Archive for journalism

Daily Mail sued by Carina Trimingham

5 October 2011 , , ,
The Press Gazette reports: MP Chris Huhne’s partner Carina Trimingham today brought a High Court damages action over a “cataclysmic interference” with her private life. The PR adviser, whose adulterous affair with the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change became public in June 2010 – with Huhne leaving his wife of 26 years [...]

Why Ivan Lewis isn’t completely wrong about journalists

28 September 2011 , ,
The fiasco over Shadow Culture Secretary Ivan Lewis’s call for journalists to be registered has rather obscured what should be a good point of debate: the degree to which journalists or editors should be held personally responsible for what they do. As I wrote earlier in the year about media regulation: There needs to be [...]

Join me in Hackney tomorrow afternoon

3 September 2011 , ,
I’m off to Hackney on Sunday afternoon to talk about the state of our media after the original speaker for the Hackney Liberal Democrats event has had to pull out. It turns out to be rather timely as I’ve just been reading Nick Davies’s seminal work on the state of our press, Flat Earth News. [...]

Did journalists really not misuse one of the UK’s largest databases of personal contact details?

Here’s a little conundrum for you. Imagine you are a journalist working on one of the  many titles that the Information Commissioner found was involved in dubious practices to get hold of personal information about people. Don’t you think it’s quite likely you would now and again have wanted to get hold of someone’s home [...]

The flaws in Ed Miliband’s media policy are no cause for rejoicing

It isn’t often that the members of one party should be worried about a proposed policy from a rival party’s leader collapsing under examination. However, David Elstein’s demolition of Ed Miliband’s proposal to limit ownership of newspapers by circulation should not provide more than a passing smile to Liberal Democrats, for it highlights the difficult of [...]

Media ownership: what have Liberal Democrats said?

9 August 2011 , ,
Flicking through old general election manifestos of the Liberal Democrats and our predecessor parties at the weekend, I was surprised to find how recent references to concerns over the pattern of media ownership in the UK are. It really is only with the 1997 general election manifesto that explicit policies about protecting or improving the [...]

Media reform in the UK

8 August 2011 , ,
Anthony Barnett (Our Kingdom), Sunny Hundal (Liberal Conspiracy), Mark Pack (Lib Dem Voice) & Will Straw (IPPR) write… July 2011 will be remembered as one of those rare moments where the nation came together in shared outrage and disgust. The hacking of Milly Dowler shocked the country and led to a series of unprecedented events [...]

I am still in awe at this amazing story

6 August 2011
Top notch news values from the British local press. Makes you want to stand up and sing the national anthem, doesn’t it?
Jumping people

Coming soon: victory over obesity, acne and being male

3 August 2011 , ,
Good news is about to hit the UK (or perhaps England and Wales; or maybe just England). Soon we will have photographic proof from the media that the nation’s young people have banished the scourge of obesity. What’s more, acne has gone too. There’s a lot of smiling around however, perhaps as a result. Jumping [...]

Could you edit The Guardian? Take a simple test

1 August 2011 , , ,
Here’s a simple test to see if you too have what it takes to edit The Guardian. a. You have an interview lined up with a Treasury minister. b. You have a journalist who happily admits they don’t understand the difference between a cyclical and structural deficit. Do you say: 1. “Pah, so what? It’s [...]