Got a job? On yer bike

The story of journalism student Lindsey Cole's plan to cycle through Africa in time for the World Cup Finals was a little sad, given that the only reason she's doing it is because she hasn't found a job since graduating with a Masters last year.

But her appeal for someone to go with her will probably not go unheeded as she’s hardly alone in her plight.

Whether through a sense of pastoral care or to fuel my own suspicions, I recently enquired after some of my students when one got in touch for a reference, having failed to secure anything approaching a proper reporting job for the best part of a year.

At a rough count, and after a bit of Facebooking on his part, we estimated that of about 12, three had found work on papers, two had gone back into education and the rest had variously, completed endless intern placements while living at home or working part-time in offices and two had quit to travel or given up and changed career.

Sadly, none of them were privileged enough to be able to live for free in London while looking, or the family connections that enabled them to coast their way through a graduate scheme on a national.

Worse still, all my advice about packing a bag and being prepared to travel “to any local paper in the country” seemed to rebound when he told me of the applications he'd made.

My only dread is that he ends up taking a job on one of those awful council-run freesheets that are at the heart of the demise of these newspapers.

Got a job anyone? He comes with a reference.

I'm a web celeb, get me out of there!

A sex pest rang this week to pester me about his privacy.

He wanted me to remove his court case from our web archive in keeping with Home Office guidelines about limiting the time criminal charges are held online.

Not sure which one he was referring to but he didn't seem to accept that the public had a right to know who among us had been compromising 12-year-old girls and failed to see the irony that he had commited his crimes - via the web.

But he was just the latest in a very long line of archive appellants to come out of the virtual woodwork wanting to rewrite history. Here are some of the best of late:

1. The party goer pictured (quite innocently) standing too close to a woman that wasn't his wife. (Poss solution: add a link to Relate)

2. The fantasist who claimed he was being watched by shadowy figures and didn't want his address used. We only reported it as Texas. (Poss solution: cc the CIA when replying)

3. The rite of passage youth who, on seeing his picture in the paper, realised he was no oil painting and didn't want to compound his misfortune by letting strangers clock him. (Poss solution; Free Photoshop download link)

4. The smiling couple who wanted their wedding picture expunged but wouldn't say why. They made their requests separately. At different times. From different numbers. (Poss solution: two free subscriptions to the dating site)

5. The businesswoman delighted with her print interview who later decided she was "probably a bit misquoted" when she the ex-partner she had shafted read it. (Poss solution: doorstep the partner for a quote. You never know.)

6. The elderly couple who bought a guest house only to Google it and find a year-old review condemning it as Devon's Fawlty Towers. (Actual solution: clarify as per moral obligation and suggest to Travel desk they review again later).

As for the sex pest quoting the Home Office: I referred him to the Foreign Office.

Murdoch and the tide of change

It's for good reason that the industry is gripped with Rupert Murdoch's plans to charge readers to see stories. And it's not just about whether he has, as many first thought, lost the plot. It's more to do with the fact that he’s in the enviable position of actually having one, for better or for worse.

Whatever his plans, he’s making an audacious statement that flies in the face of the panic sweeping newsrooms: telling Google he can do without them at a time search engines have begun dictating what we write.

As someone used to dictating the agenda, certain practices may not sit well with him, and the pandering to optimisation may be one of them. I’m not decrying SEO, far from it, but the thought of national newsrooms being told by their SEO police to write something – anything – about Jedward or the some nutter who’s taking Twitter by storm because they’re scoring well on Google Trends must rub a bit.

Not to mention the thought of some lackey sending a round-robin: "Can we start tagging stories ‘fags’” mid-budget speech or “Euro” during election night just so we can stay keyword savvy.

The issue here is not about whether he has hit upon the holy grail of business plans but how enduring is his influence as a catalyst for change. We're seeing the green shoots of that already.

Journalism as a whole was a late adopter to the web and many of the old school are still just waking up to what it represents. At its best, it means serious industry names joining key debates with conviction; at its worst, the unseemly scramble for seats from the dead wood eager to nail their colours to a new mast and reinvent themselves. (“Hey everyone, I'm now in charge of digital paperback blogging. Does that mean I get a student?”) Don't tell me that doesn't ring a bell?

Then there’s the fallacy that integration would reduce costs in Fleet Street and the qualitative cost to local journalism by virtue of the fact that it has (seriously, more on that later...).

We’ve got to accept that the face of journalism will change as the dam we’ve been holding back for the past few years finally bursts. The profile of those practicing it will change with the job description we’ve yet to write – and the commercial future will lay not with the words we produce but how we leverage our brands as a tool to attract something that will.

There are more twists and turns to come and, while Murdoch may not end up leading the change, he’s doing what he’s done many times in the past and forcing us more quickly into it.

Here's a couple we did earlier...

Another one for the mantelpiece, courtesy of the European Newspaper Awards.

Was this a case of months of planning - or just an example of the amazing things you can achieve when you're hard up for a front page picture? You decide.

Either way, we're gonna need a bigger mantelpiece people.

What Will they do next?

Congratulations to Will Lewis on his latest promotion - this time to launch a new division of Telegraph Digital following his Harvard sabbatical.

I'm not sure what a move to Euston means for the man Murdoch Mclellan first hired as City Editor then promoted to Deputy Editor even before he'd finished his gardening leave at The Times.

