Unlocking the secrets of open data journalism in Manchester

As more and more public bodies free their data to the public, and with interpretation of that data set to be increasingly important in journalism, it was only a matter of time before someone had the idea of bringing journalists and computer geeks together to learn from each other how best to crunch the data.

Over in the US, the Hacks and Hackers Hack Days have been established a little while and they recently held one in London. Here in the UK, the people at Scraperwiki have been building tools to help people clean up raw data before working it to produce the meaningful stories nestling within. I attended the News Rewired event in London in June – Scraperwiki were there too but with such a packed scheduled I had no chance to attend one of their mini intro sessions.

So when I heard that Scraperwiki was busy organising Hacks and Hackers Hack Days in the UK, I was very excited. More so when I heard they planned to hold one in Manchester. It would save me travelling to either Liverpool or Birmingham. But more importantly, it was an opportunity for my publication – Inside the M60 – to show that the new breed of digital journalists are more than willing to support such important collaborative ventures.

I’ll be the first to admit that my numeracy is patchy. From years of working in the arena of finance and banking I can spot flaws in a profit and loss account at 50 paces and tell when percentage changes don’t match the actual figures. But I’m hopeless with spreadsheets. I don’t know how to deal with data, but I’m very keen to learn as I can see plenty of opportunities for Inside the M60 to uncover important stories lurking inside Manchester’s own data sets.

This is why I and my colleague Nigel Barlow have been very busy behind the scenes, working with Scraperwiki for nearly two months to help make the Manchester Hacks and Hackers Hack Day a success.

Tickets go on sale today, for a special workshop on 15 October, with an equal number of places available for journalists/bloggers and coders/hackers. What’s going to happen? We’ll be working in small groups, learning from each other to produce stories from data and present some small projects at the end of the session to show what can be done. The previous sessions were a great success so we’ll be aiming to equal that here in Manchester.

Lots of exciting things are already happening in Manchester with data – the Open Data Manchester group persuaded GMPTE to release data sets on public transport recently and a number of interesting projects have already emerged, including phone apps of local bus timetables. Manchester’s thriving digital community will ensure that much more will happen, we local journalists just need to start working with them.

So, if you’re a coder or a journalist, do sign up – it promises to be a really useful and fun day.

And you know what? Even before this event got off the ground, news emerged that some of Preston’s enterprising journalism students and hyperlocal bloggers are already planning to form a hacks and hackers group that will meet regularly in Manchester to further whatever comes out of the workshop day on 15 October.

We are still looking for some sponsorship, so if you can support this valuable project do please get in touch! We are also still looking for someone to come and film the workshop for posterity.

If you can’t make the event, follow us on Twitter on the day. The hashtag will be #hhhmcr.

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David Ottewell, chief reporter of the Manchester Evening News, used his day off today to launch an attack on hyperlocal news websites on his MEN blog. He singled out Salford Star Online but didn’t mention any of the other half-dozen or so hyperlocal ventures currently publishing in Manchester. One wonders why not, given his claim that “they end up simply regurgitating press releases, or ripping off stories from local newspapers, because they are one-man bands run by amateurs”. If he believes this, then why not name and shame?

Unsurprisingly, fairly soon after he posted his blog, critical comments from hyperlocal journalists, including two by me, began to appear below Ottewell’s blog. Many hyperlocal news operations work hard. I know of none that rip off stories from local papers, although no doubt many use press releases where appropriate as a starting point for a story. We certainly do at Inside the M60, the hyperlocal venture I co-founded with my colleague Nigel Barlow earlier this year.

Surely Ottewell is not suggesting that the MEN never uses press releases? Pretty much all newspapers rely heavily on press releases for content these days, now that they are understaffed and experiencing severe financial pressures. Indeed, while the MEN has a good track record in digging out exclusives, a glance at the paper any day of the weeks shows that a lot of content does derive from press releases.

Ottewell also suggests hyperlocal sites shouldn’t commentate or editorialise. Why ever not? Every newspaper in the land has an editorial column and employs commenters to write opinion columns. Yet, for some absurd reason, he believes hyperlocals should not. Indeed, at Inside the M60 when we ran a comment piece on city council leader Sir Richard Leese accepting a police caution for assaulting his teenage step-daughter, we came under extraordinary attack on Twitter for commenting publicly on this and reminding readers that Leese had launched a zero-tolerance campaign against domestic violence three years earlier. We felt it was fair comment, sad as the situation was for Leese.

