UK News

from MediaFile:

Rupert Murdoch’s long crusade to make digital news pay

On the first day of one of my journalism classes, the teacher produced a large metal ring with a short rope fastened to it. The ring was made to be installed in a bull's nose, he explained; and the rope – called a lead – let you guide him wherever you wanted. The point was clear, if somewhat condescending: Writing a good lead lets the journalist guide the reader around like cattle.

That illustration was a lot more powerful before the web, during an era when closed media like print newspapers and television limited interactivity and left consumers with no choice but to passively accept the news as presented. It doesn't make sense on the web, where any reader can challenge news content or even become a publisher in a matter of minutes.

Rupert Murdoch still lives in a world of nose rings. The News Corp. CEO has had remarkable success in print and television, but he has stumbled again and again on the web, most notably with the great fizzle that was MySpace. Even today, the company is backing away from Project Alesia, its ambitious plan to create a digital newsstand, after other publishers showed little interest.

But as reports emerge on his latest digital venture – The Daily, a newspaper designed for tablets in general and the iPad in particular – it's clear that Murdoch isn't giving up on making digital news work on his terms – that is, in a tidily contained format that demands readers pay for it.

That model is working for the Wall Street Journal, more or less, because the publication is still regarded as a must read for many. But it's not clear it will work for a publication built from scratch. Initial reactions lean toward skepticism, particularly the $50 annual subscription and the newspaper-like publishing schedule. One terse summary of the reaction: “Wonderful! Slower news — and at a higher price.”

The skeptics will be right, at least at first. After all, why should digital news follow a cable-TV revenue model, as News Corp. is predicting, when so many are canceling their cable subscriptions? But News Corp. appears to be ready for a long haul: 100 journalists have been hired for The Daily and $30 million is the reported budget for the project. There will always be a huge number of news consumers who are content to graze outside Murdoch's walled gardens. But there may be just enough who are content to be led around by the nose to make The Daily a success.

How big a problem is workplace bullying?

A political row is brewing after allegations of bullying were aimed at Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The claims, made in a book and published in a Sunday newspaper, accused Brown of several abusive outbursts, including grabbing staff by the lapels, shoving them aside and shouting at them.

Downing Street has strenuously denied that the “malicious allegations” are true, while Conservative leader David Cameron has said he expects there to be an inquiry into the claims.

Christine Pratt, head of the National Bullying Helpline, weighed into the debate by saying several people who worked at Number 10 had been in touch with the charity, adding that none had directly accused Mr Brown of bullying.

Meanwhile, Business secretary Lord Mandelson, in an interview with the BBC, said that Brown is “demanding of people” and himself but has never bullied anyone.

Away from politics, research suggests that bullying in the workplace is on the rise, and the recession may be to blame. The Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) revealed in January that one in 10 employees experience bullying or harassment in the workplace, while the union Unison claimed that around one-third of workers say they were bullied in the second half of 2009 –- a 100% increase on a decade ago.

The rise was apparently down to the fact that running a business became more stressful as the economic crisis worsened. Managers, under more pressure than ever before, felt the need to be more critical of their colleagues and often took their anger and frustration out on them, all of which resulted in a large rise in employment tribunal cases.

Do you think there is a problem with bullying in the workplace? Is it something you have witnessed or been a victim of? Can passion for the job often be wrongly interpreted as harassment?

PLEASE let there be somebody out there

These are hard times for sweating hacks. Not a cloud in the sky, not an MP in town and — worst of all — not a whiff of a silly summer story in sight.

We can usually count on a few sharks off the Cornish coast but even they seem to have thought better of it this year. Japanese knotweed is pretty scary, and doing its best to get us all worried down in the West country but it’s no substitute for a dorsal fin or two off St Ives.

And now we’re cruelly told yet again there are no little green men from space. The Ministry of Defence has released files on UFO sightings reported in the 1980s and 90s, available on the National Archives.

Quite promising, some of it. Two men, for example, claim an alien with a lemon-shaped head tried to lure them into a glowing red spaceship as they returned from a night out in Staffordshire in 1995.

That generated a 15-page dossier, while the famous December 1980 sighting at Rendlesham Forest US air force base in Suffolk led to a former chief of defence staff warning Margaret Thatcher’s government not to be too scathing in its dismissal because the incident remained unexplained.

But as usual, however dramatic the sighting, we’re always told it was a weather balloon or something equally as disappointing. No master races, no alien abductions, no cigar-shaped craft or anything remotely exciting.

