kperch

Establishing the facts on animal experiment labs

2010-07-25T15:45:00.004+01:00

I often hear people say that it is the job of a newspaper to be fair and balanced, but of course it's not except when it comes to matters of opinion. When it is a matter of fact, it is the job of a newspaper to ascertain the truth and report it.

Nick Davies in his book Flat Earth News illustrates it with this question: if a council sends two men to mow a meadow and they return with one of them saying they mowed it and the other saying they didn't, what should the newspaper report? If it was fair and balanced, the article might start like this: A row broke out today over whether or not two men had mowed a meadow ... But, of course, that's not how the story should go at all - the newspaper should seek out the truth and put it before its readers. In this case, it is fairly simple to go and check whether or not the meadow has been mowed.

It's not always that easy. Take the row going on over the work by Leicester University to replace the fairly dated facilities that it has for carrying out experiments on animals.

Vivisection is a controversial subject at any time and, unsurprisingly, there is a campaign to stop the building. You can see the website of Stop the Leicester Lab here.

It seems to me that the question of whether or not there should be animal experiments at the university is one of opinion and our coverage should be fair and balanced, allowing both sides of the argument to put their case.

However, within that argument there are some facts and part of what we should try to do is establish the truth about the various claims and counter-claims.

One of the key arguments going on is over the sort of experiments that are carried out in the labs. The campaigners say that the university experiments on dogs and primates. Indeed, their website shows pictures of beagles being operated on. The university, on the other hand, says this is simply not true.

It is often difficult to establish the truth in situations like this because the discussion around vivisection is always carried out with an underlying threat of violence. To be fair to the Stop the Leicester Lab, their website is clear in its call for non-violent protest: 'We ask that supporters hold demonstrations outside their local office and politely contact those listed in complaint of their involvement in increasing animal experimentation and abuse.' However, the history of violence in similar cases elsewhere in the country is enough to mean that the university and those who work there are nervous about publicity.

Despite this, the University of Leicester has allowed one of our reporters to see for himself exactly what goes on in the labs. There were no preconditions put on our visit and our reporter was told that he could choose where he wanted to go and could look wherever he chose.

You can see his report here.

The outcome is that we could find no evidence whatsoever of experiments being carried out on dogs or primates. This, combined with the licence conditions and the statements of the university, leads us to believe that no such experiments are carried out.

This is not a comment on whether or not vivisection is right - but the argument should be based on fact, not exaggeration and scare tactics.

How should I view the way Leicester Mercury journalists use social media sites?

2010-07-22T20:25:00.003+01:00

The Leicester Mercury - in common with all good regional papers - commits itself to work within the guidelines set by the Press Complaints Commission. Our staff know this and we have written a requirement to abide by the code into any new contracts for some years now.

However, it's not quite clear how the PCC code relates to our online work and particularly to the use of social media sites by our journalists. Up until now, I have talked to individual reporters about their usage, but thought it might be useful to put my thoughts down in writing and ask the journalists what they thought.

I also thought it would be good to hear what other people think so here's what I sent to our staff:

This is how I view the way journalists at the Leicester Mercury use Twitter and other social media sites, including blogs.

I separate it into two categories:

1 Personal usage: where a member of staff uses any social media site in a personal capacity (ie where they do not mention the Leicester Mercury in their profile nor mention work in anything other than a passing reference) I do not believe that I have a part to play in overseeing that content. In the same way that I would expect them not to bring the company into disrepute in their personal lives, I would expect them to take that into consideration when writing in a personal capacity.

2 Professional usage: I believe that any use of social media sites (including Twitter) in a professional capacity (ie where the member of staff links their usage directly to their job) should be treated in the same way as a column of the newspaper. As a columnist, the journalist gets far more freedom and is able to express an opinion. However, as a columnist their work is subject to my editing. I reserve the right to edit their posts. In practice, I never see their posts until after they have been published, but staff know that I am reviewing them and, therefore, I believe, they take this into consideration before publication. I have not had to intervene in any posts so far. I regularly read all staff blogs and have a ‘list’ of Mercury journalists set up on Twitter and I review their posts every day.

It follows from this that I would be happy for the professional usage to fall within the PCC’s remit.

So, what do you think?

Accusation of bias is an insult to our integrity

2010-05-03T16:46:00.016+01:00

As the dust finally settles on the General Election, there's something I'd really like to get off my chest.

This was the eighth General Election since I first became a journalist in 1978. The Conservatives won the first four, Labour the next three - I'll leave you to decide who's won this one. I've seen the majorities swing violently from the Thatcher years when the Tories had a majority of 144 to the emergence of New Labour and the 179 majority of the first Blair government in 1997.

However, the one thing that hasn't changed during all that time is the complaints by the activists of the major parties that we are biased against them and in favour of their opponents. Some journalists will say that the only way that they know they are doing a fair job is that they receive complaints from all parties that they are biased against them. I'm not sure that I buy that, but I can see where they are coming from.

We've said more than once in the Mercury that we do not support any particular party and seek to be impartial in our coverage, but there are clearly those who don't believe us. One particular Conservative constituency party accuses us of bias, suggesting it might be because their opponent apparently once bought some print off us. Give me strength! I have no idea whatsoever whether or not the opponent ever bought print off us, but I do know that it is totally irrelevant to our coverage.

Oddly, at the same time as our bias against the Tory party, some thought we were equally unfair towards Labour. Take this comment left for me online by Labour Councillor Colin Hall, the man who is about to be made Lord Mayor of Leicester:

"In Leicester, as in Nuremberg, obeying orders is no excuse. You've had a shocker this week, as election results will show."

He doesn't elaborate, but I assume he believes that I take my political orders from the Daily Mail, the national newspaper of our parent company.

He's wrong. In fact, we're fiercely proud of our editorial independence at the Leicester Mercury and only one person sets our editorial policies and that's me. Of course, I have a boss. In fact, I have two.

The first is Lord Rothermere, chairman of our ultimate holding company, DMGT, the other is Michael Pelosi, managing director of Northcliffe, the company which runs the Mercury, and the man who appointed me and who has the power to fire me. However, in the 32 years since I first joined Northcliffe, I have never heard of any occasion on which either of them has in any way tried to influence the editorial policy of any of our regional papers. I can state categorically that neither of them has even so much as mentioned editorial policy to me.

You might be surprised to hear that my contract says nothing at all about how I should edit the paper, it simply says that I am the editor. I also don't have a job description.

I haved searched around looking for some written basis for my belief that I alone have the authority - and responsibility - to set the editorial policies of the paper. There's not much, but every now and then our company gives evidence to parliamentary committees and that makes interesting reading.

Here, for example, is what the Monopolies and Mergers Commission reported that Northcliffe said in 1994 when it was seeking to buy the Nottingham Post:

Northcliffe said that for all of its titles the respective editor determined editorial policy

Northcliffe expected the following of its editors:

to report local events in the principal town and the surrounding area as comprehensively and impartially as possible, trying always to be fair to different points of view;

to cover differing political points of view as impartially as possible and certainly without commitment to any political party;

to adhere to the code of conduct of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), to publicise the newspaper's support for this body regularly and always to report any adverse findings against the title by the PCC;

to be ready to publish, where necessary, corrections and apologies without reluctance if such publication is appropriate;

to make the letter columns accessible to those who disagree with editorial comment which the newspaper may have published, again recognizing its importance in the life of a local community;

to produce a newspaper which, while meeting the requirements above, is stimulating and entertaining, avoids being merely bland and appeals to the majority of the local people, not just leaders within the community;

and to be prepared to campaign vigorously for what he or she identifies as the interest of the principal town and county which the title serves.

