The Press v Google - or pots v kettles

You could almost touch the schadenfreude as big-name advertisers walked away from YouTube after finding themselves appearing alongside extremists.
 "At last!" proclaimed a Daily Mail leader hailing the "fightback against web anarchy". Google (which owns YouTube) rightly stood accused of profiting from hatred, it said:

Day after day, the already deeply tarnished reputations of the filth-peddling, tax-dodging terror-abetting internet behemoths sink lower into the mire.

For many years, Google, Facebook and Twitter had wilfully turned a blind eye to poisonous content, it continued. But now the day of reckoning had arrived. The BBC and Whitehall had pulled their ads. And when banks, supermarkets and Marks & Spencer joined the exodus, there was more from Dominic Lawson on the "utter shamelessness of the filth-peddling web giants".

For The Times, which set the ball rolling with an investigation by Alexi Mostrous, this was the "shaming of Google", which should now face up to its responsibilities. The alternative was "an unacceptable role as an accessory to barbarism".

The Mail and the Murdoch stable hate the internet giants because they think they are stealing their revenue and readers. Having had the field to themselves for more than 200 years, newspapers resent the interlopers. Free marketeers all, they just can't stand competition. It's the same as their gripes against the BBC (publicly funded left-wing propaganda - just look at that anti-Brexit Countryfile with the farmer saying he'd go under without migrant fruit pickers) but writ larger.
Essentially, their cry is "It's not fair!"

Murdoch titles dominate the British print media and his Sky channels dominate the satellite television market. The Sun and Times reach 31 million people a month, according to the National Readership Survey, and figures from the British Audience Research Bureau suggest that the Sky channels between them achieved a total audience of about 8 million last week. The Mail is the most successful news website in the world and its print and online offerings now reach 29 million a month. But they want more.

Murdoch not only wants full control of Sky, but he wants the opposition nobbled. Having moved into BT's world of telephones, he started complaining - through his newspapers - that it was anti-competitive for BT to have control of the cabling. And when a deal was reached with Ofcom for Openreach to be hived off as a separate company under the same umbrella, that still wasn't enough. He wants an enforced sale.
The "respectable" argument is that BT is failing to invest enough in improving broadband speeds - a view that SubScribe wholeheartedly endorses - but it's hard not to notice that BT Sport has been outbidding Sky for key football rights.

The fight with Google goes back even further, with Murdoch threatening in 2009 to remove his newspapers' content from the search engine in a row over free access. That was followed in 2014 by News Corp's appeal to the much-derided European Commission for action to combat what it called "a platform for piracy". Then came the furore over tax in January last year. Mostrous, who had been honoured for his work on celebrity tax avoidance in 2015, was again on duty for The Times, showing how little tax Google paid and how the Government had failed to get as much as other European countries out of the company.
It was a legitimate investigation - if a bit rich from a paper whose parent company had previously managed to pay not a penny of UK corporation tax on billions of pounds of income over a period of 11 years.

The latest assault is also a valid inquiry - the speed with which MPs and big businesses responded proves as much - and it has thrown up three distinct strands:

• the content itself;
• the algorithms that place advertisements alongside extremist videos;
• the fact that money generated by the ads goes to the video makers and so funds extremism

One of the biggest beefs of the Mail and the Sun is that the internet is not regulated. British newspapers, they say, are subject to the toughest regulatory system in the world. They invest money in journalism and strive for accuracy, but their very existence is being imperilled by people like Gary Lineker who can reach millions with a tweet that turns out to be misinformed. And don't get them started on fake news. (Well, actually, they’ve already started with the News Media Association’s submission to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s inquiry saying there should be a government investigation into Facebook and Google – but “don’t bring in any new rules for us”).

The Mail warmed to that theme in its leader on Saturday, accusing the web giants of ruthlessly invading the privacy of their users by gathering and exploiting personal information, going on: "Meanwhile, endless fake news and blatant libels are spread with impunity around the world."

Impunity? They must have short memories in Kensington, for only days before the Mail Online's own columnist Katie Hopkins had to pay libel damages and costs over a tweet.

For a technophobe who does not use a computer, Mail editor Paul Dacre seems remarkably well-informed about the "vile" material all over the web and its malign effects on society. His newspaper has run hundreds of stories on the subject and appears to be of the opinion that all such material – porn, fanaticism, body-shaming - should be removed. Yes, some of it is execrable, but wouldn’t that be censorship, an attack on free speech?

The advertisers seem more concerned about their good name than about removing content from the web. They don't want to be associated with inappropriate material. If Google cleans up its algorithms, they'll go back.

Then there's the notion that advertisers and their customers (and, in the case of Whitehall and the BBC, the taxpayer) are inadvertently funding hate because a proportion of the fees they pay ends up in the hands of the people producing the page on which their ad appears.
The papers say this adds up to hundreds of thousands of pounds. Google says it is "pennies".
[SubScribe can attest to the fact that Google is not exactly generous in sharing the proceeds of web ads with the page producers, but then again SubScribe does not get millions of views, so please click on an ad or two!]

So the Mail could be said to be in favour of the ad boycott to force the removal of material that spreads hate and fear.

Wait a minute. Funding hate? Ad boycotts? Material that spreads hate and fear? Doesn't all that sound familiar?

For the past eight months a group called Stop Funding Hate has been trying to persuade household names not to advertise with the Mail, Sun and Express while they continue to run so many anti-immigration stories. It chose those three papers because they were called out by the UN for the tone of their coverage. The organisation - which has just raised more than  £100,000 through a crowd-funding appeal to expand its work - argues that it is not good for companies to be associated with such a material, that the newspapers are profiting from spreading hate and fear, and that by advertising with the newspapers, advertisers are effectively using their customers' money to fund those hate messages.

This is what the Mail had to say in a leader about that:

A more malicious threat comes from Left-wing campaigners who seek to blackmail firms into withdrawing advertising from newspapers with which they disagree.
Particular targets are those, like the Mail, which voice public concerns about mass unrestricted immigration and the wanton waste of taxpayers' money on overseas aid, while the elderly and vulnerable suffer at home.
But with fair-minded companies refusing to be bullied by groups such as Stop Funding Hate, this assault on free expression can also be overcome.

Thus far, only Lego and the Body Shop have shown tangible support for the SFH campaign. Most other advertisers, including some that have pulled away from Google, have responded along the lines that they have no say in what appears near their ads.
But their reaction to the Google "scandal" proves that they think they do - or at least that they do not want to be seen next to material that runs counter to their brand image. That is exactly the judgment SFH is asking them to make about the newspapers.

Let’s be clear:

• It is censorship for campaigners to ask advertisers to influence the mindset - as opposed to the specific content - of newspapers.
• It is not censorship for the Press to demand that Google removes material from its platforms.
• It is not censorship for advertisers to seek to influence what appears on Google’s websites.

Come on! That’s obtuse! You know that a radical cleric who has been banned from the country preaching jihad is far more dangerous than a newspaper telling you that migrants take all new jobs - even if the 120pt splash caps heading and story are wrong. One is a threat to Western democracies, the other is an honest mistake made in the rush of getting important information across to readers who need to know. And newspapers own up and correct their errors (months later, in 8pt on page 2 or 32).

Of course it's all a question of scale. There are some really bad people on the web advocating some really nasty stuff. We can see how lives could be put at risk, so it's an easy call for M&S to say it doesn't want to be shown alongside real people with real guns and bombs (as opposed to the ones in Homeland).
It's harder to take a stand against a stream of prejudicial headlines, especially when those headlines are delivering the very Middle England readership it wants to talk to. But there is evidence from a number of respected sources, not simply lobbyists, that lives are being blighted - and possibly endangered - by some of things printed in our newspapers. A lot of blind eyes are being turned.

Richard Wilson, who set up SFH, is encouraged by this week's developments, saying:

We think it's brilliant that there is now a serious discussion about hate speech and about the responsibility of advertisers to acknowledge their role in it. Obviously this is a major concession from the previous position of insisting that any suggestion advertisers should consider these things was an abuse of free speech. Even the Mail now accepts that advertisers do have to think about this and act accordingly.

The Mail would naturally argue that that it does not print "hate speech". But here's a thing.  In listing obviously offensive and extremist videos from "terror groups, neo-Nazis and homophobes", the Mail reported:

An investigation by The Times found that the Home Office, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force all had advertising promotions placed beside video rants from 'shock-jock' Michael Savage, who infamously told one gay caller he should 'get Aids and die'.

The often-offensive Savage Nation podcasts pull no punches, but they come with a health warning of "adult content, adult language and psychological nudity", and they are sufficiently mainstream for the presenter to have been inducted into the radio hall of fame last November.
If it is reasonable for advertisers not to want to be associated with his output, what about the output of a woman (Katie Hopkins) who calls refugees cockroaches or a man (Kelvin MacKenzie) who thinks it's outrageous for a newsreader wearing a hijab to report on a terrorist attack  - both "vindicated" by the toughest newspaper regulator in the world?

Postscript:

In taking the Google story on from the Times's findings, the Mail also reported that Google, Facebook and Twitter had been "branded morally bankrupt for hosting thousands of images showing youngsters how to starve themselves or self-harm". It helpfully reproduced a photograph of a thin young woman. There is a real problem of mental health issues among teenagers and pro-anorexia sites exacerbate it. The Mail has written a fair bit about the tyranny of fashion and size zero models, but it would never do anything to make women worry about their body image, would it? This collection was taken from half - yes half - of yesterday's "sidebar of shame".


And one last thing:


The Mail also reported  concerns about Google's "political clout" and its "cosy relationship" with Whitehall, as evidenced by  figures showing that the company had at least 27 meetings with ministers in the 17 months after the 2015 election. There was also a "revolving door" that had seen at least 26 Whitehall staff hired by Google in the past decade.
Murdoch made a similar point in January last year, when he tweeted that Google was infiltrating Downing Street and the Obama White House.

Those Google meetings included one with David Cameron and another with Theresa May when she was Home Secretary. Over the same time period, executives of  News Corp held 20 meetings with senior government ministers, 18 of them with the Prime Minister, Chancellor or Culture Secretary. Murdoch attended seven. His chief executive, the former Times editor Robert Thomson, was at eight.

Pots and kettles.


SubScribe has analysed coverage of immigration and related issues over 2016. You can read about the front pages here and about the white-top inside pages here.

The Mail and the medallist's mother

A headline in Wednesday's Daily Mail stopped me in my tracks - and not because the question mark was in the wrong place.

Could the paper be showing contrition for running a solo picture of Tom Daley on its front page the previous day?
No chance. The intro immediately disabused me of that notion - and took my breath away:

Her son may just have won an Olympic bronze medal, but that didn't stop Dan Goodfellow's mother from finding something to complain about

Sharon Goodfellow had tweeted surprise when the Daily Telegraph's front page, featuring a photograph of Tom Daley without his diving partner, popped up on the #tomorrowspaperstoday Twitter feed on Monday evening.
The Mail hadn't arrived at that point.

@suttonnick I am very surprised by this photo. Is it for real? I am Dan's mum

— Sharon Goodfellow (@goodfellowshar1) August 8, 2016

Mrs Goodfellow's reaction stirred a bit of a Twitter breeze, inspiring 84 retweets and 170 "likes" and 20 or 30 comments that were universally supportive. One Twitter user contacted SubScribe to note that three papers had cropped Goodfellow out of a medals photograph. They hadn't. The Express went for Adam Peaty, while the Telegraph and Mail opted for  the Daley beefcake shot.

All of which made an interesting diversion and provided some material for breakfast TV and radio teams seeking something fresh for Tuesday morning.

By Wednesday, Team GB had won more and shinier medals, the world had moved on.
But not the Daily Mail.
To borrow a phrase, our athletes may just have won a clutch of Olympic medals, but that didn't stop the Mail finding someone to complain about. And in the process puncture a family's celebration.

A woman had dared to criticise the Press and question the editorial judgment of another newspaper that had made the same call as the Mail itself. This allowed it to attack both Mrs Goodfellow and another rival paper - The Times - which it didn't name. Here's a bit more of the story:

Sharon Goodfellow, 53, was incensed by media coverage of her son's success after he came third alongside Tom Daley in the synchronised diving.
Mrs Goodfellow bemoaned the fact that despite the divers being equal partners in the event, the British Press had just printed pictures of Mr Daley, 22, on their front pages.
One newspaper even left out and her 19-year-old son Mr Goodfellow's name [sic] altogether, writing as a sub-heading: "Daley and synchronised partner stunned as they claim dramatic diving bronze".

It later adds that Mrs Goodfellow had thanked Gabby Logan for "getting in touch with one broadsheet asking them to amend the sub-heading".

That paper was The Times, which had  not only fixed the omission, but also had a Matthew Syed comment piece about under-recognised "junior" sporting partners up on its website before Logan's Twitter reprimand.

@GabbyLogan we have Gabby. A bit of leeway for how close to deadline we are trying to get these Olympic papers out though! #manic

— ALEX KAY-JELSKI (@AlexKJTimes) August 8, 2016

It was a sorry error, and sports editor Alex Kay-Jelski was contrite.
Unlike the Mail.
The Times's ill-considered sub-head was on the back page, under two photographs of Goodfellow and Daley and a caption which named both (the paper had bizarrely preferred to make a "cultural" point about beach volleyball attire on its front).
Take another look at that cutting from the Daily Mail's front page at the top of this post. It focuses solely on Daley. It doesn't even say that he had a partner in a "doubles" event, let alone name him. Goodfellow did make it to the intro of the page 6 story - but Daley alone is headline material.

So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that the story about the mother who "found something to complain about", the woman who was "bemoaning", "incensed" and "irritated", didn't mention the fact that the Mail was also guilty of airbrushing Goodfellow out of the limelight.

The Mail has some pet terms for people who refuse to acknowledge what it sees as the error of their ways.
"Shameless", for example. And "arrogant".
It is also known to demand "Now say sorry!"
I think the cap fits, Mr Dacre.

PS: that cultural divide

It's easy to bash the Mail, but if you're looking for a volleyball picture to demonstrate the "cultural contrast" (as the Times calls it), isn't this one from the same spread as the Daley-Goodfellow story better?

Gareth Davies and Trinity Mirror: a postscript

Some of Davies's award-winning efforts for the Advertiser

Last week former Croydon Advertiser reporter Gareth Davies caused a Twitterstorm with a series of tweets about his old paper. Yesterday SubScribe published his long-form account of what he believes is happening to local papers all over the country.

In the course of preparing the piece, Davies submitted a series of questions to Trinity Mirror in the hope of securing an answer to his concerns. The company's spokeswoman declined to respond unless he told her where the article was to be published.
Davies questioned the relevance of the platform and was told that it was pertinent because the company would need to know whether he was writing for the layman or an industry audience that would understand the jargon etc.
Once furnished with the information, the spokeswoman declined to comment. SubScribe approached her separately, offering the opportunity to be quoted or to write a new piece setting out the company's view. Again she declined. A separate approach was made to Croydon editor Ceri Gould, who did not respond.

The following quote from a TM "spokeswoman" - who knows if it was the same one? - did, however, appear at the foot of a report of his article on the website Hold the Front Page yesterday afternoon:

“None of the claims made by Gareth Davies stacks up. Every one of his points is either a misinterpretation of basic standard practice or completely untrue.
“It is clear he is intent on misrepresenting the Croydon Advertiser and Trinity Mirror, the people who work here and the journalism we produce as part of a personal crusade. We, meanwhile, will continue with our strategy of evolving to ensure a future for our titles.”

Gareth Davies is not everyone's cup of tea. He describes himself as a pain in the arse. He does not enjoy the approval of everyone in his home town - as can be seen from the comments at the foot of another report of his article on the Inside Croydon website.
He is, however, brave enough to speak out when nearly everyone else with first-hand experience of what is going on remains silent for fear of losing their jobs or of burning bridges if they've already lost them.

SubScribe shares the concerns of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of local newspaper journalists about the state of their industry and has written to that effect ... more than once. I was therefore happy to offer a home for Davies's article, but do not necessarily agree with everything that he has written.

It may be that Trinity Mirror is unaware of SubScribe or sees it as insignificant. It is, after all, a small blog run by a one-woman band. Even so, it seems extraordinary for the company to decline to respond to the article on the site where it was published, and then to use another platform to impugn the integrity of a reporter it was happy to claim as its own when he was collecting prizes.

The comment was the only official response to the SubScribe article, but Trinity Mirror had been firing its big guns before it was even written.
Chief executive Simon Fox, regional editorial director Neil Benson and digital publishing director David Higgerson had all piped up after the tweetfest.
Apart from Higgerson's blog - which focused on the 1,000-click argument - the attacks were personal. For Fox, Davies was talking nonsense, while Benson said pointedly that the culture at the Advertiser "particularly since Gareth left" had been one of positivity. In a separate comment to Press Gazette, Benson had what appeared to be another dig: “The days when reporters could choose, arrogantly, to write about what interests them, rather than what interests the audience, are over.”

Davies is not the man in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square, but he is a lone figure standing up to a big organisation and it isn't good PR for that organisation to be seen to be trying to silence or squash him.

Sometimes the message is so strong that it doesn't matter how small or insignificant the outlet.  So, in case anyone is wondering whether Davies should have had a "conversation" about potential reader interest before writing, it is probably worth mentioning that his piece has had thousands of clicks in less than 24 hours.
It has also been debated on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, and followed up by HtFP, Inside Croydon and Press Gazette, to name but three.
Isn't that the sort of audience engagement TM craves for its output?

A further approach has been made to the company for comment or a rebuttal article. We await the response with interest.

Sexist? Fattist? Maybe. But how many people read that Victoria Wood obit before condemning it?

How often do you "like" a link posted by a Facebook friend without reading the article they're sharing - or even clicking on the link? Never? Ocasionally? Daily? Almost always?
We all do it. No one has the time to follow every link that turns up in their timeline, and pressing the "like" button is often no more than a courtesy, It's a way of acknowledging and reinforcing your relationship with the sharer, an endorsement of their general view of life, rather than a critique of whatever it was that moved them.
What about commenting? Most of us are a bit more cautious on this. You'd have to trust your friend's judgment implicitly to echo their opinion publicly without first checking what they were on about.
And sharing? Somewhere between the two perhaps.

The FB status update above turned up on my timeline last night. I don't know Daniel Smith, and we have no mutual FB friends, but it was widely shared and a real friend tagged me in a discussion on someone else's thread.
As I write, it has been shared more than 2,900 times and attracted 248 emoticons.

Smith's statistic also made it on to Twitter - although two of the sources for retweets have deleted their originals.

Disgrace, shameful, outrageous, bloody newspapers!

My own reaction was one of despair. First because of the substance of his comment, and second because I had just submitted an over-length magazine article about the treatment of women in the Press. That dealt mostly with the tabloids and I feared I was going to have to beg the editor to allow me an extra paragraph to say that serious papers could be just as culpable.

Then I read the offending obit. Three times. I found five paragraphs referring to Wood's weight and food issues, one description of a character she created as being "fat", and one quote from her about the British people not seeming to mind "if someone looks like a baked potato".
I've now been through it six or seven times and am at a loss to find the full dozen - but then again, I was always hopeless at those "spot the difference" games in childhood puzzle books.

Cellulite, pot noodles and dieting yoghurts all get an early mention - but in relation to her comedic material rather than to Wood personally. We learn that she ate tinned mince during a "grey period" and that she was vegetarian and teetotal, but these facts are not linked to her body shape.

The first mention of her weight appears in the fourth par:

Modest and self-deprecating - she struggled with shyness and her weight as a girl - she credited her success to luck, hard work and determination, playing down the considerable and multiple talents that made her a stalwart of stage and small screen for more than 40 years.

The eighth paragraph includes the description of her character Maureen in the award-winning TV play Talent as "plain and fat" compared with her "glamorous" friend Julie. Other obituaries describe Maureen as "frumpy"; the script stipulates that she is overweight.

We return to Wood's eating disorder four paragraphs later:

She was dogged by issues with food, and stung by criticisms of her weight early in her career - the worst moment came when one critic described her as "rolling on stage like a witty tank".

This is followed by a par about her preference for trousers and trainers to fancy frocks and high heels and her baked potato comment.
Three paragraphs later we are told:

Her teens were marked by shyness, which she said was because she was fat and would over-eat. 

The next mention of food comes in a description of what she called a grey period when her success on the New Faces TV talent show didn't turn her into an overnight star:

She lived in a bedsit and ate tinned mince. 

The next is ten paragraphs later, in another list of the subjects she turned into comedy:

Her sell-out stand-up comedy tours exploited whatever was current in her life: shows dealing with pregnancy, childbirth and raising kids were followed by middle age, the menopause and her issues with food. She even wrote jokes about her emergency hysterectomy.

Finally, three pars from the end we learn:

Wood sought therapy in the mid-Eighties and onwards to help her come to terms with the underlying causes of her eating problems, and for what she described as a "puritanical" streak which prevented her from fully enjoying the fruits of her success. 

So there we have it.
Daniel Smith is, in my opinion, right that there are too many references to Wood's weight and, yes, it's reassuring to know that some men notice these things. The first sub-clause is gratuitous, given that the subject will be tackled later on; the critic's "witty tank" comment should not have been given a first airing, let alone a regurgitation forty years later.

But was it really as awful as Smith and his disciples think? Was there another, better, way?

The job of a modern obituary writer is to try to get behind what made the subject the person they were, not just to list their works and awards. Victoria Wood's eating disorder clearly shaped both her mind and body - and provided her with comic material. It could not be ignored. Nor, indeed, could her onstage costume, any more than an obituary of Grayson Perry should avoid mention of his dresses and bonnets. It was a departure from the conventional and part of who she was.

The Guardian described the Maureen character as "frumpy" and quotes Wood as saying that as a teenager she was "addicted to sugar, which makes you depressed". It also mentions therapy, but declines to elaborate on what the treatment was for, saying simply that she emerged "with a confidence that surprised those who suspected she was doomed to be awkward and vulnerable". It's a good obit, but in avoiding all mention of Wood's weight and its impact on her self-confidence it denies the reader a key insight.

The Independent and Telegraph also mentioned the therapy, both saying that the reasons for it "were never specified". They must have read the same cuttings.

The intro of the Telegraph piece describes Wood as a "plump chantreuse" and later asserts that she "cultivated a deliberately frumpy roly-poly image, attracting such epithets as the Daily Telegraph's 'plucky, buxom singing blonde from Lancashire'".
It goes on to say that the teenage Wood was withdrawn, lazy and "tortured by low self-esteem". In that low period after New Faces she "stayed in bed for 14 hours at a stretch, eating too much" of that tinned mince.
When success follows the airing of Talent, The Sunday Telegraph critic says that Wood's talent is as "ample as her frame". But that was 38 years ago. Would anyone write that now? Hopefully not. But the obit continues:

For years she had agonised about her weight, having envied her two older sisters who were thin and, to her mind, more attractive. As a young woman of 15 stone, she suffered from a compulsive eating disorder which she overcame and later incorporated into her stage act.

This is interesting. It is brutal, but it gets right to the point, dealing with cause, effect and ultimate outcome succinctly rather than meandering around the issue as the Times does.

The Independent, meanwhile, restricts its thoughts on the subject to a single paragraph:

Wood suffered from low self-esteem and later talked about being shy, lonely and overweight as a child. In the Nineties she had therapy relating to her past, though the specifics were never revealed. She also talked openly about her struggles with an eating disorder.

This seems to me to be the best approach of the four.

I had, of course, noticed that Wood was larger than most women who appear on television, but until I read the obits I had no idea of how big a deal it was for her. Like her, I have spent my life fighting with my bulk; it colours my every thought. A friend similarly tortured said today: "I hope that if I ever get an obituary, people write about how fat I was and how miserable it made me."

Another Facebook friend defended The Times (albeit prefacing his comment with the dreaded "I haven't read it but...") saying:

If there was an emphasis on her weight, surely that is because it was so important to Victoria Wood herself. Her body image is surely crucial to her development as a comic and how she overcame her insecurities by draw attention to them. Significantly the BBC Radio 4 obituary programme drew attention to exactly the same weight related anxieties.

Challenged "Would it have been the same for a man?" he replied:

If height, size and weight is crucial to the genius of the obituary subject then it is perfectly acceptable to discuss these. Simply witness the many obituaries to the wonderful Ronnie Corbett. There were few indeed which did not mention at length, and then again some more, his short stature.

He's not wrong there. The Times obit of Corbett included ten references to his height, including the fact that he bought his size four-and-a-half shoes from the children's department, that he was treated to a course called "How to stretch yourself" by a well-meaning aunt, that he was once the shortest commissioned officer in the British Forces, that he wrote a book called The Small Man's Guide to Life, and that he was honorary president of an organisation called the Five Foot Club, "which was formed to fight for a better deal for little people".

Hmmm. Two wrongs or a fair comparison?

The Times obituary editor is on holiday, so was unavailable to comment - but it would be surprising if next Saturday's Feedback column didn't offer some answers.
Time constraints may be one (unsatisfactory) explanation: the version that appeared in the paper went up online at 8.04pm on the night Wood died. A much more polished version was posted on the website at 1am. The preoccupation with weight has been overcome to the extent that it is dealt with in a single paragraph three pars from the end. "Plain and fat" Maureen has gone. So, too, have the tinned mince and the baked potato.
Of course it would be better had the original never appeared. The author and sub were both at fault. At least someone at London Bridge realised that it was inadequate - beyond the pale, even - and set about improving it. Hats off to whoever that was, though it's a pity the print version wasn't also updated.

My initial question remains, however. Given that both web versions of the obit are behind The Times paywall, how many of those 2,900 sharers and tweeters read either?

It's a journalist's job to smell a rat

At 7 o'clock last Thursday evening a man called Tony Smith posted a photograph of his friend James Green on Facebook. Green was holding a litter picker, which in turn held what looked like the world's biggest rat.

The picture was shared hundreds of times and turned up in my own timeline at 10 the next morning, courtesy of my daughter, along with the message: "More mutant rats for you to write about".

From the moment I saw it, I was in no doubt about what would make the Daily Star splash the next morning. Giant rats and killer spiders are staples for the Star when Big Brother is off air and no one is being bullied in the jungle.

Sure enough, there it was on Saturday, presented with a totally straight face and without a smidgen of doubt:

"A giant rat the size of a child has been snared by a gas worker. Now there are fears the mutant super rodents could soon overrun Britain. Full story, page 5

There we were told:

"A massive super-rat  'bigger than a child' has been snared by a terrified worker amid fears they are taking over Britain.

"Gas engineer Tony Smith, 46, said he came across the four-foot rodent and grabbed it as another pest scarpered away.

"He then got his pal to pose up with the beast before warning the public about the huge vermin. The mutant rat, which weighed about 25lbs and lived on fried chicken, was spotted dead in a bush near a children's playground.

"Tony snapped a picture of the beast held by electrician pal James Green, 46. He said the creature, nicknamed Ratty, was the same length as a four-year-old boy.

"He added: 'I've got a cat and a Jack Russell and it was bigger than both of those put together. It would kill a cat....'"

Later in the story "one worker, who did not want to be named" told the paper:
"The council do not want people to know about these rats because they are worried it will scare everyone. But people need to know.

"It scared the life out of me. I didn't sleep a wink last night after seeing it. They are huge and scary."

We are then reminded of a previous rat scare from last month and experts are quoted saying that poison-resistant rodents have been on the increase.

So there we have it. 

These chaps found a rat, gave it a name and worked out its height, weight and diet.They were concerned for the public, but didn't think to take the "beast" to the council's pest control department or anyone in authority. They just took a picture and dumped it in a bin. 

Right.

Its all nonsense, of course. But the Star would never pass up a story like this. It has form:

Only spiders excite the paper more:

...although going to the seaside has recently become more perilous:

Now we've had our fun, let's set the Star aside and look at the rest of our media.

The BBC, London Evening Standard, Mail online and Sky News all followed up that Facebook post on Friday with tweets and web reports. Hackney Council tweeted its response, including photographs of one of its staff with a soft toy to show how forced perspective can make something look bigger than it really is. The BBC's online Newsbeat page rubbished the picture from the word go, with a Liverpool university professor pointing out that you couldn't pick up something weighing 25lbs with a litter picker. 

Other people tweeted examples of forced perspective and a scientist at UCL called Oliver O'Brien showed his workings to back up his calculation that the rat was probably about 2ft long (still pretty monstrous).

Newspaper websites were making hay, but gradually a note of scepticism crept into the coverage. Mail online announced that this was an African pouched rat (which the BBC's professor says averages about 1.5kg - a tenth of the weight the Star reported). Someone else said it was Norwegian 

The Guardian ran a piece about how to fake a giant rat and the unreliability of internet pictures. 

Even the Independent, preparing for its new digital life, joined in.

The Mirror went from accepting the story at face value to contemplating that the picture might have been a hoax, finishing with a reader poll asking "is this really a giant rat?" -  to which 72% of respondents voted No.

What larks! This is what the internet is all about: daft quizzes, pictures of cats and selfies - even of rats.

But it is not what newspapers should be about. 

By the time papers went to press on Friday night, the story should have died a natural death (for everyone but the Star). 

But no. There it was in the Mail, Express and Telegraph, too. 

The Express reported the find as unquestionable fact:

"As rats go, this is a revolting supersize example.

"The creature, which weighed more than 25lb, was found dead next to a children's playground in Hackney Downs, east London..."

The Telegraph described it as a "terrifying rodent" and quoted Exmoor Zoo experts as saying it might be an escaped grasscutter or cane rat.

"These are bred for their meat, which is a delicacy, and sold illegally in London markets." 

It concedes in the final par, however, that "social media sceptics" had said that the forced perspective "trick" made the rat seem bigger.

The Mail put the story right at the back of the book, and while it stuck with the Gambian pouched rat theory, this print version gave more prominence to the forced perspective scepticism.

Neither the Sun nor the Mirror was fooled:

"This image of a '4ft' rat went viral yesterday - but experts reckoned a camera trick made it look twice its size," reported the Sun.

"Workmen claimed to have found the 25lb rodent by a playground. It was said to be the length of an eight-year-old boy [I thought the workmen had said four-year-old, but never mind] and was touted as Britain's biggest."

Claimed. Said to be. Touted as. The quote marks round 4ft. Oh yes, the language says, we absolutely believe these guys.

The Mirror report was similarly laden with scepticism - and ghastly puns:

"At furs sight some may agree with sparky James Green that the dead rat he's dangling is an astonishing 4ft long...bigger than a child.

"But experts and a local council have branded it an unlikely tail..."

It quotes a professor from Greenwich who describes it as a "fine large specimen of Norway rat", and discounts the African theory. Another professor insists that it is a pouched rat, which are so big "they are often kept on a lead".

By Saturday, even the Star was having doubts and its website was asking whether the Hackney rat was from Africa or from a false perspective. It at least gave us a photograph of a genuine pouched rat being held by a human being whose hands appear to be about the same size.

For that is the giveaway in the Hackney photograph: Green's right hand is twice the size of his left.

Even a 2ft rat would be a monster, so it's not surprising that it caught the men's attention or even that they photographed it. You can't blame Green for holding it at arm's length and the men  may not have realised quite how big it would appear in the picture. Or maybe they did and they thought they'd have a little joke on Facebook. They probably didn't expect it to become a national phenomenon. 

Facebook and Twitter are awash with pictures that have been doctored or aren't what they seem, but it is not the job of the Press to reprint them. We all know that newspapers are in trouble, but trying to emulate social media is not the solution. 

The argument that this is a "talker" - a story that people will discuss in the pub - doesn't wash. The papers who ran this ended up looking gullible or cruel - turning a couple of ordinary blokes who shared a picture with internet friends into hoaxers and fakers.

Just because a few hundred people share a post or comment on it, doesn't mean it should be lifted and presented as "news", especially if all you can offer the reader is speculation.
Yes, the papers all showed the photograph to professors and "experts" to try to find a cloak of respectability, but not one went back to the source of the story to ask the two questions that mattered:

Were you having a laugh? 

And, if not, why didn't you take the rat to the council instead of throwing it in the bin?

But to do so might have produced unwanted facts that would ruin the story. So no one did.

The fact that the Daily Mail put its report as far back as page 43 tells us all we need to know about this tale: it's fine online, but it's not worth the paper it's printed on.

Searching for fragments of truth in Boston

Rumour, speculation and gossip: Twitter does its bit for bomb investigation

What's the latest on the bombing? Is it three dead? Or fifteen? Or thirty-three?

It depends on which paper or website you're reading. If you're following Twitter or the main news sites, the answer is still three -  one of them Martin Richard, an eight-year-old boy who had run to hug his father as he completed the Boston marathon.

If you are concerned about Syria, the answer is that 15 are known to have died in car bombings in Damascus on Monday last week. We still know little about the victims.

If you look a little further south to Iraq, the answer is that at least 33 are thought to have been killed in car bombings in Kirkuk (main picture) and Baghdad at about the same time as the Boston blasts yesterday. Again, there is little information about the victims.

Why, then, the heavy emphasis on Boston - especially when statistics suggest that around 80 Americans will have died of gunshot wounds yesterday? Is it somehow a greater atrocity? And if not, why is it a bigger news story?

These are, of course, rhetorical questions. Bombings in America are rare, in the Middle East they are a regular occurrence. We know that the attacks in Syria and Iraq were politically motivated and carefully targeted. We're all still fretting about the who, what and why of Boston. Al Qaeda? A lone maniac? Someone somehow linked to the threat from North Korea? A gun fanatic angered beyond all sense by suggestions of curbs after the Sandy Hook shootings? (The last stretch of the race was dedicated to the 26 killed by Adam Lanza at a Connecticut school in December.) Was it all Obama's fault - or that of the Republicans? Everyone was playing the blame game, but no one really knew anything.

The US authorities are  wary of using the word terrorism - as though bombing a city centre where half a million have gathered to celebrate a public holiday and the world's oldest marathon could be anything other than terrorism. In America, terrorism means foreigners. The notion that anyone home-grown could commit such a crime is almost impossible to swallow.

Many years ago, a journalist friend came up with an uncomfortable  equation of newsworthiness:
1 British child = 2 British adults = 10 French or Germans = 50 Australians = 100 Indians = 500 Chinese = 500,000 Biafrans.
It's horrible and in these more sensitive days, you would hope that any vestige of truth in the formula would have gone. But it hasn't quite, has it?

What is missing from the numbers game is the circumstance: how rare is the event, how great the suffering, how near are the cameras.

Terrorists of all colours, shapes and sizes, are smart cookies. They know when and how to maximise impact and when to hold back. The finishing line of the Boston marathon was a master stroke, for not only were there huge crowds, tv cameras and reporters, there were also trained first-aiders, medical equipment and wheelchairs. These bombs were relatively small ball-bearing devices and they were detonated long after the elite athletes had finished the race. This does not seem to be the work of someone determined to cause maximum death and destruction.

The terrorist's objective is generally to terrorise - the clue's in the name - and there will obviously  be consternation here with the London marathon next Sunday. That was naturally the focus of British coverage on the web today. The bombing itself was the splash in all the main papers yesterday, but even Martin Richard's human story had a tough job competing with the prequels of Mrs Thatcher's funeral today.

Up until a few years ago, the Boston story would definitely have held sway on day two. But now we are in the digital era, the rules are changing. Where an editor would scoff at a story because it had been on the Today programme, he or she will now say 'but it's been on the web all day'. Does the fact that the subject is the top trend on Twitter make it more - or less - newsworthy for a traditional print paper?

And how far does the web and Twitter influence our difficult choices about what to show and what to withhold? There used to be a cardinal rule that you did not run pictures of dead people; then it suddenly became OK if they were an unidentified foreigner  (I don't think that's OK, but what do I know?), and then if they  were famous or notorious, like Saddam Hussein.

Newspapers' websites show no restraint in publishing  photographs of blood-caked children or of people with legs missing, their faces fully visible and identifiable, being carried or wheeled away from a scene of devastation. It can be only a matter of time  before the rules are loosened still further for print. Has everyone forgotten that there were reasons for restraint: that people deserve dignity in injury and death, and the practical stricture that children should be able to pick up a paper without being frightened by what they see.

Another fear is that Twitter and the web will lead to a more cavalier attitude to what is fact and what is rumour, hearsay and speculation. The Slate website anticipated yesterday that people would seek to make capital - political or financial - from the disaster and published what it described as a journalist's guide to tweeting during a crisis. MediaUK  has also put up a miniguide under the URL tweetresponsibly.net.

Reporters on breaking stories, desperate to learn the most details in the least possible time, have to clutch at every nugget. But no matter how assiduous they are in assaying their find, they will often have been proved wrong by the time the paper appears the next day.  We have never learnt the lesson of not putting death tolls in the splash headlines on disaster stories - and they are always, always, always wrong. Yesterday morning there were two dead in Boston; now there are three. With luck that will be the final figure, but with seventeen critically ill, who could guarantee it?

Flaky and overhasty tweets - especially from bystanders or friends of friends not involved in the incident or investigation - don't help in the search for truth; the imperative 'I must get this out now before anyone else finds out' is no one's friend. Stories on almost all the websites yesterday were heavy on 'sources', 'insiders','eyewitnesses' and 'unconfirmed reports', but feather-light on solid attribution.

First we  had reports of other bombs being found in hospitals, and of one being the subject of a controlled detonation. By lunchtime a Senator was on television saying that was not the case. There was an incident at  the JFK library, but that turned out to be an unconnected fire. There was a solitary figure seen on the rooftops just before the explosions:  was he the bomber - or maybe just someone who lived in a block of flats who had gone up top to watch the race?

By noon investigators had received 2,000 tips and were asking businesses to hang on to their CCTV footage. A search was initiated for a 'dark-skinned or black male, possibly with a foreign accent'; officers were also looking at a video said to show someone taking a number of backpacks into the area five minutes before the blasts.
Then there was the erratic driver and related information that led investigators to the Revere district of the city. A block of flats was soon swarming with teams from the FBI, city police,  Homeland Security,  immigration and customs seeking a 'person of interest'. They emerged with paper bags and rucksacks - but again, the occupant was quickly ruled out as a suspect.

David Taylor and Devika Bhat's copy for The Times was, in this context, a breath of fresh air, containing nothing that was not supported by legitimate and checkable sources.

The importance of Twitter in the Arab spring and in getting news out of closed societies cannot be over-emphasised. But now everyone with a smartphone is a citizen journalist and therefore feels obliged to tweet if they are witness to a big event - or even if their Auntie Mary used to live three streets away from a big event.

When I googled  'Boston marathon' at 7am yesterday, the BBC story was the top hit. Underneath there was a line saying '25,546 more stories like this..' Twenty-five thousand stories! (I know, this one makes it 25,457.)

One imagines - or hopes - that  those were 'stories' in the sense that they had some information to impart. Twitter imposes no such discipline. Tens of thousands couldn't resist tapping 'OMG, horror in Boston' into their mobiles, while celebs felt compelled to tweet to show their compassionate nature - and burnish their image. Roll up Arnold Schwarzenegger, Taylor Swift, Ben Affleck, Russell Crowe, Miley Cyrus, Oprah Winfrey, Justin Timberlake, Courtney Cox, Pink, Ke$ha, Mark Wahlberg. We all just NEED to know that you are praying for the people of Boston.

In the face of so much piety, it was fun to see that Cher made a mess of hers. Clearly under instruction from some PR person to tweet something, she wrote: 'So sorry about happy  Boston runners being blown up. wtf', swiftly followed by  'Boston! Made parts of 2 movies there. Lovely, lively people'. Well that's good then. We all feel better to know that.

Then came the cyber-ambulance chasers out to make a swift buck from disaster. Internet entrepreneurs, self-publicists, bloggers (yes, I know, pots and kettles), all went haring off - and so did the spivs and spammers. Within hours, fake Facebook and Twitter accounts had been set up, promising donations to fake charities in exchange for 'likes'. They even had pictures of little girls supposedly running in the race (do they let primary school children run in marathons?) who were supposed to have been killed.

Not all of those making hay from the disaster were behind computers.The LiveLeak website put up a video that shows passers by taking advantage of the melee to help themselves to official marathon jackets. Looting is always wrong, but it's hard not to smile at the smug look on these men's faces as they nonchalantly saunter away with their booty.

This post is really a series of questions, so here are two more to finish: how can we make sure  that we maintain standards of journalism in our mainstream media when there are so many competing sources of information and little time to sort the wheat from the chaff?

And how can we make sure that Twitter voices that must be heard are not drowned out by the cacophony of witterers?

Discuss.

How do you see the future of journalism? Do you still have a paper delivered or pick one up at the station on the way to work? Do you prefer print, Kindle or iPad? Or have you given up on the mainstream media and switched to Twitter and blogs? Please join in the SubScribe survey here. Thank you.

@gameoldgirl

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