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 […]
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 is yet?
Maybe not. What the Independent have done is confuse the UK’s deficit with our debt. Sounds like splitting hairs, but it’s not.
Let’s demonstrate using my personal finances, which are in almost as parlous a state as those of our great nation.
As a recent graduate, I have around £20,000 debt, repayments for which whoosh out of my bank account on direct debit. Thanks to overspending on beer, office snacks and (ahem) gym memberships, I spend around £50-a-month more than I earn, after I’ve paid all my bills.
To get back on an even keel, I don’t need to pay off my £20,000 debt: all I need to do is get a £600-a-year pay raise (which works out at £50-a-month), or spend £50 less.
So cancelling my gym membership, saving myself £20 each month, leaves me with just £30-a-month to find. It means I’ve tackled about half of my monthly shortfall.
It doesn’t mean I’ve saved £20, and have £19,980 to go. In fact, I haven’t paid back any of my debt. The regular repayments from my bank account will (eventually) sort that out. I just need to stop going further into debt each month.
The government is in exactly the same position. Provided debt isn’t ridiculous, and we’re making our repayments, we’re fine. The UK’s debt is just shy of £900bn. The cuts announced on Monday do nothing to address it.
The UK’s deficit (the gap between the government’s income and spending) is around £157bn. Most economists think around £48bn of this is temporary, due solely to the recession. That means around £109bn of cuts need to be found. So, in fairness to the Indie, the £6bn still remains a small fraction of the whole. There’s much worse to come.
In other words, a national broadsheet newspaper made the debt problem look around eight times worse than it is, doubtless worrying (or at the very least) confusing its readers. And it used the whole of its front page to do so.
It’ll be interesting to see how they deal with it. An error of such magnitude against a corporation would doubtless result in lawsuits. That obviously won’t happen in this case, but the Indie does owe its readers an apology, and a prominent correction.
I’m a sucker for a nice infographic (okay, a nice bit of chartporn). But data is important. As more and more is released and done with it, it’s crucial journalists learn to treat it properly - and that’ll only come when it’s treated with the same respect (and fear) that surrounds misspelling someone’s name.
That’s still a long, long way off.
Twitter makes some strange things possible. Earlier today, I sent a message to Joanna Geary having heard rumours she, like me, was attempting to learn some basic (in my case, very basic) coding.
Within a few minutes, coding over a beer was suggested. Within five more, we had a dozen potential takers. And a good few programmers offering their expertise.
So what the heck? Let’s give it a go.
We’re going to try to learn Ruby. This is because it’s meant to be fairly learn-able (we’ll see…), but also because it’s handy for all the kind of web apps journos might want: quick and messy data-driven projects, scraping, searches, and the like.
So, the plan is to find a pub with wifi (and beer), bring laptops, a few tutorials, and make a start. If it goes well, we’ll try to do it once a month or so and learn some stuff. If we’re lucky, someone might even do a 10-15 minute introduction (any volunteers?).
We’re suggesting meeting at 7pm on Wednesday 31st March. The (unconfirmed) venue is The Regent, a mere stone’s throw from Angel station. Bring your own laptop!
Hopefully, it’ll all be great. For anyone feeling keen, here’s a nice basic guide to installing Ruby and here’s a crazy-and-offbeat introduction/guide to it.
I’d love to get an idea of numbers so if you fancy coming along, please chuck me an email (james@jamesrb.co.uk) or send me an @ message on twitter (this is me).
Provided we find a free venue (which is looking good), it’ll be free of charge. Win.
Hope to see some of you there!
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.
Help Me Investigate is - quite simply - fantastic. It’s a site designed to help people collaberate on investigations, usually based around questions. An early question was “on which Birmingham streets are the most parking tickets issued?”. And it’s been answered in style.
Heather Brooke used Freedom of Information to get hold of the full record of tickets issued in the last year. I posted a few (rambling) thoughts on the figures on the site, while this guy did a rather more thorough job. With graphs. The Birmingham Post then ran the story in full - and to its credit, cited HMI thoroughly.
All great stuff. And now the site’s out of beta, users are no longer restricted to asking questiond about Birmingham, which must come as a relief to users outside the West Midlands.
The only problem is, I’m worried it might just leave me jobless. Which would be, as they say, a bit of a bugger.
Data is slowly, painstakingly, starting to catch on in UK journalism. Computer Assisted Reporting, as data journalism is clunkily and unhelpfully dubbed, is huge in the US, with almost every paper having a CAR editor and many having full CAR teams. In the UK, the situation’s different - outside the web team and tech desk, even reporters able to do a bit of excel analysis are few and far between.
The Centre of Investigative Journalism has been spearheading a move to change that. Each year it flies over US CAR experts to train up UK journos, who are also being encouraged to start training up their newsrooms, and current journalism students in using data to produce stories (not mashups, not cool data, not spreadsheets, though all are nice - the emphasis is on stories).
Thanks to their efforts, and some damn good work priming the pump from some early freelance adopters - including (yet again) Heather Brooke - a bit of a market is starting to emerge. Stories based on FOI and data analysis will sell, just. Slowly it’s becoming possible to practise this newer brand of investigative journalism. With a bit of momentum, it could yet hit the newsrooms proper, as compared to chequebook journalism, this is cheap as chips.
