Shorthand - no short cuts

Sanity appeared to prevail in the lively debate sparked by Charlie Becket’s Polis blog on the future of shorthand teaching.

He reported on a London College of Communications validation meeting at which the relevance of shorthand teaching was questioned. The debate got a bigger airing when it appeared on Martin Stabe’s Wired blog. Thankfully, most of those who joined in were student journalists who took themselves seriously and were adamantly against the suggestion.

What worries me is that it was on the agenda at all? It is a core skill and one of the few that can’t easily be learned on the job. I’d question the credentials of anyone in education who thinks otherwise.

The only thing that interests me as an employer is not whether someone has shorthand, or even whether they use Pitman or Teeline - but how many words per minute they have.

Tape recorders are fine for sit-down interviews but are not relevant to day-to-day newsgathering. Reporters should use them like subs use spell-check.

And I’d never employ either if they couldn’t work without them.

No photographs? You're havin' a laugh

I witnessed comic history on Friday when I joined more than 15,000 at London’s O2 Arena to see Chris Rock beat Lee Evans’ record for the biggest audience for a live comedy gig.

A one and a half hour music-free, prop-free monologue of sex, race, politics, race and more race was probably worth paying £50 for, joining a queue for a drink that took the entire interval and a queue to leave that took 30 minutes to get outside, but that’s showbiz.

But I reserved the biggest laugh for the pre-concert announcement to comply with the artiste’s wishes for no photography during the show. Stewards then found themselves running up and down the aisle shooting chiding glances at those who did what they did at every other concert - and snapped away merrily with their phones.

Two nights later, a hand reached across to my £85 seat at the Coliseum and patted me on the back during the Liza Minnelli concert. The steward couldn’t reach the woman filming a few seats up and asked me to pass on her disapproval.

I did, only out of politeness, but have to say I felt that sanity returned later during the encore when a few dozen en masse began to flash away.

I’m the first to jump up and down when someone breaches my copyright and am no stranger to litigation when my interests need protecting. But these days every ticket-holder is a photographer and promoters would do well to wake up to that.

Besides, when you ask that number of people to pay those prices (plus, in the case of the Coliseum an extra £5.50 for a small glass of ordinary white wine) and expect them to keep their phones in their pockets when the performers do their best to ramp up the excitement, I think you’re taking the Michael with an M.

A question of trust (part two)

I’m sorry to have missed the launch of Adrian Monck’s book last week as it fell right on deadline. But I gather there were lively exchanges, as you’d expect for a work with such a controversial title as Can You Trust The Media?

Andrew Gilligan didn’t seem convinced by his assertion that the waning trust may not be quite such a crisis after all. But I’m on Monck’s side on this one.

When I began lecturing in the mid nineties I mischievously collected samples of some of the dodgiest newspaper practices. For example, all first editions the day after a serial killer was jailed, and pinned them up alongside each other to show headlines such as “Ten more victims”; “He killed dozens more say police”; “The Search begins for 100s more”.

Same story, different take. But how could this happen, I'd ask? Was it the reporting or the source? In this case it was a moment of madness that was a five-minute post-trial press conference, with the official response: "Well, there are ten people unaccounted for that we know about. It's not inconceivable that there are many we don't know about. How many would that be? Think of a number. It's pure speculation at this stage."

Headline writers, take your pick.

They joined a growing collection as I began to enthusiastically archive pages that were a. pulled after the first edition; b. only ever went abroad before being pulped; c. never actually made it into print; d. got a senior exec or two sacked.

The reaction? A good laugh. Interesting points made but a light touch to break up the heavy stuff. Did it deter them from reading - or writing for - newspapers? Don’t be daft. And did they matter a jot when I brought them out after a dinner party? Not a bit.

Why? There was no real trust there in the first place, merely an acceptance that we can generally read between the lines when we need to and our natural scepticism will spare us from being conned.

Since then, our attitudes to media consumption have changed. We know what to accept, what to dismiss and what to use merely as a point of reference.

I'm talking generally here. And I’m not talking major exclusives.

But look at it this way: a commuter on the 6.32 from Waterloo who picks up a discarded red top will no more believe Elvis is living on the moon than that the small ad on page 52 can make him attractive to women. But neither will destroy his confidence in the media or singles nights.

