Newspapers

Is it time for the media to lay off Lara Bingle? Sure she's done her best to be famous, but is there any reason now for blow-by-blow coverage written by journalists who are apparently being paid to trail her every step. And do the public really care that much?

One of the first things journalists learn is how to write an attention-grabbing intro. I suppose it helps to do this when you work in the Northern Territory, where out-of-the-ordinary events (often involving crocodiles and alcohol) are commonplace. Take today's NT News story, bylined Alyssa Betts, that begins:

A MAN who pleaded guilty to his 11th drive unlicensed charge believes his troubles began when he was stabbed in the back while having sex.

But wait, there's more! Those who choose to read on - and who wouldn't? - discover that the stabbing occurred while the defendant was "having sex and trying to organise a three-way orgy". Apparently he invited a 19-year-old woman, who was watching the act, to join in. Instead, she stabbed him in the back with a kitchen knife. The NT News reports that the man "paused in his sexual activity and noticed the knife sticking out of his back". As you would ...

It's inevitable that we will be soon asked to pay for certain content on news websites that have hitherto been free. The Australian reports this morning that Rupert and James Murdoch and senior News Corp executives (including News Ltd managers) attended a meeting last month to discuss plans to charge for online content. The paper reports:

News Limited (publisher of The Australian) has undertaken a research study into the types of content for which Australians are likely to pay, although it's understood the company has no plans to release details.

And, of course, that's the key. What will people pay for? I'm assuming that the News bosses realise much of what is already on its websites is not worth paying for -- not because it's not informative, but because the same stories are mostly accessible elsewhere for free. This puzzles me, because I would have thought that if you were going to start, apparently imminently, to charge for a product, you'd be doing your best to make the free version so outstanding that many people would have no hesitation in paying when asked to do so. This leads me to the thought that it's not the exisitng news websites that News intends to charge for, but new, targetted sites or subsites yet to be unveiled.

One of my pet hates has resurfaced -- the way films and television programs depict newspapers. Here's a still from a promo for the pay-TV channel 13th Street. No professional newspaper journalist I know would repeat the word "husband" from the main headline in the subhead, and none of them, I hope, would forget to put an apostrophe on the possessive form of the word.

Users of Australian news websites will, by now, be intimately familiar with Mike Van Niekerk. He's the bloke who pops up on video whenever youcall up one of the Fairfax web pages, such as smh.com.au or brisbanetimes.com.au, telling you how wonderful the new page design is. Problem is, Mike just won't go away. If you access the sites from different computers, as I do, you're likely to see and hear him several times a day. And it's been going on all week. Mike, I'm sure you and your team are very proud of your work in redesigning the sites and making the video more prominent (even though I have my reservations about it), but I think you've outworn your welcome.
PS: By the way, Mike, I think you need to do a bit more work on the sites -- unless, of course, you can explain how "Porn star demands apology" is a "related video" to your invasive instructional one.

In The Australian, Mark Day writes affectionately about journalist and jazzman Dick Hughes, with whom I had the great pleasure of working at Sydney's Daily Mirror in the 1980s. Day quotes Hughes on the often misunderstood and misrepresented art of newspaper subediting:

"When I sub I am fastidious about making clear what is meant. I try to put myself into the position of the reader; to make the reader an equal who can understand exactly what we're talking about. I like to concentrate on the who, what where and why, and get rid of contrivances. We should be simple and succinct. I believe in colloquial, instantly understandable English. We should tell our stories straight; tell them naturally."

Dick's advice on subbing: "Four letters good, three letters best. Eschew Latinisms. Active voice wherever possible. Talk neither up nor down to the reader. Tell it as though you were talking to someone in the pub."

Newspaper circulations might be slipping but, as Stephen Glover, points out in The Independent, print journalism is not dead yet in the UK. He writes

Whereas in the newspaper world there is structural decline, with nearly the whole market heading gently southwards, in the magazine world there are titles performing well and titles performing badly. Given all that has been said and written about the decline of the printed word, who can resist a flutter of pleasure that some grown-up magazines should be flourishing?

What are these "grown-up magazines"? Well, they include the satirical/investigative fortnightly Private Eye and its monthly cousin The Oldie, news digest The Week and The Economist. Here in Australia, magazine sales are generally on the slide - with a 3.5 per cent average fall across weekly titles. (Mumbrella has the figures for the three months to the end of December 2009 here.) Without naming names, I take "a flutter of pleasure" that the losers include some titles that routinely make up and publish sensational celebrity stories. If they wonder why things are so dire, their editors should grab a dictionary and look up the meaning of "credibility".