Although there is little written about the authority of the editor, in practice, the editor does make the decisions to such an extent that other parts of the company often think that we are a pain in the backside.

I guess that's just a very long winded way of saying that if you don't like what you see in the Mercury, don't bother looking for a conspiracy theory, just pick up the phone and tell me that I got it wrong!

Northcliffe update shows improving situation

2010-03-30T22:23:00.002+01:00

The Leicester Mercury's ultimate parent company, Daily Mail and General Trust, today released a trading update covering the first five months of the current financial year (which runs from October to September).

You can read the full statement here, but the general situation does appear to be getting better and this is the summary of what it says about Northcliffe, the company which runs the regional newspapers, including the Mercury:

For Northcliffe Media, underlying UK revenues for the period were 9% lower than last year with advertising revenues down 10%. Advertising trends have continued to improve: for the quarter to March so far they were 5% lower, with recruitment revenues 14% lower, but property revenues 4% above last year. Circulation revenues fell by 7% compared to last year for the five month period.

Just in case you didn't know ...

2010-03-27T18:17:00.002Z

You may have thought that the annual move to British summertime was a quaint little local tradition, but in fact the country has no choice over the matter ... it's the result of an EC directive.

The 9th EC Directive on Summer Time, to be precise.

Here's the press release that I received yesterday from the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills

Summertime begins

Summer time will start on Sunday 28 March at 1.00am GMT throughout European Union Member States. The clocks go forward an hour. This means that at 1.00am (GMT) the UK will move to 2.00am British Summer Time (BST).

Notes to Editors

1. The 9th EC Directive on summer time harmonised, for an indefinite period, the dates on which summer time begins and ends across member states as the last Sundays in March and October respectively. Under the Directive, summer time begins and ends at 1.00am GMT in each Member State. Amendments to the Summer Time Act to implement the Directive came into force on 11 March 2002.

2. Time zones are the responsibility of individual Member States and vary across the EU. The UK is not planning to move to Central European Time.

So now you know ...

Why on earth would council want to ban Twitter?

2010-03-27T08:44:00.004Z

The Mercury has long campaigned for openness in council affairs and, in recent months, has had a number of very public spats with the city council in an effort to make its decisions more transparent. The Bowstring Bridge example springs to mind.

As such, I welcome the early comments of the new council leader, Coun Veejay Patel, who has vowed to make the authority less secretive.

Coun Patel has been in power for less than 48 hours and it is clearly going to take time to change a culture which is based on years of belief that the public only has a right to know that which the council wants it to know.

We wish Coun Patel well in his campaign.

The size of the task facing him is highlighted by our article in today's Mercury which details plans by Labour’s chief whip, Coun Barbara Potter, to ban the use of social media sites, Twitter in particular, during council meetings.

Twitter allows people to post short messages onto the internet almost instantaneously and is being used by councillors, journalists and members of the public to give an almost live feed of what is going on in council meetings.

It’s not clear how the council could legally ban its use, but more importantly, it is difficult to see why it would want to.

Live video streaming of Thursday night’s council meeting was watched by far more people than ever turn up to the council chamber and this was almost entirely due to the chatter on Twitter about the meeting.

More than 40 people clicked on the link I put on Twitter that evening and I know that many of them stayed to watch at least part of the meeting because I could see the discussion on Twitter. Even last night, people were still talking about the live stream.

One councillor told me that he thought there were about 15 people in the public gallery on the night and that that was more than usual.

So, why on earth would Coun Potter want to ban the use of something which increases public interest in council meetings? It doesn't make any noise or interupt the meeting. People will probably, wrongly, assume she has something to hide!

*This post is based on the opinion I wrote for today's Mercury.

PCC rules against Leicester Mercury

2010-03-24T23:18:00.003Z

The Press Complaints Commission has ruled that the Leicester Mercury breached the code of conduct by publishing a picture of children without the permission of their parents.

It is the first time in 16 years of editing newspapers and websites that I have been found guilty of breaking the code. The ruling concerns a photograph of children being comforted in the street by a kneeling policeman after a bus crash in Leicester. We ran it on the front page under a headline which said: The tender arm of the law.

To be clear, the decision to run the picture was one that I took personally after discussing it with senior staff and considering the code of conduct carefully . The relevant clause of the code is aimed at protecting the welfare of children and I felt that the fact that the children concerned did not come from Leicester and would not be recognised by anybody meant that its publication would not adversely affect their welfare.

However, the Commission did not agree and I accept its ruling. We are running the adjudication in tomorrow's paper and I have apologised to the girl, her family and our readers for my error of judgement.

Here's the wording of the Commission's finding:

A woman complained to the Press Complaints Commission that an article headlined “Tender arm of the law”, published in the Leicester Mercury on 12 December 2009, contained a photograph of her daughter which was published without consent in breach of Clause 6 (Children) of the Editors’ Code of Practice.

The complaint was upheld.

The article reported that a bus full of primary school children on a day trip had crashed into a low railway bridge. The complainant objected to the inclusion in the coverage of a photograph of her daughter, together with numerous other children, being comforted by a policeman at the scene of the accident. Her daughter had been pictured in a clear state of distress and the complainant had not been asked for her consent for the photograph to appear. The child had been further upset by the publication of the image.

The newspaper said that this was a serious accident in which there was a legitimate public interest. The children depicted in the photograph had not been injured and were all safe from further harm. The decision to publish the photograph had not been taken lightly: its main concern was the possible impact any use of the picture would have had on the children. The photograph had been taken on the street and had been unaccompanied by any private details of the children involved. It would also not have had an impact on the welfare of the children as it had appeared only in Leicester, outside their local area. It said that they would not have been embarrassed or distressed by the coverage.

Adjudication

Newspapers are entitled to publish stories and pictures of serious road accidents, which take place in public and often have wide-reaching consequences. In this case, it was not in doubt that the bus crash – which involved more than fifty schoolchildren – was a serious incident which raised important questions in regard to public health and safety. The Commission did not wish to interfere unnecessarily with the newspaper’s right to report the matter, which it generally had done in a sensitive manner.

However, it was clear that the complainant had not given her consent for the newspaper to either take or publish the photograph which showed her daughter in a state of distress. The subject matter of the close-up photograph certainly related to her welfare.

There may be occasions where the scale and gravity of the circumstances can mean that pictures of children can be published in the public interest without consent. In the specific circumstances of this case, the Commission did not consider that there was a sufficient public interest to justify the publication of the image. It accepted that the newspaper had thought carefully about whether to use the photograph, but the Commission considered that it was just the wrong side of the line on this occasion. The complaint was therefore upheld.

Changes to Mercury website comments system

2010-03-23T21:03:00.005Z

We have finally got round to changing the way we allow comments to be added to our main website, thisisleicestershire.co.uk.

It is something which I have previously proposed both on thisisleicestershire and here on my blog, but have backed away from for various reasons. Until now, we have allowed anybody to comment on stories without asking them to register or give us any details. To help us keep an eye on what people said, we have restricted the times at which comments could be left to normal office hours.

Now, however, we have introduced a system that forces people to register with the site before they can leave a comment. We hope that forcing people to register will encourage them to join in constructive conversation rather than the abusive slanging matches which so often seem to dominate the 'discussion.' In return, we will leave the commenting functionality enabled 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Following the advice given by our lawyers, Foot Anstey, we will no longer moderate the comments in any way, but have introduced an easy way for readers to report abuse which we will then check and act on if appropriate.

