Among yesterday’s front pages was a data visualisation which, at first glance, was one of the most effective I’ve ever seen: the Independent had made an infographic showing yesterday’s £6bn budget cuts in context - as a fraction of a debt mountain.
Then I looked closer - and something’s very, very wrong.
Can you tell what it […]
This Friday supposedly heralds the launch of a new London freesheet, The London Weekly. Each Friday and Saturday, the ambitious new venture will distribute 250,000 copies to eager Londoners.
Coming just weeks after the closure of The London Paper and London Lite, the publication - which says it has a 50-strong editorial staff - has certainly attracted attention: its launch was covered in Media Guardian, Press Gazette, Brand Republic, and The Independent.
But commenters on almost all the sites, were skeptical to say the least. After spending a few minutes in more-or-less idle discussion of the venture with @martinstabe and @paulmcnally, it was easy to see why.
There’s nothing to suggest The London Weekly is anything other than what it seems - but the site throws up plenty of questions.
Updates have been sporadic, based largely on press release material - with all the front page content written by two users, and comments from Guardian readers on the design have been uncomplimentary at best. For a company claiming £10.5m investment, it’s certainly basic.
But there’s more. The staff page throws up questions. Despite listing over 50 staff, there are no contact numbers and just one email address.
The “chief of reporters” is listed in the library department. Many of the staff throw up virtually no results on google (“Leah Fogerty” is a good example). Others do have some journalistic presence.
Curiously, no-one I asked this evening saw any form of advertisement for these jobs on any of the popular forums. Given there’s hardly a surfeit of journalistic jobs at present, that’s a bit on an unusual situation. How was the team hired? Where are they based?
They’re certainly not based at the address given on the website’s whois record. That gives a registered address of 2 Old Brompton Rd. Google Street View shows this is a FedEx PO Box site.
Even that’s not the biggest question mark The London Weekly throws up. The next one’s a doozy: London Weekly claims to be owned by a five-strong partnership called Global Publishing Group. There’s no record of this company on UK Companies House, either as a limited company or a limited liability partnership.
Odd.
The highest google match for Global Publishing Group is gpg.com. This site has been registered for 15 years to one Anoosh Hosseini, resident in California. The state’s register of businesses has no records of a company bearing that name. Given London Weekly says GPG was founded in 2008, my summation would be that gpg.com is entirely unrelated, leaving a mystery: who on earth actually owns TLW?
Despite covering the site themselves, journalism.co.uk did some substantive digging. Reporter Judith Townend did notice that The London Weekly Limited was incorporated on 17 December 2009.
Unfortunately, if anything, this only serves to muddy the waters even further. The London Weekly Ltd appears to operate thelondonweekly.net, a site which (somewhat oddly given the company’s incorporation date) says it has operated since 2005. The site is registered, once again, to a PO box.
The sole director of TLW Ltd is Oleg Kozerod, based from a residential address in Urmston. Kozerod has a Wikipedia page claiming he is a “well-known journalist, history researcher and Doctor of Historical Sciences…and co-owner of The London Weekly (2007)”.
This wikipedia page was first created just days ago, on 23 January, by a user named “Marina bauer”. This user has never made any other contributions to the site.
Search results for Kozerod on Google Scholar are astonishingly scarce, despite his apparent status as a well-published academic.
Whether The London Weekly Ltd is a strange sideshow or (as Judith townend wondered) somehow related to the Global Publishing Group enigma is for now immaterial - there’s certainly no decent answers now.
Instead, we appear to have a situation in which two national papers and several trade websites received a press release from an unknown group claiming to have raised millions of pounds, recruited dozens of staff, and collected the apparatus to publish a London freesheet within weeks (a venture at which both News International and Associated failed).
The outlets then appear to have taken all these claims - to greater or lesser degrees - on trust.
And whether The London Weekly turns out to be all that it claims to be or not, that’s bad journalism.
At a time when journalists are constantly having to state and prove the case for professional reporting, the outlets nearest that front line were utterly beaten by their readers - many of whom found some of these key details within minutes of the news posts.
Others found even more details, and even speculated whether TLW was some elaborate SEO ploy.
Media hacks know better than any of us how vehement the arguments around the future of news are getting. They know how much trouble the industry is in. It’s why more than anyone else, they need to show what reporters can offer than unpaid enthusiasts can’t.
On this occasion, I’m far from sure they did.