The importance of the message depends on the level of trust he places in the messenger. TV awards aside, strong images and reporters in flak jackets will generally get a good response, first person headlines about soap stars in the Sunday tabs will not.

A local paper will be trusted by and large (and that’s the point) because the issues it deals with matter to its readers and, given that many of their stories will be exclusive in the purest sense, there are fewer points of reference to test their scepticism.

Even if the Weekly Bugle says Fred Toadstool is 52 when you know for a fact he's 56, you’ll accept the mistake at face value because the paper’s perceived raison d’etre (planning applications, real people’s weddings, death notices) is to inform, not to grab attention at any cost.

A national paper will invariably be merely one of many reference points for a reader following a story on many platforms; the bigger the story, the greater the outlets. Angles will vary and some facts will differ but, in the main, the key ones won't.

It's a game of averages. What really matters is that a paper has to be seen to get it right most of the time but be trying to get it right all the time.

Levels of trust will vary according to experience. Readers like victims of crime, are a product of their experiences.

A question of trust (part one)

I was on the middle bench of the Sunday Mirror the day they bought up the boyfriend of Julie Ward, the year old safari girl killed in an African game reserve. It was to be the splash, the headline was already written and my job was to shoehorn it on to the page.

I gave it to one of my top subs, a woman in her early thirties, and set to work on the subdeck and then an extraordinary thing happened. She sent it back. Resolutely refused to have any input whatsoever.

Why? Did she know the girl? Was this too close to home in some other way? No, the reason, she insisted: “It was utter bollocks.”

Surely there was nothing dodgy about intimate, unsubstantiated, descriptions of passion in the Kenyan moonlight and the appalling headline; Safari girl Julie's last sex-crazed night.

Don’t answer that. Years later it joined a few dozen anecdotes on a list I trot out from time to time when debating ethics with students.

This week Prof Adrian Monck, whose charges at City University I occasionally speak to, gave me a few more with his book Can You trust the media?

He cites many examples of trust erosion from the shark photographs Kevin Keeble didn’t take in Cornwall to the bogus drug addict story that landed Janet Cooke a Pulitzer prize.

This isn’t supposed to be a book review but I will get to the point and highly recommend it as a pretty decent work on the state of journalism as he puts succinctly on paper what we all know but rarely publicly admit: our main priority is to gain as much of the public's time as we can, rather than inform. And their trust is eroded in the process.

He refers to it here and there as a crisis but explores it rather coolly and with little sense of panic. There's some good analysis too, especially for the sociologically-minded; not all of Fleet Street swallowed the dodgy dossier story, bad news did more to boost morale than good news in the WW2, for example. And he puts a realistic perspective on the so-called power of the citizen journalist.

But he sees light at the end of the tunnel and offers a few solutions, which - suppose, is what you'd expect from an educator.

Personally, I welcome any work that intelligently questions what we do and how we do it. Ever since Lies Damned Lies I've been comfortable with being uncomfortable, if that makes sense.

Monck’s book is not quite the gloom and doom of Nick Davies's Flat Earth News and his publishers are quick to point this out. But I don't see it as a head-to-head. Their debates launch from different premises. Where Davis exposes, Monck examines and discusses.

I'm drawn to these works, having seen at first hand many excesses over the years. None of them made me want to quit, join the PCC or leave my drink on the bar in the last chance saloon.

And I've bookmarked a few passages for use in a lecture theatre somewhere near you, sometime soon. I share his passion in nurturing the talent of the future, but it’s always good to let them know what they're coming into.

More on this later . . .

Never write off the sub

Archant have lost the plot if they imagine for a moment that shedding 20 subs and replacing them with £18,OOO-a-year advertising designers at their Suffolk papers is anything but the most naïve false economy.

But of far greater worry is the way it once again opens the whole subs-are-a-thing-of-the-past debate.

Roy Greenslade immediately opened a can of worms on his blog by reaffirming a point he's made before - that they'll be the first victims of the digital revolution. Eddie Shah told me the same during the last publishing revolution - two months before back-to-back subbing shifts actually got Today on to the shelves.

Sorry, but I won’t budge on this: the reality is that subs are absolutely essential, both for print and for integrated newsrooms.