Unsurprisingly, the change was not met with universal approval and a number of users immediately set about proving that it was still possible to cheat the system by, for example, registering multiple accounts or changing their displayed user name to impersonate someone else. We know the system is not perfect, but I believe that the changes will help. We'll see.

At the same time as we introduced the changes, we highlighted our terms and conditions and the way in which we expected people to use the site.

One user, Daniel, wasn't happy.

Just looking at the house rules:-

You must not make or encourage comments which are:
defamatory, false or misleading;
insulting, threatening or abusive;
obscene or of a sexual nature;
offensive, racist, sexist, homophobic or discriminatory against any religions or other groups
If you enforced this then no-one would have an opinion on anything! and if they did it wouldnt stay on the comments page.

Freedom of speech!, i'm not so sure. It seems you can only post something if its politically correct but what if you dont actually believe in the ridiculous P.C world we live in are you less of a human who shouldn't be allowed to have your say. The L.M is clearly stating 'have an opinion as long as no one else disagrees with it, or happens to find it offensive' well I am sorry but so what if someone happens to find a post offensive thats their business, isn't the whole point of having your opinion known is that its YOUR opinion.

That seems a bit of an odd objection to me: if you look at the rules in reverse, how would people feel if we said it was ok to make comments that were any of the things listed - it's ok to be racist, defamatory or obscene, for example?

Of course, somebody always complains about a restriction of their freedom of speech whenever you have rules that prevent them writing whatever they want. I believe strongly in freedom of speech and would not seek to prevent you saying whatever you want ... but that doesn't mean that I think you should be allowed to do that on our website. We provide our website for the information and enjoyment of our readers, but it is our website and I think it is reasonable for us to set the rules.

BNP: should they be allowed to advertise?

2010-03-13T08:57:00.004Z

Newspapers and online news organisations face an interesting decision as we prepare for the general election: should the BNP be allowed to advertise in our publications?

It's a question which polarises opinion.

Take this from Hackney TUC:

The presence of a BNP advert (which will also be a recruitment tool) in a Hackney paper will be an insult to the people of Hackney who have a strong tradition of resisting the BNP and their ilk. It will be an insult to black people, to Jews, to people with disabilities, to trade unionists, to gays and lesbians, to faith leaders, to women and to anyone who opposes their politics of hatred. In fact, there can be hardly anyone in Hackney who will not be repulsed by the thought of the BNP seeking to establish a visible presence in Hackney.

And this from media pundit Roy Greenslade:

Journalists should support freedom of expression and accept that it means reading and hearing material that they find offensive. Better that we do that than play into the BNP's hands by censoring it.
Think about it for a moment. If a liberal society is prepared to stifle freedom of speech then it provides fascist parties with a justification for their illiberal policies.

Hackney TUC is 'outraged' that their local paper, the Hackney Gazette, has decided to publish adverts from the BNP:

We want to approach every newsagent in Hackney and ask them to send a fax to the publisher protesting at the plan to give advertising space to the BNP and cancelling their order for this week’s paper unless it drops the BNP advert.

We need to approach the regular advertisers (principally estate agents) and ask them to use their economic influence with the Gazette to pressurise for the adverts to be dropped.

We need some volunteer ‘community leaders’ to seek to meet with the paper on Monday or Tuesday to put our case.

Please send email’s of (polite) protest to the publisher

According to Greenslade, the newspaper owners, Archant, say that to refuse such ads "might be playing into the hands of those intolerant and anti-democratic forces that people condemn. It is for the electorate to cast judgement, not us."

My own views are perhaps closest to those expressed by former New Statesman editor Peter Wilby who argues that certain issues constitute a 'special case':

Anything to do with race ... falls into a special category. Racism (including Islamophobia) is peculiarly repugnant because it attacks people at the core of their identity, an identity that cannot easily be altered or hidden as political opinions can.

Some black or Jewish people will be genuinely frightened — as opposed to merely indignant — if they see an ad for the BNP or Irving’s books in their favourite paper. Their friends, they may feel, have deserted them. People who wish them serious harm are being given respectability.

That is what makes such ads so difficult for editors to call. The most central principles for any liberal society — freedom of speech and opposition to racism — come into direct conflict. At least, as an ex-editor, I don’t have to make such decisions any more.

However, I am still an editor and do have to make such decisions. I have already warned our ad director how I feel about this, but what do you think? Would I be right to ban such ads from the BNP?

Anger over council 'ban' on tweeting by bloggers

2010-03-08T21:10:00.004Z

A Guardian blog has today reported that a council has effectively banned bloggers from tweeting from council meetings in a move which it says is 'part of its commitment to increasing involvement in the democratic process. '

Ok, to be fair, I have twisted what the council actually said. Very slightly.

The council concerned is Tameside in the north-west and it was questioned by Sarah Hartley, the editor of Guardian Local, about whether or not it allowed people to tweet during council meetings. The council's response included this sentence:

Following requests the Council has authorised the Manchester Evening News, Tameside Advertiser and Tameside Reporter to use twitter in each of the Council meetings they have requested to do so, as duly accredited representatives of the press, as defined in the Local Government Act 1972.

and this:

As you can see the Council allows the use of ‘twitter’ during Council meetings by duly accredited representatives of the press as part of its commitment to increasing involvement in the democratic process.

According to Sarah, at least one blogger has been thrown out of the council building for attempting to tweet when he was not 'authorised.'

Every fibre in my body shudders at the thought that a council is going to 'authorise' who can report and the fact that someone wants to use Twitter as the platform is completely irrelevant in my opinion. What's worse, I'm not sure the council has the legal right to ban someone from tweeting in the public gallery - although this may be debatable and certainly Sarah says she thinks the council acted legally.

According to Tameside it ' follows the legislation governing the conduct of Council meetings and in particular the recording and transmitting of meetings which are set out in Section 100 (A)(7) of the Local Government Act 1972 .'

And this is what the Act says:

Nothing in this section shall require a principal council to permit the taking of photographs of any proceedings, or the use of any means to enable persons not present to see or hear any proceedings (whether at the time or later), or the making of any oral report on any proceedings as they take place.

So what exactly in that paragraph says anything about Twitter? It says the council can decide whether or not anyone can take photographs or use anything that allows people outside the council chamber to see or hear the proceedings. It also says that a council doesn't have to allow anyone to make an 'oral report' of proceedings while they are taking place.

But Twitter doesn't do any of those things. It quite obviously does not allow anyone to see or hear the proceedings and it doesn't involve the making of an oral report. That's not all that surprising given that the Act dates from 1972, long before the Internet was around, let alone Twitter.

So that's my first objection to this: it doesn't look legal to me. I also had a chat this evening with a media lawyer who said he couldn't see how the clause could be used to ban someone from tweeting a meeting.

But just as bad is that the fact that even if the council could argue that somehow the paragraph did relate to Twitter - or blogging for that matter - it would only give it the right to ban it. It doesn't say it should ban anything, just that it can. Why would any council want to?

Of course, Tameside says it doesn't want to - it sees Twitter as a way of underlining its ' commitment to increasing involvement in the democratic process.'

That's great. I'm all in favour of using anything possible to increase coverage of council decisions.

But how on earth can anyone argue that they support increased involvement in the democratic process and, in the same breath, say they will only allow 'duly accredited' members of the press to report on proceedings?

I'm sorry, but I don't want to be 'duly accredited'. I don't want any special priveleges and I don't want community journalists obstructed in any way: the more the better in my view.

We've been working for some time with Citizens' Eye and the community news hubs in Leicester as I believe we all have a role to play in local democracy. To be fair to Leicester City Council they appear to be happy to help the community journalists as they look to build on local coverage, but if it was ever to come to it, I would be happy to join the fight to protect the rights of others to report.

