Posts Tagged ‘Guardian’

The London Weekly is quickly turning into a much-loved in-joke for the capital’s journalists. Hacks and commenters alike are delighting in pointing out grammatical errors, terrible headlines and typographical car-crashes.

But the real story of The London Weekly – or at least what we know of it so far – is much less funny, and risks being buried behind what otherwise looks like nothing more than sneering at an earnest new rival.

Anyone is entitled to publish a paper full of crap, just like anyone‘s entitled to mock it. The problem with The London Weekly isn’t that the product is dire – it’s instead the gaping chasm between its hype and its reality.

Over-trained cynics suggested the product was a hoax. The reality looks grimmer: it’s a real operation making some wild claims which look increasingly fantastic the longer they stay under the spotlight.

To those who’d believe the hype, The London Weekly is a slick operation backed by five private equity investors to the tune of £10.5m. It’s hired a 50-strong editorial team, works out of Camden-based offices, and has undertaken market research on its target audience for the benefit of prospective advertisers.

The apparent reality is a ramshackle publication run out of a small room in Hackney, produced remotely by nine or ten relatively-unknown freelancers.

Many of its claimed staff are non-existent, much of its content is copied-and-pasted, and nothing involved seems to be registered at Companies House.

It’s a copy/paste world

Much of the London Weekly’s content is copied from other sources – and so is its market research.
Freelance photographer Jonathan Warren has produced an excellent Flickr gallery showing just how much of the latest issue of the paper is directly copied and pasted from other sources.

Copying and pasting from press releases is lousy journalism but legally perfectly acceptable. Lifting content from other publications, without attribution and for commercial gain, is a different proposition. That’s certainly been the case with some of the commercial content, but may not be the case on the editorial side - much of the directly ‘lifted’ material noticed by Warren is from agency Bangshowbiz, with whom TLW may well have a commercial relationship.

But copyright owners trying to get in touch are going to have problems. Neither The London Weekly nor Global Publishing Group are registered in any form at Companies House. Even finding the company’s Hackney headquarters takes digging. Anyone wishing to sue for libel would have similar problems.

No-one at the publication has responded to any questioning on the legal status of the company, but anyone who may want to chase up copyright or attribution issues will have great difficulties finding the legal entity that publishes the paper.

Some point out the Global Publishing Group claims to be a partnership, which would not need to be registered. It would be atonishingly unusual, but possible, for anyone to invest in a newspaper (exposed to libel and other legal issues) without limiting their liability, either through a ltd company or a limited-liability partnership. Both of those steps require registration at Companies House.

Advertisers risk a similar quandary. The TLW site says the paper is read by “250,000 young adults aged 15-44 in the central belt per week. This equates to a readership of over 1.5 million readers (excluding online per month)”

This paragraph is lifted directly from an advertising pack for the Metro – in Scotland (PDF) (which explains references to the “central belt”). Anyone advertiser taking such a claim at face value might find themselves short-changed: numerous rivals, PR experts and bloggers commented on how difficult The London Weekly was to find, throwing doubt on the quoted 250,000 print run.

Once again, the paper refused to comment on any of these issues, and has not disclosed its printer. Its circulation claims are unaudited.

Why transparency matters

Rightly or wrongly, few of us are likely to shed tears for advertisers who fall victim to over-eager hyping. But they’re not the only people whose judgement may have been thrown by what can – even on the most generous possible interpretation – be described as plagiarised over-hyping.

The people who’ve really been jerked about are prospective employees, and perhaps even those who got hired. In the wake of the widespread coverage of the new freesheet when it was first announced last year, laid-off sales staff from the London Lite, Metro, London Paper and other publications sent CVs.

After signing NDAs (which as they refer to non-registered entities would likely be unenforceable), some were offered sales jobs: based entirely on commission.

One such individual was offered the role of “advertising director” having never so much as spoken to anyone on the title. He was expected to work with no basic pay, but instead would receive 35% commission on advertising sold. Unsurprisingly, he decided to decline the offer.

However, others may have been more desperate. The question is whether TLW’s hype – and much of the media’s willingness to re-print it with little to no checking – influenced some into making a different decision. It is one thing to work commission-only for a company with £10.5m cash behind it, another to work for a new start-up. People may be willing to work for either, but deserve an informed choice.