The contribution of print subs extends far beyond the fact-checking and grammar-policing in the job descriptions. Anyone who's tried to see off stone seven editions of a Sunday newspaper with three of their top table away, their splash sub sick and a group of casuals drafted in from some of the Mirror Group's more junior titles will know what I mean when I say they're the engine room. I have the scars to prove it.

The more interesting scenario is the digital one, particularly as technology marches us towards total integration.

This is one area growing more heavily dependent on subs, albeit working in a slightly different way and, I confess, probably in time under a different name. Nonetheless, the vision of a serious journalist writing serious copy straight to page is a fantasy.

You only have to look at some of the straight-to-web puffery that slips under the radar as online “content” to see what I mean.

Be that as it may; if anyone is thinking of doing away with the digital, integrated, sub, ask yourself the following:

Who will Photoshop those pictures, moderate those comments, embed those MP3 files, write two decks of 24pt across three cols - and a standfirst - and rejig the lot for SEO? Who will write a caption that knits together three pictures on page five, then 15 more for an online gallery, complete with links? Who will classify/categorise/tag each story and rewrite ten homepage headlines every hour to keep them fresh?

Sorry, I nearly forgot: turn 700 words of repetitive drivel (written at speed by someone under pressure to bash it out on the way to the podcast studio) into 300 that’ll grab a browsing reader a click away from a more succinct version – and keep him coming back and back as the story progresses in real time?

It won't be the writer. It won't be an "advertising designer", It may not even be the team effort that currently comprises the print sub and the ill-fated web producer; it'll be the sub of tomorrow using the technology of tomorrow.

That’s a long-winded way of saying what a good sub would summarise in two points:

1. We should be debating the changing role of the sub, not their demise.

2. The wheel shouldn't be reinvented by those who think its square.

Who's spinning who? The debate goes on

The BBC's economics editor Jeremy Hillman kept the Flat Earth News debate on the boil by telling a PR and the Media conference that up to 15 per cent of the corporation's news output is PR-oriented and accusing fellow reporters of becoming "copiers".

This was reported extensively in PR Week, the same magazine in which Brent Council's director of communications, Toni McConville, warned her peers to watch out for "pointless muck raking" by young reporters making FOI requests.

Both appear to add weight to Nick Davies' controversial findings. Not that it's anything other than blindingly obvious anyway.

Sadly, if conclusive proof were needed of spin-controlled media, surely Prince Harry's brief foray into Afghanistan takes the biscuit.

Peter Wilby hit the nail on the head in the The Guardian: you just can't put a price on that sort of spin.

Mind you, I did admire the tactical nous of the Palace spin machine. It’s the sort that wins wars.

For us Conrad, the party was over long ago

The jailing of Conrad Black has marked the end of an era for yet another larger-than-life media mogul.

But you may be surprised to learn that his passing was mourned a long time ago by many at Canary Wharf when he handed the keys of the Telegraph group.

Long before even the spectre of the first knife in the first back, there was a dire casualty - the drinks cabinet in the executive canteen.

Oh, those days. How we loved it when someone left (I mean voluntarily). Or the great and the good came to lunch. The wine, the speeches, the wine, the banter, the wine . . .

One handshake, a few signatures and a press release later and, well, put it this way, lunch hours became just that again.

Just how engaged is GMTV?

Didn't GMTV just plumb new depths this morning with yet another cringe-making stunt?

You could have scripted it: Feb 29, let's get a blushing wannabe bride-to-be to pop the question live on TV and set hearts a-flutter.

So they found Emma, a long-suffering DIY widow who has spent seven years booking romantic breaks for factory worker Mario without him once taking the hint and dropping to one knee.

Surely, a camera in his face and a few million dew-eyed viewers would clinch it. So, with the help of his mates on the shopfloor, they whipped the poor bloke upstairs for a bogus meeting while they sneaked in the cameras, a presenter and the hapless Emma eagerly waiting to become the happiest man in Hoddesden.

When they rounded the corner, hey presto! he was already kneeling, albeit at his machine and in his overalls, but, still, good sign. Enter on screen, Emma, cherubic, expectant, little box in hand flanked by not one, but two, cameras and what looked like a holiday camp MC with a microphone.

A short speech and Emma ask for his hand. Mario, bemused, eyes darting everywhere, looked bang to rights like a dodgy builder fronted up on Watchdog.

So, will he or won't he? "Yeah, awright" he said, adding when pressed: "She's a little bugger, she is."

