Another intelligent if slightly idiosyncratic take on the “pay for news” discussion from Simon Jenkins in The Guardian; a paper whose editor Alan Rusbridger – under the influence of “dead tree press is dead” media evangelist Jeff Jarvis – is doing a lot o thinking on the issue himself.
Jenkins talks of a friend [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Alan Rusbridger’
Your media choices as part of your personal brand?
August 11th, 2009 |
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Guardian editor calls for local news funding
July 22nd, 2009 |
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Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian’s editor in chief, tonight threw his support behind a plan to give public funding to Britain’s national press agency to allow it to provide news from public authorities and courts as local newspapers withdraw because they can no longer afford it.
Rusbridger, speaking at a seminar on the future of journalism at the Media Standards Trust in London, also outlined his vision for a new digital world in which the public grows much closer to journalists.
Speaking in front of guests including film director Lord Puttnam, BBC business editor Robert Peston and Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards, Rusbridger said local news needed to be supported, or “corruption and inefficiency” would grow as scrutiny lessened.
He said the Press Association, in which most of the big British media firms including the Guardian Media Group are shareholders, should be the recipient of public money to provide local news as other providers such as newspapers and ITV regional news disappear.
In return, PA would contract out the reporting of public authorities and courts to local papers, with the content then shared with other outlets.
PA is currently looking for funding to trial the idea.
Rusbridger said the gradual disappearance of local journalism worried him.
“This bit of journalism is going to have to be done by somebody,” Rusbridger said. “It makes me worry about all of those public authorities and courts which will in future operate without any kind of systematic public scrutiny. I don’t think our legislators have begun to wake up to this imminent problem as we face the collapse of the infrastructure of local news in the press and broadcasting.”
Rusbridger said local public service journalism was a “kind of utility” which was just as important as gas and water.
“We must face up to the fact that if there is no public subsidy, then some of this [public service] reporting will come to pass in this country,” he said.
“The need is there. It is going to be needed pretty quickly.”
Rusbridger also laid out his vision of what he called “mutualised news,” which he said would “take down the walls” of traditional media companies by distributing information through new means such as social networking site Twitter and by asking the public to get involved through experiments such as “crowd sourcing”, used by the Guardian to help with its investigation into the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests.
“It was a piece of conventional reporting and tapping into the resources of a crowd,” he said. “There are thousands of reporters in any crowd nowadays. There was nothing to stop people from publishing those pictures but it needed the apparatus of a mainstream news organisation for that to cut through and have impact.”
He added: “What I like about idea of mutualised news is it gets over the concept of us versus them. It is us and them. It blurs the line between journalists and reader. It is much more diverse and plural than a conventional newspaper. It gives us a huge extensive resource.”
Rusbridger denied it would be the end of conventional journalism, saying that trained journalists and the public could work together, adding it was “futile” to deny that “something interesting and exciting is going on here.”
“There are many things that mainstream media do which in collaboration with others is still really important. The ability to take a large audience and amplify things and to give more weight to what would [otherwise] be fragments. Somebody has to have the job of pulling it all together.”
Rusbridger admitted that he had originally dismissed Twitter as “silly” but now saw its huge benefits for media companies in building communities and distributing news. “When Twitter started, I confess, I didn’t get it. Sometimes you are too old to keep up with all these things and Twitter just seemed silly and I didn’t have time to add it to all of these other things, but that was completely wrong.”
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Guardian shows MPs hacking proof
July 14th, 2009 |
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MPs investigating allegations of widespread use of private investigators by the News of the World to hack into phones were handed documents today revealing that more journalists were involved in the practice than the paper’s owner, News International, has previously admitted.
During testimony to the Commons committee on culture, media and sport, the Guardian investigative reporter Nick Davies produced previously unseen records which showed that two senior figures on the paper as well as a junior reporter had a role in obtaining the contents of private voicemail messages through a private investigator.
News International has previously insisted that only one of its journalists, the royal editor, Clive Goodman, had used this illegal method. He was jailed for four months in January 2007, along with a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire.