And here’s where Help Me Investigate, despite its brilliance, gives me chills. Some of the best data journalism is incredibly complex, fraught with legal issues, and inordinately time-consuming. Some downright middling data journalism comes close. This article on police compensation was a CAR story.
The most complex bit of data-analysis in that story was simply working out rates per 100,000. But gathering FOI data from 43 police forces, in different formats, getting them into one sheet, cleaning the data, and working out reliable population estimates was both lengthy and dull. Then the real work started: contacting each force before publication to give chance to respond - then dealing with each force coming up with a string of excuses and (much lower) revised numbers. This relatively straightforward story ended up taking well over 50 man hours.
Most don’t. But if papers can get stories that look and feel like “investigations” from sites like HMI very cheaply - even free - the rationale for hiring data journalists or buying in their stories gets weaker, especially given the newsroom climate of constant cost-cutting.
Projects like the Birmingham car parking tickets investigation are great targets for collaberation, work everyone should be glad is being done, and perfectly suited to sites like HMI. The more complex stuff is likely less so. It would be a crying shame if a scheme like HMI led to less of this work being done.
There is an alternative school of thought that leads to a virtuous circle - data journalists can work with HMI on some investigations and keep a steady stream of compartively straightforward stories flowing. The journalists most eager to help out on the site will have the inside track to publish, and in turn will also have more of their own time to work on the complex stuff that takes full-time workers.
If CAR were more established in the UK, and newsroom culture wasn’t what it is, I’d tend immediately towards this latter happy option. But at present, the majority of the UK’s data journos do their stories as freelancers - and losing this sort of low-hanging fruit both hits income (and given the “news mix”) makes the pitching battle harder.
It would be a crying shame if the brilliantly intentioned - and rather nicely executed - social journalism project that is HMI actually ended up stifling a fledgling journalistic field. Maybe I’m far too negative. But it does seem the risk is there.
With thanks to the twittered contributions and back-and-forth from:
@paulbradshaw and @podnosh - two of the site’s founders
and @rasga and @coneee
Thoughts gratefully received…
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…
Twenty years ago, journalism training was relatively simple. Students picked a pathway – broadcast, newspapers, or periodicals, and found a course teaching the skills needed. With the skills they picked up, some work experience, the right contacts and a bit of luck, they landed that crucial first job.
Now, it’s not so simple. It’s still possible to enrol on courses in newspaper, magazine and broadcast journalism, and students may still aspire to work in these fields. The difficulty is the all-pervasiveness of the internet – wherever you want to work, learning online skills could make all the difference. Bizarrely, learning how to shoot video might help land you your dream newspaper job.
But Emma Harpley of the National Council for the Training of Journalists, which accredits 60 UK journalism courses, said the first thing students should remember is not to neglect key skills like shorthand. “However the story is going to be presented, shorthand is key to actually getting the facts in the first place, so will always be a vital part of journalism.”
Harpley says students on NCTJ-accredited courses concentrate on core newsgathering skills that will always be solid and sound. Incorporating online skills into accredited courses is, she said, still “work in progress at the minute, as the industry is moving forward quickly”.
However, Harpley also believes young journalists should learn multimedia skills. “If someone’s very experienced in print then there’ll still be jobs out there even if they aren’t multimedia skilled. But looking forward, those kinds of jobs will be diminishing.
“The future of journalism is certainly becoming very much more focused online – and it’s moving very quickly at the moment. Journalists need to keep their skills up to date,” she says.
Journalism training institutions and the industry seem clear that multimedia skills are important, but the industry still expects students to have all the writing and newsgathering skills of journalists qualifying a generation ago. Shorthand and media law are as essential as ever. With so much to pack in to a short course, it’s important to have a clear idea of what’s essential.
Bill Thompson, new-media pundit and visiting lecturer at City University, London, says he believes an understanding of new media is crucial for trainee journalists. “Just as we teach you about the legal environment within which you work, so we must teach you about the technological stream in which you are now swimming,” he says.
Those in training now have some things easier than their immediate predecessors. A few years ago, it was essential to know programming languages to work online. Thankfully, due to content management systems (CMS), Thompson says this is no longer the case. “As a recovered programmer, I’d like to teach you all Java, of course, but that’s just me being cruel,” he says.
“I think you need to know enough about coding to be able to tell why the copy you’ve cut and pasted into your CMS template from Microsoft Word is screwed up. That means a basic understanding of HTML and AJAX.”
Everyone agrees that having multimedia skills will help you find a job. Knowing how far to go is still difficult to judge, especially when courses and the industry still haven’t set out their requirements.
Thompson believes a general approach is essential.
“Nobody should leave a journalism course without knowing how to write copy, sub a website, record an interview for audio or video, make a radio package, drive a desk, do a stand-up piece to camera and make a video report, and use a content management system. Any less than that and you’re not a journalist in the modern age – sorry.”
This article originally appeared in Press Gazette
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?
The new NHS site has a feature looking at health and science stories and how well they stand up with the research. It’s really accessible and looks great. So far, I’m really impressed - long may it continue