And as Emma wept real tears of joy, the MC pressed him further,asking why he hadn't in all those years, made an honest woman of her. There was even the sound of violins.

Meanwhile, back in the studio, presenters Penny Smith and Andrew Castle were openly wetting thenselves as they spoke of how "thrilled" poor old Mario looked.

Then, cut to the factory. There was the couple, flowers in hand, getting into a car "for a bit of a chat", said Castle. I bet. "Have a nice weekend," he added as Smith fairly burst her sides.

If the engagement survives this, let's just hope the wedding video fares a little better.

Style, and doing it by the book

Interesting to see the Telegraph have updated their stylebook for the modern age. It's full of the traditional stylebook pomp, suited and booted by Simon Heffer, and includes for the first time references on how to write for multiple platforms.

For the uninitiated, stylebooks are a newspaper's workshop manual; they're there to ensure all the pages speak in one voice.

In practice, they can usually be summarised by a well-honed introduction setting out the basic aims and three to four pages of banned words, adopted spellings and a few quirks.

In reality, they are often an excuse for the Style Guru of the day to vent matters dear to his or her heart with a pithiness that underlines their ambition to be seen the next Leslie Sellers.

Often, the editor changes his mind (or the management change the editor) before the ink is dry and the keenest pedants eagerly await "the revised version" that never materialises. Meanwhile, everyone uses their common sense and defers to the wisdom they brought with them from their first job - or uses the search engine to find consensus.

They do provide important clarification on issues such as adopted spellings - do we write gipsy or gypsy? Is it fulfil or fulfill? And more: Can we say wed when we mean marry and is Xmas OK for headlines? (and is OK okay?)

Heffer’s offering answers these but also regurgitates loads of age old stuff that fatten up all style sheets and turn them into style books:

Birds Eye doesn’t have an apostrophe, McDonald's does; Cate Blanchett spells her name with a C; farther relates to distance, further means additional – all basic stuff that anyone on a national broadsheet should be able to recite in their sleep. And any intern reporter would be expected to Google before placing in the news editor's basket on a freesheet.

Often style is confirmed or amended on the spin. In 2001, Charles Moore had to think on his feet to confirm the spelling of Taliban (not the BBC’s Taleban). A few years earlier, Max Hastings, aware that young bucks like me were stealthily dumbing down the news pages, banned the words Youth and Celebrity. Moore later told me he had a problem with the way we were using Timeline on the web.

Bill Deedes had bequeathed Hastings the edict: never insult your worldly-wise readers by reminding them of Ministers' christian names. Thus: Mr Howe walked out of Mrs Thatcher's government and Mr Biffen expressed his regret.

The best style guru the Telegraph ever had was Andrew Hutchinson, the managing editor and reader ombudsman whose legendary and revered tome cautioned us against being flippant with the language, with the reminder: “Only Malays run amok.”

His gentlemanly bollockings of subs who failed to spot even the most minor error were legendary. “To err is human,” he told me years ago over a glass of wine in his glass box where my misery was on show to all. “To do it on the pages of the Daily Telegraph is quite another matter.”

He went on: “Never mind this missive had been written in haste by a foreign correspondent . . . passed by a harassed news desk . . . approved by the night editor . . . placed on a page by his lieutenant, the responsibility for this most heinous of spelling errors falls entirely on the shoulders of you, the sub editor.”

I’m not sure how he would have responded to Heffer’s latest assertion:

No journalist should expect his or her line editors to spot mistakes or solecisms or to be there to correct them. While executives handling copy and production journalists should be alert to any errors and should correct them when spotted, the responsibility for any that get into the paper will lie solely with the writer..

How times change. Wish I’d had that with me when I went for my spanking. Would have been more effective than a copy of Debretts down my trousers.

Don't ignore the Flat Earth warnings

Nick Davies's Flat Earth News revelations have become a real talking point but they shouldn't surprise anyone.

His main finding,backed by academic research, was that all but 12 per cent of stories published by Fleet Street's quality papers is original, the remainder consisting of reworked agency copy or PR material, thereby relegating what we do as "churnalism".

The papers at the heart of this expose, the Mail, the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Independent either failed to comment or dismissed it with a few platitudes.

It was a feeble response. Anyone who's ever copytasted in Fleet Street will know just how embarrassingly accurate these findings are. The only revelation was in the sheer amount of recycling involved.

