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…

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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…

2. Create a home for the conversation

We’ve learned from recent episodes that, today, “consultation” in the NUJ means activists talking to activists. That’s cosy. At least the rooms won’t have smoke in them any more. But, sorry to say, it’s quite clear you guys don’t know much about what’s happening in our business. When it comes to Web 2.0, 3.0 or – frankly – 1.0, it must be the blind leading the blind – or what insight there is is being lost in translation to policy. So throw open some forums on your site, invite some clueful early contributors to chip in – I suggest you get Shane Richmond and Donnacha DeLong to have a good to-and-fro, if Shane’s not left the union yet – and you’ll learn a lot. And you’ll also gain kudos for hosting the conversation.

3. NUJ 2.0: throw the union’s processes open to scrutiny

It’s not enough just to be talking about the right things. You’ve got to walk the walk too. Imagine, by going for idea number two, you were able to create some buzz in the new media content industry by hosting some of its most important debates. And, moreover, imagine some new media hacks – non-members – were intrigued by the far-sighted organisation that made all this possible. What would they find if they ventured to the rest of your website? A transparently democratic, forward-looking organisation? Or an ugly green mishmash that apparently makes it as hard as possible to learn or do or say anything?

It’s time to start again. Let us know how you make decisions. Insist that every member of the national executive council contribute to a blog, at least once a week, telling us what they’re doing and why, and put the headlines from that blog on the site’s front page, next to the latest union news. Publish the minutes of any meeting not dealing with confidential negotiations. Sell us, up front, the benefits of being a member. Learn from the best – take a browse through some brilliant but low-budget NGO and voluntary organisation websites in the New Statesman award shortlist. Start viewing the web as the princple means of reaching current and future members.

Most importantly, show that there is a clear path to take insights from sensible discussion through to implementation and campaigning on sensible policy.

4. Create a digital conference for all comers

For all the NUJ’s desire to involve itself in a debate about web journalism, it’s posted missing on the regular new media conference circuit. Thus, the union appears to have nothing to say to the outside world, and appears to think it has nothing to learn either. This isn’t the case. So set up a conference, perhaps in partnership with good people like NMK or Press Gazette or Frontline, and move your debate outside your own structures. Invite digital natives to speak, and don’t worry if they – or anyone in the audience – don’t have union membership. If they’re impressed, maybe they’ll join. Keep your meetings closed and you won’t get a single new sub.

5. Accept muscle has been replaced by knowledge

This final bit is inspired by Jeff Jarvis’s idea of the new collective, posted last week. It’s also the most testing bit for a union, because it can’t be just a token effort.

Here’s the thing: once, a union’s members gained their power only through collective (industrial) action. Today, union members find it both harder to strike legally, and harder to say yes in a strike ballot. That’s led to a diminishing of the power of trade unions, even if diehards refuse to accept the glory days are gone.

It would be better for all if you realised the new power comes through circulating knowledge through the ranks – not the kind of badly filtered, politically tainted, change-is-bad “knowledge” we’ve seen so far, but real information about what the hell’s going on.

So launch the remedial new media training first. As Craig McGinty says in comments to yesterday’s post, “start with simple training in the use of RSS, blogging, online advertising opportunities, social bookmarking – especially as newsroom staff will be asked to be more web aware, or if cutbacks are made look at having to go freelance.” He’s right – it’s all useful stuff.

Also: do the advanced training for smaller, more advanced groups, just as you do for traditional media skills – web hosting, design, CSS, the fundamentals of new media publishing. Share best practice through industry forums, and help members get jobs – traditional staff ones, and their share of the new wave of freelance ones that will spread through this industry over the next few years. Match members to jobs. Help them form alliances to bid and execute on the kind of collaborative work that characterises the web industry these days.

And, finally, you start leading the debate, rather than trying to drag it back.

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?

Well, we had a long debate in the comments on this blog, during which he had to water down an early claim that “quite a few of our recommendations [from the witness contributor report] were subsequently adopted by broadcasters”, implying I was being harsh for attacking it while the big boys got on with engaging with the union and its ideas. There was no causal effect between union paper and broadcaster action, and we got a bit of clarity on that. Delong thought I was being “absurd” in pursuing it, but I thought it was important to find out what influence the NUJ had on policy, and we got an answer eventually.

Delong also chipped in on the Telegraph blog – more snide, there, perhaps thinking their writer’s criticism had more to do with politics than clue. That was unfortunate.

