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 […]
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.
