Robert Hardie's blog
I blog, therefore I amArchive for October, 2011
If you don’t want reporters to be stuck in an office, don’t give them an office
Apart from the fact that I started out my career working in offices just likes the ones being closed in these stories about Marlborough and Stroud, and actually in the case of the Stroud one, I thought the “not working from an office’ element was underplayed in the Marlborough one.
Undoubtedly driven in this case by cost-cutting, it struck me that one solution to reporters never getting out of the office might just be not to have an office to be stuck in.
Mobile phones, wifi connections and laptops make remote working not just possible but often preferable in a way that it wasn’t even ten years ago.
Working from home just moves the problem from the office to someone equally unpublic, but having a permanent base right in the heart of a community – in a coffee shop for instance – makes a reporter both visible to, and accessible for, their readers in a way that they can never be in an office that is increasingly likely to be on an out-of-town industrial estate.
They’d get more stories too.
Will the public take any notice of nOtice?
nOtice, launched into beta by the Guardian yesterday, is the most recent attempt to answer a massively important question – is there any place for Big Publishing in Little Media?
There can be no question that hyperlocal publishing (a) is flourishing and (b) has a big future, but will the likes of the Guardian and DMGT (via the Local People project) be the ones to benefit from that?
It is, of course, only six months since the Guardian pulled the plug on Guardian Local, a local/regional news pilot, and nOtice is a distinctly different proposition taking a distinctly different approach.
Local People continues to plough ahead, thanks to the deep pockets of DMGT, with a high cost model that employs digital publishers at c£500/m for a site and then uses tem to seed content and engagement. Last month’s announcement that they were seeking franchise partners has yet be followed up any any announcement that they found any.
But the Holy Grail in this space is not the publisher of the hyperlocal site, it’s the users – engage them in substantial numbers and the business model for hyperlocal advertising adds up, don’t and it doesn’t.
Big Publishing’s approach to Little Publishing is also predicated on scale. An individual hyperlocal publisher who has sufficient passion and enthusiasm to have started a site for their area and sufficient drive to sell ads on it too should be able to make a profit mainly because his or her costs are going to be very low. Very low costs, however, are not something Big Publishing costs. Big Publishing will want to have its own platform, its own developers, its own servers, its own marketing team, its own management structure, its own Head Office and so on.
And the $64,000 question on engagement is what makes a user who could post hyperlocal content turn into one who actually does on a consistent basis? No-one has yet found the answer on a wide enough scale to make Big Publishing in the Little Publishing space a profitable proposition.
No Sun, no funding via a paywall
After all the hype over the Times paywall both when it launched and every time visitor numbers are discussed, I see NI have decided against taking the same approach for the Sun – ad-funded is the way forward, apparently.
It’s going to take some rowing back for the spin doctors given Rupert Murdoch’s statement in 2009 that “We intend to charge for all our news websites”.
The reality, of course, is that digital publishing is still a strategy in search of a business model and no one solution was ever going to dominate.
News websites are not selling scarcity, hence the difficulty of getting anyone to pay up front for access in the way that financially-advantageous data sites can, but they can sell experience (via apps, for instance) and bring audiences along with them to attract advertising.
OFT decision leaves Kent operation in the lurch
Inspirational as he is, Richard Karn (MD of Northcliffe’s operations in the South East) has got the unenviable job of picking up the pieces after the OFT pulled the plug on the sale of the Group’s Kent papers to the Kent Messenger Group.
Restoring morale among the troops after Northcliffe made it clear it wanted to get rid of the titles was always going to be difficult but not as difficult as trying to put a gloss on the fact that the people who said very publicly that they didn’t want you have still got you.
It’s also difficult to see any logic in the OFT decision – the choice is not between two strong groups of titles and one even stronger one, it’s between two weak groups and probably no groups at all.
Arrivistes will have their way, for now
I got involved yesterday in a minor twitter debate with @Arsbiswas and @WonderGunner about the relative costs of the two teams in Man Utd 1 v 6 Man City at the weekend. My minimal input was to suggest that the real issue was not how much money each team cost but when the money had been spent. It seemed the least I could do to find out.
Courtesy of date from Soccerbase, this table shows how much each player cost, when he signed and how many months’ service the club has got from him.
| Player | £m | Signed | Months |
| MUFC | |||
| De Gea | 18.9 | 6/11 | 4 |
| Evra | 5.5 | 1/6 | 69 |
| Ferdinand | 30 | 7/2 | 110 |
| Evans | 0 | 1/6 | 70 |
| Smalling | 10 | 1/10 | 21 |
| Anderson | 27 | 7/7 | 51 |
| Nani | 25.5 | 7/7 | 51 |
| Young | 17 | 1/11 | 9 |
| Fletcher | 0 | 8/0 | 123 |
| Rooney | 20 | 8/4 | 86 |
| Welbeck | 0 | 7/7 | 51 |
| 153.9 | 646 | ||
| Lindegaard | 3.5 | 1/11 | 9 |
| Jones | 16.5 | 6/11 | 4 |
| Fabio | 0 | 7/6 | 63 |
| Park | 4 | 7/5 | 75 |
| Valencia | 16 | 6/9 | 28 |
| Berbatov | 30.7 | 9/8 | 37 |
| Hernandez | 0 | 7/10 | 15 |
| 70.7 | 231 | ||
| Total | 224.6 | 877 | |
| MCFC | |||
| Hart | 6 | 5/6 | 66 |
| Richards | 0 | 7/5 | 75 |
| Kompany | 6 | 8/8 | 38 |
| Lescott | 22 | 8/9 | 26 |
| Clichy | 7 | 7/11 | 3 |
| Milner | 26 | 8/10 | 14 |
| Barry | 12 | 7/9 | 27 |
| Silva | 26 | 6/10 | 16 |
| Y Toure | 24.4 | 7/10 | 15 |
| Aguero | 38 | 7/11 | 3 |
| Balotelli | 24 | 7/10 | 15 |
| 191.4 | 298 | ||
| Pantilon | 0 | 7/11 | 3 |
| Zabaleta | 6.4 | 8/8 | 38 |
| Kolarov | 19 | 7/10 | 15 |
| K Toure | 16 | 7/9 | 27 |
| Nasri | 24 | 7/11 | 3 |
| De Jong | 18 | 1/9 | 33 |
| Dzeko | 27 | 1/11 | 9 |
| 110.4 | 128 | ||
| Total | 301.8 | 426 |
The overall costs of the squads (£224.6m for MUFC, £301.8m for MCFC) is not that marked, especially at today’s prices, it’s but the length of service differential (Utd’s players have spent more than twice as long at their club that have City’s) that demonstrates the difference between the clubs and approaches.
Some fairly crude maths shows that Utd have only had to spend £256,100 for each month of service their players have given them, whereas City have had to fork out £708,450 to get a month out of one of their squad.
But those numbers neatly take us onto the £s we can’t measure – salaries. Impossible to gather data on, it’s the salaries that marks out the clubs who don’t have to work inside the confines of any sort of business model from the ones that do.
Of course we have no way of knowing how long City will decide to hang onto their current crop of players for and so the comparison may be an unfair one, but what tier bottomless pit of free money does remove is any sort of dynamic for players to be kept for long enough to provide any sort of return on the investment their purchase price and salary represents. If Utd spend want £20m on a player that’s £20m (plus probably the same amount in salary over, say, four years) added onto their debts, which are debts that have to be paid back. City can cheerfully offer £30m and probably £40m in salary over the same four years, without having to worry about repaying a penny of that because it’s been “lent” to them by someone who doesn’t want it back.
Until UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations kick in – and that’s assuming that Man City, whose most recent “losses” are a mere £120m a year, don’t find a way to work outside them – this is the reality of Premier League football. The ability of a club to spend money on both transfers and salaries that they neither have to earn nor pay back means only it can realistically expect to win the title, and the rest have to just make do with the scraps.
Images of Gadaffi demean us all
Last Friday’s decisions by the Picture Editors and Editors of the tabloids to splash graphic images of the corpse of Colonel Gadaffi on their from pages was a sad victory for Lowest Common Denomenator publishing.
The story was that Gadaffi was dead – the picture added nothing.
At a time when journalism and the media are under the spotlight in a way they have rarely been before, it was a terrible own goal. What sort or argument could now be presented against charges that we care about nothing other than sensationalism, even to the extent of desensitising children to summary executions with little or no regard of judicial scrutiny.
