Mark Pack

If you look at the political blogs which are most read by MPs and political journalists, you find that they are run by a nearly all male cast: Jonathan Isaby, Tim Montgomerie, Alex Smith, Stephen Tall, myself and so on. As I wrote when looking at the impact of the internet on politics in 2010: That’s not [...] »

This year we’ve tracking each month how good newspapers are at reporting their own political opinion polls. Getting your own story right isn’t perhaps the highest of bars to set newspapers, but on past experience it’s one they often seem to miss. But what’s the actual evidence? Who does best? Who does worst? In order to provide [...] »

The BBC's website regularly feature in the lists of the ten most popular websites in the UK - and are usually the only ones in the top ten from a British organisation. So the BBC's plans to refocus and shrink its web presence are likely to be widely felt. The 79 page strategy document ranges over all [...] »

It’s a fair question to ask: lots of complaints made over Jan Moir’s piece on the death of Stephen Gately, none upheld. However, as Enemies of Reason points out, that isn’t the only measure of success: But I would like to hope – hope against hope – that the storm the Daily Mail found itself in after [...] »

We’ve covered before the habit of BBC Question Time of dropping a Liberal Democrat from the panel (three times in four weeks most recently) and also of loading up the panel with a far from politically balanced set of non-Parliamentarians. But it’s not only Question Time where that’s a problem. BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions? has [...] »

Reacting to the DCMS select committee report on “Press standards, privacy and libel”, which has just been published, Chris Huhne has said: This report blows a gaping hole in the News of the World’s line that only a sole rogue reporter was involved in illegal hacking of phones, and reveals enormous worries about the feeble response of the [...] »

... but under the proposed criteria for letting bloggers have lobby passes, I wonder if several existing lobby pass holders should lose theirs: The general criteria we would agree with is that the person applying for the pass should be a proper journalist with a track record of journalism; that they should be operating for a [...] »

Yes, someone said something foolish on Twitter. Yes, he then dug himself into a hole with an explanation that doesn’t stack up. Yes, he shouldn’t have done it. But even for a Twitter-holic like me, you’ve got to wonder quite why this story is garnering so much online chatter in comparison with the news we may [...] »

Cross-posted from the Mandate blog: The future for journalism is much debated in the context of declining newspaper sales and the question of whether their online operations can bring in sufficient income, whether by advertising, pay walls or other business models. But the latest ABC figures for magazine circulation shows that there are sectors of printed journalism [...] »

(Blogging this for my own convenience so I can easily find the information, but it may be of use to others too...) ComRes polled 151 MPs in April and May 2009 asking, amongst other questions, which bloggers they most respect: Conservative MPs: ConservativeHome Guido Fawkes Iain Dale Political Betting Daniel Hannan Labour MPs: Iain Dale Tom Harris Nick Robinson Guardian Guido Fawkes Liberal Democrat MPs: Political Betting Lib Dem Voice Lynne Featherstone (Because [...] »