Posts Tagged ‘journalism.co.uk’

The London Weekly finally hit the streets last Friday, and the lucky few who got their hands on it weren’t impressed.

The release of the typo-filled chip-wrapping served only to fuel a wave of mystery around the launch: who was actually writing the paper, who’s funding it, why do no companies exist – even whether the title was a hoax was up for grabs.

Those not up-to-date on the title can catch up with my two previous posts (here and here), Help Me Investigate’s frankly brilliant efforts and Media Guardian’s excellent liveblog from Friday.

But digging and speculation will only get us so far. We have found many, many questions, old and new. Now, it feels like time to get some answers, and only the Invincible Group or The London Weekly – or someone close to them – can provide them.

Below is the full text of an email sent to the editorial and commercial teams of the newspaper, and to its parent Invincible. It contains many questions, some fairly difficult. Virtually all need answers if The London Weekly wants to win any credibility with its sceptics – which by now almost certainly includes potential advertisers – and shake off its highly questionable corporate status.

If you know the answer to any question, or have anything else worth asking, either drop me an email (james@jamesrb.co.uk) or use the comments thread below.

If you’re also keen to get answers - or have extra questions of your own - please feel free to RT, repost or add more in the comments.

Re: The London Weekly and the Invincible Group

To whom it may concern,

The launch last week of your new freesheet, The London Weekly, generally met with less-than-favourable reactions. Some thought the product was poor, many thought it stood no chance, and what must be a worrying number of people suspected a hoax. Others had still graver misgivings.

It’s not exactly the PR any new start-up would hope for. So in the interests of putting an end to the speculation, and giving The London Weekly and its owners a chance to clear the record, I’ve gathered together all the major questions regarding the title.

There are quite a few. Scores of people, including myself; Judith Townend of journalism.co.uk; the users of helpmeinvestegate.com; Media Guardian and Twitter users @Coneee, @Kjalee, @VickyJo, @MartinStabe and @PaulMcNally found a string of inconsistencies and puzzling items.

I’ve grouped them together below, and edited them down. All should be straightforward questions for any startup, and answers would serve to reassure readers, potential advertisers, journalists and bloggers as to the viability of the paper. If nothing else, on one or two points, it could serve as a chance to clear the slate.

I will be publishing this letter in full on jamesrb.co.uk. I will publish any response received either by email or on that blog, in full – and promote it on twitter. I will also be encouraging anyone who knows anything about the project to provide answers. For ease, I have numbered the questions, and separated them into subject areas.

Ownership

1. What is the precise nature of the relationship between The London Weekly and the Invincible Group? There is no mention of Invincible on thelondonweekly.co.uk, but the two businesses are run from the same office in Hackney, and share many staff (and web hosting) in common.
2. What involvement does the Invincible Group’s founder Jordan Kensington have with the paper? Is TLW a second attempt at Invincible’s failed freesheet effort from 2007?
3. Who are the Global Publishing Group? Why is it not registered at Companies House? Has it ever made any previous investments – and why haven’t they received any coverage? And why is its editorial director named as Agnes Theresa – better known to most of us as Mother Theresa – the name of Jordan Kensington’s first school.
4. Why has The London Weekly not been registered as a limited company?
5. Given neither TLW or GPG is a registered company, what is the name of the entity paying staff and suppliers?
6. The Invincible Group has been carrying out award ceremonies for a decade – why are none of its named companies registered on Companies House?Does The London Weekly really have £10.5m backing? Can we speak to the backers?
7. Ex-footballer Tony Woodcock – who has previously been involved with Jordan Kensington at awards ceremonies – appeared on ITN as a co-founder of the project. Given his other (unprofitable) businesses are registered on Companies House, why isn’t GPG or TLW?

Commercial

1. The London Weekly was widely said to be very hard to get hold of on both Friday and Saturday. Was its print run 250,000? How many were distributed? Who was the printer?
2. The largest recruitment advert in the first edition was for Zuricom.com. This domain was registered three months ago, to the same office address as The London Weekly and Invincible. What is the association between the companies?
3. The second recruitment ad – for Chisholm and Moore, a genuine recruitment agency working at candm.co.uk points to a non-existent domain chisholmandmoore.co.uk. Why is this?
4. Did advertisers see a preview copy of The London Weekly? Have any been in touch after the publication of the first issue?
5. Your legal disclaimed in the masthead of your first issue – “GPG does not assume any responsibility for all materials published in the paper. However, all material remain copyright to GPG” – is unenforceable. Who advised you on this?
6. Given your difficult first week, are you happy with your PR strategy to date? Is it likely to change?

Editorial

1. Your online list of staff contains more than 50 employees. The printed masthead contained just 14. What happened to the other 36?
2. Several ‘employees’ contacted by The Guardian said they had not spoken to anyone from TLW from several months and had never received any payment. Why, then, were they listed as staff?
3. Others contacted by the paper and by journalism.co.uk said they were not involved full-time with the project. How many full-time staff are working on The London Weekly? How many of these have prior journalistic experience? Where?
4. Until recently, searching for your web developer Arol Figueroldo on google resulted in no hits on any site but yours (a googlewhack). Does he really exist? And if he does – how has a web developer managed to stay entirely off google? More importantly, why?
5. What was behind the decision to employ no copy editors? Will this decision be revised?
6. Have any copyright owners been in contact regarding copy and images lifted from amazon.co.uk (book reviews) and other content, particularly online? If not, how do you intend to respond should this happen in future?
7. Why was your first cover story an almost verbatim press release from 4 days before publication?
8. Why did your first managing editor, Roisin Robertson, depart so shortly after joining The London Weekly?
9. Why have so few contact details for your newsdesk been published? This is a baffling move to any working journalist, who generally relies on being easy to contact in order to find news.
10. What happened to your pledge to use 30% user-generated content in your publication?

Invincible

1. Why does Invincible claim to have offices on the 30th floor of 14 Wall Street – one of the most prestigious business addresses in the world – yet operate out of a monthly-rental office in Hackney? And why, given Wall Street’s location, is the US phone number given based in California?
2. Why has the normally publicity-hungry Jordan Kensington never appeared on the Sunday Times Under 30 rich list given his “estimated” $18m net worth? Who estimated it?
3. Where are Invincible Radio’s “millions of listeners”. The site redirects to a free streaming service with fewer than 20 followers.
4. Is Invincible Magazine still published? Its forum is populated solely by spam and in many categories there have been fewer than 5 news stories in the last 3 months.
5. Why does Invincible group have an “investor relations” page copied and pasted – bizarrely – from Ryanair?
6. The British Music Week website claims to have a mailing list of 200,000 yet has 0 groups, 0 discussions and 0 albums. What gives?

…And finally

1. What, exactly, is The London Weekly trying to achieve?
2. If (as seems ever-more unlikely) TLW is a hoax, what on earth is the punchline?

I look forward to your answers to these points – largely so I can then get on with my life – and to hopefully laying my hands on a copy of the paper.

Best,
James Ball

Jamesrb.co.uk
@Jamesrbuk (Twitter)

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.