In fact, since even before we launched Inside the M60 officially at Easter, we have come under sustained attack from other local journalists who have used Twitter to call us names and question our fitness to find and publish local news. Many of those attacking us are not even direct rivals but working in quite different sectors of journalism. Do we really scare them so much?

But I digress – let’s go back to Ottewell. He had approved nine comments on his blog post by 3pm, including two from me. I replied a third time but my comment is, at time of writing (5pm), still awaiting approval.

In the interim, conversations on Twitter revealed at least seven other people had posted critical comments and were awaiting approval. David Ottewell appears, however, to have gone to ground.

Sarah Hartley, the Guardian’s Local Editor, got fed up waiting for her comment to appear, so blogged it on her own blog. So did my Inside the M60 partner, Nigel Barlow – you can read his reply to Ottewell on his own blog.

Journalism tutor and hyperlocal champion Paul Bradshaw, highly respected in the journalism sphere, tweeted his as yet unpublished comment: “I said “Don’t throw around vague generalisations to which the Salford Star is an exception. Name names.” ”

Also still awaiting comment approval are @Journopig, @philipjohn and @JosephStash (for the 2nd time).

Just why has the MEN gone so silent? Surely it can handle a bit of criticism?

I shall, of course, update this blog post if the MEN ever does approve its backlog of comments on this…

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*Edited to add that just as I posted, a rash of previously unpublished comments appeared on Ottewell’s blog.

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Several zillion words were written yesterday on the sale of the Manchester Evening News to Trinity Mirror – the details, the commentary, and the rest of the speculation. I’m not going to rehash what’s already been said.But, as a freelance journalist working in my adopted city of Manchester, I’ve had time to ponder what it might mean now I’m past my first wave of fury.

Fury, yes. I’ve not written for the MEN but know many who have. It’s a good, solid, regional paper, albeit one that’s been in gentle decline in recent years chiefly due to neglect by Guardian Media Group and its shameless milking of MEN profits to prop up the loss-making Guardian. It’s only 18 months since the MEN moved into its shiny new HQ in the heart of Manchester city centre – when I visited, it was so new the building still had that strange whiff of new electricals and pristine carpeting. Barely seven months later, the axe fell on 150 staff – half from the MEN itself, the rest from the stable of local titles based in Greater Manchester’s outlying districts. I was angry then, angry that much local news would no longer be reported. So it has proved – those local titles have become shadows of their former selves, while the MEN itself has carried far less comprehensive coverage of the metropolitan area’s affairs.

Trinity Mirror’s purchase does not bode well for the paper’s future. TM has a history of asset-stripping its purchases, slashing staff and then shutting titles. Many TM journalists are rightly incensed by TM’s claims in recent years that it’s been too broke to give them decent pay rises, decent staffing levels and decent kit, because TM doesn’t seem to have had any trouble conjuring up nearly £8m in cash for GMG as part of the £44.8m deal. That £8m could have gone a long way to supporting TM’s existing titles and the staff that produce them.

But what does it mean for the MEN? For Manchester? Rumours were rife today that operations would be moved out to Oldham. It would be disastrous for Manchester if true. A daily paper covering an area populated by 2.5 million people and with no city centre presence could not possibly be expected to maintain even the existing (reduced) standard of coverage. TM has claimed that it’s looking at various options and the Oldham move is not set in stone. Manchester-based freelance journalist, Nigel Barlow, offers a different perspective, suggesting that a move out of town could be beneficial for city reportage, although I’m not convinced myself. I agree with him, though, that it offers a great opportunity for hyperlocal ventures to spring up, take ownership of a patch or beat and flourish.