Yesterday Davies handed over copies of an email from an unnamed junior News of the World reporter to Mulcaire that also referred to the paper’s chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck. In the email, the reporter says: “Hello, this is the transcript for Neville.” Davies told the committee that the email, dated 29 June 2005, contained “a typed-up transcript of 35 messages which Mulcaire had hacked from the telephones of Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association, and Jo Armstrong, a legal adviser at the PFA”.
The second document handed to MPs was a contract dated February 2005 between the News of the World assistant editor Greg Miskiw and Mulcaire – who was using an alias, Paul Williams. In the document, Miskiw promises Mulcaire a bonus of £7,000 if he delivers a specific story about Gordon Taylor.
The Guardian revealed last week that Taylor, Armstrong and a third person were paid a total of more than £1m in costs and damages by the News of the World’s parent company, News Group, to settle a lawsuit for breach of privacy and to keep it secret. Davies told the committee: “It is hard to resist the conclusion that [News International] have consistently admitted only what has been dragged into the public domain and is indisputable.”
The Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, who was also giving evidence to MPs, said the Taylor story was significant “because it undermines the assurances given both to you and the PCC [Press Complaints Commission] about the sole reporter and the sole detective – the so-called rotten apple defence”. He continued: “News International have known about the involvement of other journalists, including at senior level, for at least a year. It is believed the case [Gordon Taylor] was settled last September. So that begs the question: why they did not tell the PCC, the regulators, or this committee, of the new facts that have come to light.”
The Conservative party’s director of communications, Andy Coulson, who was editing the News of the World at the time of the Goodman case, resigned when Goodman was convicted.
Both documents produced by the Guardian today had been seized by police during the Goodman case.
Rusbridger said the Guardian story was not “a campaign to oust anybody”.
“It wasn’t a campaign to reopen the police inquiry, or to call for prosecutions or to force anybody to resign. We have not called for any of those.
“As a paper we do believe in effective self-regulation and we don’t want a privacy law. When it comes to effective self- regulation, it seems to me it can only work if newspaper groups are truthful and open with the regulators.”
He suggested to MPs that a possible way forward for newspaper editors would be to draw on a definition of the public interest proposed by the government’s former security co-ordinator Sir David Omand.
John Whittingdale, who chairs the culture committee, said the Guardian’s revelations “raised questions” about the extent of phone hacking at the tabloid. News of the World editor Colin Myler and Tom Crone, the paper’s in-house lawyer, will give evidence to the MPs next week.
It also emerged today that the Home Office questioned the decision by Scotland Yard’s assistant commissioner, John Yates, not to reopen the Met’s phone-tapping investigation.
An exchange of letters placed in the House of Commons library discloses that Stephen Rimmer, the Home Office’s director general of crime and policing, wrote to Yates last Friday asking what the Met was doing about the allegations about the involvement of 27 other journalists and whether the police would be informing all those allegedly targeted.
Yates’s reply, sent the same day, said that he had not conducted a review and said he had only been asked by the Met commissioner to establish the facts in the light of the Guardian’s articles in connection with the 2005 police investigation.
Yates’s confirmation that the original investigation did not cover any other journalists has fuelled demands at Westminster that Scotland Yard reopen its investigation. Its understood the Commons home affairs select committee is also likely to open its own investigation into the police failure to look into the wider allegations unless it receives a satisfactory explanation by the end of this week.
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Guardian shows MPs hacking proof
July 14th, 2009 |
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Documents produced by Nick Davies involve senior News of the World journalists in Mulcaire affair
• How the Guardian committee hearing unfolded
The Guardian today produced evidence to MPs that shows phone-hacking at the News of the World was more widespread than its owner News International had claimed.
Documents passed to the Commons culture, media and sport committee, which is investigating phone hacking, reveal that Neville Thurlbeck, the paper’s chief reporter, read transcripts of 35 hacked telephone messages between PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor and Jo Armstrong, a legal advisor at the PFA.
They were sent in an email to Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator on the paper’s payroll, by an unnamed junior reporter on the paper on 29 June 2005. In the email, the reporter says “Hello, this is the transcript for Neville”. The committee was told by Guardian reporter Nick Davies this was Neville Thurlbeck.
Mulcaire was used by the paper’s former royal editor, Clive Goodman, who was jailed in January 2007 along with Mulcaire. Executives at the NoW’s owner, News International, have always maintained that Mulcaire and Goodman were acting alone and without the knowledge of managers or executives at the paper.
