June 2008 Archives

Suspicion is an important trait for journalists.
It is always vital to remember that for most people who are speaking to you voluntarily there is normally an angle from which they will be benefiting.
This may be the unemployed mother-of-three who is telling you about the terrible conditions of her council house because secretly she just wants to be moved away from her neighbour, or the local councillor who tips you off about a problem in the borough because it reflects badly on the opposition party.
With both these cases it is possible to see and understand the complainants motivation, yet still make an interesting yet balanced story by exploring both sides.
The most obvious people with agendas are press officers. Quite simply, they are paid to promote good news and limit the damage on bad.
There is an almost spiteful prejudice towards PR in journalism and, whatever seasoned hacks may say, a lot of it is born out of snobbery.
I have not known the supposed "halcyon days" of journalism which the portly red-faced survivors of Fleet Street harp on about at any given opportunity. In these days supposedly no organisations had press officers, you could spend four hours at lunch time in the pub with the head of the Met Police DCI Gene Hunt and pigs flew in the window and dropped stories on your desk as you sat in an alcoholic stupor waiting for the internet to be invented.
Since I started my career everyone from the Mayor of London to the local birdspotting club has had someone who handles their press. As a journalist it can at times be very frustrating to have access to organisations restricted to a small team of employees and there is nothing more infuriating than turning up at the scene of a police incident only to be told by PCs on the cordon that you will have to contact the press office to find out what is going on. But what journalists so often fail to realise is how intimidating it can be to be approached and quizzed on a subject by someone who is recording all your words and will probably reproduce them to be read by thousands of others.
Even writing this blog I have time to pick my words carefully, edit and reedit it and I know it will not be spun out of context, because I'm the one publishing it. If someone rang me up and asked me to give my opinion out of the blue and they would write it all down I'm sure this would just be an incoherent mass of drivel (even more so than it is now), which would invariably include something which would get me fired.
Press officers are there to make sure your average worker doesn't have to deal with the unfamiliar world of journalism and a good one can often be more of a help than a hindrance.
But before I get a host of mocking emails from my colleagues claiming I have 'gone to the dark side' I will end this entry with my top five things a bad press officer can do which make me so angry I want to swear in front of nuns:

5) Send out press releases without a single word of real English, filled to the brim with meaningless phrases like "transgenerational partnership".
4) Ask me when my deadline is then completely fail to get any kind of response in time and not even have the courtesy to phone.
3) Provide a quote but refuse to attribute it to anyone except a faceless spokesperson - if 99-year-old Mrs Biddleswaite has had the courage to give us her name when complaining about the poor service she received in a supermarket then the international chain which runs said store could have the decency to scrape up a real employee to apologise on its behalf.
2) Ring me up with a story that has no relevance at all to the area we cover then reveal they are clearly completely ignorant of what kind of publication we are.
1) And worst of all crimes - try to tell me that something I'm enquiring about "really isn't a story" and maybe I should just drop it. When you run the paper you can decide what stories are done and which ones aren't, until then just answer my question like you're paid to. Grrrr... I hope I don't pass any nunneries on the way home.

Right now your home could be in danger.
I'm not referring to the dreaded credit crunch or market crash, but a much more sinister evil lurking in your kitchen.
This seemingly innocuous device has the power to turn a piece of bread into a raging inferno which could consume your house and all your possessions (except that asbestos donkey your uncle Nigel bought back from Spain which you have to keep out of reach of the kids).
That's right, I'm talking about toasters, the hidden menace waiting to turn our suburbs into a hellish apocalyptic blaze.
Many of you may not be aware of the dangers this seemingly harmless invention poses to humanity, and I myself was blissfully ignorant until just a few hours ago.
That was until our office manager received a reply to a naive request from editorial to invite this lurking monster into our kitchen.
Our HR bods were quick to inform her that toasters are a "fire hazard" and therefore not allowed.
If only more people realised the danger they are putting themselves and their loved ones in purely for the sake of a bit of burnt bread, and maybe the occasional crumpet.
So I have decided to spread the word - get home now, run if you have to, tear your toaster from its plug and throw it down the nearest well or convenient chasm, for if you don't you never know when it might strike.
In fact why stop at toasters? I'm proposing removing our kitchen sink as it poses a "drowning hazard" and all our office pens are going right out the window to remove possible "poking in the eye hazards".
If people don't look out for these things for us we will never survive in this terrifying world.