I do recall on the eve of a threatened strike at the Telegraph a few years back, telling anyone who'd listen that a few subs could produce the first 15 pages for weeks from PA, Reuters, and the massive wave of copy that flows by the minute into the corr-wire basket, probably without anyone noticing.

In fact, not merely once did I take a PA story for a first edition slot, only to get staff copy later and find some big-name byline has simply rewritten the same stuff I'd had subbed earlier. Often, the rewrite was not as good as the copy the sub had produced, so I just stuck a byline on it and slipped the page.

I look forward to studying Davies’ findings more closely but don't assume it'll it be a wake up call. In fact, it's going to get worse as digital becomes more dominant.

The push to web-first will mean that one of two things will happen:

1. Reporters asked to produce more versions of one story in more formats will, ipso facto, produce even less of anything original.

2. They will actually focus their attention on the exclusives we’re missing - and leave the breaking news to the agencies such as PA who are far better geared up to do it anyway.

Oh Lord, who's really in charge?

What a wonderful sitcom the Lords' communications committee has become as editor after editor is brought before them to justify who really wears the trousers on their papers.

Editorships are priveleged and powerful positions often steeped in legend, even if often of our own making, and it spoils the image to find they're often just people like the rest of us who do as they're told.

Whatever Rebekkah Wade says about Murdoch or Andrew Neil says about the Barclay Brothers, I'd personally save a bit of taxpayers dosh and retire them to the country with a handful of biogs.

I'd recommend Piers Morgan's The Insider (Murdoch), Max Hastings' Editor (Black) for starters. Brian MacArthur's Today and the Newspaper Revolution (Shah) was pretty insightful too. There's a few on Maxwell but, trust me when I say at least one is only useful for resting your cocoa mugs as you read into the night.

Ron Hunt: telling it straight

I was sad to hear of the death of Ron Hunt, the editor who defied the NUJ for six months by bringing out Kettering's Evening Telegraph on his own in the bad old days of the late seventies.

I spent a little under a year there as a district reporter, a short while after the braziers had cooled - and after the mutton-chopped one had kindly let me choose my patch.

It was a toss up between Corby, a town reborn on the back of a thriving steelworks, a union hotbed and rampaging Scots who'd followed the work south, or Rushden, a dead-on-its-feet old boot-and-shoe town where "bugger all happens outside the Lions Club AGM".

I chose the Cobblers over the Gorbals because I reckoned its sleepiness was a front for the sort of salacious exclusives I'd been flogging to the red tops on my last paper. I came away with my six-quid-a-week better contract thinking Ron must be dead chuffed to have snared such a high-flyer and wondering how long he could hang on to him before Larry Lamb or Derek Jameson finally snapped him up.

A few weeks later, my old boss rang to see how I was getting on. I left out the bits about the pensioners' bring-and-buy and the guest speaker at the Probus Club and gushed on about the mole I was cultivating deep inside Thrapston Councl.

He said Ron would be delighted. He'd rung him for a reference, said he thought I was a cocky little t**t but would have to do because the strike had put a lot of good people off and he was desperate.

I did get a few exclusives, even though my other mole at Irthlingborogh Women Against Nuclear Proliferation never delivered and did get snapped up after eight months ... by the rival freesheet.

Hey-ho, onwards and downwards ...

It must be true. It's in the papers

Wires are always getting crossed between departments. It's embarrassing when you splash on Takeover deal imminent and the City desk runs a diary piece scotching rumours. But in the terrace talk and training ground whispers that is modern-day sports reporing, it's easy for the same desk to score an own goal.

Today's Metro (Page 67) has Alan Shearer experincing Shear Heartache "with [ex-Fulham nanager Chris] Coleman set to be King Kev's No.2

Turn two pages and Coleman looks to have ruled himself out of the running and Shearer, clearly a master of his own destiny, appears far from heartbroken when he make it clear: I don't know whether I want to be a number two.

Hardly singing from the same team sheet.

The truth is out there somewhere

Regular readers will know I'm always urging rookie reporters to dump from Big Brother and watch DVDs of Lou Grant. Well, I've more essential viewing for those with the stomach for it: Jeremy Kyle.

Not because it'll harden them up to vox pops on dodgy estates but for the sheer plausibility exhibited almost daily by the most accomplished liars.