As to The London Weekly, personally, I’ll be surprised if I see a copy come Friday. But in an ideal world, someone will have found out whether I will or not well before then.
Finding the questions was easy. Answering them might prove a bit trickier. There’s time to pull this one out of the bag yet - here’s hoping.
Tags: Associated, Brand Republic, citizen journalism, featured, freesheet, Guardian, Independent, journalism.co.uk, News International, Press Gazette, The London Weekly
February 2nd, 2010 at 8:20 am
Good questions. Similar suspicion about its existence was raised in the comments on our blog in December: http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2009/12/21/london-weekly-launches-online/
I rang and emailed the main contact points given on the TLW site to no avail pre-Christmas, but I did manage to speak to the then-listed managing editor Roisin Robertson, whose contact details (number/s and email) I found on various websites - she seemed to be attached to Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the Green Party. One online biography described her as a former chief reporter of the Chislehurst Times: http://bromley.greenparty.org.uk/news/16
She wouldn’t give me more details about TLW, but claimed she was working as managing editor for the paper.
On January 22, Robertson left a comment on the J.co.uk blog saying she was no longer associated with the newspaper. I rang her: she didn’t want to comment, other than saying she had stepped down from the paper and was concentrating on her other activities.
I then tried to contact TLW again. If you ring, whoever picks up the phone demands to know who you are before you can say who you want to speak to. When I challenged this, I was told it was their policy. Last week, I managed to get through to the listed marketing manager, Paul Morris, who claimed they had a policy of no interviews over the phone - only email. He sent me the media pack the Guardian had reported on. In regards to Robertson, he sent me this bland statement:
“We had a temporary acting editor for the launch of the website and our new editor is Alan Mills.”
So, many questions, particularly over the status of the companies, remain unanswered.
Today’s task? To contact the supposed sponsors of promotions on London Weekly’s site, Packard Bell and Samsung: http://www.thelondonweekly.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=78&Itemid=113
February 2nd, 2010 at 1:13 pm
Considering the level of mystery about the firm, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the secretive Barclay Brothers are the beneficial owners of the company.
February 3rd, 2010 at 1:12 pm
It is a curious case indeed - the website is so ineptly done, in design, story selection and general English, it is hard to credit as a genuine concern.
However, to use the fact that it has been reported at all as a stick to beat the old media is misleading - and pretty typical of the sanctimonious nature of bloggers. If you look at the original Media Guardian story, you’ll notice they followed up all leads and betrayed a good deal of scepticism:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/30/freesheet-launch-london-weekly
February 3rd, 2010 at 2:06 pm
Hi Jim - I had a look at this bag of shite when we all got canned and dug up an address on an industrial estate in north London. Couldn’t be arsed going as it turned out as I got meself sorted out. But it’s clearly either a hoax or the well-intention but utterly uttterly futile attempts of amateurs.
So piss-poor it’s not worthy of comment.
February 4th, 2010 at 4:40 pm
I agree with one commenter above. The Guardian piece actually reports that the backers are mysterious and does manage to track someone down. Seems like this blog has an agenda to bash old media rather than actually analysing the story itself.
February 4th, 2010 at 4:49 pm
MK: I feel worth pointing out I have no old media axe to grind. I’m a full-time “old media” journalist and have written for guardian.co.uk myself on plenty of occasions.
The first guardian story on TLW (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/30/freesheet-launch-london-weekly) does, as you say, spot that the publishing group isn’t registered on Companies House – as a note in the final paragraph, below where many people stop reading.
Simply by doing that alone, it’s better than a lot of the coverage TLW has received. But the vast majority of the article reports the press release straight, when just an hour or so digging would have raised many more question marks.
When you look through the archive of coverage on Invincible, Jordan Kensington and more recently TLW across media outlets in the last few months, there are many examples where little to no fact-checking has ever taken place.
Personally, I don’t think that’s good service to readers. I think there’s a great case for professional media – but one that’s not served whatsoever by a large proportion of the initial coverage of The London Weekly.
February 12th, 2010 at 7:05 pm
Domen thelondonweekly.net was register in october 2008
February 13th, 2010 at 11:23 am
hi guys, we open our media-site “the london weekly” in 2005, this name it was my idea, in middle of 2008 we registered this domen and european copyrights.
This site was impotent for our community, we published some news, exclusive interview etc. What registered GPG in 2008? Nothing. I think its attack on our name and our copyrights. all the best