I was somewhat saddened yesterday to see that US comedian George Carlin had died.
He's probably best known in this country for his role as Rufus in the Bill and Ted films, but he was a really funny standup and one of the few who managed to stay sharp as he grew older.
His most famous routine was probably The Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV, which managed to make an interesting point about the strength of language, whilst still being utterly hilarious. Now I'm not going to suggest you go out seeking a profanity-filled performance (somebody has to think of the children), but I also can't stop you Googling Carlin and finding a rendition on, say, Youtube.
The whole thing got me thinking about censorship and the dangers of letting people say whatever they like (see how I seamlessly introduced this topic? You couldn't see the joins with a microscope).
With our web forums, although we can keep an eye on them and take down anything offensive if it appears, we still can't regulate them 24/7. With this in mind it seems the programmers who built the forum software created a list of banned words which are automatically replaced by asterisks if any scurrilous rogue tries to write them.
Many of these words are perfectly understandable and the sort of thing which would have made Mary Whitehouse turn an odd shade of purple and smack you with her handbag. However, some of them are somewhat more mysterious and I feel we may have become a bit overzealous in our attempts to make Harrow profanity-free.
The strangest example of this, which is coincidentally quite relevant today, is the fact that you can't write 'John Leslie' on our forum. Now I know he's reportedly been a bit of a scoundrel, but you can still happily discuss Hitler, Robert Mugabe or even Simon Cowell with no fear of censorship.
I don't know who particularly picked on Leslie (and I hope I'm not accidentally creating mass offence every time I repeat his name), but the logical conclusion is that he is to programmers what Macbeth is to actors. I can only assume therefore that he's known online as 'The Scottish rogue' or something similar.
If anyone has any other celebrities they think should be blanked out I would love to hear from you and will consider all entries.

To err is human, to spell check is divine. Admittedly this may not be the traditional form of this idiom, but I wish I had paid it some heed last week.
For reporters accuracy must be paramount, you can write the most interesting story in the world, but if the details are incorrect it will sweep the very foundations out from under it.
Last week battle lines were somewhat drawn up after I raised the hackles of our rival publication with one of my earlier entries regarding us scooping them on the website. Unfortunately there is nothing more self-indulgent and frankly boring than a petty dispute brought into the public domain, so I will extend the olive branch of peace here and now, but one very good point was raised by my nameless rival.
It may seem pedantic to some to focus on the fact that we spelt the word 'occasion' wrong in our coverage of a story, but this genuinely is a serious crime in journalism.
If a reporter cannot be accurate in the words he or she writes then how can they be trusted to be accurate in the facts they present to a reader?
News is often extremely sensitive for those involved and there have been several occasions (carefully spell checked) when I have been acting in an editorial capacity and people have rung me angry with a story.
Most common of these complaints is petty criminals, many of whom will be angry when their court case is covered for all the world to see. I firmly believe that if people do not want the world to know what they have been up to they shouldn't be breaking the law in the first place, and furthermore a trial is, generally, open to the public and therefore a matter of public record, which we have every right to report.
This is a fairly standard opinion amongst journalist and I am confident in presenting it to aforementioned complainers. However, if we have made an error in the story, such as spelling a name wrong or attributing the wrong age to someone, it completely undermines the argument. Simple mistakes such as that call into question all the other facts in the article and are indefensible.
Now I'm not saying mistakes won't happen, and I would prefer if you didn't go rifling through all your copies of the Observer (or even this blog) with a red marker pen and a dictionary, but it is our job to make sure they happen as infrequently as possible. Spell checks are a start, but nothing can properly replace taking time to thoroughly go over copy and make sure you're happy with what you've written.
One final thought, I've read and reread this entry and checked the spelling on every word I'm unsure of, but irony being what it is I'm sure there's a mistake in here somewhere. So congratulations to whoever spots it, but you're not getting a prize!

Monday morning, there's nothing quite like it is there?
All the happy chatting faces who were on the train home on Friday, planning meals with loved ones or drinks with friends are now sat sullen and silent, their minds already in the office, their bodies complaining about being rudely awakened by the alarm clock.
I am probably at this stage supposed to claim that my love for my job is such that I don't suffer the Monday morning misery, and don't get me wrong I do enjoy my job and am proud of my work, but I also enjoy weekends, walks in the country, lie-ins, rollercoasters, Pimms in the park, buying CDs, going on holiday and generally not having any responsibilities. So having all these lovely possibilities rudely interrupted by the arrival of the working week is rarely top of my wishlist.
This morning however, there was an extra sting in the tail as I arrived in the office only to dscover we had no internet or email working at all. As web editor this put me at somewhat of a disadvantage in getting my work done.
But it was not just me who suffered, the whole newsroom virtually ground to a halt without its digital tools. Nearly every phone conversation reporters were having feaured the phrase: "I'm sorry, our emails aren't working at the moment, I can't see that."
It is amazing how reliant we have become on the internet and how helpless you can feel if it is taken away. It seems difficult now to imagine a world without it and many people don't even know where to start when looking for information without a computer in front of them.
I'm all for the digital age (not suprising considering my job) but I still think we have to be careful that the web doesn't become our lives, rather than an exciting and useful tool.
Thankfully we're all back up now (otherwise you couldn't be reading this obviously), but it makes you wonder what would happen if the internet went down forever. Sounds like the plot for a good B-movie, any budding writers out there can have that one for free.

It's all go in the newsroom this week - quite literally.
On Wednesday our esteemed editor Lindsay Coulson will be hanging up her green visor and braces (okay, she doesn't wear these, but one day I hope to encounter an editor who does) and moving off to pastures new. Actually, there aren't many pastures where she's heading, as she's off to Westminster to work for its council press office.
Also this month we are losing our much-loved sports editor John Comfort, who will no doubt be familiar to our readers, many of whom will have spend a drizzly Saturday afternoon stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him on the borders of various sports fields, watching the borough's hopefuls throw themselves around in the mud.
And finally (at least I hope this is all for now), our news editor Emily Twinch is weeks away from departure, having returned from a holiday in Cuba and handed in her notice. Rumours of her joining the revolution several years too late are, I'm assured, unfounded.
This all leaves us with a rather bare looking news desk, but thankfully reinforcements are on their way. In this case the reinforcements come in the shape of David Tilley, the content editor at the Uxbridge Gazette, who next week is being tranferred across to take the helm here at the Observer.
A new editor is always an interesting time for a paper, as they bring their own ideas, style and enthusiasm to it. Observant readers can quite quickly spot when this happens, as often regular features which are not working out are dropped and new and exciting ones appear in their place.
I won't take any guesses as to what David has in store for the Observer, but keep your eye's peeled over the next few months and I bet you can spot them yourself.

Covering breaking news as it happens is a real relay race to be first.
With a weekly paper you have time to put a story together, explore every angle, consider different presentations and get reactions from people invloved.But with the internet it's all about being first with the facts. To do this you need a smooth relay between reporter, photographer and news desk, and this week, I'm proud to say, we have pulled it off with aplomb.
Firstly there was a big case of a prolific robber at Harrow Crown Court on Thursday which our reporter David Baker was sent to cover.
On arriving at court a journalist from a rival organ was also present, and the scene was set for a race to get the verdict up in the public domain first. Following the sentencing from the judge David did a sterling effort in quickly ringing in the story for me to post on our site. I shan't say who got it up first between us and our rivals because there's nothing worse than being a bad winner.
Similarly our chief reporer Ian Proctor met Dave 'Hug a hoodie' Cameron at Harrow Civic Centre today, accompanied by photographer Stuart Emmerson. Within an hour of his arrival we had both pictures and a taster of our exclusive interview on the website.
It's quite a thrill getting news from source to you, dear reader, in such a short time, and something which almost every journalist enjoys. The challenge is to make sure stories are accurate, interesting and informative, so that nothing is compromised.
As our website grows in size and popularity the race will never truly end, but I'm hoping we're going to keep picking up gold medals along the way.

Who would have thought running a website would be so much work? I thought you just set these things up, sit back and enjoy the show. Not so apparently.
The best way I can describe it is like running round a vast mansion opening doors, sweeping away rapidly settling dust and cobwebs and shouting into rooms to see if anyone is there. If you leave a room too long it rapidly starts to look old and abandoned.
Our site has so many exciting, fun and diverse sections that constantly need attention to keep them fresh and full of the most up to date information.
This is where you, dear reader, come in. Currently there are a few of you wandering in the hallways, inspecting the silverware or admiring the drapes. But we're not that formal here - write on the walls, jump on the bed, give everything a try and soon you'll be shaking any dust off yourselves.
We have already had plenty of people sending in their stories and pictures and posting in the forum, but I want more.
So please, you've come this far, just pop along to our forum sign up (it takes less than a minute) and leave a post. It can be anything, whatever's on your mind, or reply to something someone else has said. With your help we can turn this mansion into a palace.