Amplified Leicester: an introduction

2010-03-05T08:02:00.007Z

I've really enjoyed being on the fringes of this project, watching a diverse group of people from across Leicester come together to use social media tools to explore their views of each other and the city. A number of mini-projects are now under-way which will, well, amplify Amplified.

I'm looking forward to the showcase on April 15th - you can find out more and book a place at the showcase by visiting Amplified's blog here.

Obnoxious followers of my blog

2010-03-05T07:14:00.002Z

I noticed today that my blog was being followed by someone using the name Gerry McCann and a photograph of Maddy in their profile.

The actual name being used was the fairly suspicious looking Gérry MCcann Operación Task Máfia Organizadas so I clicked on the user profile and found a few hundred words of Spanish (or was it Portuguese?) - two moments later and Google translate confirmed what I feared: this is an obnoxious person with lots of horrible things to say about the McCanns. I put the name into Google and found that this has been added to a lot of blogs and websites.

Blogger makes it fairly easy to block followers.

Government plays fast and loose with my personal data ... again!

2010-03-04T20:50:00.003Z

If there's one thing in life that really drives me mad it's public bodies who treat our information as if it is theirs.

Usually this takes the form of them refusing to give out information - you can find plenty of examples elsewhere on this blog - but it also happens when they happily pass out our personal data willy nilly as if it belongs to them. It happened to me again today.

A few months ago I wrote about a Government department that sent out my home address to a car parking company which falsely claimed that my wife had breached some imagined contract. After a simple phone call, the supermarket which employed the car parking company admitted that the 'fine' was not aimed at customers like my wife and withdrew it. What annoyed me was the fact that I have to give my details to the Government by law, but they then decide to pass them on to a third party.

At the time I wrote to the Information Commissioner, the man charged with making sure that companies and public bodies do not misuse personal information. His office responded saying that they had decided that it was in the public interest for the DVLA to pass on personal data to all sorts of parking companies otherwise the only way for those companies to 'police' their land would be to use clamps ... and that would be worse for the drivers. Ah, so it's for our own good. Nanny knows best.

Of course, it's nonsense. This is not about controlling parking, it's about making money. If that's not the case, why are companies charging people £80 for parking? The unintended consequence of this decision is that every mean-minded money grabbing company has now decided that it needs to control parking on its land so badly that they employ third parties whose sole aim in life is to send out as many £80 parking charges as possible since that's the only way they make money.

In my wife's case, she took more than two hours to do the shopping at Morrisions because she chose to sit with a friend in their cafe and have lunch before heading off to the aisles. When she rang the manager of the local store he told her that they didn't intend to penalise customers like her and that not only would he cancel that charge, but should she ever get another in the future, all she had to do was ring and he'd cancel that too.

Right, so the supermarket doesn't want to charge my wife, but the DVLA is happy to send out our address?

Now it's happened again. This time the DVLA has sent my name and address to some idiotic car parking company which claims I spent five hours parked in a motorway service station car park. I didn't, but that doesn't seem to matter to the DVLA, they've sent my personal details out.

To make matters worse, the DVLA gave out my work details so the car park company wrote to my office telling them I had spent five hours in a motorway service station! As it happens, I was on a day off, but suppose I had been a rep on the road? How would I have explained that?

So why did I get one of these ludicrous £80 (£50 if I pay it quickly) charges? Well, I drove up to Newcastle to watch my daughter play football, stopped at Wetherby service station (yes, Moto, you are the guilty party) on the way up for 10 minutes and then, five hours later on the way back, stopped again for 20 minutes. The pathetic systems of the company Moto pays to 'police' the parking, CP Plus Ltd, can't differentiate between someone who stops for five hours and someone who calls in twice in five hours.

So twice in a couple of months, the DVLA has handed over my personal information to companies who had no right to receive it, one which can't differentiate between customers and non-customers and the other which has such useless systems in place that it really has no idea how long I parked for.

I'll be writing to the Information Commissioner again ... but don't hold your breath. In the meantime, I'll also be sending a request under the Freedom of Information Act to find out just how many times the DVLA has sent out personal details to car parking companies: I'm willing to bet that it has grown exponentially over recent years as more and more companies see it as a way of making money ...

New police chief promises 'safest' city

2010-02-14T22:57:00.003Z

The new commander of police in Leicester city centre, Chief Superintendent Rob Nixon, says he has introduced a new 'back to basics' approach for police in the city.

In an email sent out on Saturday, Chief Supt Nixon said he was working with his officers and staff to make Leicester the safest city in the country. Here's the text of his email:

Good afternoon

The purpose of this email is to formally introduce myself as the City Area BCU Commander. I am aware that Chris Garnham wrote to you and informed you of the changes in December. Having now been in post since 4th January, I have been overwhelmed by the support and commitment displayed and very much look forward to working with you in taking the City forward during 2010.

In an attempt to simplify the message to the Police Officers and Police Staff working in the City, we have introduced a back to basics approach which I have included below for your information.

During 2010 we will work together as a team to make Leicester the safest city in the country, where people have confidence in their local police. We will do this by:

* First rate response to those who need our help, getting it right first time
* Highly visible and accessible neighbourhood policing, tackling crime and anti-social behaviour with partners, on issues which matters most to the community
* Identifying and protecting the vulnerable, communities and people alike
* Preventing and detecting crime through hunting down and locking up criminals
* Acting with integrity, honesty and professionalism, valuing and supporting one another

I have fantastic memories of working in the City previously and encourage partnership working at all levels. I am sure that over the coming months our paths will cross and I look forward to working with you.

Regards,

Rob Nixon
Chief Superintendent
City BCU Commander

Don't you just love Google ads?

2010-01-07T08:03:00.003Z

We're always a bit nervous on newspapers about Google's automated process that tries to match ads to the content on our website pages because too often it throws up inappropriate ads.

Perhaps most infamous were the ads for Samsonite suitcases after the suitcase bomb attacks on airliners or, seen more frequently, adverts for new cars against articles about car crashes.

However, I had to laugh when reading the blog of our Leicester City writer, Rob Tanner, this morning. He was writing about the sackings of various football managers, sparked by the dismissal of Gary Megson at Bolton and the subsequent appointment of Owen Coyle. There was a whole list of managers who had lost their jobs and the Google computers were working flat out to come up with the right ads.

The first one was:

Re train as a plumber: Huge shortage, Earn up to £50,747. No exp needed.

I guess that was aimed at Gary Megson, but I wonder if £50k a week is really enough for a Premiership manager?

The second one read:

Cash for cars in Bolton: We buy any car. From £50-£100,000. As seen on TV.

Obviously Megson will need to sell his expensive Merc so that he can buy the van he'll need for his new job!

And finally:

Football Stats: I'll do all the boring analysis so you can just pick up the cash ..

My first thought was that this was aimed at Mr Coyle who presumably would be able to sit back and relax as Bolton soar to the top of the league ... unfortunately it turns out to be a betting scam - 'pay me a few quid and I'll send you an email every Friday with betting tips that can't fail etc etc.'

UGC ruling comfort for bloggers

2010-01-01T13:45:00.006Z

A landmark High Court judgement in early December offers some level of comfort to those bloggers who worry about being sued for comments left on their websites by visitors.

Our solicitors - Foot Anstey - issued a briefing note to editors shortly before Christmas and partner Tony Jaffa has agreed that I can use the briefing on this blog in case it is of help to anyone out there in the blogosphere.

The case concerned a lawyer, Imran Karim, who sued Newsquest Media Group - one of the other big publishers of regional newspapers in the UK - over an article headlined: 'Crooked solicitors spent client money on a Rolex, loose women and drink'.