One day perhaps they’ll give us something to go on — and we all know they’re out there, don’t we? But until then we’ll just have to rely on daft squirrels popping up in tourist photos and the antics of celebs and politicos in the South of France to keep us going in the silly season.

MPs shoot themselves in foot over expenses

The online release of MPs’ expense claims has only served to further dent their already battered reputation.

Forty-two days after the Daily Telegraph began to investigate MPs’ expenses the Houses of Parliament finally got round to publishing official details of them. Or rather it didn’t, as lots of key information was blacked out.

Britain’s newspapers spelt out their condemnation – in black and white – of this supposed exercise in freedom of information.

The Sun labelled MPs “Blankers”, the Daily Mirror led with the headline: “Blackwash”, while the Daily Mail posed the question: “Just how stupid do they think we are?”

Commons officials insisted that the information that had been blacked out was done to protect MPs’ security, but the consensus of Britain’s media was that the political classes had shot themselves in the foot.

“Yesterday’s exercise in obfuscation suggested the House of Commons has learnt nothing,” opined the Daily Telegraph’s editorial, with the paper promising to publish an uncensored version of every MP’s expense claim on Saturday.

“The Portcullis House edition of the dossier does not so much slam the door behind a bolted stallion as painstakingly construct a new stable in order to house a dead nag,” wrote the Guardian.

Nostalgia makes a comeback in TV ad-land

The recession is bringing back the strangest characters.  Rising from their graves like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead are people we thought had been buried decades ago.

The Milky Bar Kid is one, Persil mum is another and, inevitably, the Hovis bread delivery boy struggling up his cobbled hill while the brass band plays on.

What next? Bing Crosby singing about Shell perhaps or the famous Smash-peddling Martians who thought it was so funny that Earthlings bothered to peel potatoes?

Advertising experts believe nostalgia works because it takes adult consumers back to a time when they were young and without any worries. Never mind recession, the old ads say, these are value brands that have stood the test of time.

Marks and Spencer has been trying a similar tack with the launch of its 75p plain jam sandwiches. “For those who haven’t eaten one for years, one bite takes you straight back to your childhood,” runs the blurb.

The old ads are peculiarly effective transports to the past. Some of us go so far back we can still hear the jingle from Esso Blue adverts and remember those gobsmacked housewives comparing the whiteness of their newly washed sheets with Daz man. Ah, takes you back …

Are there any old adverts that you would like to see come back?

The London Evening Standard says “sorry”

Bleary-eyed commuters passing through Clapham Junction station in southwest London on their way to work this week were among the first to witness the opening blast of one of the most remarkable advertising campaigns to have hit the capital in recent years.******No, not Flu Man sneezing his germs all over us but a short message in huge black lettering that simply says: “Sorry for losing touch.”******The only clue as to who is so publicly donning the hair shirt is a small drawing tucked away in the corner of the hoarding featuring the Eros statue in Piccadilly Circus, the  logo of London’s only paid-for evening paper, the Evening Standard.******The message is an attempt by the paper to reconnect with its readership now that it is under new ownership and will appear in the next few weeks on the side of buses and on the underground. Other slogans will say Sorry for being negative, for taking you for granted, for being complacent and for being predictable.******Not the hardest word at all then, though one that seems likely to cause considerable offence to the paper’s former editor Veronica Wadley.******The campaign comes in response to market research, commissioned by the newspaper’s new editor, Geordie Greig, which found that Londoners felt the paper was too negative and did not meet the capital’s needs.******Russian tycoon and former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev bought the loss-making Standard from the Daily Mail and General Trust in February and media analysts have long predicted it will become less right-wing in its political stance. Some expect it to go more upmarket in an attempt to distance itself from the free sheets which have cut so badly into its circulation.******But few can have predicted such a public confessional as this. The “Sorry” campaign will run for three weeks in the run-up to the 181-year-old paper’s relaunch later this month.******After a year in which so many have been clamouring for a ”sorry” from miscreants ranging from bankers to MPs and even debt-laden prime ministers, Londoners may actually soon find themselves becoming sick of the word.

Mervyn King’s warning to the government

The unusual foray into politics by Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, in suggesting there should be no more tax cuts or spending rises in next month’s budget, has been widely interpreted by the newspapers as a blow to Gordon Brown but a source of secret satisfaction to the Treasury.

Chancellor Alistair Darling, several say, was not happy with Brown’s reported budget plans to offer voters more jam before they had digested the 25 billion-pound fiscal package in last Autumn’s Pre-Budget report.

