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Joining the Wall Street Journal

WSJ.com's front page, today You may have noticed the world of finance making the news of late, so it seems like a good time to let you know: from the new year, I hope to be bringing you a few of those headlines.

After nine-and-a-half wonderful years at the Guardian, I’ve decided to move to pastures new, to become editor of the European edition of WSJ.com, the Wall Street Journal’s website.

WSJ.com has been making great strides of late, including an impressive redesign unveiled just as the current crisis took hold last month. The team there is working to create something outstanding around one of the biggest stories of the time, and it’s a huge thrill to be asked to take the helm in Europe.

I’ll be developing European editorial from London, although I’ll also be working on some special projects with the global operation in New York. Things kick off in the New Year.

Before then, lots of farewells. It’s been a privilege to work for the Guardian in print and on the web, working on some big stories and meeting fascinating people along the way. On guardian.co.uk, I’ve had enormous fun doing things like building our blogs, and launching our audio and video services. I’ll miss everyone, although I hope they’ll still let me sneak in to see the plush new Kings Place offices when they’re all settled in.

But, before then, some drinks may be taken around Farringdon…

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Best Western responds to those hack claims

I mentioned Iain S Bruce’s big Sunday Herald exclusive yesterday, which claimed that 8m people had their personal details compromised by an alleged security lapse at the Best Western hotel chain.

Well, the chain has finally responded, and has done so very firmly indeed. Best Western doesn’t admit to any data loss, saying only that the Herald “brought to our attention the possible compromise of a select portion of data at a single hotel”.

Best Western says it has “found no evidence to support the sensational claims ultimately made by the reporter and newspaper.” They also describe the steps they take to keep data secure, and say “we have no evidence to suggest that there is need for widespread concern”.

Given the strength of Best Western’s denials, the ball appears to be back in the Herald’s court. More evidence would be interesting to see now, especially as the chatter continues around the web; Slashdot has a thread while the Information Week blog asks some questions about Best Western’s statement. There’s clearly a million miles between the Herald’s story and the chain’s retort.

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[Updated] Best Western hacked – 8m people should [maybe] be nervous

[Update: Since I wrote this, Best Western has responded to the story, firmly denying the reported scale of their data loss. I've posted more on this here]

Here’s a big story from Iain S Bruce at the Sunday Herald in Glasgow; a story with global impact and ramifications. The name, address, booking and credit card details of eight million people have been compromised after a Best Western hotel computer system was cracked, the newspaper claims.

If you’ve stayed in one of those hotels – there are more than 1300 – in the last year, or have a booking in one for sometime soon, you may want to check your credit card and bank statements with even more care for the next few… umm… years.

And, as Craig McGill points out

“Not only is it a cracking tale, but it shows that in this day and age you can pull in a good scoop from contacts across the globe – as long as you have the paper willing to back you on it. Contacts are no longer just people you meet down the road.”

Indeed. Little wonder the story appears to be the Herald’s splash this morning. Oddly, there is no reaction on Best Western’s website at the time of writing. [Update: as I say, now there is a response]

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Fake Steve Jobs on the future of digital media

Forbes magazine journalist Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, has given an entertaining keynote here on the last day of Web 2.0. I think – although I may have missed someone – that he’s the only big media staffer to be given time on a stage during the event.

What he writes on his blog becomes, of course, great keynote fodder; geek humour, plenty of visual gags to keep the crowd entertained. And, by God, Steve Jobs is rich raw material.

Of interest to me is that Lyons’ story is also a cautionary tale for big (old) media’s digital departments who might be tempted to ignore colleagues in print. I hadn’t known that Forbes Digital knocked him back several times for a job, even just a blog, before he kicked off his site. Even if they’d said yes, it doesn’t sound a lot like they’d have let him adopt the controversial persona he adopted for his Blogger.com site, initially written anonymously.

The games he played before being stripped of that anonymity isn’t a tale that Forbes Digital bosses will enjoy hearing played back. Having been rejected, again, by his magazine’s digital arm, he emailed a boss at Forbes as Fake Steve to ask if he’d be interested in taking him on. The Forbes boss, not knowing he was emailing someone who was already an employee on the old print side, sent back a fawning email saying, in essence, “yes”. In the meantime, Forbes Publisher Richard Karlgaard joined in the chase to unmask Fake Steve, all the while also emailing over storyline ideas for Fake Steve.

Lyons makes them all sound like utter halfwits. He refers to Forbes a couple of times in the keynote while flicking wanker gestures over his shoulder. His corporate paymasters must have a strong sense of humour.

Beyond the gags and clear conversion to the blogging world, Lyons retains a very traditional media perspective. In a slightly half-baked way towards the end of his talk, he offers up that big media is really starting to get the web, and presents as slightly inevitable that – now they’ve grasped what’s going on – they’ll come to dominate it.

