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 […]
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.
For anyone interested in the business of producing journalism, there’s an impressive new blog over on Press Gazette - Media Money. Well worth a look.
Disclaimer: Yes, I know I write for PG now and then. I’ve got nothing to do with this ‘un. Just think it’s good.
I now have a piece published under my byline (in the Press Gazette once again) including the quote: “Tony Blair is not even worth being called a cunt.” It’s the first piece of foul language ever published under my name - might as well start big, I suppose.
Link to follow when it’s online…
Got my first front page splash this week, in Press Gazette. Might make me something of an old-media dinosaur, but seeing a story running big on a front page is a pretty good feeling. Somehow it’s more exciting than the front page of a website, though maybe as a generation genuinely grows up with the web imprinted in its culture that’ll change.
Anyway, the Information Commissioner’s backlog will remain until at least 2010 - one in three FoI complaints take over six months to resolve, and one in five take over a year. That’s including those complaints which are dismissed as invalid, too. The ICO are blaming “higher than expected” caseload, which is frankly rubbish. The Commissioner said in 2006 he expected 2-3000 complaints in the first year, potentially rising to over 5000 by 2009. They received under 2500. Goes to show how meaningless having a 20-day limit on responding to requests, 40 days on reviews, when you have no deadline whatsoever for complaints.
On the flipside, the ICO did acknowledge my request on receipt, respond in full (one week early, no less), and supplied some extra details extremely promptly when requested. Credit where it’s due - if only they were all that good.