But it was only a matter of time before Tony Gallagher cashed in his brownie points over the MPs expenses exclusive to take the editor's chair.

What intrigues me most about this, though, is the promise of 50 new digital jobs.

The Telegraph Group has come on leaps and bounds, but one thing they have got disgracefully wrong over the past year or so is the misguided way it it has discarded some of its best talent, particularly among the more anonymous, junior ranks. If a stint at business school has taught Lewis anything, I hope it is how to recognise where the real value in a workforce lies.

And, maybe, invite a few of them back.

A timely intervention

I've just joined an interesting think-tank which aims to explore emerging cross-media business models.

It's an academic network funded by London's Kings College and Bristol's Brunel University and has the backing of a number of diverse digital businesses and the AOP.

It's early days and I'll report back on progress. This space needs to be watched.

PS: a small boast. We've just bagged another award. Need a bigger mantelpiece.

Katie pays the Price

I hope the Sun’s first-person headline on Katie Price’s jungle torment was rhetorical. Since she returned to I’m a Celebrity last week, strutting around in a Lara Croft outfit and telling everyone she was there for “closure” when she meant exposure, viewers have been voting for her to do every gruelling, filthy and frankly, highly disturbing task on offer. Thus the question: Why are they picking on me?

The answer, as your publicist must surely have told you, is simple: that’s what you are there for.

Anyone who builds themselves into a massively lucrative brand by taking their clothes off, having boob job after lip job after boob job, earns a bundle from a fly-on-the-wall documentaries on their every movements and flogs their wedding pix for substantial sums must realise that is their role in life.

This show is built on the premise that viewers can pay small amounts via their phone bills to put minor and rather annoying celebs in the stocks, happy in the knowledge that the show’s producers will throw more than tomatoes and rotting eggs at them.

And given the C-list group they have in there at the moment, a cockroach or two down Katie’s cleavage is, frankly, the best we can hope for. Which is also probably why she attracts a considerably higher fee than her camp mates.

That aside, let's hope the medical support we keep hearing about is as good as we’d hope. Sideshow that Price is, can it really be right to subject anyone to such pressure? Is it wise for someone with a genuine water phobia to be entombed underground in the dark surrounded by rats – and then literally flushed by a sudden and surprise torrent into an underground tank and left screaming to get out?

To give her credit, she does get stuck in. But all the controlled conditions and teams of medics on hand doesn't mean someone can’t have a heart attack?

Bad press for adverorials

The Express's thinly veiled attempts to pass off advertorials as real news was tantamount to a Premiership star not trying too hard against his old club. At the end of the day, and with the score at 0-0, no-one gets hurt, so what if a few rules got a bent a little?

After all, how many travel puffs have you seen tarted up as the poetically knowing prose of the world weary. Or adjectives laden as a hefty tip in a breathless blurb disguised as a restaurant review?

I don't even blame Richard Desmond. He's a businessman. I'd expect him to do what he could to keep an advertiser happy.

But the question remains: how the hell did it get on the page? And it shouldn’t have taken the Advertising Standards Authority to see it for what it was – a creeping cancer that should have never dodged the copytaster’s spike.

As for ad concessions, I think the Sunday Express probably did enough with last week’s awful Tesco Club Card ad that reduced their splash on The McCann’s stalker to a mere five lines.

Michael Jackson: how to cover a running story

Michael Jackson’s death fell just right for the late editions, to the relief of night editors who must have been wetting themselves at the thought of running a 3am Final in limbo.

But they had enough on their plates, coping with web updates as speculation grew and newsrooms turned in desperation to Twitter which was, to anyone sifting their tweets, ahead of the game with the first referrals to TMZ, who broke the story way ahead of anyone.

It was interesting reading. As the midnight hour approached and many of the 60,000 tweets were reflecting the death line (Thanks to David Cohen, or dgcohen23, for that), The Times prefixed their home page splash with Breaking: Jackson 'dies' after suffering heart attack. The story moved very slowly though and the more follows was slow to live up to its promise.

The BBC got round it by splashing on Gravely ill Jackson in hospital and shoving their media player across top of the home page for some real-time reporting.

The Guardian did have Michael Jackson dead but attributed with say reports. They too offered only a few lines. Oddly, they were still attributing doubt to the hours-old: Farrah Fawcett dies at age of 53 – PA.

The SEO-savvy Telegraph wisely used cardiac arrest in a clunky-but-friendly 13-word head and repeated it in a 22-word summary. They did much better on the copy though, pulling together a story long enough to justify the subject, even if they had Micheal in the headline briefly. Ouch. Been there.

Then, as Google was apparently crashing under the strain of a search-term siege, TV news reports repeated, almost by the minute, that the reports were “uncomfirmed”.

At around 11.50, the BBC announced: Singer Michael Jackson is 'dead' then rather sloppily added a list of links that included the earlier gravely-ill story.

USA Today fared a lot worse. At 11.30, their site led with Michael Jackson dies at 50 - but clicked through to a lengthy obit with no mention of his death or the circumstances. A case of grab what you can from the basket and throw it up. An intro would have helped.

The New York Times had Michael Jackson, 50, is dead but put the story in the 'arts beat' section. Worse, it consisted of an incoherent series of blog-style posts with garbled reaction

By this time the Telegraph were rewriting the style book on attribution with an intro that announced he was dead, according to showbiz site TMZ, the LA Times, AP, the BBC and PA. Back well covered then, chaps.