King’s message was interpreted as bad news for Brown just as the Prime Minister embarks on a whrlwind tour of the Americas to drum up support for agreement at next week’s G20 meeting on a major international programme of fiscal stimulus.

Most papers support the Governor.

“Mr King was right and timely in his message,” said the Times. “Fiscal profligacy by the government since well before the last election has sharply constrained the ability of UK policy makers to borrow and spend more.”

In a comment piece, the paper’s business editor David Wighton notes: “Mr King’s intervention hardly strengthens the Prime Minister’s hand as he tries to rally support for further measures at the G20 meeting.”

Damian Reece in the right-wing Daily Telegraph commented: “King was right to warn the government over further public spending splurges. Given the long-term damage Labour has helped cause to the economy and sterling, we really can’t take much more punishment.

Don’t turn back into Stalin, Gordon

The system was bust, something had to be done and what Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling did on Monday with their bank rescue package was a bold and sound move, newspapers agreed.

But many worried about how the government will now use its huge stakes in the banks and several had words of warning.

“Gone is Mr Bean but don’t turn into Stalin,” said the Daily Mail, noting how the financial crisis has transformed Brown’s political fortunes from the days when Lib Dem Deputy Leader Vince Cable launched his infamous jibe in the Commons.

“It is imperative that ministers keep well out of the day-to-day running of the banks they now control,” the paper said. “But can they be trusted?”

“Will they find it impossible to resist forcing banks to lend unwisely — for example to ailing industries in Labour marginals?”

Some papers noted that Brown has already talked of making banks restore their mortgage lending to 2007 levels, a rate of lending, some suggested, that might reinflate the housing bubble.

“The prime Minister is now the ultimate paymaster of institutions that are responsible for a substantial share of British mortgages and deposits,” said The Times.  “The measure of the rescue will not just be a short-term restoration of confidence but evidence that the banks’ behaviour is not perverted or politicised in years to come.”

Media’s views on the abortion vote

As MPs prepare to vote on cutting the time limit for abortions, the Daily Mail says the current system “shames our nation”.

Foetuses are being aborted at a late stage in their development when they would have had a good chance of survival outside the womb, the Mail says in an editorial.

“An attack on women? Utter nonsense. The campaign to cut the time-limit is an attack on an everyday practice that shames our nation,” it says.

Rubbish, says Times columnist David Aaronovitch.

There is no significant evidence to support the claim that the foetus is more viable at up to 24 weeks than in 1967 or 1990 when the law was last changed.

“If viability isn’t the test – as it was claimed to be back in 1990 when the limit was reduced from 28 weeks – then the judgment must be that some folk simply don’t like abortions and wish to restrict them as much as possible,” he writes.

There is little doubt that the “temperature of the debate about abortion” has changed in recent times, says the Independent.

Darling’s tax fix wins few plaudits

The Daily Mirror is alone among the papers in giving unqualified praise to Chancellor Alistair Darling’s 2.7 billion pound solution to the damaging 10p tax row.

“Once critical Labour MPs hailed it as a masterstroke,” the paper said. “Hopefully it signals the start of a concerted fightback by a prime minister who has been on the ropes for months.”

The Daily Mail says the original decision to scrap the starting 10p rate of tax was “A mistake, yes… but fatal? Hardly.” It says Darling and Prime Minister Gordon Brown “deserve credit for choosing the right means to help those who suffered,” by raising the tax threshhold.

But the Chancellor might want to avoid the rest of the dailies, especially the one printed on pink paper. Darling’s tax announcement “ has shattered any residual idea that Mr Brown’s administration can run an orderly fiscal policy,” says the Financial Times.

The paper concedes that “in policy terms, the plan to put up personal allowances makes sense.” However, it adds that the political cost is heavy — the government will no longer now be able to attack the Conservatives over unfunded promises of tax cuts. “This is a significant weakening of the election campaign armoury,” it says.

The Daily Telegraph, somewhat grudgingly, saying that the Chancellor “deserves congratulations” for doing precisely what the paper had urged last Friday. But it adds that Darling’s statement was “a purely political damage-limitation exercise”, timed “to save Labour’s bacon” in next week’s Crewe and Nantwich by-election.

On a similar theme, the Times suggests that the late MP Gwyneth Dunwoody’s final service to the Labour Party has been in death rather than life. “It’s hard to believe that Alistair Darling would have made the statement he did on the 10p tax rate yesterday if it were not for fear of a massive defeat” in Crewe next week, Dunwoody’s former seat.