I’m currently temping at BBC Radio Manchester, which has just received some of its best-ever RAJAR figures.  I think it’s fair to say that BBC regional stations don’t always do local very well, but Manchester does do community pretty well – that’s certainly been my overriding impression over the last 6 weeks on the inside. Obviously, BBC Manchester can’t be a substitute for the MEN although it has always sat comfortably alongside it. I do wonder if the BBC might mop up some of the MEN’s readership if predictions for the paper turn out to be true and it plunges even further into doom and gloom. Time will tell but, for now, the city’s large media sector is watching developments with very keen interest…

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At risk of stating the obvious, we’ve had a lot of snow this week. News coverage of the cold snap generally has been at saturation levels, often at the expense of more important stories such as the Robinson scandal – I’m surely not the only person fed up of news footage of people telling us how much snow they’ve had in their town or press websites asking readers to send in their pictures of the weather. It’s winter, it’s supposed to snow and be cold. And, ideally, things should run more or less smoothly like they do in the rest of Europe in mid-winter. Unfortunately, however, things tend to grind to a halt at the first flakes here. It’s a cliché but only because it’s broadly true.

And precisely because things fall apart in the UK when we get more than a centimetre of snow, local news sources are vital for keeping people informed about what’s going on, or not as the case may be. Here in Manchester, we were particularly badly hit by the weather with some 8 inches of snow falling overnight on Monday/Tuesday. Manchester was chaotic on Tuesday morning. Even main roads were barely passable and, unsurprisingly, public transport was in severely short supply. The GMPTE website had almost no useful information, if you could even load it. If you wanted to know anything at all – which buses were running, whether schools were closed, or what officialdom was doing – there was only one place to turn. Local media. (Well, two, actually, as Twitter became an excellent source of real-time updates. More on that in a bit.)

The Manchester Evening News reinstated its live weather coverage using Cover It Live blogging software and had pretty good real-time updates on public transport services collated partly by the paper’s reporters and partly from aggregated tweets. BBC Radio Manchester turned its breakfast show into a rolling news service as it kept Mancunians informed about school closures, traffic updates and statements from the police, NHS and council about the changing situation.

I must disclose here that I’m currently working at Radio Manchester as part of the inFUZE programme (which aims to provide professional journalists with additional skills) and I’d started there only the day before. So when the snow fell, I was determined to get to the BBC by fair means or foul. I left home early, expecting my 20-minute bus ride to take considerably longer. Even before I stepped outside, I’d used Twitter to crowdsource information on the buses and knew I might not be able to catch one. Mancunians were using Twitter as a form of public service announcement platform – incredibly useful for those few of us on the move. As I waited in the still-falling snow, I joined in passing on what little info I had.

When I finally arrived at the newsroom (by cab, and by luck), only a skeleton staff had made it in and the phones were ringing non-stop. BBC reporters worked incredibly hard to get the news out (and I did my bit monitoring Twitter for them to get updates on bus services, closed institutions and the like). Tuesday’s radio schedule was completely rejigged to stay abreast of the news and key staff stayed in a nearby hotel overnight to ensure the news would be out on Wednesday as well. And so it went for the rest of the week.

An internal memo at the BBC on Thursday indicated that page impressions on the various regional news hubs on the BBC website had rocketed up to 23-fold, while figures for radio and TV audiences tuning in for local coverage had also gone through the roof. No doubt MEN’s website has seen similar traffic. All because of a few inches of snow. The Cumbrian papers combined forces during the autumn floods there to share real-time information on the internet, using reporters, aggregated tweets and updates from the emergency services to keep Cumbrians up to speed on the disaster unfolding there. It serves to prove that in such situations, only local media can provide the kind of on-the-ground hard facts that local people need.

An unprecedented number of local papers closed in 2009, or made drastic staff cuts in order to stave off closure. Communities without local media are left bereft, not just of the day-to-day news but also a focal point when there’s a crisis. Hyperlocal news is the buzzword for 2010 – most media pundits agree that hyperlocal news will fill such gaps where papers have closed and many also agree that this will be the year that sees many self-employed journalists setting up their own hyperlocal ventures. While few will have the kind of clout enjoyed by the BBC regional hubs or papers like the MEN, they will undoubtedly play a crucial role in keeping communities informed on the things that matter, particularly in a crisis situation. The snow will be gone in a week or so, but the need for solid local reporting will remain forever. It matters not whether that reporting is on a small-scale hyperlocal basis or by a long-established newspaper or radio station. The only thing that matters is that local people continue to be able to get quality local news.