The Mirror joined the slower sites by sitting on a couple of pars with a more follows and The Sun relied on a series of Yahoo links!

It was harder for the live broadcasters. Sky managed to grab a bit of airtime with Paul Gambaccini who managed to fill a quote book (remember those?) on his own with gems such as: “It’s the biggest news story in the world at the moment. I know it’s number one in Japan for example”; and when likening his death to that of John Lennon, adding: “There was one difference there. There was violence. Murder is much worse than a heart attack.”

But quote of the night went to Sky: “We just spoke to Uri Geller, a close friend. He was so emotional he couldn’t speak to us.”

Wired: the future just caught up with me

I’ve just read the second edition of David Rowan’s Wired magazine and he’ll no doubt rest a lot easier knowing I think it’s shaping up nicely. I didn’t dwell too much on the launch issue; I never do as they’re always too long in the making to represent real publishing.

Besides, it was hard to find. This month’s editorial puts that down to a sell-out, something I’ve done on all my launches. Hope it did but, even so, the truth is, no matter how much sway even major publishers have with the multiples, it’s hard to guarantee launches a good show in the independent newsagents.

I also wasn’t a fan of the original cover. I liked the fold-out image but the texture just irritated. But that’s just me. I’m the same with fabrics. Never could wear wool.

Anyway, this month’s “proper” issue does itself serious credit. It’s well-presented, eclectic enough to move beyond the obvious niche market and nicely mixes the waiting room reads (How to read war and Peace in 34 seconds) with those requiring a decent hammock and a bit of peace and quiet ( Britain’s Internet censors, How the Web was almost brought down, World’s biggest diamond heist).

I did smile to myself when I read that he’d sent writers to India, Kenya, US, Sweden, Italy, Holland, St Kitts. Must be wonderful not to have me querying the cost of an overnight stay in Blackpool.

Private jokes aside, good editors build the best brands when they do it in their own image. This is a good example. Here’s a very exceptional editor; an intellectual having fun with a subject that fascinates him.

We just need to see it in a few more shops.

Otherwise, I’ll just have to get a subscription.

To Davos and beyond

I have to say congratulations to Adrian Monck on his appointment as the new communications head for the World Economic Forum. I'll miss his blog, but what the hell; he’ll be in for a good time there. It’s one hell of a job.

How do I know? I was in line for it a while back, about a year before I parted company with the Telegraph, in fact. The title wasn’t quite the same and the internal changes that would have facilitated it never came about, but the job was roughly the same: travelling the world and spreading the word.

It was sold to me as the ultimate networking opportunity during the few hours I spent in a massively-gated James Bond-base style headquarters in Geneva. Apart from the meet-and-greet stuff at Davos, it offered what was probably the most enviable opportunity to get inside the global corridors of power than any in the media.

I’d gone as far as looking into the possibility of becoming a frontalier, one of those people who buys a small estate over the border in France for the price of a Barbican flat and commutes every day past sweeping vineyards in an open-top sports car.

My only recollection of a downside to the job was that, high up in the hills fronted by a dusty residential road leading to nowhere, where does one go for lunch.

Then I noticed outside on the grass overlooking the lake, loads of them working out in the sun, with a personal trainer.

Beats the queue for Pret any day.

Good excuse for being late for work

The day began a little later than usual, because a woman almost gave birth on a train.

Passengers travelling on the Central Line into the City were stuck for about 20 minutes as the driver gave constant updates. But left out the best bits.

After first explaining there appeared to be a door problem with the train in front at St Paul's Station, he then announced the unexpected labour.

But from then on, his minute-by-minute "customer updates" included everything from how the train was being cleared, how he could see the driver ushering people off, how the platform was now dangerously crowded, how it was being cleared, how we would be technically jumping a red light and "proceeding at 10kph or less", how only the first carriage would reach the platform as the other train was still there and how the driver would have to open the doors "manually from the outside" to let us out, single-file.

But no news of mother and baby.

It was only as I boarded the escalator for the exit that I found out. There, riding alongside me on the next one, strapped to a stretcher and screaming the place down, was mum-to-be.

The time it took to move her from the platform suggested either the ambulance had been stuck in rush-hour traffic or they'd expected a platform birth.

Eiher way, bet she calls it Paul.

Council papers - journalism they aint

I can fully understand why journalists on the breadline find the lure of jumping ship to council papers so attractive. But I can’t understand how they can still call themselves journalists. They’re not. They’ve taken the very well-trodden path across the road to PR.

It was ever thus. More than once a town hall took one of my promising, albeit starving, young reporters and gave them a living wage to write the sort of press releases they’d have rewritten or spiked a few days earlier. But they became as much a part of the spin machine as Alistair Campbell did when he left the Mirror for Whitehall – and never made any secret of it.

The defections have grown in line with the rise of council newspapers which are, in the main, awful. OK, in house magazine terms, which is more or less the genre in which I’d place them, some are not bad. But don’t let’s persist in the notion that they any more deserve a place in the media than the corporate newsletters big companies place in dump bins in the factory canteens.

Katie and Peter - the latest chapter

Jordan and Peter Andre's marriage is on the rocks, and they have asked for privacy during their difficult time.

I'd love to think their wishes could be granted, particularly as I used to rent a flat to his publicist and never once felt tempted to invade his privacy. Mind you, he had faded from view after his one fairly forgetable hit.

But that's beside the point. Given that the pair met on a reality show that reinvigorated his career, they sold their wedding pictures for a sum equivalent to 50 backbenchers' expense claims and made a fortune by living their lives in front of the cameras, they've got as much hope of privacy as Newcastle has of winning the premiership.

Incidentally, the publicist moved out ages ago. Pity. I'd love to ask her what she thought of the mileage the couple are getting out of this, particularly as their story is currently the most read on several national newspaper websites - even beating those expenses stories.

Raising Standards?

Just seen the new-look Evening Standard. In a nutshell:

1. The masthead: play with that at your peril. Eros defined the brand. Not sure where that has gone.
2. Standfirsts: over-long. They call them sells in magazines, which are read sitting down. This is read standing up.
3. Those Tesco ads: top and bottom of facing pages. Hope Tesco paid through the nose for them to sacrifice the editorial that now flows under them.
4. The design: has a look of Lite about it; breezy, modern and a bit freesheet. It’s not. It’s the market leader. It’s paid-for and should evoke authority. The spot colours don’t help.
5. It’s also day one. The key here is not today, but next week and next month when the staff have settled into it and moulded it.

Good Morning, here's the bill

GMTV, my morning favourite, have done it again. This morning they flew two presenters and a film crew all the way to Monte Carlo launch their Win £100,000 competition.

“What better place?” they asked as they stood on the deck of the boat emblazoned with banners announcing the OK!-sponsored competition. Indeed. But why did the viewer not get a single image of this “millionaire’s playground”?

Close-ups, side of the boat, cartoon cutaways of Jenni Falconer wondering how the cash would change her life, but no Monte Carlo. Just the odd snatch of blue sky.

Glad I’m not signing off the eccies.

Sorry can be the daftest word

Veronica Wadley must be chuffed to bits with the Standard's Sorry for losing touch campaign

All incoming editors arrive with a vision and want to stamp their mark pretty much immediately. But Geordie Greig’s campaign that includes apologetic ads on London buses is both risky externally and potentially undermining internally, if you factor in staff loyalties.

I've worked with Veronica and know she’s never one to do anything without conviction.

The only time I've shared office space with Geordie was in the eighties on the ill-fated Today. He moved on and may well have flown by the time Tiny Rowland bought out Eddie Shah and we relaunched with a campaign to mitigate the disastrous launch. By saying sorry. My views haven't changed since.

Sadly, there are many reasons for a newspaper to say sorry. Not agreeing with your predecessor isn't one of them.

Call me cynical..


“I’m from a marketing company ringing on behalf of Vodafone. You recently changed your Blackberry handset and we’d like to ask you some questions. Were you satisfied with the service?”

“No. It took three days when I was told it’d be done in one. I had nom proper explanation and was left without a functioning handset for much longer than I was told I’d have to.”

“Can I ask what profession you’re in. Is it public relations, marketing, sales of journalism.”

“Journalism.”

“In what position exactly.”

“Managing editor of a national newspaper.”

“Could you hang on a moment?”

A full minute later…

“Are you the person who dealt directly with the handset transfer?”

“Of course not. I have people to do that.”

“In that case, we can’t talk to you. We can only speak to those directly involved. Goodbye.”

I’ll spare the rest but summarise my response: You asked a customer care question of a media worker and got a negative response. You gingerly asked if they were in journalism and took advice on the implications. Then you came with a closing question to which there could be only one answer.

No hard feelings. I wrote this on the new Blackberry. Works a treat.

I paid £50 not to see Bob Dylan

There are some stars who just don’t get bad reviews. Paul McCartney’s concerts will always get the same slavish treatment as his divorce hearings. The Stones can play Honky Honk Woman like a pub band and still be lauded as iconic.

That’s probably why Andy Gill let him off lightly in the Independent and Bloomberg’s Mark Beech cut him a little slack after his piss-take of a performance at the O2 on Saturday night. Only Andrew Perry in the Telegraph seemed to see the concert I saw. That is, before I joined the other poor souls who voted with their feet totally hacked off after booking a ground-floor seat only to find they could neither see or hear him properly.

They couldn’t hear because his voice, so past it, it was rendered a grumble, didn’t take advantage of the arena’s sound system and couldn’t see because the wave of dew-eyed superannuated hippies who rose to their feet to greet his arrival, stayed upright throughout and the hapless hundreds from row B backwards were denied the convenience of the big screens that usually flank the stage.

Why? Because, venue staff assured me as I left, burbling Bob, Pop’s Poet Laureate couldn’t be doing with it.

Fine, I suppose: if you’re a true pop icon who’s always played by his own rules, we can expect no more.

Just don’t charge £50 a ticket and make us work harder than the band for the privilege. And don’t let nostalgia say it’s anything other than what it was.

Glad that’s off my chest. Now, what’s the chance of a refund?

No stop press at Press Gazette


Yet again, Press Gazette has been saved from closure, this time after being bought Progressive Media. It’s website opened for business again yesterday and it looks like we’ll be getting another edition for May.

Editor Dominic Ponsford said the deal was “a positive sign for all journalists working on titles going through dramatic change”.

I’d say that was an understatement.

I was, for different reasons, a little sad to learn that The Ecologist will stop printing from July and spare the carbon footprint by publishing exclusively online. It’s innovative, leads by example and the decision is completely in keeping with a magazine that has done shedloads to raise awareness of some of the most serious issues facing mankind.

All I can say is that it’s come a long way since its early days in small first floor office in Tavistock High Street when it tried to make an editor out of a local newspaper reporter who knew so little about the environment he arrived early for the interview and kept his car engine running for 20 minutes to keep warm while he sat in a car park reading a back copy and trying to convince himself that the Baldwin Effect was nothing to do with Coronation Street.

Luckily, I didn’t get the job.

To print or not to print

What would you do if the chairman of the local bench was up in his own court for shoplifting, threatened to pull his firm’s advertising if you ran a word of it and your staff urged caution because his wife had heart problems? Oh, and he was a pillar of the local community, did shedloads for charity and was a big golfing buddy of your chairman.

Yep – the poor sod gets 100pt Ariel Bold across the front page, a decent turn inside on his wife’s sudden heart attack and a cross-ref to a leader on how we expect our betters to set an example.

Obvious, yes? But not to the journalists of the future, apparently. The scenario is one used in media workshops run by the Independent Schools Careers Office to make candidates think about the dilemmas they could be facing in the real world.

Over two days last week, 40 of the 70-odd candidates from schools such as Eton and Cheltenham, said they’d either not publish it at all, or tuck it away inside so as not to sensationalise. A few said the decision was purely commercial, but most sympathised with his position and didn’t want to upset his wife.

Where does this come from? It’s not as if these extremely bright youngsters, all destined for our top universities, don’t read newspapers.

Could it be that these papers simply give a more caring impression than some of us may imagine?

Law and order, an appreciation

Last week saw the end of Law and Order, not the glossy NBC one on at the moment but the G F Newman four-parter I first watched on a black and white portable in 1979. If you’re unlucky enough to have missed it, it was the seediest of tales about a small-time villain framed for robbery by a bent cop.

It told the story through the eyes of the villain, the copper, the lawyer and, eventually, the prisoner “banged up” for a stretch because “he was well overdue”.

It was full of “nonces” and “slags” saying things like “leave it out,” and “do me a favour” and the worst swearing was the occasional “bladdy hell.”

But what made it so special was that it just rang true. Not the institutionalised corruption (heaven forbid) but the sheer vagaries of a justice system itself well overdue for a clean-up.

I spent days on end in courts in those days and absolutely recognised the judge who wouldn’t hear a word said against the police, the brief who met DCs in pubs to “do a bit of business”, the hapless families who packed the public galleries, the juries who got it all wrong and the prisoners who emerged with tales unbecoming of a modern penal institution.

Newman's tale was both entertainment and nostalgia for the days when the first seeds of a healthy cynicism were sown. Whether fact ever really mirrored fiction, I didn't know. But that didn't matter quite as much as the moment the elderly court reporter I'd spent years siting next to felt compelled to write to the local paper to voice his frustration at having to sit through "allegation after baseless allegation of police curruption made by criminal elements".

What a load of pap

Not the best night for press relations last night with BBC3’s somewhat repetitive mini-doc Paparazzi: Next Generation. Camera crews followed a group of young bucks with telephoto lenses, driving with one hand, jumping red lights and sticking their cameras in the faces of everyone from Amy Winehouse to Goldie Hawn.

Narrator Lee Williams did his best to big them up by referring to them variously as Top Gun, Lone Gun and Sharpshooter and pondered what it must be like “looking down the barrel”. There were shoulder-cam shots of chirpy chappies running around in pursuit of prey and one or two of them came over well; waiting for hours in one spot, giving it large when the moment came, and downloading £££-a time shots from their laptops.

But it was worth it to see the hapless Ryan Essex standing outside a Thames-side hotel waiting for the prime Minister emerge from credit crunch crisis talks. Somehow he hadn’t sussed that while shouting “Paris” outside Stringfellows may elicit a pout in his direction, shouting repeatedly “Gordon” would not.

Having failed to snap anything of value he complained: “It would have hurt him to turn round. Why is he so moody?”

He may have got a few pix in the papers, but it wouldn’t hurt to read them….

Oh Carol, you and your big mouth

It didn't surprise me at all that Carol Thatcher compounded her golliwog gaffe by taking ages to apologise.

From the little time I've spent in her company, it's obvious she has a somewhat bombastic sense of fun and I’ve no doubt, genuinely imagined it to be innocuous at the time and in the context she said it.

Admittedly, it would have been better if she'd fessed up and backed down on the spot. It’s daft, belongs to a best-forgotten age when black and asian people were described as coloured and it’s galling to find it’s still in circulation. But did it really warrant Adrian Chiles and Jo Brand "storming out" in disgust? Stick her firmly in her place by all means. It’d sink in later. But don’t blab…

Carol's a big character, great fun and it’s the public’s loss to see joining the queue through the BBC’s PC exit door.

And don‘t tell me there is any contrition in this punishment. No sooner had Jonathan Ross served his time in obscurity, he was back on his Friday night show taking the p*** and milking it for all it was worth.

Courting contempt

They've done it yet again. My local free magazine, The Voice of the Village, has committed another blatant contempt.