The pick of them came on Thursday when a somewhat tasty geezer whose fibs had been rumbled by a lie detector the previous week, flatly and animatedly refused to admit he'd spent the night with his mistress or tried repeatedly to phone her before the next show so they could get their stories straight to avoid further embarrassment.

He stuck to his guns, even when his pal in the audience, albeit thick as a brickie's buttie, inadvertently shopped him. And when the mistress produced her phone to reveal nine missed calls from him, he still protested his innocence and insisted everyone was "'avin a larf".

Now that’s a reality show. And one that every rookie would do well to watch once in a while, if only to reaffirm what every old hand on the news desk will tell them: people lie their pants off, sometimes ever so convincingly, whenever it suits them to do so.

Goliath and the Stars of David

There's nothing better than watching a little guy with a cause punching above his weight, be it at the foot of a beanstalk, on the set of a kung fu film or in the third round of the FA Cup.

Readers of the JC, whose purse strings I now hold, know the feeling well, having seen their favourite Sabbath distraction feed the national media major exclusives three weeks running; from leaked emails at Clarence House to David Abraham's philosophy of giving to the £2 million-a-year Prudential boss who broke his nose during a Sunday football spat.

None of them came easy. The first was classic use of contacts, the second, days of persistence and refusal to take no for an answer and the third a result of tracking down 22 men in shorts and half a dozen in suits, all of whom were one way or another sworn to secrecy.

It's always good to do. Better by far to do it against the odds. And somehow satisfying that it all emanated from the last remaining national newspaper office in EC4.

In text advertising? In your dreams . . .

The newspapers experimenting with in-text advertising are deluding themselves if they think there is any merit in allowing companies to sponsor words in stories.

There is not and it pains me to think they are people out there daft enough to think there is.

Sky Sports, Dennis Publishing and the Telegraph have decided to let advertisers choose words that relate to their products, highlight them in text and link through to an annoying - and in terms of any sort of editorial credibility, damaging - pop-up ad.

As the Guardian have clearly realised, this is a massive abuse of readers' trust and the thin end of a very dangerous wedge and, wisely, passed. But in America, Vibrant Media claim they are delivering these ads to 110 million web users a month on nearly 3,000 sites, many oif them owned by papers such as The Indianapolis Star, The Arizona Republic, and the Reno Gazette-Journal.

I've encountered these in several previous lives and, once upset my commercial team by calling a meeting with Vibrant to a premature close with the words: "You're having a laugh."

This is intelligent technology used in a very unintellident way. It has bags of potential within advertising features and, used internally, the coding can open up all sorts of possibilities. But at the moment it is a loose cannon. It short-changes readers and is prone to farcical error.

My last contact with this was a discussion involving an ad campaign for BP and the prospect of them sponsoring words such as oil and emission. I was minded to be more civil this time and suggested that, even if I did lose my marbles and cave in, it would do the sponsor few favours to have their smiley pop-ups linked to words that usually make the news pages via stories involving sea birds killed by spillages or suicides involving exhaust pipes and lengths of hose.

On a lighter note, one motoring magazine editor told me he'd shamefully trialled it to find the sponsored word tyre successfully ignited a pop-up for remoulds. But the word rubber gave readers sex dolls.

When it finally dawned on the Sun

Not that it's any of my business, but I was just a tad depressed that Rebekah Wade wrote to her staff to ask them to get behind plans to embrace the web and publish on a “truly global scale”.

It's 2007, 13 years since newspapers began to embrace a medium their kids already had and, more significantly for her, more than two years since Rupert Murdoch told editors exactly that.

The Sun has had a very successful site for a long time. Its use of images has, ahem, made it very clickable but, more importantly, they've had a clever editor in Pete Picton who knew all about recreating and enhancing a successful brand online.

A few years ago, Wade blamed the success of Sun Online for the drop in her paper's circulation. Picton was quizzed on this during a panel discussion at an AOP event shortly afterwards and diplomatically sidestepped. But we all knew it was nonsense. Web hits were growing, print sales were falling and the relationship between the two in terms of cause and effect were limited.

Even so, the Sun apart, this does paint a time capsule picture of journalism as a whole and one which rings true.

For too long, too many senior journalists dismissed the Web as they would an advertising supplement, embraced it when the penny dropped that their futures depended on it and are chasing the game in understanding the logistics of how it works.