Mr Karim was not happy. And he didn't like some of the comments posted by users of the newspapers' websites.

The newspaper group applied to the High Court to have the case thrown out on the grounds that Mr Karim had no chance of winning and Mr Justice Eady agreed and gave a summary judgement in favour of Newsquest.

I'm not going to go into why the article itself was ok - it was protected as a report of legal proceedings - as that is something for another day, but the interesting thing for bloggers was the decision that the newspaper was not responsible for comments left on its websites by users.

Here's what Tony says:

By his judgement, Mr Justice Eady has confirmed that web publishers who are unaware of defamatory UGC posts on their websites, have a defence to a claim for libel damages if they act quickly to remove such UGC posts as soon as they are notified that a post is the subject of a complaint.

The judgement also confirms that publishers do not need to pre-moderate or edit UGC posts on their websites to have a defence to a claim for libel damages.

And, here's the really important bit:

In fact, in purely legal terms, publishers will be better off not pre-moderating UGC at all.

The ruling is based on the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002, Regulation 19, sometimes known as the hosting defence. Here's that regulation:

Hosting

19. Where an information society service is provided which consists of the storage of information provided by a recipient of the service, the service provider (if he otherwise would) shall not be liable for damages or for any other pecuniary remedy or for any criminal sanction as a result of that storage where -

(a) the service provider -

(i) does not have actual knowledge of unlawful activity or information and, where a claim for damages is made, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which it would have been apparent to the service provider that the activity or information was unlawful; or

(ii) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove or to disable access to the information, and

(b) the recipient of the service was not acting under the authority or the control of the service provider.

According to Tony Jaffa the judge held:

1 the users of publishers' and newspapers' websites are recipients of an 'information society service';

2 UGC facilities on such websites are bulletin boards;

3 web publishers have no knowledge of, or control over, UGC prior to becoming aware, or being notified, of any contentious posts;

4 therefore, publishers have no liability if posts are removed as soon as a complaint is received.

So, you can sleep a little more easily now! Although, of course, there are a number of caveats and if you have lots of controversial comments on your blog, it would be worth reading both Tony's briefing and the judgement in full ... or even taking legal advice (I'm sure Tony would give you a good price if you told him you knew me!)

I just want to add two further comments. Tony hints at the first when he says that in 'purely legal terms' it might be best to avoid pre-moderation. The issue this throws up, of course, is the fact that you have a reputation to protect and if you don't pre-moderate you may well find all sorts of rubbish appearing on your site, undermining your own good name. This is a difficult one for publishers and it probably comes down to your own confidence in pre-moderating, along with the level of comments, both in terms of quantity and quality. I think lots of bloggers do moderate comments on their sites and I must admit, I tend to come down in favour of moderation on this blog.

The other point that I'd like to make is that this sort of ruling often has unintentional side effects - for example, it would be easy to see why people might remove comments from their sites as soon as they receive any complaint about them so that they can say they acted quickly, allowing them to use the hosting defence. But we sometimes receive complaints - particularly from Leicester City Council - about comments on our sites which they don't like. Of course, the fact that they don't like them, doesn't make them libellous and I usually refuse to remove them ... this ruling may increase pressure to remove comments before too much thought is given to the merit of the complaint.

Finally, I'd like to say well done to Newsquest for fighting this battle. In these difficult times, it often easier to give in than to challenge those who attempt to use the law to control the press. If companies like my own, Northcliffe, and Newsquest don't stand up to be counted, it's unlikely that anybody else will. So, thanks, to whoever made the decision at Newsquest.

Newspapers today - with thanks to Charles Dickens

2009-12-27T21:52:00.003Z

I don't know why (?), but this passage from A Christmas Carol reminds me of work at the moment! I read the book in early December and went to see the new Disney version just before Christmas - I'd recommend the book to anyone. The film was surprisingly true to the book, but for a couple of Disney moments where they inserted a Victorian 'car chase' and a roller-coaster ride! Nevertheless, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the film.

Anyway, here's the original bit of Dickens:

This lunatic, in letting Scrooge's nephew out, had let two other people in. They were portly gentlemen, pleasant to behold, and now stood, with their hats off, in Scrooge's office. They had books and papers in their hands, and bowed to him.

"Scrooge and Marley's, I believe," said one of the gentlemen, referring to his list. "Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr Scrooge, or Mr Marley?"

"Mr Marley has been dead these seven years," Scrooge replied. "He died seven years ago, this very night."

"We have no doubt his liberality is well represented by his surviving partner," said the gentleman, presenting his credentials.

It certainly was; for they had been two kindred spirits. At the ominous word "liberality", Scrooge frowned, and shook his head, and handed the credentials back.

"At this festive season of the year, Mr Scrooge," said the gentleman, taking up a pen, "it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir."

"Are there no prisons?" asked Scrooge.

"Plenty of prisons," said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

"And the Union workhouses?" demanded Scrooge. "Are they still in operation?"

"They are. Still," returned the gentleman, " I wish I could say they were not."

"The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?" said Scrooge.

"Both very busy, sir."

"Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course," said Scrooge. "I'm very glad to hear it."

"Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude," returned the gentleman, "a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?"

"Nothing!" Scrooge replied.

"You wish to be anonymous?"

"I wish to be left alone," said Scrooge. "Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there."

"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."

"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides -- excuse me -- I don't know that."

"But you might know it," observed the gentleman.

"It's not my business," Scrooge returned. "It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!"

Seeing clearly that it would be useless to pursue their point, the gentlemen withdrew. Scrooge resumed his labours with an improved opinion of himself, and in a more facetious temper than was usual with him.

Should we publish pictures of children in bus crash?

2009-12-11T21:09:00.001Z

Today's horrific bus crash in Leicester left us worrying about privacy issues for what seemed like the umpteenth time this week.

You might think it would be fairly straightforward when it comes to covering a big public news item like a bus crash, but we spent some time looking at pictures and discussing the issues before making our decision.

In case you haven't seen or read the story, a double decker bus carrying more than 50 children and teachers ran into a low bridge in Lancaster Road, shearing off much of the top deck. In what really was a miraculous escape, nobody was seriously injured and by tea time, even the 10 people taken to hospital for treatment were allowed home.

The decision we were discussing was which pictures to use in tomorrow's paper. The Mercury's photographers arrived shortly after the emergency services and we had a large choice of shots. Many of them showed the bus and the damage, but there were also quite a lot of the children being comforted by various adults. The question was this: should we use pictures showing the faces of the children involved?

There is no legal reason why we shouldn't, it was more an ethical or moral discussion.

We turned to the Press Complaints Commission's Code of Conduct for guidance. There are three sections of paragraph 6 that might be relevant:

i) Young people should be free to complete their time at school without unnecessary intrusion.

ii) A child under 16 must not be interviewed or photographed on issues involving their own or another child’s welfare unless a custodial parent or similarly responsible adult consents.

iii) Pupils must not be approached or photographed at school without the permission of the school authorities.

However, we decided that none of these was really relevant, particularly as we felt the reference to a child's welfare was probably intended to cover issues around court cases rather than this sort of incident. We did not believe that the use of the pictures would in any way harm the welfare of the children. Add to this the fact that the children were actually from Nottingham and, therefore, unlikely to be recognised by anybody in Leicester and we made our decision to publish the picture you see on this page. We also discussed the tone of our coverage and as it was to be of a supportive nature, we felt this also made our decision easier.

It will be interesting to see how our readers react to our decision.

The very definition of optimism ...

2009-12-02T08:06:00.003Z

Newsrooms have always been a place where gallows humour flourished. I admit I even enjoy - much to my wife's disgust - disaster jokes. I've always assumed it was a sub-conscious coping technique because we spend so much time looking at tragedy.

So perhaps it wasn't that surprising that on a trip to the House of Commons on Monday to listen to Peter Mandelson - that's the Right Honourable Lord Peter Mandelson to you and me - the thing that most stuck in my mind was a gag told by another journalist, rather than anything that came from the lips of the First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation & Skills, Lord President of the Council ...

Whatever you think of Lord Mandelson, he is a consumate politician. He hasn't survived the scandals to go from Minister without Portfolio to Minister of Everything for no reason. That's why I wasn't that surprised at my reaction to his speech. I couldn't help thinking yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah ... Some might not agree - I might have missed something insightful or interesting, but I felt I'd heard it all before. I notice that Guardian media pundit Roy Greenslade, who was sat opposite me, didn't even mention the speech in his prolific blog the next day, preferring rather to talk about Marmite, Dubai, Singapore and New York. The full speech is here if you'd like to read it yourself.

Anyway, back to the gag ...

Actually, I need to do a tiny bit more scene-setting first. DMGT - parent company of Northcliffe Media Group, owners of the Leicester Mercury - released its interim profit statement at the end of last week. Although the group as whole exceeded the City's expectations, the figures for Northcliffe did not look great - profit down 67% on revenues down 24%. But for £50-million of cuts, much of it made up from the loss of more than 1,000 jobs, the company would have made a £30-million loss.

The Guardian ran an article based on an interview with DMGT chief executive Martin Morgan which began like this:

There will be more cost-cutting at the Daily Mail & General Trust's Northcliffe Media regional newspaper operation next year, with further job losses possible, the DMGT chief executive, Martin Morgan, said today.

Morgan said that Northcliffe Media – which has already shed 1,100 staff, about 25% of total headcount, in the year to 4 October – had perhaps weathered the worst of the unprecedented advertising slump but that more needed to be done.

"The drive for change and efficiency is continuing and we expect costs to fall [further] next year," he added, saying that further job cuts were "possible". "We will continue our reorganisation and re-engineering of the business. There has to be a continuing drive. We expect costs to fall again next year but the big cuts are behind us."

I guess the silver lining in that statement is that the big cuts are behind us, but it's why it is understandable that job security is still the number one issue for many of our staff in any one-to-one conversations I have with them.

And that gag?

What's the definition of optimism? A regional newspaper journalist ironing five shirts on a Sunday ...

So that's why he had the office changed!

2009-11-19T22:57:00.002Z

The following memo went out to all staff this morning:

Subject: Leicester Mercury - Keith Perch

Earlier this year in February, following Nick Carter’s departure, Keith Perch agreed to serve as Acting Editor of the Leicester Mercury.

I am delighted to inform you that Keith has agreed to remain in this position on a permanent basis. Thus, with immediate effect, Keith is appointed Editor of the Leicester Mercury.

We wish Keith every success in his new role and in taking forward the Mercury during this challenging time for local newspapers.

Michael Pelosi
Managing Director
Northcliffe Media Group

The decade in seven minutes

2009-11-18T08:19:00.002Z

Another day in the office ...

2009-11-12T20:33:00.003Z

The day didn't get off to a great start ... out of the blue came an email to all staff from head office telling us that the company was continuing with its pay freeze, probably for the rest of this financial year (which for us means all the way through to next October).

I understand why the pay freeze is in place - we continue to face an incredibly difficult financial situation - but there's no hiding how disappointing it is for everyone. The pay freeze affects everyone including head office and local directors, but obviously it will be even more keenly felt by the lowest paid amongst us. ****!

An absence of malice

2009-11-11T08:18:00.004Z

Our new writer, Simon Perry, has his first column, The Skeptic, in the Mercury today and turns his attention to a local shop which claims that if you give it £35 and a strand of hair, it will tell you what you are allergic to.

Simon calls himself a skeptic. What does that mean? Well, a dictionary definition looks something like this:

Skep -tic

–noun

1.	a person who questions the validity or authenticity of something purporting to be factual.

2.	a person who maintains a doubting attitude, as toward values, plans, statements, or the character of others.

I would say it was someone who would doubt a claim until they saw conclusive evidence to support the claim.

[Before you write and complain, I know that in this country we spell the word with a 'c', as in sceptic, but Simon prefers the American spelling (with a 'k') because it avoids confusion with 'cynic', which is, of course, a completely different kettle of fish.]

I like the way Simon thinks. His doubting and questioning is an extension to much of the work that we have to do as a newspaper and it's great to find someone else with the inclination and time to look into claims made in our local area.

It is a few weeks now since I first asked him to write for the Mercury and much of the time that has elapsed has been spent with us checking out Simon's writing with the lawyers. Here's how our news editor, Mark Charlton, put it on Twitter last night: 'You are a legal fXXking nightmare. But welcome 2 journalism.'

The problem for us is the libel law. It's not an easy law to deal with for newspapers because it puts all the onus on the newspaper to prove what it says is true. You might think that is entirely the right way round on the grounds that we ought only to print what we know is true, but that's the issue: sometimes you know something is true, but you can't prove it. We are pretty sure that the claims made in Simon's first column are both true and provable - it will be interesting to see how much more difficult that becomes with some of the topics he intends to cover over the coming months!

The other question that came up was the motives behind Simon's articles. The lawyers wanted to know that he was not driven by malice. Of course, he's not. As Simon puts it: An inquiring mind, an interest in the truth and an urge to prevent people being ripped off are my only motivations.

Why does that matter? Because if, at some point, we make a mistake - Simon gets something wrong and we don't spot it - we may have to rely on a defence against libel other than one which simply says that we got it right. There are circumstances where, even when we are wrong, we can claim protection against a libel suit. However, any such defence would melt away if it could be shown that either Simon or the newspaper acted maliciously.

That's not going to happen.

If you like what you read, you might also be interested in Simon's blog, Adventures in Nonsense, or perhaps turn out to one of the Skeptics in the Pub meetings in Leicester: next Tuesday (Nov 17th) sees Professor Chris French discussing the Psychology of Alien Contact and Abduction!

Where in the world?

2009-11-07T09:24:00.009Z

We tend to pour moral outrage on to those parts of the world where people can be arrested, charged, tried and jailed in secret. Conversely we are proud of our own open and transparent judicial system.

Witness the widespread anger over attempts to prevent coverage of Parliament recently in the Trafigura case ... and yet, here in Leicester, if judges had their way, you might be surprised how often people were locked away in secret. As Editor of the local paper, I am threatened with jail if I report the cases.

Just in the past couple of weeks we have come across two such cases. In both, we have launched a legal challenge to the decisions of the courts to ban publication of details of the names of those charged and have won, overturning the decisions so that justice could not only be done, but be seen to be done.

In one case, we found ourselves in the ludicrous situation where the defendant had been named in the Mercury and details of the allegations against him had been published before a judge imposed an order banning us from publishing anything else. In other words, the man could have gone on to be jailed for many years, but you would never have known ... or equally unfairly, the man may have been found not guilty and would have had no way of telling the world that the allegations printed were unfair and that he was an innocent man.

We challenged the order immediately, but the judge dismissed our point of view and the trial went on in secret. By law, our reporter was allowed to remain in court, taking notes of everything that happened over the next few days but could not report it. Even more oddly, any member of the public could also sit in court listening to the case as long as they did not publish the details. Behind the scenes, we continued to challenge the order and even considered employing a barrister to take the case to the High Court - an expensive and time-consuming issue for us. In the meantime, we continued to send letters to the judge and, after a few days of stand-off, he unexpectedly relented and accepted our arguments about the importance of open justice and we were able to resume our coverage.

Why did the judge issue the ban in the first place? I would argue that it was because of a misguided belief that it would protect the victims of the crime, but we are experienced in covering cases in such a way that the defendant is named, but the victims protected. I've written about this before here.

UPDATED: I have removed the details of the next case because of a legal issue which I will blog about separately ... but we now find ourselves in the position where we would have to spend about £10,000 to challenge a court order made by a judge. It's an order we are sure is incorrectly made, but which the judge remains adamantly behind.

Earlier this week, I was asked to speak at a Common Purpose workshop. The title I was given to speak to was: Local media and its impact on the city and county. I knew they wanted me to talk about whether or not negative stories impacted adversely on the perception of the area, but I believe that is such a narrow view of our impact that I talked instead about the other ways we impact on Leicester.

And, this, ensuring we have an open and transparent justice system is just one of those ways. If we were not in court challenging the decisions of judges and magistrates, nobody would be. We would effectively have secret trials and people would disappear without explanation.

As I've said before, you'd miss us if we were gone.

Update on Mercury columnist

2009-10-16T08:58:00.002+01:00

Here's the latest on our newest columnist and BBC 5Live reporter Ben Jacobs. It comes from the Biased BBC blog.

BBC freelance sports broadcaster Ben Jacobs, the alleged prime suspect in a high-level BBC inquiry into the sabotaged early Saturday morning precording for a 5 Live sports news bulletin that contained inserted obscene material from the Beeb’s bloopers file, will take legal action if necessary to clear his name.

Jacobs says in an email to BBC colleagues: ‘I now face being barred from potentially all BBC outlets for something I fervently, vociferously can swear I did not do, nor could ever conceive of doing.

'I will take the matter to a law-court if I have to, because I have worked hard and honestly for the past five years and some idiot has ruined my reputation and career overnight.’

Hey ho.

Another sucker punch for newspapers

2009-10-15T23:27:00.003+01:00

Great. It's just what we needed five days before Nick Davies rolls into town to persuade everybody - if they needed persuading - that newspapers are full of lies!

The author of Flat Earth News is in Leicester to speak to a meeting of Skeptics in the Pub with the promise that: 'A veteran reporter blows the whistle on his own profession, exposing the scale and origin of falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the news.' I've read Nick's book (twice, as you ask,) and he has a list as long as your arm of examples of how papers get it wrong.

So, he doesn't need any help. But that hasn't stopped director Chris Atkins and his documentary film makers from loading Nick's gun with further ammo. I don't suppose there's much chance that he's missed the reports especially as the Guardian, the paper that employs him on a freelance contract, reported what was going on.

Chris Atkins and his team decided to test their theory that tabloid editors sometimes print stories about celebrities without checking them very much first. All right, without checking them at all. They set about ringing the Sun, Mirror, Star et al with completely false tip-offs and then sat back and laughed as the papers ran the stories without even vaguely checking if they were true.

Here's a taste of what happened according to the Guardian:

Their first call, on 18 March, concerned a fictional sighting of the Canadian singer Avril Lavigne asleep at the nightclub Bungalow 8.

The story appeared in the following day's Daily Mirror under the headline: "Avril Lavigne a lightweight at London clubbing". "After knocking back cocktails, the singer was found slumped across her table, snoring," the story noted. "Lightweight!"
Within a fortnight, almost every daily tabloid newspaper in the UK had published one of the Starsuckers team's bogus stories about the likes of Amy Winehouse, Pixie Geldof and Guy Ritchie. At times, the fake stories were reproduced by media outlets across the world, where they were presented to millions of readers as fact.

And:

A story about singer Amy Winehouse's hair catching fire from a faulty fuse spread across the world after it was printed in the Mirror on 21 March under the headline "Amy Winehouse in hair fire drama". The Starsuckers researcher gave the newspaper fictional details of the story, which she said she had "heard" from an unnamed friend who was at the singer's house.
"Fuses blew as Wino jammed with mates at the house in north London – and sparks lit up her beehive," the Mirror reported. "We always knew you were a hothead, Amy."

What can I say? I'd like to say that it's the tabloids, that we wouldn't do it, but I know that's only tempting fate. I think we check more carefully than that ... and we sent out a link to the Guardian's story to all our staff this afternoon as a gentle reminder.

Fair play to Chris Atkins - he set about proving his point and proved it.

But wait a minute. There's a short video on the Guardian site with an interview with him in which he makes completely unsubstantiated claims which go far further than can possibly be stood up by his film ... and the Guardian lets him state these 'truths' without vaguely checking them or challenging him.

For example, Mr Atkins says: 'on no account were any of the stories fact checked.' Is that true? The Guardian gives a number of examples where various tabloids did not run the stories. Mr Atkins says his film shows 'exactly how little truth there is in the tabloid press.' I don't think it does that at all - it shows how easy it is to fool them into printing untruths, but that's not the same thing. And then, finally, he goes on to say that when it comes to celebrity stories in the tabloids 'nothing whatsoever is about the truth.' Again, his film simply does not prove that one way or another.

Which sort of brings me all the way back round to Nick Davies.

Because he's coming to Leicester next week, I thought I'd read his book again. I have to admit, I agree with a certain amount of what he says, but I can't help thinking that he's guilty of what he accuses papers of doing ... and of what Mr Atkins and the Guardian do in that video.

For example, as I drove home tonight, I was listening to a chapter from Nick's book (I bought it from Audible, a life-saver for anyone who has a daily commute) in which he casts a nostalgic eye back to the good old days and tells us about a journalist in the 60s who went off to a small Welsh town to report on a court case. While he was there he met journalists from all the other nationals. Nick's point is that these reporters went to where the story was and he contrasts that with an account of life on a regional daily paper today where a young reporter tells how he is tied to his desk. Nick goes on to say that this is one of the problems - reporters don't get out any more and nobody covers courts. They don't have time to make good contacts or find their own stories.

I'm sorry, but that's simply not true. It's a generalisation.

The Mercury still has two reporters whose only job is to cover courts - it's all they do. We also have two full-time council reporters, two full-time business reporters, a health correspondent, an education correspondent and a social affairs correspondent. None of these is tied to their desk. They all run their own diaries, find their own stories, cultivate their own contacts - they decide whether or not they are at their desks or out and about.

Much the same could be said about our district reporters as they pretty much set their own diaries. It's also true of our feature writers who nearly always suggest their own topics. It's less true of our general reporters, but that's at least in part because the newsdesk has stories that it wants covering - as do I, as Editor - and these are usually given to general reporters. We also have to make sure that various evening and weekend shifts are covered.

What's the point I'm making? I don't know, I guess I'm just hacked off that the tabloids get caught out so easily by people who want to pour scorn on them and it ends up reflecting badly on the whole media industry when you find those same people doing pretty much what they accuse the tabloids of.

But then again, may be I'm just hacked off!

You'd miss us if we were gone!

2009-10-13T07:12:00.004+01:00

Some of the response to our exclusive revelations about the perilous state of the finances at De Montfort Hall was surprising to say the least.

Take this comment left on our website by Sean, of Leicester:

Once again, the Mercury, printed from Nottingham, shows that is only interested in 'bad' news stories from Leicester. We have a fantastic city and the vision that the team at De Montfort Hall have shown to grow an event of nationwide significance like Summer Sundae should be absolutely applauded. Instead it's derided by jealous journalists who are upset because they couldn't get a free ticket to the show.