Editorial staff faced a similar dilemma. TLW’s masthead was lifted directly from Entertainment Weekly (names were then changed). Some staff named appeared not to exist: the editor-in-chief shared a name with Mother Theresa, the web designer returned no results on google, and the Guardian found others named in connection with the mag said they’d had no involvement for months, and never received payment.

One prospective intern recounted being interviewed in a dingy corridor, asked to work during term-time for no expenses, and told she’d need to use her own laptop. She (sensibly) declined the generous offer.

The likely backer?

The London Weekly is almost certainly the latest project of the Invincible Group, which is either a huge PR and media conglomerate with offices on Wall Street, or a similarly unregistered operation which operates from the same single room in Hackney.

In addition to sharing an address, Invincible and TLW also share several staff - one of whom referred on-air to TLW as Invincible’s new newspaper. Characteristically, to date, no-one at TLW or Invincible has commented formally on any connection.

Invincible has run several awards ceremonies for years: charging guests to play at events, nominees to visit them, and sponsors to advertise there. Founder Jordan Kensington has been quoted in several national papers, and even appeared on the BBC. The Londown Weekly, needless to say, is already planning its own awards. Sound familiar?

Invincible throws up even more questions than The London Weekly - and has some strangely-similar mysteries. These are linked in full at the bottom of this post, but mysteries include an investors relations page copied-and-pasted from Ryan Air; £5m investment from an unregistered company and an online radio station with a claims to have 1.2 million listeners but which in reality has only 12 ‘followers’ and fewer than 4,000 pageviews since 2008 - a figure which suggests fewer than six listeners tuned in each day.

No Invincible company appears to be registered at Companies House. No-one from the group has responded to any request for comment, whether made directly by email or in previous blog posts.

A cautionary tale

The London Weekly’s grammar is atrocious, its headlines are hilarious, and its design is a mess. Were its commercial foundations clear, its legal status public, and its ownership cleared up, these would be of no concern – though many would undoubtedly have some fun sniping.

But until the paper publicly tackles the many substantive concerns around its existence, advertisers and prospective employees alike might be advised to tread very, very carefully. If nothing else, asking for an explanation of why its circulation figures seem to relate to a Central Scottish region seems reasonable, no?

The other cautionary tale from the whole sorry saga is for those who trust the media. One ex-London Lite staffer said he had checked out The London Weekly through googling it, and seeing it covered in the journalism and PR trade press, was happy to accept it at face value.

Many media publications subsequently did some quality digging, though others are still churning out terrible fare. Some included sceptical notes in their very first posts (though often didn’t immediately dig deeper). But such publications owe their readers more – especially those who went on to sneer at TLW’s re-printing of press releases after themselves accepting much of the paper’s hype.

Barring any spectacular developments, this will be my final post on The London Weekly: there are bigger and nastier fish out there much more deserving of frying. Though I’ll continue following the great work being done at Help Me Investigate, for me the real story of The London Weekly has been a simple tale on the power of hype.

In other words, fake it ‘til you make it – it’s easier than you think.

The full list of questions sent to The London Weekly last week can be found here. Any response will be published here in full.

If you’ve got any info, either get in touch with me at james@jamesrb.co.uk or go to Help Me Investigate here.

Yesterday’s post on the deepending mystery that is The London Weekly triggered a heck of a lot more twitter interested than expected, and spurred some solid extra posts from both journalism.co.uk and Media Guardian.

Better yet, Judith Townend has established a crowdsourced investigation into TLW on the excellent Help Me Investigate for anyone interested to try and find out what’s going on - ideally before Friday.

Highlights from the assorted investigations so far include:
-Global Publishing Group is headed by one Agnes A. Theresa - better known as Mother Theresa of Calcutta.
-Until I wrote this post, searching for Arol Figueroldo resulted in a googlewhack, making him perhaps the world’s only web professional with absolutely no presence whatsoever on the net
-The staff that j.co.uk and guardian.co.uk managed to track down appear to be freelance. One said he had not heard from anyone involved in TLW for months, and had never received any payment.

But perhaps more significantly - if less entertaining - further evidence emerged around the link between Invincible Radio and The London Weekly first uncovered weeks ago by Guardian commentors.

Angus Auden, one of the most prolific posters on thelondonweekly.co.uk, doubles as a DJ for Invincible Radio. A company which agreed a promotion with The London Weekly was given an address in London, and shared this with Judith Townend.