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My thirst for knowledge never seems to diminish. There are always things I’m curious about, want to know more about, pique my interest enough to go exploring further. Much of my curiosity is transient – I’ll read a blog and look up something on Wikipedia or remember something someone mentioned in passing and do a net search for more info. In a work context, learning is often referred to to as CPD, a horrible clunky acronym that belies the reality of the simple need to stay ahead in one’s profession and the simple pleasure of learning for its own sake.I still remember clearly the day 20-odd years ago I started working on a computer the first time – the sense I was out of my depth, struggling with something alien to me but determined to master as much of it as I needed (and a little bit extra) in order to be able to keep working.  I’d sensed this was a permanent shift.

And so it continues. I learned some DOS, then early Windows, then switched to a Mac and Quark Xpress, then back to a PC… I’ve been blogging for more than 10 years and while I wouldn’t describe myself as an early adopter, compared to the general population I probably am. Workwise, it always seemed logical to me to embrace change and exploit it. In an industry that is shifting rapidly, it makes sense to use the tools online that are available to expand the opportunities to work.

The need to stay ahead as a freelance was what prompted me to sign up for inFUZE. I almost didn’t apply, thinking it wasn’t aimed at tech-savvy hacks like me, and in a way I was right. When I turned up for the week of workshops, I was not only a fair bit older than the rest of the intake but also more technologically advanced in many ways. This surprised me – I’d have expected the 20-somethings there to be comfortable using blogs, Twitter and other social media platforms. I had a frustrating day or two sitting through sessions on how to blog, which I obviously didn’t need, but it shows just how important programmes like inFUZE are if younger journalists coming up through the ranks are not being taught these skills as part of their job or degree course. I suspect the real benefit for me will be when I go on the staff placement early next year, where I’ll get to share my social media skills in exchange for other experience I’ve not yet had despite a lengthy career in journalism.

I also like to grab other opportunities to learn when I can. I’m not only interested in technology and how I can use it, I sometimes write about it too. I’m fortunate to live in Manchester, a city long renowned for its creativity, which these days it’s just as likely to be technological as musical. The city is awash with tech developers of all hues and the events calendar is full of possibilities to meet up and learn for the fun of it. The hottest initiative in town right now is the MadLab, the Manchester Digital Laboratory, a community project born from the desire to have a permanent hackspace for geeks to come together and share their knowledge. Based in the Northern Quarter, the MadLab is a welcoming meeting place for all kinds of local techy groups to collaborate.  It’s a non-profit enterprise so events can be held for free, making it a valuable resource.

Pic: © MadLab, used by permission

I was delighted to be able to attend the #ARdevcamp at MadLab last weekend. I’m not a coder, a hacker or a developer but I’m interested in augmented reality and mobile apps so the chance to learn about AR was too good to resist. Dave Mee, one of the brains behind MadLab, introduced the day-long session with potted history of augmented reality using video clips and other examples and then the developers were off, busy dismantling strings of code and trying to hack solutions. I felt out of my depth but it was a wonderfully relaxed atmosphere in which to soak up other people’s knowledge and I left hours later considerably wiser than when I’d arrived. MadLab will undoubtedly be hosting more workshops of this nature – it’s a fantastic initiative that not only benefited my own understanding of a certain type of technology but will benefit many others once it really becomes established as an integral part of Manchester’s growing and expert digital community.

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It’s election time at the NUJ and my vote was long decided before the ballot papers were issued. At stake is the editorship of the union’s publication, the imaginatively titled The Journalist. Unlike most such jobs, where you fill in an application form, get through a couple of interviews then negotiate terms and conditions, this post is balloted by the membership rather than decided by a couple of senior executives. It’s an important job, because the magazine is a key way for the union to communicate with its members.

I must confess to being a somewhat lazy cardholder. I pay my subs but don’t really get involved. I’m one of those members that is glad the union is there when I need help but tend to ignore it the rest of the time. It’s partly because too often I see the executive putting effort into supporting causes abroad rather than working to improve our lot at home. Don’t get me wrong, supporting journalists overseas working in difficult conditions is vital but such official solidarity has often been given at the expense of helping members here. The NUJ has been slow to adapt to the rapidly changing face of British journalism. Gone are the days of huge chapels at every paper or magazine. And while the London Freelance branch has a thriving membership, us freelances outside the capital often feel ignored or forgotten about.

This is why I’m voting for Michael Cross. I’ve been privileged to know him as a colleague and occasional drinking buddy for a while and I was one of those who persuaded him to run for office (disclosure: I also helped set up his online campaign). Michael has many years experience under his belt – he’s been a staffer, worked abroad, done stints in broadcast and also has enjoyed a thriving freelance career of late. In short, his work record alone makes him someone who understands many of the different roles a journalist might perform. Indeed, as the number of freelances grows, Michael’s own experience should appeal to many.

