Today, the Telegraph carries an exclusive story about comments made by the British ambassador to the US, Sir Nigel Sheinwald, about the supposed aloofness of Barack Obama.

The Guardian ripped the story off at just after midnight:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/03/uselections2008.barackobama2

The Times scraped it soon after with no attribution:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article4871276.ece

The Independent ripped it off - unattributed - at 1am and, in a nice touch, also ripped off the Telegraph’s resume of Sir Nigel’s career:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/obama-is-uninspiring-says-british-ambassador-to-america-949853.html

I’m becoming increasingly intrigued by Roy Greenslade’s idea of blogging and his apparent willingness to publish any old bit of tittle tattle emailed to him by two or three Telegraph journalists with axes to grind.

His latest ”contribution” to the debate about the future of journalism at the Telegraph Media Group is unworthy of him. Perhaps Roy, if you had bothered to check a few facts or were more in touch with what’s going on in the real world you might have paused before publishing.

The original complainant has contacted Greenslade again to further impress upon the professor’s readers just how dire conditions are at the Telegraph.  Like last time, he cites pay, hours worked and how difficult it is to have a ”normal family life”.

On pay, the Telegraph journalist complains that journalism will cease to be a viable career for anybody over 30. He cites the new content editor roles at TMG, claiming that the Telegraph “is only offering £25,000 a year for its much-trumpeted new jobs and expects people to work one full weekend in two”.

This statement is so misleading and inaccurate that it renders the rest of the Greenslade piece meaningless. The content editor salaries are on a scale according to age and experience - to quote a  figure of £25,000 indicates that the author of the email has no idea what he or she is talking about.

But more worringly, Greenslade is prepared to republish tired and hackneyed comments about the Telegraph’s news agenda and then to give them credence by describing them as “revelations”.

A second employee at TMG contacted him. Greenslade says that she wanted “to complain about a ‘lamentable decline in the breadth of news covered by the Telegraph’ and believes that under the stewardship of the editor, Will Lewis, the paper ‘has become superficial, uninformative and filled with content that isn’t news and isn’t even new - witness the repeated health page items on the virtues of the Mediterranean diet.’

“She paints a picture of an organisation determined to generate as much content as possible as cheaply as possible to put up on to the website. ‘You do realise, don’t you, that stuff is being lifted with hardly a word changed from the Mail website and the Metro?’”

So Greenslade weighs in: “In fact, I noted just a week ago that a story about a member of my own family that was originally on the Mail website appeared the next day on the Telegraph website. But it didn’t dawn on me at the time that this was not a one-off, but a pattern backed by a policy decision. This is some revelation, is it not?”

Well, Roy, no it is not a revelation. Like the rest of this execrable piece of point scoring that you’re trying to pass off as a blog post, it has no basis in reality. The suggestion that the Telegraph lifts stories lock, stock and barrel from the Mail website is crap. Like all other newsdesks, ours checks rival websites constantly to see if we’re missing anything that our 22 million users should be able to see on our site.

If we haven’t seen copy on it, then we then look to see if agencies have filed stories they are featuring. We then use that copy. It looks the same because it comes from the same source - an agency. The Mail and Metro publish vast amounts of agency copy on their websites as does, horror, the Guardian.

Of course the Guardian doesn’t place any of the unadulterated Reuters or PA copy it pumps out on its website summary pages.
This Guardian practice means that it continues to pick up vast numbers of search engine referrals for copy that is not its own while ensuring that Greenslade is able to maintain his righteous indignation at the appalling things going on in Buckingham Palace Road.

Pathetic, Roy. Really, really poor.

As as already been noted, The Guardian is spending considerable sums of money trying to maintain its position as the UK’s most visited newspaper website. What I hadn’t realised was just how eye-watering those sums are - they are far, far in excess of anything that anybody else is spending .

An analysis of the Hitwise figures shows that in August the Guardian generated 30 per cent of its total traffic from search engine referrals. Nothing untoward there, we’re all chasing search traffic and we’re all optimising like crazy to make sure we get it.

But a closer look reveals that 20 per cent of that figure came from paid searches - those sponsored links and keywords that the Guardian is buying. Remember Madeleine McCann that the Guardian bought “in error“? Well, it seems that they are doing this in multiples of 100 every day.

Source: Hitwise

We don’t yet have the audited figures for August so we’re using July’s numbers here. So, a month ago Guardian News and Media reported 8.4 million unique users from the UK which equates to roughly 13 million visits according to the metric that Hitwise uses.

The 30 per cent generated from search equates to four million visits and the 20 per cent of that which was pay per click amounts to 800,000 visits which, roughly, equates to 500,000 uniques - just enough to ensure the Guardian stays out in front.

But the most astonishing figure here is how much that is likely to be costing the Guardian - somewhere between £100,000 and £150,000 a month or up to £1.8million a year. And this is just the figure for UK uniques - it doesn’t take into account the squillions from abroad.

To put it into context, timesonline.co.uk generates 4 per cent of its total search traffic through pay per click. And telegraph.co.uk? Just 1 per cent.