Blogger blags his way into the NUJ

The NUJ's acceptance of Endgadget blogger Conrad Quilty Harper as a member marks a significant milestone in its history. They've always had strict rules about who qualifies, traditionally judging applications on the percentage of their earnings from actual journalism to root out the village correspondents and pamphleteers.

It shows how far the union and the media have come but begs the question, notwithstanding the NUJ's resistance to many things new media - and taking into account its membership has seen better days - why on earth would he want to join a union in the first place?

So, what does the future hold?

All this talk of the Web 2.0 journalist is causing much disquiet among those who hold the key to its future.

During two lively QandA sessions at Cardiff University yesterday, I was faced four times with questions that, however phrased, boiled down to: "What on earth will employers want from us when we qualify?"

It was no good me reassuring them that their core investigative skills and writing ability would be enough, and that colleges of this quality equip them technically well in the first place, although I do stand by it.

And it didn't help that I predicted yet more redundancies as papers talking up convergence actually converge and work to a business model that gets close to the management ideal of a few multi-skillers doing the job of many - and getting a return on the fortunes they's spent on their infrastructure.

But that's still a way off as it involves a technical interface that publishers are still struggling to get to grips with and a broadcast-style editorial management that is often equally misunderstood.

Anyway, before we get carried away, It's probably worth reiterating that I don't envisage any great sea change in the way these guys will be operating, save for the fact that some of them will be using a bit more kit from time to time than they would have done when the Sun was broadsheet.

(pause here and spare a thought for all those agency hacks of the 70s filing fudges, flongs and snaps, banging off a pic on the court steps, an off-the-cuff page top for the evenings, an overnighter for the mornings, a backgrounder for the Sundays, then dashing to the game and filing updates for local radio live from a phone in the press box)

The real challenge for educators remains in producing reporters who can think on their feet, file quickly, with clarity and authority, ask questions that get answers quickly and develop and maintain contacts that will produce copy to justify a place on an ever emerging plethora of platforms.

As for the technical challenges they're worried about, be they using a microphone or tagging story files for searchability, they'll absorb them before lunch on their induction day. And I speak from years of experience watching interns get to grips with applications it took weeks for the newsroom to grasp.

At the moment many publishers, no matter how they have rearranged their desks, are still operating a two-tier system which distinguishes those who write from those who upload. Because, often, the best uploaders are post-grads who've never seen the inside of a council chamber, let alone doorstepped a minister, and the best writers can't, or won't, lower themselves to filing web-only chunks on a running story, let alone learn how a new CMS works.

So, until the new wave comes through with the attitude and skills to produce well-sourced, old-fashioned exclusives at any time on platforms they see as no more complex than an ipod, we're stuck with newsrooms struggling to make sense of the brave new world.

And it doesn't help that many of the driving forces are so adrift from reality, they are still referring to the crown jewells of their endeavours as "content".

Those who think that's what it is - and defer to it as being "king" - should abdicate.

The rights and wrongs of David Montgomery

David Montgomery is right to criticise pay on regional newspapers. I told my first editor I wanted to learn the trade and was bollocked for using a blue collar word. He left me in no doubt, it was a profession.

That's as maybe but, 30 years on, it's hard to justify paying a daily paper reporter who exposes a paedophile ring in Newcastle or a columnist in Manchester who changes the way a Bill on disability is drafted thousands of pounds less than a graduate who uploads video to a national website.

But he's delusional if he thinks you can dispense with subs and maintain any sort of professional credibilty at the same time.

He's come in for some criticism from subs who, rightly, shudder at the thought of some of the text-speak masquerading as copy going straight into print. But, to be fair, I think he was talking about new, digital platforms.

If so, and he really thinks all subs do is "check things that don't need to be checked", he's completely misunderstood the way stories are presented - and absorbed - online.

Never mind the words, good Web subbing - chunking, linking, classifying, teasing, updating, editing for SEO - will give "content" the "context" it needs to justify publishing in a free-to-air medium struggling to pay for itself.

And no matter hard you try - and all of the big boys are really trying - I've yet to find software to do that.

What surprises me most though is that the Monty I knew spent as brief a time he as could actually writing anything. His ambition was to get into the editors chair as fast as possible - and he chose the fastest route. Subbing.