Crucially, Michael’s vision for The Journalist is the most comprehensive. Although he has the smell of hot metal in his nostrils, he’s also very aware that our union mag needs to be fit for our multimedia, digital era. And despite being a former FoC, Michael’s no yes man – he will bring an independence to the job and know when it’s necessary to stand his ground against the union leadership, should the need arise.

Perhaps most importantly, Michael aims to turn The Journalist into a proper publication advocating journalism and reflecting our working lives, rather than being a union propaganda sheet – propaganda is all well and good at times, but I for one want a magazine I actually want to read and I know I’m not alone in that. The NUJ is full of lazy members like me but a properly produced The Journalist should be there to cover professional issues and not just workplace ones (especially for the hordes of us whose workplace is their front room). Being in a union isn’t just about standing on picket lines but also about feeling supported as a professional. Michael’s vision would mean The Journalist would be a publication non-members would want to read too, which could be crucial in halting and reversing the declining membership. And that vision also includes a wide-ranging online strategy, essential for attracting young journalists who won’t remember the pre-internet way of working.

Michael’s manifesto is openly available on the Facebook campaign group and you can also follow him on Twitter. There will also be a hustings in Manchester on 22 October if you want to hear him speak (the other candidates will be there too).

The ballot’s already underway and closes on 6 November. If you’re an NUJ member and you haven’t made your mind up yet who to vote for, I urge you to check out the manifesto and put a 1 in the box next to Michael’s name. You won’t regret it.

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I read an intriguing article in today’s Media Guardian about a London scheme for selling more newspapers. News International has started offering top-up publications alongside subscriptions for some of its own stable – the Times and Sunday Times.  The free delivery scheme actually started last July but has now been expanded to include non-NI publications such as Grazia, the Radio Times, the Economist and NI’s tabloids (the Sun and News of the World).

At present, the scheme is only available within the M25, but it could serve as a useful model across the UK for boosting newspaper sales, which have been in decline for a long time. Despite being a journalist, I rarely buy newspapers any more. I purchased the Guardian twice last week as I was out of the house both days, but being on the move is the only time I buy a physical copy unless I have had something published in the press. Otherwise I do what so many others do these days – I read the papers online, for free.

I have little incentive to buy a paper when my nearest newsagent is a good 8 minutes walk away but my PC is in my front room. But I do buy a lot of magazines and my local newsagents stock a very limited selection of titles, so I usually have to head into Manchester city centre to buy the mags I want. And I’ve just purchased a year’s subscription to the Radio Times because I struggle to find even that locally.

The beauty of the NI scheme, apart from free delivery, is you don’t need to spend masses of cash in advance on a lengthy subscription. You can buy what you want, for as long as you want, and top it up to suit. You can change your order the night before and you can do it all online. Just as well, when it’s increasingly difficult to find a newsagent that will deliver.

Rolling out this kind of option further afield and offering more magazines alongside could be a winner when it comes to encouraging readers to return to a paper. I know that such a scheme within the boundaries of the M60 and offering a good selection of magazines alongside would certainly get my vote – and my cash. I’d love to hear the sound of my favourite paper and magazines gently plopping onto my doormat at 7am, ready to be pored over with my breakfast cuppa.

News International has failed to convince me so far that paywalls on its newspaper websites are the answer. I’ll simply stop dipping into the News of the World for a free skim of the celebrity gossip once I have to pay. But this plan, which seems to be doing well so far or why else increase the range of magazines you can buy alongside the Times, could just do the trick in helping up sales of print editions. No doubt NI is already planning its next move for this scheme. I for one will be keeping a keen eye on its development.

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Journalist and blogger Linda Jones has tagged me in her meme about writing. I really rate Linda’s writing as well as her business acumen so I’m responding to the challenge (and it’s the perfect excuse to kickstart this sadly neglected blog, too).

Which words do you use too much in your writing?

I probably swear too much, certainly when blogging, tweeting or posting in forums. I try and keep commissioned pieces clean, though! I’m probably more guilty of writing over-long sentences, scattered liberally with commas to break them up. And I definitely overuse the ellipsis…

Which words do you consider overused in stuff you read?