We all know the Guardian is a charity, but how much longer can the Scott Trust keep this up?

Journalist complains: “I can see, from here, that national newspapers are beginning to head in the direction that local papers went 20 years ago, demanding levels of commitment - in hours and workload - that are unsustainable in conjunction with a normal family life.”
When, exactly, did journalists with aspirations to get on in national newspapers enjoy a normal family life? Was it during that hallowed period before the internet, before TV, before radio, even? Seriously… when was it? I am struggling to recall a time when the newspaper publication cycle allowed hacks to be out of the door at five or six and enjoying a supper with their families by seven. But perhaps at 40 I’m too young to remember this golden era of which the author clearly has such fond memories.

Journalist fears: “In the next five to 10 years it will be very hard for any grown-up to sustain a career in journalism at all, unless they have a private income or a particular sense of vocation or ambition.”
I’ve heard this argument so often in the last 20 years that I could give a convincing impersonation of somebody who believed it in a balloon debate. There’s always a point - and it’s usually five to 10 years from now - that there won’t be any journalists left on papers aside from those born into enough money to sustain their careers working for avaricious proprietors. A few toffs, most probably Oxbridge graduates, will be left working for next to nothing in newsrooms - their meagre wages subsidised by mummy and daddy. It’s funny this argument because that is exactly how I remember the Telegraph was when I arrived there from the Daily Mail nearly six years ago. A place staffed by fellows of this or that college. A place with little conception of what life outside Canary Wharf, let alone the M25, was like. A place where Dominic Lawson was able, without a trace of irony, to ask me at interview how I’d managed to forget to include which university I’d attended on my CV.
In contrast, today’s Telegraph is staffed by graduates and recruits from the regions. By young and mature. A place where an advert for a handful of jobs leads to hundreds of applications within hours. Yes, it’s got so bad that there are people in their early 30s earning only twice what I earned when I joined the Daily Mail in 1999.

Journalist predicts: “By the same token, as papers/websites etc use more and more content from citizen journalists/bloggers and others prepared to work for nothing, there is a danger that the only people with a voice will be those most desperate to be heard - and they are not usually the people you most want to listen to.”
Does the author want to be heard or does he/she want merely to sit there and either wait for newsdesk to push a morsel his or her way or the chief sub asks for a few nibs to be knocked out? Does the author actually know the difference between a citizen journalist and a blogger? Where are these citizen journalists in the Telegraph? Perhaps the author is referring to that newfangled thing called the letters page.
Citizen journalism works when it’s a ground up thing. Look at the hyperlocal blogs that are taking down local papers. These are run by people fed up with the shite standard of journalism in the regions who are reinventing the trade for a new age. Some of them are even making money doing it. I’m sorry but the reason that this is happening is because the traditional journalists were too slow or too lazy to adapt to this new vista.

Journalist opines: “Again, it’s becoming all too clear at the Telegraph, whose online business plan seems to be centred on chasing hits through Google by rehashing and rewriting stories that people are already interested in.”
Funny thing that - writing about things that people are interested in. It would be a … er … radical editor who went to his bosses and said that his reporters would, henceforth, only write about things that people weren’t interested in.

I await Roy (I do not necessarily agree with the writer but I am certain that many of you will be nodding throughout) Greenslade’s response with great anticipation.

During about 50 interviews, I must have been asked at least a dozen times what the shift will be for that particular job. Each time that question has been asked by somebody from a traditional sub or copy editing background - not by a reporter, a desk editor or one of the many “new” journalists with a primarily online background.

Having spent more than half of my career on a subs’ desk, I can see why the question is asked - subs are, generally speaking, the only people in the newsroom who, upon starting their working day at, say, 3.30pm, can confidently phone their partner and accurately tell him or her what time they’ll be home. That’s what they’ve grown used to and that’s what they’ve come to expect. It is, in short, a production line where you clock in and clock out.

This has never been the case for reporters who - particularly in the national press and agencies - have always been on call 24 hours a day. It ceased to be the case for news editors some years ago - many of them now work very long days indeed. In the integrated newsroom, there are reporters and desk editors now starting at 6am who should, if they took their “shift” literally, would leave the building at 2pm. But a lot of them are still there at 5pm with one or two masochistic souls choosing to see it out to early evening.

I’m not advocating the sudden adoption of 14-hour days but it is telling that the subs continue to work their shifted eight-hour days come hell or high water when the world around them operates on a completely different pattern.

This is not a pejorative post but it’s pretty obvious why this is - the job of the sub editor remains tied to the newspaper production cycle. A lot of a sub’s day is spent waiting for copy with the remaining portion spent editing it under ridiculous pressure before the first edition deadline. And, despite the extraordinary strides we’ve made on the web in the last couple of years, we still insist on putting papers together in the shortest and most pressured way possible.

The media organisations have, on the whole, chosen to exclude a large group of talented people from the online revolution for, in most cases, reasons of speed rather than ideology. It really is time to correct this by using our subs’ skills to post moderate a lot of what is, frankly, poor web copy and to get them involved in building front pages and driving traffic using social and viral networks.