A second document is a contract between the News of the World and Glenn Mulcaire offering him a bonus of £7,000 if he worked to develop a story they were after. It includes the name of Greg Miskiw, then the paper’s assistant editor in charge of news. It used the false name of Paul Williams but was sent to Mulcaire.
MPs were also shown an invoice from an unnamed private investigator for work carried out for the News Group, which publishes NI’s tabloid titles, dating back to 1998.
Nick Davies, the Guardian reporter who wrote the story, told the committee: “It is hard to resist the conclusion that [News International] have consistently admitted only what has been dragged into the public domain and is indisputable.”
Earlier, PCC director Tim Toulmin told MPs. “People had raised eyebrows that Andy Coulson did not know what was going on. I would say – having been exposed as not knowing – he then resigned because he did not know what was going on. For that reason he resigned and paid a high price.”
The Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, said: “This is not a campaign to oust anyone, to reopen the police inquiry, for more prosecutions [or to] force anyone to resign. We have not called for any of those.”
He added that one of the key questions was whether self regulation of the press was “effective”.
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MPs shown phone-hacking evidence
July 14th, 2009 |
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News of the World exposé ‘might contradict’ evidence of Les Hinton, adds chairman of commons culture committee
John Whittingdale, the chairman of the commons culture committee, said today that the Guardian revelations about alleged phone hacking at the News of the World “raised questions” about the extent of the practice and “might contradict” evidence given by former News International executive chairman Les Hinton.
Speaking at the start of a hearing prompted by Guardian stories that the paper’s publisher had secretly paid £1m to victims of phone hacking at the tabloid, he revealed that Hinton did not want to change the evidence he gave to a previous culture committee inquiry into press self-regulation in 2007.
Whittingdale said “when the committee saw these stories it did raise questions. It appeared there might be some contradiction between [them and] the evidence given by Les Hinton two years ago”.
In his letter to Whittingdale, Hinton said the answers he gave in 2007 were “sincere” and “comprehensive” and that he declined to appear.
Giving evidence to the committee, Tim Toulmin, the director of the Press Complaints Commission, said that the watchdog would contact the News of the World again in the light of the Guardian stories, which revealed that PFA chief exec Gordon Taylor and two others were paid a total of £1m in out-of-court settlements by the Murdoch title after suing on privacy grounds.
He said that the Guardian stories “gave us cause for concern. We’re going to ask further questions [to discover] whether there was any evidence we were misled.”
“The fact that Gordon Taylor had sued the paper and the suggestion that another reporter at the NoW knew about Mulcaire’s activity – I think that’s new, and we will be chasing that with the Guardian”.
Glenn Mulcaire was the private investigator used by Clive Goodman, former NoW royal editor to obtain information illegally, sometimes by hacking into mobile phone messages. Both men were jailed in January 2007 after admitting the offence.
Toulmin said the PCC would be “writing to the paper [NoW] once we have as much information as we can possibly lay our hands on.”
He added that the board of the PCC, which meets next week, will ultimately decide whether further action should be taken. “If there is any evidence we have been misled, we will be straight on it.”
Paul Farrelly MP asked Toulmin what aspects of the case the PCC would investigate.
Farrelly said the PCC might want to ask how Mulcaire was paid: if it came out of a retainer or a “separate slush fund”.
Farrelly also said the PCC should ask “how far up the chain of command a settlement of the Taylor case went? Did it go to the board of NI?”
Toulmin said “We weren’t told about the Taylor settlement”.
Farrelly pointed out that NoW journalists and executives who organised and attended PCC training seminars held in the wake of the Goodman case would have known about the Taylor case.
He also asked whether the PCC regretted his decision not to call former NoW editor Andy Coulson during its 2007 investigation into the extent of phone hacking and other activities on Fleet Street. Toulmin said “maybe it would have been better for the PCC to have done so. The focus of this is on have we been misled?
“If Andy Coulson has any evidence … he may come into it as a relevant party. That is a decision for the board. We are going to test what they said to us two years ago with what [we] now know.”
Toulmin added that he was convinced such practices were no longer commonplace on Fleet Street because of the amount of publicity they received in the wake of the Goodman trial. The hearing is also taking evidence from the Guardian News & Media editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, reporter Nick Davies, and the GNM deputy editor, Paul Johnson.