Most tabloidese. The word “star” seems to be applied to anyone who’s come within sniffing distance of a TV studio and is guaranteed to get my back up.

What’s your favourite piece of writing by you?

I covered the trial of Paul Touvier when he was in the dock for crimes against humanity, as I was living in France at the time. I was the only foreign freelance journalist to get a press pass (and they were very scarce). My feature’s not available online but I’ll dig it out one day, scan it and post it on my website.

What blog post do you wish you’d written?

Lots! I follow so many fantastic blogs that are brimming with great writing, I’m not sure I could choose. I’m a massive fan of Benefit Scrounging Scum – her posts always resonate with me because she writes about the realities of living with a disability in such an accessible way. I wish I could laugh about my own, comparatively minor, disability in the same way she does about hers even while letting you know the seriousness of her situation.

Regrets, do you have a few? Is there anything you wish you hadn’t written?

I wish I’d never written for Fabulous (the magazine of News of the World). It was a very unhappy experience for me and I’ll never sell out for a high word rate again. I felt grubby afterwards and I learned the lesson that selling my personal experience for shekels is not worth it when the subs distort everything you wrote. Otherwise I try not to regret things. I’d rather learn from my mistakes and move on than dwell on them.

How has your writing made a difference? What do you consider your most important piece of writing?

Most of the stuff I’ve done over the years is not that important in the great scheme of things. I started out as a music journalist and I’ve also done a fair bit of TV reviewing. There have been ranty columns galore, too – amusing to read but hardly world-changing.

I’m really pleased with the stuff I’ve done on disability benefits as I know I’ve helped people directly by exposing some of the system’s anomalies. Around 20 years ago, I wrote regularly for foreign magazines on the rise of the far right in a post-Communist Europe – I’m a little bit proud that I helped expose a small bit of that to a wider audience. And, of course, my Touvier piece is the one that I consider my most important (see above).

Name three favourite words

Yikes! Wordsmith. Brandy.

…And three words you’re not so keen on

British National Party.

Do you have a writing mentor, role model or inspiration?

I’ve never had a mentor but thanks are due to my old friend Fritz, who first published me in his fanzine, Wrong Image, when I was a 15-year-old punk in the mid-1970s. I’d already decided I wanted to be a journalist but seeing my first articles sealed the deal for me. A huge nod also goes to Mel Young, who gave me my first proper break in 1978 at Edinburgh City Lynx.

I’m inspired by many, many writers – every journalist I admire is a far better writer than I could ever hope to be.

I did want Julie Burchill’s job when she was at the NME, though. And her subsequent salary. But I never actually wanted to be her.

What’s your writing ambition?

I’ve never been terribly ambitious, which is probably why I never replaced Burchill at the NME. I’m fairly sure I had the talent but I lacked the drive and still do. So as long as I can somehow keep making a reasonable living as a wordsmith, that’ll do me nicely. I may even sling another book together at some point…

Plug alert!  List any work you would like to tell your readers about:

I published my first book, Epilepsy The Essential Guide, in May 2009. I’ve had epilepsy myself since 1996 and I basically wrote the book I wanted to read when I was diagnosed but it wasn’t available. It’s selling well, has had good reviews and I know it’s already helped a few people, which is what I wanted to achieve with it.

In spring 2009, I collaborated with Linda Jones on TwitterTitters, which we did to raise money for Comic Relief while seeing if it was possible to a) create a book through Twitter and b) do it from scratch within a month. It was, but it gave me extra grey hairs. And sod it, I’d do it again!

Forthcoming this autumn, I’m one co-author (of around 250) of QFinance The Ultimate Resource, which is an encyclopedia on one of my specialist subjects – finance. It’s not dull, honest!

Tag time. Some colleagues I hope will also do the meme:

Dave Lee

Allie Dickinson

Sarah Hartley

Alison Gow

BendyGirl

The rules: If you have time to do this meme, then please link to my original, then link to three to five other bloggers and pass it on, asking them to answer your questions and link to you. You can add, remove or change one question as you go. You absolutely do not have to be what you may think of as a “published” or “successful” writer to respond to this meme, I hope people can take the time to reflect on what their blogging has brought them and how it has been useful to others.