The same mag that all but convicted a drunk driver a day or so after his arrest, this week, under the headline; 'Man charged with post office robbery' listed in detail the full indictment, including times and dates of eight other charges and the date he is due in court.

But it also included the killer lines: He was responsible for the attempted robbery...he threatened staff... he demanded money...before lapsing into belated anonymity by concluing that 'the man' escaped in an uinknown direction on his bike.

And if there were any doubt as to who the guilty party is - they used an old police-issue mugshot.

There but for the grace and all that . . . but someone should have a word.

The future - in a single breath

I spoke to students and academics at Kings College this week, wired for sound.

Apparently, the entire 60-minutes is to be transcribed word-for-word for a university paper, which is why I had to wear a lapel microphone as I delivered a lecture on the problems facing newspapers in the digital age.

I'm not sure anyone is going to relish the task of typing up my remarks. But for the more fortunate, here in 150 words are the highlights of my advice to publishers:

Make integration work on a technical level before you integrate people and workflows/Don't ditch your print edition until you can afford to ditch your brand/don't imagine you'll have the same pulling power online when faced with more organic and innovative competition/Be honest that the main point of integration is to cut jobs – and cut the right ones/Give blog space to new voices with something to say, not to corporates trying to appear on-message/Tailor your content to the actual medium and not to your perception of how it should be/Remember you are multi-media so don't treat any platform as a favourite son/Listen to those on the front line working with technology you don’t understand/Integrate best practice from both sides of the divide/Don't try to model yourself on something you’re not/Make SEO work for you, don't work for it/Re-structure staffing around key strengths and forget the romantic myth of the multi-media journalist - and never, ever, use the word content.

I'm not sure that'll spare a typist an afternoon's work, but it brought me down to earth, reducing my “keynote” address to a glorified nib.

Such gaffes are no laughing matter

I look forward to Simon Heffer’s missives to Telegraph staff more and more. The latest was doing the rounds on Wednesday, a classic, and one that, while entertaining, worried me for one reason: the more mistakes he catches, the wittier are the ripostes.
Among the latest gems, we had phrases that told us:

If you sleep with dogs you get flees
You can connect things to a computer with a UBS cable.
Russell Brand, was not "descent".
There were "peels of thunder".
Someone "seems let to loose" something.
A cook made a meal with suede and carrots
A Liberal Democrat MP was called Normal Baker

And on it goes… including the classic mention of the fact that Lucian Freud's unfinished portrait of Francis Bacon was completed in 1967.

All very amusing. But about 12 years ago, as a down-table sub there, I let through a nib on Randolph Churchill (spelt Randolf). The next morning the managing editor, Andrew Hutchinson, had his secretary call me for “an explanation”. I then endured a ritual bollocking in which involved a glass of wine, the words, “if you are to remain a Telegraph sub” and having to sit in a glass box while the rest of the 3pm shift filed in past us.

Needless to say, I didn’t do it again.

But, had my gaffe been reduced to the folly of a jolly round-robin email, I may well have done.

As we used to in those days, subs please note . . .

Ross and Brand fail the screen test

The complaints that forced the suspension of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand had less to do, I fear, with the rather juvenile, but otherwise (let’s be honest) harmless messages on Andrew Sachs’ answering machine – and more to do with the webcam images screened when the row first broke.

The transcript seemed to suggest they’d had a liquid lunch. But the images were far more disturbing. The sight of two of the biggest beneficiaries of licence-payers money acting like stag-night karaoke stars while supposedly at work for our public service broadcaster were what jammed the BBC switchboard.

But, let’s be honest, it was a disaster waiting to happen. That these highly talented and experienced broadcast professionals were caught out by a camera defies belief.

The dangers in parish pump

My village magazine has done it again. Hard on the heels of a contempt so blatant I now use it as a teaching aid, this week's issue sees it questioning a court’s decision to jail a teenage sex pest.

After about five pars of routine evidence - including a bit of questionable description that could well identify the unnamed youth - it suddenly began to editorialise, chipping in with lines such as how the defendant must be "in denial" and that the offence was "clearly not a one-off".

Hopefully, a circulation of a few thousand may help to mitigate in the unlikely event that the judge decided to refer it up the line, and I wasn’t in court so don’t know if there was any privileged basis on which to base such comments, but that’s not the point.

Publications like this are springing up all over the place. Rather like the Gestetner-produced leaflets and newsletters that emanated from the Amstrad boom of the 80s, everyone is a publisher these days.

Except that, when you have a 120-odd page glossy with a high advertising ratio and a clearly well-organised circulation network, it does become more than a more back-bedroom affair. I know these organisations can’t afford a £500-an-hour night lawyer to peruse their copy, but a copy of Essential Law for Journalists could be theirs for under £20.

One amusing point: in their attempt to hype up the fact that they actually had a story, they flagged it: The story others would not print!

They clearly didn’t understand it was a fairly trivial local court case, not something that would catch the eye of the agency lads I know well who cover St Albans Crown Court for the nationals.

But they may well have unwittingly hit on the fact that local papers simply don’t have the resources to send anyone to court any more.

Back home and nothing changes

While I was sunning myself on the Amalfi Coast, Max Hastings was predicting darker days for newspapers with a James Cameron Memorial lecture attack on multi-skilling.

Further down the pile of industry comment set as aside for post-holiday reading was the announcement that Newsquest had become even further ingrained in the multi tasking bandwagon by replacing subs with multimedia journalists and giving them a breathless 31-point job description that included everything bar doing the delivery round.

And under that were two widely leaked emails from top brass at the Express and the Telegraph bemoaning the sort of schoolboy errors that would hold parish magazines to ridicule.

But just when all seemed lost, I received in my inbox an invitation to a PPA training course on effective subbing with a promise to: “Develop you copy writing skills!” (their screamer, incidentally. The laughter was all mine).

Puff and be damned

Should Journalism students be taught how to write press releases? Teachers at Highbury College in Portsmouth think so. As well as commendably giving them patches to cover around town and encouraging them to find exclusives, they are now being given the chance to learn new skills in a project run in conjunction with the campus marketing department.

Apparently, the marketing people feel it will give them an advantage when it comes to finding jobs. I’m not sure what advantage that would be – or what jobs they’re thinking of - but I can’t help feeling the future of journalism would be best served if they maintained a healthy distance.

The dangers of self-publishing

I've had a chuckle in the past about the endearing nature of the community newspaper: those in which poems share column inches with carnival pictures, wartime reminiscences and appeals for missing cats.

A combination of bespoke publishing advanvces and diminishing local coverage by the regional press has fueled their rise in many towns and villages. In some cases, they are hobbyist; the product of too much time on the hands of someone with good intent. In others, they are genuinely filling an information gap, an argument proffered by the publishers of the controversial new wave of council-run newspapers.

Some, like my local one, look on the face of it, to be highly viable businesses, judging by the amount of advertising and the fact that it seems to have a proper distribution network (it comes through my door and I see it in the local Budgens).

But there's a major difference between the Town Hall Times and the Living room Leader that publishers of the latter need to be aware of. The council offerings are compiled to some extent by professionals: usually a PR department staffed by NCTJ-trained former local paper reporters. The parish mags are run by those with no such experience, and here lies the danger.

I'm reading mine now. It's 114 pages, A4, glossy cover, packed with advertising and listings and has just treated itself to a redesign, courtesy of a local ad agency. With this new look comes a newfound confidence that has seen it add the word News prominently to its masthead.

And news there is; stories of vandalism, a school fete being washed out and a host of feel-good people stories of awards for this and that.

But it’s when they stray into the realms of serious journalism that things come unstuck.

The lead story tells of a woman's "miracle escape" from injury in a car crash. It has the headline: "Lady hit head-on by drunk driver". It's explicit in its detail; telling how the “drunk” swerved out in front of her and questioning how he could be so stupid. It goes on to say he was “led away by police”, almost hit another car and that the driver of that car witnessed the whole thing.

The only problem is, the driver she blames for this near-death experience, the magazine reports, has just been charged with drinking and driving.

And if you're wondering why I've not included any geographical details relating to this story – it’s because I don't want to risk the same contempt charges one hapless editor must be facing.

Don’t press me, I’m a journalist

Ian Reeves’ Media Guardian splash about the latest troubles at Press Gazette made uncomfortable reading: not just because it marks the demise of a magazine I've read for 35 years, but because the bickering and smarting behind the scenes painted a rather pathetic picture of an industry not at all at ease with itself.

I was particularly galled, but not a bit surprised, by his tales of editors bleating every time they were faced with the sort of direct questioning they demand every day from their own reporters.

We've long been guilty of dishing it out but not being able to take it. I could hold court for hours with tales of writers trying to suppress totally legitimate stories that involve them. From the NUJ branch meeting in the seventies where I was lobbied to “go easy” on a member up in court following a drunken rampage to the stringer involved in a serious car crash who recently rang just about everyone in my office to beg them not to cover his case.

But that's almost excusable set against Reeves' examples of editors who bleated when they didn't win awards.

Even more of what subbing is about

It's Budget day. You've been given the personal finance spread to lay out and sub. You’ve been told to expect an overlong wrap-up within half an hour of the Chancellor sitting down, a couple of case histories from families who can no longer pay their mortgages, a graphic littered with beer glasses, monopoly houses and palm trees and an analysis from the IFA who writes the Mr Pursestrings column.

The wrap, when it arrives 20 minutes late, is way, way too long; loads of reaction quotes that dropped off the splash now have to find a home with you and you're told you may have to accommodate a turn so leave space for a single-column to fill.

Any problems? Well, one or two stats in the graphic conflict with those in the text, the name of the single mum in the case history is spelt two ways and the intro ends with .... for the first time since records began in ???? (subs please check).

Oh, and with all the finance subs deployed elsewhere, you've been given a couple of slash-and-burn boys from the sports desk who cut from the end whatever.

Ten minutes before deadline, the analysis comes through. It more or less fits but the Budget Byron’s poetic prose is so ambiguous you don’t know where to start on the headline. Is he being sarcastic when he says the vehicle excise hike will help the environment by taxing us off the road?

You jot down a couple of queries and ring the City desk. He’s not there, so you nip round the corner and find him, on deadline, all white teeth and Beaujolais cheeks in the glass box, vodcasting his stripey red braces off.

Point made. Point ends.

More of what subbing is about . . .

Scenario two

A nazi war criminal is being brought to trial in Eastern Europe. He is 85, confined to a wheelchair and is pushed into court by a nurse. It's a preliminary hearing but the charges are read in detail the nurse sheds a tear. He struggles to hear. There are demonstrations, the occasional outburst; lots of colour and the writer has captured all of it, a fact not lost on the editor who thinks its a great piece.

The chief sub gives it to you and tells you to be sensitive: the editor loves every word.

But there are 300 too many. You've got to cut it by a third but not lose a thing. The good news is you have 90 minutes to do it. The bad news: it includes the headline that has to sing, a strap, a standfirst, two pull quotes and five captions.

What the hell, you get to work the text.

This is bespoke tailoring. If you’re on form, the chief sub won't see the join. And neither will the editor.

And the writer will thank you.

More follows . .

Lest we forget . . . what subbing is really about


Memo to all second year BA students taking the print pathway newspaper production module next semester (and anyone else remotely interested in what it takes to get a newspaper out).

You've hopefully been following the debate about the future of subs and some of you may wonder whether it's worth turning up to learn anything about what's being cited as a dying trade.

It is. The scare stories are b*****ks (use of stars will be debated under the style briefing). What follows is not a defence of a craft but a series of real scenarios that will demonstrate the sort of pressures you may face in later life: whether you are called a sub, a producer, a page designer, a copy editor, part of a pod, hub, desk or remote indesign operation..

Three escaped prisoners are spotted on the Isle of Wight, 30 minutes before first edition deadline. A space is cleared on the front for six pars.

You have three PA snaps and some online cuts of the original breakout. There’s more on its way though, so off you go.

Fifteen minutes and a PA snapfull later the BBC are saying two of the three have been arrested so you hedge your bets with the intro. Five minutes on, the newsdesk confirm it but they’re not sure which two.

The page is sent but it's to be slipped immediately. Meantime, a local stringer nails it: there are no arrests but two of the three have been spotted. He thinks police have them cornered. The story is still moving. The whereabouts of the third is unknown. You have a story, of sorts. But it’s ready to go.

PA then say the pair were spotted by an off-duty warden. The same warden blamed for their escape. So, you’ve got an intro.

Meanwhile, a ferry has been told it can't dock until all three are caught and the wires are full of highly quotable but conflicting witness reports.

Three minutes to deadline. Sub it straight to the page, word perfect as you can and three decks of 20pt.

The page goes again and you're off for the third edition. It's now the splash. Sid next to you is subbing the current splash into the turn on page two, the basement moves up to a single column top, opening a deep oblong to make way for some pictures and give it welly.

You check your inbox. The copytaster has sent you seven takes from PA, five agency, three direct from the newsdesk and two crisp quotes he added himself direct from Sky News. Sid has finished shoehorning his economy in crisis yarn into P2 only to be told it's now the page four lead. The turn is all yours. Can you fill?

Of course you can. You've got 45 minutes and about 2,000 words to boil into 500-odd. You've opened up a new file and you're cutting and pasting chunks of them from every source you have into some sort of order.

In your head, you're subbing from the third par down. Sky have just flashed up one arrest. It'll be a different intro by the time the edition goes but the rest will be word perfect. The picture desk come over with four images and some scribbled info for the captions. The chief sub (in no mood to repeat himself as he's got four pages to reshuffle) dumps a layout on your desk and tells you where they all go. You take in most of it.

Sid goes to the canteen to get you something cold for later and you get to work. There's a grey cardigan in the prodnose chair; he thinks you’re a tosser and he's chief subbing all next week. One widow, one solecism, on style gaffe and your subbing nibs Sunday to Friday.

Meanwhile, the newsdesk say they're doing a write-through. There's a young casual reporter from the Evening Examiner "pulling it all together".

His missive arrives on deadline. You glance at it for anything new and then spike. This began a sub’s story and it’ll end a sub's story.

More follows . . .

Another publishing error - and this time you can't blame subs

Wasn't it this week that consultaion began on job cuts at City AM - a move which would see all the subs kicked out and the writers left to sub their own copy.

Must be judging by the unusual sloppiness in what is normally a tighly-subbed paper on Monday; (awful widow on splash), bizarre syntax (house prices fell for the ninth month in the row), awkward headlines (London Eye owner reports financial figures) to name a few.

Either they've gone already or they're still there and have something understandably more pressing on their minds.

Look and learn

Never one to miss a chance to say I told you so, I was delighted to see the East London Advertiser's Ted Jeory winning the weekly paper reporter of the year title in this year's Regional Press Awards.

I singled out the story that won it for praise in this blog months ago and suggested that all junior reporters read his account of how he did it and learn what real journalism is all about.

Still worth a read for those who missed it.

(I wasn't on the judging panel by the way).

If only I had an ark big enough . . .

A former Telegraph colleague emailed me this morning to point out that I’d been missed from a roll call of departees on the media guardian site. The piece concluded by asking if it had missed anyone?

I couldn’t elongate the list of more than 80 I’m afraid as I departed nearly two years ago and this lot had either jumped ship or been pushed overboard in the past 12 months.

But what a line-up. From editors to section heads to reporters to support staff of every discipline; it included some of the best names to grace their pages for a generation.

Headhunters take note. There’s the staff of entire a national newspaper there – and a bloody good one if only you could get them under one roof.

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.