Here’s the location in question:

Unit 107,
203 Mare Studios,
London,
E8 3QE

Shockingly, this address also happens to be the headquarters of Invincible Radio, which is lniked very closely to Invinciblemag.com, and also the grandly-named Invincible Group.

Invincible shares many traits with The London Weekly: big talk, broken links, mismatched dates and empty space where Companies House listings should be. However, if the connection is more than coincidental, the name behind The London Weekly may have emerged.

It is worth noting that this link could be circumstantial – if Angus Auden is an Invincible DJ who did some freelance work for TLW, he may have used this office address as a location when trying to get promoters for thelondonweekly.co.uk.

The alternative is that the two ventures are linked.

Firstly, the above address is genuine office space, owned by Workspace Group and available on monthly lease. Unit 307 is currently for lease at circa £800/month.

As is rapidly becoming familiar, there are no existing or dissolved companies registered at UK Companies House bearing the name “Invincible Group”, “Invincible Media Group”, “Invincible Magazine” or “Invincible Radio”. This is despite a claim on the company’s site that Invincible was founded in London in 1999.

Invincible Ltd is a real, dormant company. It was founded in 2003, based in Surrey. It doesn’t seem to be related to the group.

Invinciblegroup.com (grandiosely) has an Investor Relations page. This is just plain text, with no links to any financial statements. Some statements appear to be garbage – I have no idea to what “Latest Passenger figures” would even refer if the link did work.

The page mentions listings on the Irish stock exchange and Nasdaq. I have been unable to find either.

The sites don’t appear to be particularly successful. Invincibleradio.com operates from an online streaming service, and has just 12 followers.

Invinciblemag.com claims to be the no. 1 bi-monthly urban music magazine. Its forums are populated entirely with spam. While it has a string of news posts over the last week or so, there is nothing in ‘Fashion News’ between September 2009 and late Jan 2010.

Similarly, there is no ‘Music News’ between November 2009 and Jan 2010. This is a pattern repeated throughout the site. Many sections have no content since 2006. The ‘subscribe’ and ‘about us’ links on the site are dead.

Another group site, http://www.britishmusicweek.com/ claims to have over 200,000 users and a partnership with British Airways. It has 0 groups, 0 discussions and 3 wall posts.

“Serial entrepeneur” Jordan Kensington is named as the founder of Invincible - and surprise surprise is something of an enigma. His wikipedia profile was created and maintained by a user named Bilingual87. This user has only edited his page and Invincible’s on the site. His profile has only existed since April 2009, despite Invincible’s claim to have existed since 1999.

Invincible Media Group’s wiki page was created on the same day (24 April 2009), by the same user. The group is referred to as a “holding company” – but is not listed on Companies House. Nor are the other companies referred to on the page.

One thing, however, does check out: the Urban Music Awards are real, and Kensington is involved. This guardian story relates to violence at the awards in 2004 – however, generally speaking they have attracted very little coverage. A google news archive search results in suprisingly few hits.

Happily, Kensington can be found on twitter.

The next task – the one that leaps out – is for someone to track down Jordan Kensington and see if he has any involvement with The London Weekly. And if so, why he’s kept his involvement such a secret.

Over to you.

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.

David Leigh, investigations editor of the Guardian, has accused the Government of undermining the appeals procedure for Freedom of Information requests.

Speaking to XCity, the alumni magazine of City University, where he holds the post of Anthony Sampson Professor of Reporting, Leigh said:

“The dysfunctionality of the [FoI] appeal procedure is getting worse, and the ICO is probably being deliberately underfunded”

Leigh was speaking in response to a story in Press Gazette (by, er, me) which reported that one in five complaints to the commissioner take over a year to be processed, with one in three taking over six months.

The XCity article (print version only) continued to quote a spokesman from the ICO backing up concerns over funding:

“Our current funding levels for this work will restrict our ability to make further improvements to this backlog. We are in ongoing discussions with the Ministry of Justice to discuss the current level of funding”

It’s perhaps not wise to hold out too much hope for these talks - the current Minister of Justice, Jack Straw, has not been among FoI’s biggest cheerleaders. Last year he was forced to apologise for criticising the Information Commissioner for not paying enough attention to exemptions within the Act (allowing Government to be too open, in other words). He was also a signatory to the Private Member’s Bill (later quashed in the Lords) calling for the Commons to be exempt from the Act. Still, we live in hope.