But to do this, the idea of a shift which starts and finishes within seconds of a certain time has to end. That means we’ve got to stop treating them like drones at the end of the day and get them much more involved in some serious editorial judgement calls and decision making. We’ve got to find a more mature way of building newspapers which does not involve doing 90 per cent of the day’s work in the last hour and a half before deadline.

In short, we’ve got to reengage our brightest sub editors and offer them a new start.

Lehman Bros:

AIG:

HBOS:

And a couple of more generic ones from both timesonline and telegraph.co.uk:

Credit crunch:

Recession:

The publication’s advert says that the ideal candidate to be “online reporter” will:

“…have knowledge of and good contacts within the journalism industry and be able to break stories and keep abreast of breaking news, writing for the website and the the wire…”

What planet are these people on? Press Gazette has a staff of six reporters. What are these guys doing? Is Wilmington seriously telling us that there’ll be six people working exclusively on the mag?

But I forget - Wilmington has already decided that it’s going to club Press Gazette to death as fast as it can - how else does one explain its genius idea of only putting something called “breaking news” on the website? Why else would the brains trust at this company “save” everything else for its (now monthly) magazine?

Let’s give it six months, shall we?

Right now, our readers aren’t particularly Internet savvy. Many still use dial-up for internet access. They generally only check their email a couple times a week. They don’t know much about what’s available online. They still depend heavily on the printed paper for their news

He continues:

But that’s not going to stay the case for long. When our readers discover the Internet, and the myriad websites that have local information, they will start migrating from print to online. If readers are going to trust a newspaper, it has to be first with news more often than any competitor. So if we are going to keep readers in an online world, they have to know that when an important story breaks, they can quickly find coverage on our website

Carry on reading and you’ll get the distinct impression that Mark wants to go web first. He talks about beating the local television station by hours. He talks about “owning the internet” in Bowling Green.

But it seems there’s a problem:

Our Managing Editor Mike Alexieff, has repeatedly said that he has only one concern about adopting a “web first” strategy: killing the print edition. “I don’t want to give our readers any more reasons to drop their subscription,” he said. “Our print edition pays the bills…our website only brings in 5% of our revenue and that is flat…what would happen to the newsroom if our print product goes away?”

Alexieff points out that there is no threat online that can compete with the Daily News. He sees no threat on the horizon because of the capital investment required to launch a site and get a staff in place. He cites the cost and lack of potential revenue as a reason to stick with print instead of adopting a “web first” strategy.

Mike - you may know your readers inside out. You may have a pile of market research in front of you which tells you that (hard as it is to believe), yes, your readers are only using the web a couple of times a week, that most of them haven’t migrated to broadband and that they aren’t particularly web savvy. You may truly believe that web first would kill the print edition.

But consider this - the cost to a rival, a group of bloggers or some other outfit to set a site up and get it running would be as close to zero as you could imagine. There may be no threat on the horizon right now, but how distant is that horizon? Imagine a rival publisher moving in with a guy on the ground, some citizen journalists being paid per click and some pretty smart open source software. How long do you think this would take? And how long would it be before your ”not particularly internet savvy” readers would migrate? How long would it take these guys to kill your print edition?

I’m sure the vista looks pretty good right now. But the guys in charge of the Bowling Green Daily News are killing their paper and journalism in their town as surely as if they took all their reporters outside and had them shot. It’s only a matter of time before somebody spots that several hundred thousand people are not being served by their local newspaper and does something about it.

Preston’s argument is based on this premise:

In sum, a newspaper tells you many unexpected things which you didn’t know in the process of telling you what you wanted to know, while a website deals in expected things that you already know you need to know. So format matters.

Like all those who cannot bring themselves to see what is happening to their industry - that newspaper readership is either rapidly shifting to the web or is simply migrating to a different astral plane, Preston believes that the format developed over hundreds of years cannot simply disappear but will merely lift and shift to some new piece of technology in all its existing finery.

That, to former editors like Preston and others who cannot conceive that today’s and tomorrow’s consumers of information don’t receive their information in linear ways - here is the news and here is the way we’re going to present it to you - is why the web and all of its delivery mechanisms cannot replace the newspaper. People, argue the curmudgeons, want to be presented with a series of choices of  what to read by those ‘who know best’.

Preston argues that Google referrals cannot satisfy this need because a search is, by its nature, a search for information that the user already knows he is looking for:

Probable answer: you flip through the paper, turning the pages, absorbing pictures and headlines, stopping when something catches your interest - but you go to the net with specific intent, Googling, digging deeper

But the web, particularly in its second and third incarnations, is all about things we didn’t know which stop us and catch our interest. How else to explain the rise and rise of Digg and Fark, Reddit and Stumbleupon? This is the future, where the user editor suggests content to millions of other user editors. This is the future of news online. We, the providers, supply the content while the users edit and decide on prominence and dissemination.

I can see e-readers catching on in niche markets. But when it comes to the mass market of news, they are nothing more than lift and shift - moving an 18th century format on to a electronic delivery device.