Maybe, he offers as consolation to this crowd, some blog publishers will become big media too, by implication suggesting that will be the web world’s contribution to the media landscape.

It’s an odd message to come now, at the end of a conference where big media has been almost entirely absent, where all the energy and thinking about how content evolves is coming from technology companies, not journalists or traditional media. Unless Yahoo counts as traditional media, which has been suggested

That portion of his keynote is greeted with silence. I don’t think many here really believe him.

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Marking up the NUJ’s new media verdict

NUJ notes I laughed when I saw m’fellow j-blogger Paul Bradshaw had also been annotating a print-out of the NUJ’s Shaping the Future report – the product of their commission on multi-media working.

First, his picture and mine, right, proves the paperless office remains a myth, even among those of us paid to be webheads – I’d printed the PDF out to read it too. Second, we clearly both needed highlighter help as we waded through the 55 pages, trying to work out if the union had actually managed to get its act together since it caused such disquiet with some initial findings earlier in the year.

And the short answer is… yes, it has. The report has some problems – more of which later – but it seems only fair to lead on the news that the final report is substantially better than what was published in that controversial (if predictably rubbish) edition of The Journalist – the one that prompted Roy Greenslade’s departure from the union, and the scorn of many others.

This time out, Jeremy Dear’s introduction sets the right tone from the off by making a proper distinction between the underlying technologies powering the digital revolution, and the silly things some media owners are attempting to do under the cover of modernisation.

This shows a level of understanding completely absent from much of what the union has had to say about the web to date, and is a significant step forward. When I met union new media rep Donnacha Delong for an affable coffee after the initial row, this was my one plea to him and his colleagues: understand the technology could make journalism much better, and understand bad management – whether committed under the guise of multimedia working or not – is still just bad management.

That seems to have happened. In today’s report there are lots of reasonable sections; on pay, conditions, working practices and training. The proposed union focus on journalism education, for instance, would be welcome – as long as it wasn’t to insist on everyone learning to bash out 300 words on a typewriter. Nor can you find fault with calls for more consensual approaches to sorting out multimedia working on newspapers, or proper training for people moving from print into the digital realm. All this is, really, is good management.

The report’s closing pages on the future of journalism are much better researched than previous pronouncements on digital from the union and – while I’d take issue with some of the points – at least come to some solid conclusions. And I was delighted to see the union acknowledge, on page 31, that journalists would have to establish themselves as a brand, even if I was a little disappointed they didn’t run with this idea and examine what a liberating effect this approach has had, in other industries, on working lives.

The problems? There are lots of references to “good journalism” where, one suspects, they mean “the way things have always been done”. In particular, the document is predictably keen on preserving sub-editing jobs, and it insists standards cannot be maintained without subbing processes. I’m not so sure.

As a former sub myself, I’ve got some sympathy. When I first started out subbing (on another title, I should add) I was always astonished at the pisspoor prose emerging from some big names. Anonymous subs were, often, asked to rescue what appeared under the bouffant byline pictures.

But, as ad revenues shrink with the shift online, is there a future for the journalist who can’t actually write? Blogs, self-published and unedited, immediately out the illiterate and the deathly dull [you're here, you already know that]. But things aren’t that bad. It appears there is a world of people out there who can string accurate, properly punctuated sentences together. We’ll always need subs – they’re essentially the only quality assurance journalism has. But given the apparent widespread literacy among our readers, should news organisations of the future employ people who can’t actually write, and who need the traditional four, five or even six layers of subbing? The new economics of content might make the decision for them.

The final irritation: the union continues to flog the dead horse of its Witness Contributor Code of Conduct, which remains a profoundly silly document. For example, its insistence on, whenever possible, using “material produced by NUJ members [...] when such alternatives to witness contributors are available” cheapens the latest, more savvy, report. It speaks more of a fear than an understanding or vision of what users might add to our traditional work. It looks old-fashioned alongside today’s report, and should be spiked.

But to end on a positive: when I spoke to Donnacha, it wasn’t clear if the report would make the web in a form that would allow us to link to it (ie – something other than a PDF). Not only has the union put the lot online (that’s what all those links are, above) but it has finally redesigned its entire website, with the ability to leave comments on some pages. I haven’t had a chance to properly look through the new site, but putting the report online is a step forward as well.

The union’s still got a way to go if it’s to fully understand the threats and opportunities facing its members, but it’s made a lot of progress in only a couple of months.

Let’s hope it keeps going.

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Congratulations to Planet Ink

Hearty congratulations to my mate Shaun Milne and his colleagues at Planet Ink, who are – I’m certain – continuing hearty celebrations after winning staff magazine of the year at the PPA Scotland awards.

Planet Ink is a young firm set up by Shaun, a former Mirror executive, and his business partner Gerry Cassidy. They’re doing some cool stuff in print and online backed – and this makes the crucial difference – by some reassuringly old-fashioned editorial rigour and very splendid design. You can read all about the team here. They’re a good-looking bunch, as you’ll see.

