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 […]
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.
Interesting front cover on yesterday’s metro - it’s at the bottom of this paragraph - in which they’d managed at the last minute to get a photo and very short story on Heath Ledger’s death into the paper. But the micro-story and pic is only pared off from the main headline by a hard to spot blue border:
