England lost, but it's the Sun wot won it

There are few better days to night edit a tabloid than the week of an England match against West Germany. The trick is to be in the chair all week to make sure you get the full range of headline opportunities.

It’s all very well for Thomas de Maiziere to call for restraint, but he needs to know that, behind the scenes in the aftermath of the only story anyone is talking about, it’s open season - and pure Spitting Image.

Why else would we go like lambs to the slaughter of credibility with such barking predictions as Germans terrified of 3 lions (Sun, Friday, complete with picture of ‘scaredy cat’ players in a fortified safari truck and an inset Wayne Rooney in boxing pose), We’ll make Roo sorry (Sunday Mirror) and All-out roar (NoW with an embarrassing picture of Rooney, Gerrard and Terry showing their fangs alongside a token lion, there presumably so we don’t mistake them for vampires). Even the Sunday Express waded in with Rooney holding a giant flag with the headline: Your country needs Roo.

That was before the match. Edition put to bed, its time to roll up your sleeves and you’re 90 minutes away from the likes of Fritz your lot (Daily Star) and Rout of Africa (Mirror); the sort written days ago, when the draw was made and stored for the inevitable.

The Mail gave the top of page one to the Littlejohn quote, If The few had defended as badly as England, we’d all be speaking German now. That just about said it.

But for once, only one tabloid back benche woke up the old adage that there’s no better way to tell a story than straight.

Thus the best front page of the day: The Sun, with it’s full-page shot of the backs of the players lined up for the national anthem as if facing a firing squad of fans with the headline: You let your country down.

Some things are best served raw.

Don't make hard work out of seeking work

It feels good to be advertising for staff, even casual staff, these days. And it's encouraging to get a strong and instant response from Gorkana.

But common sense dictates that it the need for more hands on deck usually means you're up to your eyes in it and need someone to share the workload. So, a few pleas:

1. If I ask for a news reporter, get in touch if you fit the bill - don't tell me you specialise in arts, book reviews or, God help us, travel – and could turn your hand to it. I wouldn’t hire a vet who fancied having a go at my ulcers.

2. If ask for a sub, don't even think of not reading your letter before sending it, lest you try to convince me your work is “fast and acurate”. And that’s an accurate quote.

3. And whatever I ask for, don't tell me you're conversant, (or worse, compliant) with systems if you're going to demonstrate the opposite by ramming my Outlook account with 10mb of PDF attachments.

Like I said, I'm busy. I want to know at a glance that you're The One, and if you cant relate that fact at a glance, you're probably not.

See you at the interview.

Own goals? I know the feeling

Footballers eh? They’re like children. You watch ‘em grown then they let you down.

Take Nigeria’s athletic keeper Vincent Enyeama. A stunning display against Argentina had the talent scouts watching his every move. Good news for his club side, Hapoel Tel Aviv who, my man in Israel tells me, are hoping to cash in by flogging him at a premium.

Nice to hear some good news following the wall-to-wall coverage of the hand-of-clod howler made by England’s Robert Green.

Media students: please feel free to count every inch given to five seconds of action. We’ll dissect soon and discover the true art of milking a yarn for all it’s worth.

Anyway, not to be outdone, Enyeama gave the Chronicle its own angle on goalies and swerving balls for a readership interested in all things Israeli – so we joined in the fun and milked it just that little bit further.

Here’s the angle: Enyeama’s old manager Avram Grant has just got a new job and may be looking to headhunt his former No.1. And where is Grant destined for when the new season begins? West Ham. And which club does the hapless Robert green play for? Yep: West Ham. Conclusion: Poor old Rob may be fighting for his place with a star who doesn’t spill easy shots.

Thus, a back-page picture of Enyeama saving spectacularly in front of the best player in the world (Messi, if you’re not into this) with the irresistible headline: Sorry Rob, your problems just got worse.

Fine and Dandy. Until you put the paper to bed and turn on the TV to see Enyeama’s Nigeria line up against Greece for their second group match.

Hardly had the presses stopped rolling before Enyeama faced a low shot, not a great deal different from the one Green had spilled on Sunday. And what did he do?

He spilled it. Nigeria lost and a our inspiring story of the hero soon to take a coveted premiership jersey hit the shelves alongside all the red tops, seemingly dying to have a pop at suspect goalies.

Thankfully, it hardly got a mention. At least the blushes were saved.

Work experience - what about life experience?

Ed Caesar has put a stark light on what we already suspected, and knew if we did the sums, that we’re witnessing something of a volcanic eruption in journalism training against a backdrop of a steep fall in journalism jobs.

By his reckoning 1,870 students were on post-graduate journalism courses in last year compared with 763 ten years earlier. There’s an even steeper rise in those on undergraduate courses; from 1,972 to 8,095 in the same period.

It’s an interesting read as he cites eager youngsters trying to make a break and concludes with a breakdown of the essential qualities needed to do so; including the inclination and means to work for nothing doing work experience in London. All true in my experience but I’m not sure I find it so worrying.

Let’s put another shine on it.

I know from the lecture theatre that a number (let’s not get carried away, but I do mean a fair few) of those on these courses are not interested per se in jobs in journalism. They want a degree and the courses, combining as they do cool sociological aspects - and even cooler stuff their generation is interested in - offer a tempting pathway. That shouldn’t come as a shock.. Not all history students want to join Time Team and not all ecology students want to save rainforests.

A fair few of these will be from other countries – and be returning there with degrees from a British university which carry more kudos than any they could have got at home -and a fair few more will go on to further study, so the same names will be moving between the undergrad/postgrad categories.

I know that still leaves a fair few. It’s also worth noting that there are more students these days because there are more courses and course places as colleges have flexed to meet the demand in an increasingly media-aware society.

But I couldn’t help thinking that Caesar, like many who have covered this subject, seems to throw all his eggs at jobs in London and national newspapers. They very fact that so many he quotes actually got in there, I such a short time, straight from college is, in itself, bizarre.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing or a good thing, only that it’s stretching reality. The media is a bigger marketplace than national broadsheets for middle-class kids who think life on a smaller publication is an annoying hurdle.

One of languages student he quotes tells of breathlessly pitching ideas to the Guardian, being offered a job and having to think about whether she wanted to accept or go off and “build her own magazine empire” before actually saying yes.

Another, now in PR, told of leaving Hull, doing an NCTJ course, followed by work experience on local papers before coming to London - yes, straight to London – landing a few weeks of the same on the Observer, then the Inde, before getting a low-paid job and a short-term editing gig before being let go!

The odd unnamed exec is quoted as having ethical doubts about such exploitation. Well, here’s a named one, and one that's run a few grad schemes here in the smoke. I have no such qualms.

Anyone who imagines they can leave the classroom for a well-paid job on a national newspaper with virtually nothing in between cannot possibly possess the sort of down-to-earth awareness of what life is about to be able to say anything a reader would want to hear.

A word from Jack

It was good of Jack Straw to side with Fulham and Hammersmith Chronicle in their battle with the local council over its town-hall produced local newspaper. He is reported as telling the The Newspaper Society: “I am on the side of the papers and not the councils.”



The Trinity-owned paper launched a campaign on its front page and is embarking on a two-week outdoor advertising push on key sites around the borough including eight 48 sheet posters. An ad van even drove around Parliament before moving on to the Hammersmith and Fulham area where it pulled up outside David Cameron’s house.

No paper wants to fall out with its local council any more than it has to when reminding it how it should be doing its job properly and this wasn’t an expense they entered into lightly.

So, it shows very little understanding on the part of the Justice Secretary when he refers to one of the many battles being fought all over the provinces as a “spat”.

Then again, maybe he’ll prove that cynicism misplaced by having a word in the right ear and actually do something about it.

The print crisis explained

The debate on the future of print media has never been quite so succinctly put. I saw this about an hour ago and thought it worth a wider audience. One tip: do watch to the end.

A farewell to Peter Rose

Another of Fleet Street's finest left us last week, thankfully a lot later than first feared but, sadly, many years before he should have done.

Peter Rose, a mere 53 and the Mail's one-time chief crime reporter, died after what he would have called (were he writing about someone else) “a brave fight” against a liver disorder following years of conviviality in the pursuit of copy.

It's a tragic loss. Journalism has lost one of the old school, three kids have lost a father and I have lost a mate.

Reunion:(from left)Pete, Ross, me and Jim

I'd known him for 36 years and the Pete that died last week was unashamedly the same one I first met outside a courthouse in St Albans back in the mid-seventies: a softly-spoken, dry-witted true gent tailor-made for getting the very best out of a good old-fashioned crime beat.

A series of scoops on just about every major murderer from Myra Hindley to Fred West saw him elevated to the presidency of the Crime Reporters' Association.

We hadn't seen each other for a few years when Ross Francis of Fairley and Simmons rang to break the news that Pete “probably wouldn't last the summer”.

Pete had asked him get in touch with myself and Jim Last, formerly of Home Counties Newspapers, for one last get-together. Hard as that was to hear, we did so with relish and so, on a winter's evening in the Harrow in Whitefriars Street, four former cub reporters met to relive the days when they cut their teeth on a typically gutsy, punch-above-your-weight news agency run off the slave labour of those who'd work for peanuts just to run with the pack.

It wasn’t exactly the playing fields of Eton, but the bonds from those days were strong and enduring. Over the years our paths crossed frequently; one would either put in a word for, team up with, take on or just find themselves sitting alongside, one or the other in some newspaper in some part of the country.

One memorable occasion was in 1979, a few years after the agency had folded. I'd joined the Herts Advertiser in St Albans (a job brokered by a call from Pete who was on the sister Hemel Mail), I'd got Jim on board after one of the seniors had a strop with the newsdesk and quit and Ross was freelancing from his own office a few streets away. I'd been out and snagged what was to be my first HA splash, we all met in a pub round the corner, conspired on an intro to what was a convoluted yarn involving asylum seekers, I went back and claimed the byline and Ross waited until the early hours to flog it around the dailies.

Ross coined it in, slipped me a tenner, Jim chased a follow-up for the following week and Pete sat back and sniggered something about me being “stitched”. I was too young to know better.

The reunions, few as they were in the event, were pub crawls, of course. Pete felt at home, we swapped anecdotes and frightened tourists with noisy, huggy, goodbyes outside the old PA building.

A boozy night out may sound odd, given his condition. But his philosophy was simple: “This is me, this is the life I've lived. No regrets.” He wasn't going to change.

Peter Rose was the reporter's reporter who never wanted to grow up. He lived Life on Mars; he never left the seventies. He had a notebook, a mobile that just made calls, no email address I was aware of, and more snouts than a bacon factory.

To do his tie up fully, to appease an advertiser, to say anything nice about subs, would have been to sell-out. When the agency launched a features arm, I seem to recall he was the only one who didn't want to waste his time “knocking out fluff for Woman's Own”.

He was all about integrity, about patience, and about getting it right. He was never about sensationalism for its own sake – and never about giving up.

They were old-school ethics. But, there again, as Press gazette pointed out in its obit, he was just that.

Once, during one of those reunions, he asked me what I'd been up to that day. I said I'd been in a meeting about mobile apps with partners who'd been helping us formulate a social networking strategy.

He pursed his lips as I spoke, as if he'd recalled a joke, nodded a few times, then looked over my shoulder at the others and said: “What the fuck is he talking about?”

John Terry? Privacy?

When the John Terry story broke, one of our juniors insisted the coverage was OTT and complained that even footballers deserve a private life.

Bit of a red rag to a bull, to be honest. Footballers? Private lives?

Listen, I said. Anyone who earns in a week four times what the average fan who follows them all over the country pockets in a year, who creams off as much again in marketing and sponsorship deals and reaps every reward imaginable just for (clichéd, but true) turning out for 90 minutes on a Saturday afternoon, doesn’t deserve so much as an ex-directory listing.

Footballers are millionaires for one reason: media money. They are media property for the use and abuse of the aforesaid. His role is twofold: to win the World Cup and to keep us entertained.

Helping us sell papers is their way of giving something back.

One PS though: What were the Mirror and Sun doing on Saturday, with the Terry and wife Dubai snog? Page One headlines: Healed with a kiss? and JT’s got wahey with it?

It took the Mail to get it right: Terry and his wife kiss for the cameras. Back of the net.

Laying down the law

Things haven’t been getting any better at the Telegraph subs’ desk of late, judging by Simon Heffer’s latest round-robin bollocking to staff.

It includes the usual spelling howlers (TV program, neighbor and not knowing whether practice is a noun or a verb), but also a classic he calls a “24 carrot gold” cock-up: “hospital patience”, which anyone who has been one will confirm is wrong on many counts.

He also moans about confusing “insight” and “incite”, the misuse of apostrophes - “how soldier’s found Hitler’s body” – and the fact that there is no such word as adaption

But these stood out:

The terms “rifle” and “shotgun” are not interchangeable. A rifle is a precision weapon that fires bullets. A shotgun fires cartridges loaded with shot that scatters in a pattern and kills or wounds anything in its path. Gourmand and gourmet are not interchangeable either. The latter is a connoisseur of food and the former simply greedy. Buckinghamshire is not in the Cotswolds.

And…

Lay is a transitive verb (I lay down a case of claret every month; she laid the table).

When I joined the subs’ desk there in 1991, I would cringe at the disdain with which the middle aged gents alongside me treated anything they saw as “pop” culture (the chief parly sub had never heard of Sigourney Weaver and the chief revise sub didn’t know why anyone would be interested in a nib on Guns ‘n Roses).

But to a cardigan, they would all have known how to lay down a case of claret.

A Ranter? Moi?

I’ve just made my debut on Gentlemen Ranters, a hilarious forum for old Fleet Street farts and others to reminisce and remind ourselves things aren’t what they used to be. Behind those anecdotes though lies a wealth of history that tells you all you need to know about the Fourth Estate.

What barrier a paywall?

US blogs have been jumping all over the story that the Long Island weekly Newsday has gained a mere 35 online subscriptions in the three months since they put their site behind a paywall.

It’s a worrying figure, given extra resonance coming as it does on the back of the neighbouring New York Times announcement of a paywall from 2011.

But without knowing the full extent of their subscription model, I’m not clear what it tells us. The sums are clear: online-only subscribers pay $5 a week (or $260 a year) giving an annual return of $9,000 against a capital cost of $4 million, which is what new owners, Cablevision spent rebuilding the site with the wall in place.

But given the massive subscriber base the company already has via its print home deliveries and Cablevision customers – all of whom get online access as part of the deal - these may be irrelevant in terms if the business model, especially if such access was part of the upsell.

In other words, they have near-saturation already, the 35 are incidental. Rather like the guaranteed circulation publications (freesheets to the plain-speaking) delivered to every house in town but available for a quid “where sold”.

More interesting is the massive fall in traffic since October: uniques are down from 2.2 to 1.5 million. Again, that could be a direct result of the barrier or something to do with the popularity of the redesign. I can’t recall the old one, but there are some on the newsroom floor that have been less than complimentary.

Behind all this though is another business question: how important are page impressions?
The Guardian has just set a new record for a UK national newspaper, recording an incredible 36.98 million global uniques for December - a 62 per cent rise from last year. Digital Director Emily Bell, who must take a wallop of the credit, puts it down to their coverage of the Copenhagen climate change conference, which is in itself interesting.

I say that because, despite high-minded claims to the contrary, hits are normally driven by the quirky, the bizarre or the risque; Elvis reincarnated as Man in the Moon, cancer man grows tree our of his head or Cheryl Cole takes a skinny dip; the sort of stories that would lead Sunday Sport in the eighties. And a lot of it’s down to cleverly cynical use of SEO, even Googling phrases and penning stories to catch the wave.

Hit inflation has been responsible for digital newsroom high-fiving since Fleet Street properly caught on in the mid-nineties. And the Guardian is not alone. The Mail, second in the online premiership table, saw a 67 per cent rise, for example.

So, the question is: just how many more eyes do we need on our sites – and how important are these masses as against, say, a more minimal, closed, core readership?

Few of these conversations can take place in such broad terms. If anything, publishers will have to seek alliances outside the industry if they are to seek traffic of proper relevance.

I wouldn’t be so quick to write off the Newsday debacle. It has to be down to individual business models to determine what these figures mean. In the meantime, there was a quirky one worthy of note, if a comment on one posting is to be believed: 35 is the exact number of senior executives at the paper.

More scandal at the town hall

So, the Audit Commission doesn’t think local councils are misusing public funds by producing their own papers. No surprises there.

And equally without shock value is the news that that the Newspaper Society is now calling for the OFT to examine the “damaging impact” on local media businesses.

Two questions: Are these the correct bodies to be dealing with this issue in the first place? And what happened to Lord Mandelson’s pledge of support?

Chief executive Steve Bundred didn’t seem to think that these freesheets were published often enough “to be viable media for most local advertising”. Someone needs to tell him just how little there is to go around.

And he didn’t seem to think that councils were using public money to further their political agendas, saying there were “adequate safeguards”. Someone needs to show him one.

If all else fails, may I suggest a few editors offer their services to empty dustbins? Bad example. It was going through a councillor leader’s dustbin a few years back that got me the sort of splash that you’d never see in Town Hall Today.

Actually, not such a bad example, come to think of it.

Dear hacker, we know where you live

We found the hacker. We know how he got in, what he did and even spotted him coming back to check on his handiwork. We also now know a fair bit about him – and so do the police who are talking in very joined up terms about liaison between the Public Protection Unit, Special Branch and Interpol. I envisage cuffs being snapped on a wrist in a Turkish internet café sometime soon.

Rounding on the hackers

A hacker managed to make a minor incursion into the Jewish Chronicle’s news site yesterday, placing a pro-Palestinian message across the home page.

It was a clever intrusion and we had to take the site down and reboot to wipe what we could and probe around the back-end to see how it happened. That’s ongoing but we went live again this morning with a two-fingered message to the perpetrators.

But I was impressed by the massive reach of the readership. Within minutes, I was getting calls and text messages from readers, alerted by the sort of people I’d never assume read the site, let alone on a weekend.

The editor, the MD and the IT head had them as well: and on they went into the night and the following morning. There was obviously intrigue in that it involved the Mujaheed and a site that takes such a deep interest in Israel. And the fact that the suspect IP address was Turkish, given the diplomatic spat between the countries at the moment.

But I got a cosy sense of a circling of wagons from our wider community as word – and real concern – spread so quickly by less technical means.

The geeks are on it now. And they love this sort of thing. They go into Silent Witness mode in their dark corners, examining every router, server, source, port and a few things I can’t pronounce.

Not sure what they’ll find, but I’ll let you know.

I wouldn’t be too eager to change the Beaver

Damn these email spam filters. How dare they force one of Canada’s oldest magazines to change its name?

Winnipeg’s finest, The Beaver, has been doing very well for the past 90 years, thank you very much. Until, that is, readers found their online queries bouncing back.

Whatever next?

I just hope this doesn’t discourage others from taking their erstwhile local publications online. Residents of the County Donegal village of Muff may experience a few problems, not to mention those in the Savoie village of Pussy.

It wasn’t like that in the good old days of innocence when all we had to worry about was the good old black and white TV. I remember well my mum’s favourite programme; a light-hearted singalong show with Noel Gordon on her pre-Crossroads days. Its name: Lunchbox.

Sorry about that. But I've just done wonders for my SEO.

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.