Like any new venture, I know getting the business going has been a lot of hard work for Shaun and his colleagues. But the nice thing is, a gong is a great way of discovering you are, indeed, doing a very good job indeed. May it be the first of many.

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Five things the NUJ could do to engage with the web

OK. As threatened yesterday, here are some suggestions on how the NUJ could get more clued-up about what’s happening in its industry. Do leave your ideas in the comments.

1. Fix your print and online publications

Irony of ironies, but your publications suck. Sorry, but nuj.org.uk is a shambles – why can’t I see who runs the union without logging in? Why is the rulebook only a PDF? What is an ADM, why does it matter, and why don’t you explain anything? Why can’t I apply for a press card online? In print, let’s not discuss your newsletters. And Adrian Monck is right – The Journalist is the worst periodical ever published.

I’m less interested in sorting out the printed magazine, frankly – it’s quite far gone. But a first step to improving things digitally might be putting The Journalist online, and opening it up to the kind of wider critique a few bits of its content have had in the last two weeks. Use WordPress, or another free, lightweight CMS – I’m sure you’ll find a member who can help on this front. Open comments on the contents. Then you’ll have started to…

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NUJ and new media: the trouble is, they just don’t know what’s going on

The Journalist magazine finally arrived at Tosh Towers, and its convergence coverage was broadly as bad as expected. Those expectations were already low thanks to the vigorous fiskings provided by the Telegraph’s Shane Richmond and, yesterday, Mr and Mrs Strange Attractor.

I’d actually say this edition’s bout wasn’t quite at silly as the “Witness Contributor” debacle of last year, but then familiarity with the union’s stance on The Future blunts its ability to shock.

There’s been plenty of debate about the purpose of the NUJ in new media, prompted largely by Roy Greenslade’s decision to leave the union. He wins pickout quote of the week award for his parting shot yesterday, in The NUJ and me: a considered response:

“I cannot, in all conscience, remain within a union I now regard, albeit reluctantly, as reactionary. The digital revolution is here and I am digital revolutionary.”

Bravo.

Roy perfectly summed up the conundrum for anyone who thinks the union’s views on new media are ill-informed, wrong and hugely misleading for a membership which has to face change, whether it wants to or not. There are countless examples in the Journalist’s extract from the commission report which suggest the union simply doesn’t have a clue.

Despite the ongoing collapse in print revenue and sales, they contend: “Print is not dead, nor even unwell”. Despite the inexorable rise of micropublishing they see media businesses “increasingly competing for an undifferentiated, global market”. They bemoan websites that “all begin to look alike, because design is restricted by the physical character [sic] of the medium”. As Shane said, show me a medium not “restricted by the physical character[istics] of the medium”. And, by the way, do check out the emerging science of usability, which helps you understand why some things are similar, or – if that’s too much – Jeff Jarvis’s notion of the visual grammar of news – it’s all about designing for users, not professional ego.

I could go on. All told, though, it’s a crock, with the cherry on top being the piece entitled “Web 2.0 is rubbish” written by Donnacha Delong, who represents new media journalists on the union’s executive. What has Delong being saying to defend his words?

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NUJ: is it “hypocritical” to remain a member?

It would, you’d imagine, take something remarkable to unite commentators from the Telegraph and the Guardian. Yet my union – the National Union of Journalists – might just be managing it.

Some backstory: my regular reader will recall that, last year, the NUJ got into a terrible pickle over a proposed code of conduct for citizen journalists – or, as it called them, “witness contributors”.

That attempt to apply some absurd rules failed, thank goodness. But the union may be at it again, with a new “commission” on multimedia working, the findings of which are starting to emerge.

The only bit I’ve read so far is this contribution to the union’s magazine by Donnacha DeLong, who claims to represent new media workers on the NUJ’s national executive council. His piece is bobbins; it might be a deliberate act of provocation, but DeLong still shows a profound lack of understanding of some of the basics of web 2.0, and introduces the perfect straw man to the debate – that, somehow, web 2.0 “replaces traditional media”. He, and the magazine’s editor, does the union’s members a disservice by publishing it.

But that isn’t the full report – that’s all elsewhere in the Union’s magazine, which doesn’t appear online and which hasn’t arrived through my mailbox yet.

Others have reacted to indirect reports on the report, or managed to get their hands on the magazine. And, lo, the glorious sight of unity – across age-old Fleet Street divides, and even across the Atlantic – has emerged. Continue Reading →

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More frank news coverage

Following on from last week’s post, I know you’ll appreciate this new piece of plain-speaking news reportage, as featured (briefly) at the top of Google News and picked up by Captain’s Quarters: "Bush butt probed, Cheney in charge". Not for the first time, one wonders how Google News picks its sources…

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