Most revealing, though, in an interview Delong had with BBC 5Live’s Pods & Blogs show, in which he made clear his nightmare vision was of publishers offloading all their professional reporters, and using only amateur reporters to file reports then edited by a rump of subeditors back in the otherwise deserted newsroom.

That is, indeed, a nightmare vision, and Delong puts an articulate case. But he’s talking about something that nobody is suggesting will happen. He says Roy Greenslade supports the nightmare in his blog, but that’s simply not true – Greenslade just openly worries about their being fewer staff jobs, and more freelance, user-generated and/or blogged content instead.

Now, what is the case is that once, people – mostly academics in the US – were suggesting it could go down like this; that amateur would replace pro (and then get paid, which made it all very confusing). But that was always bullshit, some of us called it, and eventually nothing much happened. The few citizen journalism projects there were didn’t do very well. Many of the old concepts of citizen journalism simply died on their arse.

Now the debate’s moved on to more rational ground, and we’re talking about “networked journalism” where professionals use the network – yes, of amateurs – to contribute to a huge piece of work. But this is on a different scale to just getting amateurs to replace pros. This isn’t stuff that pros could do alone.

But Delong, like a soldier lost in the woods, is fighting the war that was won years ago. And, damagingly for the union, he’s insisting it bear arms in the name of this cause as well. That’s why we’re all wondering what the hell’s going on.

So, there’s two ways this could be happening. Either the union feels the only way it can rally its troops to defend The Way Things Are is by painting a false picture of what’s on the horizon. Or it’s getting it wrong because key figures haven’t kept up with the debate among practicioners and academics.

Greenslade has concluded it’s all a big straw man – and decided to quit the union. For the moment, I’ll give the NUJ the benefit of the doubt, and hope it’s all a big misunderstanding. But the acid test will be: can we shift the union’s policies to a better-informed position? If not – and their current thinking has little basis in reality – then we’ll know they’re trying to put the frighteners on. Talk’s cheap. Let’s see what they actually do.

Tomorrow, I’ll start the push by suggesting here five things the NUJ could do to become more digitally savvy. Do leave you suggestions.

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.
First up was US-based Jeff Jarvis, not holding back, attacking the “whiny, territorial, ass-covering, protecting-the-priesthood, preservation-instead-of-innovation faux report”.

Then the Telegraph’s Shane Richmond, who got his copy of the magazine, gave the union both barrels too, calling its approach “blinkered”.

“The article that follows, which ostensibly introduces the concept of convergence, is uncredited and frequently mixes opinion with fact. To my mind it does so to present the internet as a threat to good old journalistic values. Let me share some examples.

After a short intro, explaining that previously separate mediums can now be united online, we’re given this: ‘Print is not dead, nor even unwell, despite the technophiles who promised us a paperless office 40 years ago.’

Firstly, the beginning of that sentence is about one thing (newspapers) and the end is about another (office supplies), which is either devious or stupid. Secondly, where’s the evidence to back up the claim that print is not ‘even unwell’?”

And that’s just him warming up.

Now, my Guardian colleague Roy Greenslade has joined the outcry, and decided that after 42 years of membership he’s quitting the union. In a careful and thoughtful piece, Roy has explained why it would be “hypocritical” to remain a member, given he has clear views on where the industry is going, and what is going to need to happen.

His use of the word “hypocritical” strikes a raw nerve. Like him, my views on what’s happening in the business are very different to those of the union. I’m an optimist about where journalism is going, generally, and think the opportunities emerging are more important (or more real) than the grievances the union has flagged up.

Even if they occasionally have a point, especially around working practices at smaller titles, the union’s almost willful refusal to attempt to understand the true dangers and opportunities in new media leaves me frustrated and angry. It also masks the fact that many of its members are engaged, and knowledgeable, about digital media, and are toiling honestly to make it work.

There is an opportunity – a need, even – for an engaged union that’s able to represent and help its members adapt, as Jeff says today. And, fundamentally, I think unions are a Good Thing – even in a white collar business like journalism – because employees’ rights, especially those of people just starting out, can be abused.

I’m going to wait until I’ve read the whole thing in the Journalist, whenever it finally hits my mat. But I’m already asking myself: is it hypocritical to remain in an organisation that doesn’t reflect some of your most closely held views, especially when you’re not – and I’m not – prepared to rejoin the world of union politics to try and change the line?

I think it is. So is leaving the union the only course of action?