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National treasure Stephen Fry has waded into the debate about MPs’ expenses, claiming that MPs are not really doing anything much wrong, and stating very bluntly that journalists are far worse when it comes to fiddling expenses.

I have news for Stephen. The expenses culture for journalists ended a long time ago – at least 10 years ago – when the accountants moved in and put an end to it. The scandal at the Houses of Parliament, however, has been going on a long time – only MPs can vote on their expense allowances and they just keep voting to continue. The broadsheets, especially the Telegraph – have done a fantastic job of uncovering just how much MPs are ripping off the tax-payers – to the average tune of £200,000 a year.

Compare that to journalists. Freelances cannot claim any expenses from a publication at all, unless approved in advance by the commissioning editor. If I go to a meeting with an editor in a café, I can’t claim even the cost of two cups of coffee – under Inland Revenue rules, that counts as “entertainment” and I’m not permitted to put it through my books as a tax-deductible expense. I can’t even claim for a solo sandwich unless I’m away overnight, and only then is it permissible as “subsistence”.

Staff journalists find it incredibly difficult to claim anything these days. Buy a beer for a contact who’s giving you a possible story? Probably – if you get a receipt from the pub. Anything beyond such petty claims is vetoed by a paper’s management now. So for Stephen Fry to call us “venal and disgusting” is a bit much.

Stephen Fry served a prison sentence for credit card fraud as a teenager. I’m not judging him for that – I did things as a teenager that broke the law (although not quite as badly as that). He’s done his time and moved on, as is right.

But he of all people should understand that taking other people’s money is wrong. And taking the piss in these straitened times – when we’ve just saddled ourselves with trillions of debt that will take until our grandchildren are adults before it’s paid off – is even worse.

Remember that most journalists are on low salaries that haven’t really changed much in 20 years or longer (average salary for a mid-level reporter on a regional paper is £18k). It’s almost understandable that, until the mid-90s, hacks would fiddle their claims to stretch their wages. MPs, on the other hand, earn a basic salary of £64,766. Plus allowances. A canny politician can easily rake in £250,000 a year or more simply by using the system “in good faith”.

Fry has got it badly wrong this time.

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I took part in the second JEEcamp in Birmingham yesterday. Last year, it was very much an experiment to see what might happen if you stuck 50 journalists in a room and let them unconference for a day about how to create a new journalism for the future. I’d been mapping plans for an online journalism venture in my head for a couple of years – JEEcamp was inspiring and I came away enthused and keen to put my plans into action. Unfortunately, a change in my personal circumstances put paid to my ideas.

Twelve months on and the journalism universe looks very different now. A year ago, we were just seeing the start of the recessionary effects on our industry – job cuts, papers closing, freelance budgets being slashed. Since then, literally thousands of jobs have gone and the changes are not over yet. Give it another 12 months and the landscape will look different again. None of us knows what it might look like, but it will be radically different to the traditional model of print media funded by advertising. The online revolution has already meant massive changes in how we work – in the future, online is almost certainly where pretty much everything will be happening, whether it’s the tools we use or the content we publish. Journalists are going to have be enterprising and create their own opportunities to take advantage of irrevocable changes.

The keynote presentation at JEEcamp 2009 came from Kyle Macrae, who gave a really interesting account of his attempt to set up a picture agency (Scoopt.com) trading in citizen journalists’ photos and what happened when it all went horribly wrong after partnering with Getty Images. The Q&A that followed was also enlightening, with lots of questions about venture-capital funding, business models and exit strategies.

I missed most of the breakout sessions, using the time to network instead with some people I wanted to talk to. There were a couple of really good panel discussions, to wrap it all up, about the future of journalism, particularly about paid-for content models (Rupert Murdoch had just annnounced his own thoughts on this), the problems with council-funded newspapers and the kinds of enterprises journalists might want to engage in.

Andy Dickinson, who teaches journalism at UCLAN, was bang on the nail when he said we can’t exist in isolation. For all we network on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere, there’s no substitute for getting together face to face to exchange ideas and find new ways of working. Next year’s JEEcamp should be charting progress in that direction.

Me, I have no plans yet to develop a new online enterprise, after abandoning the last one. I’m still settling down after all the upheaval of the last 12 months in my personal life. One thing’s certain, though, I will be starting something online at some point. I just need to figure out what it might be..

Thanks to Paul Bradshaw again for organising such a creative and useful event.

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