Thanks to Paul Colgan (@colgo on Twitter) for highlighting this: according to the latest Newspoll, only 5 per cent of Australians think climate change is not at all caused by human activity. Ninety-four per cent of us think human activity is involved to some degree or other. Now I know weight of numbers doesn't necessarily make a thing right, but why does the media - especially the opinion pages of some newspapers and most talkback radio jocks - give such credence to opinions held by such a small minority, especially when the overwhelming evidence of science is that we are at least partly responsible for climate change?

The New York Times has revealed cases of "substantial overlap" between reports by one of its business writers and stories in other news sources. Zachery Kouwe "reused language from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and other sources without attribution or acknowledgment", the Times has acknowledged. It's not the first case of plagiarism at the distinguished paper, which has 1000 journalists and prides itself on its fact-checking. Reporter Jayson Blair resigned about seven years ago over what The Times called "widespread fabrication and plagiarism". Why do reporters and other writers who ought to know better simply lift copy from other sources without acknowledgement? Well, perhaps there's a clue in the behaviour of young German author Helene Hegemann who, according to Deutsche Welle, stands accused of lifting large passages of her book, Axolotl Roadkill, from several sources including another novel titled Strobo by an author known simply as Airen. In explaining herself to the newspaper Die Welt, 17-year-old Hegemann said: "I think there are good ethical grounds for giving sources for a book - and the fact that I neglected to do so reflects my thoughtlessness and my narcissism. But for me personally, it doesn’t matter at all where people get their material - what matters is what they do with it."
P.S. Many universities now use software that detects plagiarism. I wonder why newspapers and book publishers don't?
(As usual, my sources for this post are credited and/or hyperlinked.)

A British nurse, Greig Ferguson, reportedly got a top job with a "drastically embellished" CV which included the claim that he had worked at County General, the Chicago hospital featured on television drama ER. Since he got caught out, I've decided to erase the Daily Planet, the Hill Valley Telegraph, the Daily Prophet and the Canley Evening News from my resume.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are reportedly suing Britain's News of the World for its erroneous report that they had separated. The paper claimed the couple had visited a divorce lawyer in December and agreed to divide up their fortune and custody of their six children. Media Guardian quotes the couple's lawyer, Keith Schilling, as saying:

"The News of the World has failed to meet our clients' reasonable demands for a retraction of and apology for these false and intrusive allegations which have now been widely republished by mainstream news outlets. We have advised them to bring proceedings, which they have now done."

Should the Australian publications that reprinted the allegations be worried?

No booze for kids; let them have soft drinks and get cancer. From news.com.au:

It seems Senator Barnaby Joyce isn't the only one having trouble distinguishing between billions and millions. The couriermail.com.au website can't quite decide, between the headline and story intro, how much the Moranbah ammonium nitrate plant is worth.

The Telegraph in the UK is reportedly moving away from chasing more and more hits. Media Guardian quotes the Telegraph Media Group's digital editor, Edward Roussel, as saying:

The big focus for us now is yielding a sustainable business model. Rather than focusing relentlessly on the aggregated numbers of unique users and page impressions, we are now looking more at channels.

The Telegraph's mantra, apparently, is "content, commerce and clubs".

"How Rupert quit worrying and learned to love the iPad" is the title of this opinion piece by the ABC's Media Watch host, Johnathan Holmes. He says the big issue in media this year "will be whether the so-called heritage media - and especially those substantial bits of it owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation - will start charging for content online, and if so, how". But, as Holmes points out, when Apple boss Steve Jobs launched the iPad, it was with an app designed for the New York Times, not part of the Murdoch empire - although News Corp was very quick subsequently to jump on the iPad bandwagon. Drawing on Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff, Holmes argues that Murdoch's apparent strategy is flawed. News Corp, he says, wants to sell an electronic newspaper compiled by his journalists and editors to an audience that has already become too used to setting its own news agenda. And, of course, he wants to sell news to people who are accustomed to getting it for free. I guess the question is, will Murdoch - who has survived and prospered longer in the cut-throat media world than anybody in modern times - prevail again, or will he ride that bomb towards extinction?