We are rightly outraged when someone seeks to limit the media’s rights but we should care equally about exercising our responsibilities.
No insiders will help Leveson and the media get to the truth
The call – rightly rejected, as it turned out – by all the major newspaper publishers for Mr Justice Leveson’s inquiry into media ethics to have representatives from inside the media on it was not a surprise, but it does betray a nervousness of what may come out.
Within the media, there are many things that we take for granted because they have “always happened” and so are spared the glare of the spotlight that having to examine and reappraise them brings.
With media insiders on the inquiry panel, the chance of somebody saying “I’m sorry, can you just explain to me how that works?” is reduced – with no media insiders on it, the chance that one of the practices or customs that we might prefer not to have to explain in public will have to be judged in the court of public opinion.
The temptation to do things just because they have always been done that way is not restricted to the media, but the responsibility that having to explain how the media operates to people who do not carry with them the baggage us media types all do is one that needs to be embraced, not shied away from, if the reputation of the media is to be first re-established and then enhanced.
Whenever I am managing journalists I always tell them never to write anything or do anything they wouldn’t want their mother to hear them own up to in a court of law – given the scrutiny the media is under now and in the future, perhaps the advice should be never to write anything or do anything you wouldn’t want to explain to Mr Justice Leveson and his colleagues.
Made-up reaction and quotes were a backgrounder too far
When the MailOnline interpreted the Amanda Knox appeal verdict incorrectly – or, quite possibly, was watching Sky News (who initially interpreted it incorrectly) rather than BBc News 24 (who got it right first time) – and published their backgrounder for a lost appeal, including graphic descriptions of Miss Knox’s reaction to her appeal being “dismissed: and quotes from “a friend” reacting to the verdict that never was, they revealed one of journalism’s grubby little secrets – we don’t always wait for things to happen before we write about them.
They weren’t the first news organisation to jump the gun and they won’t be the last, but to have both invented the description of Miss Knox’s courtroom meltdown and made up quotes from “a friend”, they revealed a pushing of the the envelope that was way farther than is excusable in the interests of the logistics of publishing.
One of the beauties of digital journalism is that you can reflect the dynamic of a developing news story by developing the story of the news in a way that, by definition, deadline-restricted print journalists can’t. A snap that the appeal had been upheld (and preparing two snaps in advance and then publishing the correct one would be perfectly acceptable) could easily have then been extended to include the actual, rather than imagined, reaction.
Backgrounders in themselves are not the issue – done honestly and handled professionally they add greatly to the public’s understanding of a story at the time when it’s interest in it is at its highest – but to both misquote and paraphrase Leo McGarry of the West Wing, there are two things you shouldn’t show the public how you make: news stories and sausages.
Being an editor just isn’t what it used to be
The resignation as editor of the Leicester Mercury of Keith Perch, for whom I worked at the Derby Telegraph and then in various digital roles in Northcliffe for the next nine years, is a sad day – especially for the Mercury.
One thing’s for certain – when Keith first became an editor on the South Wales Echo back in the 1990s, editors had status, authority, resources, senior teams and numbers of journalists working for them way, way in excess of what they are likely to command today.
It’s impossible not to feel for the most recent appointments as editors who came into the profession and aspired to have their own Chair, only to find out when they finally got one that it was a world away from what it had been when they started out.
Of course circulations are smaller too, but that doesn’t make the pill any easier to swallow.
Tomorrow’s BBC cuts could mean the day after tomorrow’s Jeremy Paxman might not have a job
News consumes such a high proportion of BBC resources that it was inevitable that it would bear the brunt of the DQF cuts anounced by Mark Thompson this week. “Salami slicing” has won the day rather than the wholesale removal of a station or a platform such as was suggested, and then withdrawn, a year ago with 6Music and the Asian Network.
And with Local being so muh less sexy than National, it’s also not a surprise that BBC Local Radio has also been so hard hit – so much so, and with so much national content now going to be in place on it, that continuing to call it “local” radio might be stretching a point.
The danger for the BBC is that by cutting back to much on local newsrooms they are choking off what has been such a vital first step for graduates or local/regional newspaper journalists wanting to get into broadcasting and what has been such a rich vein of talent for the BBC itself.