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Three inquiries into hacking claims
July 10th, 2009 |
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News International was facing three fresh inquiries into the conduct of its journalists and executives following the Guardian’s disclosures that Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire paid £1m to keep secret the use of criminal methods to get stories.
The director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, announced he was intending to launch an urgent review of the evidence relating to phone hacking gathered in the investigation of the News of the World reporter Clive Goodman, who was jailed for obtaining information illegally.
A powerful Commons select committee said it would be calling senior managers from News International to give evidence as early as next week to clarify what they knew about malpractice by journalists at the News of the World. Andy Coulson, the former editor of the paper and now the Conservative party’s director of communications, will be asked to appear. He has always denied he knew reporters working for him had hacked into the mobile phones of politicians and celebrities.
The Press Complaints Commission also announced it was conducting an inquiry.
At Westminster, senior Labour figures continued to call for Coulson to resign and the prime minister said that there were “serious questions” to answer.
Gordon Brown was responding after the Guardian revealed that News Group, the publishers of the News of the World, had made the £1m payout to secure secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of journalists using private investigators to illegally hack into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures. It is also alleged journalists gained unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and phone bills. Targets included John Prescott and Tessa Jowell.
The chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, Gordon Taylor, last year received £700,000 from News International in compensation and legal costs, and agreed not to discuss the case.
However, hundreds of other public figures may also have been targeted. Some said they were seeking legal advice. Among them were the celebrity publicist Max Clifford and TV presenter Vanessa Feltz. Lawyers told the Guardian that News International could face expensive legal actions if it was proved that its reporters were engaged in behaviour that breached privacy.
The Met’s assistant commissioner John Yates said Scotland Yard would not be reopening its files because no new evidence had come to light and the original inquiry had concluded phone tapping had occurred in only a minority of cases.
That decision was criticised later when John Prescott, one of those whose phone was allegedly hacked, told the BBC’s Newsnight “serious questions had to be answered” despite Yates’s statement. “Frankly he has come out, he has defined in a very narrow way what he is going to look at, and then gives a report that everything is OK,” he said.
Legal experts said the Yard’s decision would not affect the ability of alleged hacking victims to sue for breach of privacy.
The parliamentary inquiry will focus on executives at News International, including Rebekah Wade, the outgoing Sun editor who has been promoted to News International chief executive; Stuart Kuttner, the News of the World’s outgoing managing editor; Colin Myler, the current News of the World editor; and Les Hinton, the former chairman of News International.
John Whittingdale, the chairman of the committee, said he was particularly keen to question Hinton, who told a previous hearing Goodman had been acting alone.
The Conservative leader, David Cameron, was forced to defend Coulson, but Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, last night insisted that Coulson should lose his job.
Cameron told reporters: “It’s wrong for newspapers to breach people’s privacy with no justification. That is why Andy Coulson resigned as editor two and a half years ago. Of course I knew about that resignation before offering him the job. But I believe in giving people a second chance. As director of communications for the Conservatives he does an excellent job in a proper, upright way.”
The Tories also pointed to Scotland Yard’s decision not to reopen its inquiry.
Nevertheless, the DPP said he was setting up a team to review the evidence and the decision taken over the material discovered during the police inquiry into Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator who was also jailed. “In the light of the fresh allegations … I have ordered an urgent examination of the material supplied to the CPS by the police,” he said.
He was taking this action “to satisfy myself and assure the public that the appropriate actions were taken”. He said the evidence was extensive and complex, “but it has all been located and a small team is rapidly working through it … It will necessarily take some time. I am only too aware of the need for urgency.”
News International broke its silence last night, but did not address the specific allegations made by the Guardian, saying: “News International is prevented by confidentiality obligations from discussing allegations made in the Guardian newspaper.” It said its journalists had complied with relevant legislation and codes of conduct since February 2007, after the Goodman case and Coulson’s resignation.
Alan Rusbridger, the editor in chief of the Guardian, said: “We note that News International has not contested any part of the Guardian coverage – including the central assertion that the company had paid a record £1m to ensure secrecy over damages paid to victims of illegal phone-hacking.”
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