Everyone’s trying to work out how journalism is going to work online - especially how the hell it’s going to be paid for. Making the news market work online (well, monetizing anything online) is tricky. But a decent question is whether journalism works as a market product now. Most publications are certainly trying to make money out of it, but is journalism governed by supply and demand? Not really.

Can I back that statement up? I can have a go. Take a look at the graph below, from google trends:

The top graph is number of UK searches in the last month on 4 more-or-less random current affairs stories. The bottom graph is (roughly) the number of stories written by professional news organisations in that time. There’s a reasonable correlation for the olympics, but you’ll note more’s written than read on the credit crunch, and vice versa (bigtime) on Shannon and Madeleine. Recession? Who cares?

If journalism’s a market, it’s not really working. I spotted another sign that the journalism market doesn’t behave over at Adrian Monck, who carried a quote from a blog post on the Berkman Conference (on “participatory media”, no less):
Serious journalism was described … repeatedly, as something akin to like broccoli, or medicine the citizenry needs to spoon down, no matter how unpalatable, if democracy is to survive. That’s despite the fact investigative, or civic, journalism is still seen inside the industry as being at the top, most vital top end of what we do. Yet I struggle to think of another industry that views its premium product as something akin to a nasty cough syrup - necessary, good for your health, but irredeemably foul-tasting.
(Apologies to Prof Monck, from whom I’ve lifted not only this snippet, but also post title. Tsk.)

Let’s accept for now that papers (and other outlets) don’t just offer what people want to read. There’s a lot that’s market-driven, of course, or papers would quickly go out of business. But at least some (to differing extents) of what gets published is not just there to satisfy demand.

This idea helps to explain why “old media” is starting to have a tough time of it. The obvious example here is gawker. Gawker’s bloggers are paid by the number of views each post gets. Don’t know about you, but that scares the bejeesus out of me, as a “content provider”. But I digress. Bloggers have very little incentive to produce worthy-but-dull content for gawker - feeding what the public wants is really the only way. Old media outlets, whose staff don’t face such direct incentives, are less likely to be so market-focussed, so may struggle. But should news outlets follow the market? There’s a decent argument against it - but be warned, economics is involved.

Warning: 3 paragraphs of economics follows. It’s worth it though, honest.

Some “serious” journalism has benefits to society. Let’s say I buy the Guardian because I enjoy reading it. As I’m browsing through, I read that all that stuff about MMR vaccines causing autism was, well, bollocks. As I result, I have my children immunised, and we don’t get measles outbreaks in our school. My personal decision to buy the paper had benefits to society at large. There’s also usually arguments about informed democracy, and keeping politicians honest, etc, in this reasoning. Goods with these funky benefits are called merit goods in economist lingo.

Merit goods sound great, but they’re actually a pain in the arse. To see why, it’s easiest to think about the opposite. When I buy a car, it causes problems for everyone else in society. It adds to traffic congestion, it’s noisy when I drive around outside your house, it means my neighbours have to battle with me for parking, it wears down roads, and of course it contributes to climate change. My car costs you, and the Government, time and money which I don’t notice. To force me to take these into account, I pay tax on my car and on fuel - I’m forced to take the social cost on board.

But in the opposite situation, it’s a bit trickier. There are benefits to society in me following the news - instead of wanting less people to use the good (as with cars), we would like more people to read papers (or news sites, or broadcasts). The “free market” fails for goods like these exactly as it fails for cards - the “right” amount isn’t provided (see the earlier “merit goods” link for a nice graph showing this). One way to fix this is to lower the cost - Government subsidies to News International anyone? No? TV networks are compelled to provide a certain amount of news each day - for “public service” reasons. Should we do the same for other potential news outlets?

Economics bit over. Thanks for your patience

Until now, we’ve never really needed to. There are many reasons for owning a newspaper, and profit is rarely chief among them (thankfully). Very few newspapers rake in the cash - nor many magazines. Papers are a path to influence public opinion, a show of status for the owner, an almost surefire route to a peerage, and more. Proprietors’ complex motives have actually led to partial fixing of the “merit goods” issue.

Newspapers bundle a load of content together - sports, arts, TV listings, film reviews, comment and news. People buy the Sun for its cracking sports section, and keep roughly abreast (pun unintended but left in place) of current affairs at the same time. You may buy the Indie for a particular columnist, and get the rest thrown in. A populist front page story about house prices may draw someone in to buy a paper containing “worthy” stuff within. It’s worked for decades.

