are way livelier.

The connection? The respect of peers is a luxury that US newspapers have enjoyed because, for much of the second half of the 20th century, they were local monopolies. They could afford to be respectable, because they didn’t need to pander to readers. In the UK, by contrast, 12 national dailies are in vicious competition. Editors fear the loss of their jobs, not their honor.

Would that be the sort of competition which has led the Daily Star to make three high profile apologies in the past three weeks?

The topic of the middle-class hold on journalism is not new but Media Guardian’s four page focus on journalism training is welcome, especially if the debate it stimulates results in action.

Peter Wilby leads the debate with an examination of the rise of the narrow social and ethnic base of journalism. He writes:

Faced with trying to understand, say, the grievances of the Muslim community or what drives inner-city youth to violence or what it’s like to have children attending a “sink school”, most journalists are lost. They have no contacts and no inside information.

Back in June 2006 I commented on a Sutton Trust report and wrote:

There are few from the poor housing estates, the very communities that are being covered with little understanding. With the rise of white nationalism (shown in the recent local government elections) and the threat of home-grown terrorism we need, more than ever, reporters and commentators who understand the people who live in these places.

So it is not surprising that I endorse virtually everything else Wilby writes. The real question is, what is to be done about it?

The new creative and media vocational diploma which is promoted by Cilve Jones, ITV’s former chief executive of news and regions, who has been advising the government, looks promising. In a Media Guardian interview he says the industry could do far more by funding bursaries and training schemes and ensuring we have a balanced entry.

Yet if we are to get to difficult places to reach the industry may have to go further, recruit young school-leavers for a probationary period and then provide those who show promise with the time and money for training.

But I am not holding my breath. It is more or less what I proposed at an early-1960s NUJ conference when I called for post entry release to attend NCTJ certificate courses. I was soundly defeated then.

Two remarkably similar comments about Tesco, the UK’s biggest retailer, have been made 6,000 miles apart. The first is from today’s Guardian and the second from the Southeast Asian Press Alliance on March 19.

Instead of frankly explaining their position and/or engaging in a public dialogue Tesco has taken the extraordinary step of suing for libel in a clear attempt to close down the debate and discourage others from looking too closely.

It’s hard to think of another large public company which would resort to such bullying tactics.

The Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA) strongly condemns the heavy-handed attempts of Tesco Lotus to intimidate its critics, and thereby sending a chilling message to civil society and members of the press. Civil defamation suits of this nature and of such absurd proportions are not really meant to win in court, but rather to intimidate independent media, harass legitimate criticism, and stifle discussions and debate over legitimate public concerns.

Tesco has started legal proceedings against the Guardian and editor Alan Rusbridger over allegations made by the paper about its tax affairs. The paper alleged that complex tax arrangements were to avoid paying £1bn in UK corporation tax. Tesco denies this but says it will save up to £63m in stamp duty.

Across the word in Thailand where Tesco is expanding rapidly, its legal department is gunning for an ex-MP who runs the Thai chamber of commerce and a newspaper columnist.

It is not the criticism of the effects of the rapid expansion of Tesco which both men suggested could lead to serious conflict with small retailers, that has brought the action.

It is their suggestion that as much as 37 per cent of Tesco’s global revenue came from Thailand that is being challenged by the company which is seeking damages totalling 1.1bn baht (£17.4m). The two men accept the figure was wrong.

Tesco opened its first store in Thailand in 1998 and its 2007 annual report showed the number had risen to 370. The figure now is said to be approaching 500.

We always knew Tesco was an aggressive retailer but taken together these cases look like the makings of a spectacular own goal.

Wakened at dawn by the sound of a Psalm booming out from from a loudspeaker my first thought was that it was the Caribbean island of Barbuda’s call to prayer. With a population of fewer than 1,500 and seven churches, that seemed quite likely.

But a long item on the forthcoming draw for a raffle prize suggested otherwise. Two loudspeakers on the top of of a house is the island’s hyperlocal news service MRS Radio run by Ordrick Samuel, known as Jicky.

The following morning there was news that a black handbag had been found. Who did it belong to? With the population clustered in one settlement the loudspeakers provide a low cost and effective way of disseminating news and paid-for announcements.

The island which is a part of the state of Antigua and Barbuda is unlike any other Caribbean island I have visited. The restaurants and shops have no signs because everyone knows them in this tight-knit community where no one who is not a Barbudan is allowed to build a house.

The island was held on a lease from the British crown by the Codrington family, who owned plantations in other islands. Barbuda was not included in the emancipation of slaves act of 1834. It was not until 1880 when that lease ran out that the people gained their freedom and their own lease on the island.

This communal control of the land has prevented the spread of development seen on other islands. The people have leased a few enclaves for international hotels of extreme luxury. Princess Diana twice stayed at one which is now closed. Coco Point with its own private airstrip is now offering rooms at more than US$1,000 a night. We stayed in a simple guest house run by McArthur and Natalie Nedd in the village.

Back in my Suffolk village of Debenham (population 2,000) I find there is local news which deserves to be broadcast. But I doubt if a couple of loudspeakers on top of my house would go down well.

With James Murdoch confirmed as the heir apparent of his father’s News Corporation business there is much speculation about the future of the media empire he is destined to run.

Possibly the most significant indicator this year of the way in which News Corp will move has been the $5bn purchase of Dow Jones which includes the Wall Street Journal.

The spending of more than three times as much, over $17bn, on Reuters by the Thomson Corporation has attracted much less attention. Thomson was once a power in newspapers in the UK and north America, but has largely got out of that business. It sold The Times to Murdoch back in 1981. This year both have been getting into financial information.

The Thomson newspaper business was founded by Canadian Roy Thomson who became the first Lord Thomson of Fleet. Since his son Ken became the boss it has become a huge information business concentrating on legal, financial, scientific and healthcare information.

After 25 years as chairman, Ken Thomson said:

By wholeheartedly embracing change, I’m sure an exciting future lies ahead for everyone associated with Thomson. If my father were alive he would understand completely the need to continuously move on. The world changes, situations change, corporations change, we change personally. Everything changes, you know, that’s the one constant in the world.

How News Corp will change is unknown but it will undoubtedly change. But James Murdoch can at least look at Thomson Corporation and see that family businesses can and do prosper although Thomson is the smaller business.

Thomson has more than prospered with the grandson David Thomson now at the helm with a fortune of $22bn putting him in tenth place in the Forbes rich list. Rupert Murdoch is way down the list at 73 with $9bn to his name.

There must have been a joker at the British Comedy Awards on Thursday night. The evidence is in the Guardian’s corrections column today. In the absence of any explanation of how their reporter came to write that the Turner Prize Winner, Mark Wallinger, was at the awards in a bear suit and introduced as “Muhammad”, we can only assume someone misled her.

I feel for the reporter. Once I was sent under duress to cover a rugby match and not knowing anything about the teams (there was no programme) asked for help and was given a string of invented names. No doubt the story was told with glee in the club house, but it did not seem funny to me.

And I wonder if Mark Wallinger finds it funny that Guardian Unlimited has not added a correction note to the original story.

How nice it must be as a blogger to have an editor to protect you from your solecisms. That would be a real luxury. A Washington Post memo on blogging includes a checklist for new blogs which says: “Blog items need to be edited. Your proposal needs to say who will edit blog copy.”

The bit about the value of promotion in print and at the main online site also sounds like a dream for independent bloggers.

The memo, available at the Washington City Paper, talks a lot of sense about blogging. It includes the need for regular updating (at least once a day) which I have not been doing recently.

With my infrequent posts I was surprised to find myself in Adrian Monck’s table of ten British journo-bloggers. It must be the long tail that has kept me there but thanks Adrian.

Yes, I could do with an editor to nag me for the copy.

Yet, there is something special about the immediacy of an unedited blog. Discuss.

How the use of a fold up keyboard and a mobile phone to file copy from a courtroom — because the judge might consider a laptop too obtrusive — would go down in England I don’t know. But Ron Sylvester’s account of using technology to cover a murder case in Kansas is fascinating.

Pity then, that following a link to an example in his blog post there is a message saying the Wichita Eagle is unable to locate the page. In some ways the account is high tech and in others it is making the best of limited resources. For example, he uses a memory stick to get pictures from photographers and file them, which suggests they cannot use their own laptops to send.

What I like, is the sense of a reporter working out the best available way of getting his copy in as fast as possible. That I can really understand. And it will be a bit faster than the copy boys who used to pick up hand-written copy from Bristol magistrates’ court.

When I learned reporting the square bracket was virtually unknown in journalism: it was something found in academic writing. Now it is everywhere. It is useful sometimes and probably the result of most journalists having university degrees.

So why is it being so frequently misused? Instead of being used as a means of interpolation in direct quotations it is being used for substitution. The clue to this is what happens to the quoted sentence if the words in the square brackets are removed — it should still make sense. Take this example from today’s Observer:

‘The efficiency challenge for [the Ministry of Justice] is substantial,’ the document says.

It looks very much as if the quote has been doctored by removing a pronoun. That is not how they should be used, as the Guardian style book makes clear:

“Square brackets,” the grammarian said, “are used in direct quotes when an interpolation [a note from the writer, not uttered by the speaker] is added to provide essential information.”

The Economist style book uses this example: “Let them [the poor] eat cake.” Better would have to give us the pure quote and write:

Marie-Antionette said of the poor: “Let them eat cake.”

Mostly the need for square brackets can be avoided by careful writing. If writers do not understand their use what hope has the reader.

A shot which probably lasted no more than a second in the film Lions for Lambs has been troubling me. It has nothing to do with the theme of the picture but the reporter, Janine Roth (Meryl Streep), looks at a page of her notebook in a taxi — it is written in shorthand. But American reporters don’t do shorthand.

What, I have been puzzling, is the significance of that shot in a film made in American for an American audience. It can’t be to suggest a slipping in standards of US journalism, because the skill of writing shorthand has never been popular there.

An article in the New York Times of 1898 about the problems of working as a reporter in London, says: “In England nearly all reporters are first-class shorthand man (sic); in American shorthand writing among newspaper men is almost unknown.”

So far as I know, things have not changed much and in 1998 Rex Rhodes examined the differences in England and the US in an article for the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

As one of those who struggled to master (partially) Pitman’s I think it was worthwhile and tell students who complain, that they will not regret the tedium of learning. When I later tried using a tape recorder I found it was too slow for daily use, although valuable as a record of some interviews. As a productivity tool shorthand is essential.

But why did Robert Redford include the shot of a page in shorthand? I can’t believe that it was done without thought, but the meaning escapes me.