And along comes the ‘net, and bundling has had it. There are compensations: it’s easier to get something big out there quick and well than it ever was. It’s also easier to communicate and interact with your core audience - and even “dull but worthy” has a decent population wanting to read it. The ‘net’s prevailing price point (free) makes it easier for, say, business consumers to tune in to the relevant RSS feeds of several news organisations at once. “Quality” journalism isn’t necessarily doomed. But mass-market news is in trouble.

There’s probably an opportunity there, too. Bundling’s probably a fairly lazy tactic, as they go. Trying to find ways to make complex stories accessible and interesting suddenly becomes high priority. Given the ability to tell the same stories in different ways online, it could be doable. Let’s not forget “old media” is doing pretty well at moving online. The biggest news sources online (in the UK, anyway) are the old media outlets - BBC and the Guardian up in front, with several other newspaper sites rapidly closing the gap. Guido and Iain Dale may claim traffic figures coming close (or maybe not), but if we keep using the web as we do now, then all of today’s “future of news” arguments will look pretty stupid in five years time. But my job prospects would be looking healthier, so I could bear the discomfort with fortitude.

And finally: Just out of interest: Is it too old left, or old media to suggest there are stories out there that have worth beyond their readability? If not, what ideas do people have to preserve that kind of journalism in the new media age? Ideas on a postcard to the usual address…

Saturday’s Guardian ran an article titled Do you want Lloyds or HSBC? Account details for sale online. It was so, so, nearly a great story - a bit of creative thinking and online investigation leading him to discover forums selling access to bank account, pricing by balance. The standfirst read: “Details of UK bank customers offered for as little as $75″

One small issue: the article never showed this was the case. The reporter (one Robert Booth) paid his money for some account details, and at the time of writing hadn’t received any details. What occurred to me - before I read that fact - was this would be a brilliant con in itself. Con would-be fraudsters out of some money by offering to sell bank details you don’t possess. They can’t exactly go to the police with THAT one, can they?

This article doesn’t prove a thing. If they had the bank details, then their original story can run as verified - probably with some nice quotes from the genuine account holder. If bank details were never sent, they may have a fantastic little story about conning the conners. As it stands, they had neither.

All that work, all that initiative ruined, when waiting just another day or so would have verified one or other of the lines. Why was it so important to get the piece in the Saturday edition? All in all, it thoroughly demoralised me, personally. Wonder how the writer felt?

Almost everything we hear about the Government, health advice, statistics or finance comes from the media. There’s a problem there. Many journalists - and a good chunk of journalism students - hate numbers. These arts (or social sciences) graduates then become responsible for disseminating figures to the masses. And, shock horror, need no training to do so. Does this have any adverse consequences, I hear you cry? My answer: maybe.

To find out slightly more definitively, I’m going to spend a week finding out. I’m one of the afore-mentioned social science graduates, and so my analysis is nothing other than amateur. That’s important, though. It’s not fair to expect newspapers or TV news to publish thesis-level statistical analysis. For one, almost no-one could read it, and fewer still would want to. But, there are numerous basic errors that there’s just no excuse for: if the story is simple enough to read and be remembered by an average person (as they all should be), it had better be right.

To see how many are right - to the layman’s eye - I’m spending this week logging glaring errors in this very post - check back for updates:

The weekend:

Example One: Guardian Money
Over on the Guardian Money blog, one writer suggested that the UK writes 270m cheques each quarter, worth an “eye-watering” £294m. Unfortunately, it took commenters to notice that this meant that the average cheque in the UK was for about £1. Perhaps not, eh? To the Guardian’s credit, the writer than tracked down more figures and made an adjustment in the comments.

Example Two: The Sun
More serious is this one, in the Sun. They’re offering an interactive MRSA/C.Difficile map to tell people about infection at their local hospital. This is a great idea - but they’ve done it really badly. What they claim is a list of hospitals is actually a list of hospital trusts. Some trusts have one hospital, some have upwards of six - the figures are totally meaningless - and could leave people with misleading fears about their local hospital.

Finally, who am I to look at these figures? I’m no mathematician, and that’s the point - I have a decent A-level in Maths, but my degree is in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Any journalist can easily check their figures. This exercise will show whether they’re doing so, and whether it matters if they aren’t. If nothing else, it’ll risk my future prospects working at papers (or programmes) I single out. And that counts for something, right?

So, Albus is out of the closet. Seems someone not a million miles away from me has something to say about that on Comment is Free