Adam Wakelin should put his true cards on the table as should the editor of the Mercury. How are your sales going Keith?

So Summer Sundae lost money in 2007 and 2008. I hear that 2009 figures will be much healthier. I hear that the Mercury knows this as well but was only interested in printing the bad news.

And with Summer Sundae it's not just about the bottom line. I'm sure that Leicesters restaurants, hotels, shops, taxi firms, pubs and clubs all benefit from the activities which go on.

I for one would hate it if Summer Sundae did not happen next year. I'm hoping that the Mercury's witch-hunt with half truths will not lead to that but if it does we'll all know who to blame for hurting Leicester.

Putting aside the jibes about where we are printed (actually, it's Derby not Leicester and it makes no difference to what we cover, or how), and our falling circulation (we are independently audited and our figures are published), Sean misses the point.

Do you know what? I agree with him 100% about one thing - I'd also hate it if Summer Sundae disappeared.

There are, however, a couple of factual errors in his comment. Firstly, Summer Sundae is not derided by our journalists - we put a massive amount of effort into previewing and reviewing the festival and I've just checked this year's coverage and it was overwhelmingly positive. The only negative note came from the fact that The Streets pulled out at the last moment and even that was covered in article headlined: 'Word on The Streets meant cancellation was no problem.'

We'll come back to Sean's call for me to put my cards on the table - it's the main point of this post and I do have a few cards I'd like to lay down.

But he says that he has heard that this year's festival performed much better financially and that we know this, but were only interested in printing bad news.

Actually, we don't know that. We did ask for the figures, but we were told they were not yet available. If they had been, we would have published them whatever they showed.

Which brings me to my main point: this article was not about Summer Sundae. It was not even really about DMH - it was the latest in a series of revelations from the Mercury about the way the city council spends our money.

Don't get me wrong. It's not about the fact that the city council spends our money, it's about the way it spends our money.

Personally, I'm in favour of public money being spent on public art. I don't believe Leicester spends enough on it, but the level of spending is a decision for the councillors we elect to make these decisions. Should they plough money into DMH? I think that it's great that they do.

Over the past two years, councillors have looked at DMH and decided to give it a grant of just over £1million to help it bring music to the city and we at the Mercury have no issue with that at all. Leicester needs DMH and it needs to attract performers to the city.

So far, so good.

But what we do take issue with is what happens next and the way the city council reacts.

It turns out that De Montfort goes £1.4million over budget and needs to be bailed out with taxpayers' money. Independent auditors are brought in and uncover a catalogue of mismanagement and a bewildering scene of chaos. (We'll try to publish a full copy of the report later today - we should have done that yesterday).

What does the city council do to stem the flow of cash? Well, not enough. The overspend went up in the year after the report and it's clear that the council failed to implement many of the recommendations of the auditors' report.

And that's the nub of our report. It's not about the level of grant aid given to DMH in general, or the Summer Sundae in particular, it's about the lack of control over the way our cash is spent and the way the council makes decisions.

As I hinted at above, this is not an isolated instance:

The Curve Theatre - another essential part of the city's cultural offering - was promised at a cost of £26million, but came in at £61million. Again, independent auditors were very critical of the city council's handling of the project. The Mercury's complaint is not that the city council built The Curve, but that it got the finances so wrong.

Plans for a new art gallery on New Walk - the estimated cost has risen from £1million to £2.2million before we've even seen the plans ... and the plans themselves were not made publicly available early enough in the process and turned out to be unsuitable.

Bowstring Bridge - contrary to popular opinion, the Mercury has not campaigned to save the bridge, but we have tried, to no avail, to force the council to hold its discussions in the open instead of hiding away behind closed doors when making such a big decision.

The common thread running through these reports is not that we object to the decisions taken by the council - we elect them to make the decisions. But we, in common with all the taxpayers of Leicester, have a right to expect the council to spend our money wisely and openly, and to keep a tight grip on projects so that we don't 'accidentally' spend far more than they told us we needed to.

And going back to Sean's comment about our circulation, I'm not sure what point he is trying to make. In common with every newspaper in Britain, our circulation has fallen and has done so pretty much every year for the past 30 years. However, we still have about 150,000 readers every day and we see 'public watchdog' as one of our key roles.

Uncovering the sort of mismanagement outlined in the stories mentioned above is not easy. Adam Wakelin has been looking into DMH's finances for months - it takes determination, time and knowledge - and if we weren't doing it, who would?

No such thing as bad publicity ...

2009-10-06T17:21:00.004+01:00

Today's Mercury carried a first column from BBC 5Live freelance reporter and Leicester City season ticket holder, Ben Jacobs, and, I guess, there's an argument that says any publicity is good publicity ...

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions on this little piece that appeared in the Daily Mail today:

Saboteur hunt at 5live
The BBC are mounting a top-level probe, using CCTV and computer information, to find who was responsible for tampering with an early Saturday morning 5live sports news bulletin featuring a pre-recorded Jacqui Oatley interview with Wigan manager Roberto Martinez.
The Martinez chat was interrupted by a voice saying '******* trumpet, ******* Stanley Clarke', which the Beeb hierarchy believe may have been inserted by a disgruntled employee.
Freelance sports reporter Ben Jacobs, who graduated from Oxford University with a double first in English Language and Literature in 2004, missed his BBC sports shift on Sunday having been told he was involved in the inquiry.
Jacobs' agent David Welch said: 'Ben is fully co-operating with the investigation but totally denies any involvement in any malpractice.

UPDATE: I've just found this YouTube clip of the outburst at the centre of the issue via the Biased-BBC blog. Don't listen to it if you don't want to hear swearing on the BBC!

Stupid errors invite criticism

2009-10-06T08:15:00.005+01:00

Sometimes we make errors that are just plain stupid. I'm not sure anyone can explain it - it's not that we don't know the facts, it's just that a reporter, even an experienced reporter, simply gets it wrong and then neither the sub nor the proof reader picks it up.

We did it yesterday in our report on the switch-on of Leicester's Diwali lights. For some inexplicable reason the reporter got the location wrong and used the word Hindi instead of Hindu.

Online, our readers were quick to point out the errors:

LM, suggest you re-train/educate your staff or hire adequate journalists. The area is Belgrave Road, not Belgrave Gate..........and it is a Hindu festival (not Hindi) and the community is also Hindu not Hindi!

Good night, however I agree, Leicester Mercury do need to get a proof reader! Point One, its Belgrave Road, not Belgrave Gate as Belgrave Gate is over the Flyover. Secondly, its Hindu and not Hindi! Just small things makes a big difference! But yeah it was good!

I couldn't agree more. Small things, but makes a big difference.

To make matters worse, having spotted the errors in the paper, we then left them on our website even after our readers started pointing them out! I tried to correct them myself in the early evening last night (far too late), only to find that our web publishing system had ground to a halt and, try as I might for over an hour, I just couldn't make the changes. I tried again at 10pm without success and finally corrected the article at 2am this morning, adding the following apology:

Thank you for pointing out the errors in this article. They have now been corrected and I apologise that they were made in the first place and for the amount of time it has taken for us to put them right on the site.

Still, I can't help thinking the damage is done.

Libel article brought a smile to my face

2009-10-01T20:40:00.003+01:00

About 20 years ago I had the privilege and pleasure to work for one of the great journalists' editors of the time, Mike Lowe.

Mike is a natural journalist and I've probably never worked with anyone as gifted at pulling together all the elements of a complex issue and then laying them out on a page in such a way as to give them impact and clarity. Above all, he had a wicked sense of humour which shone through his newspapers.

Sadly, he eventually fell out of favour with our employers and left the business.

But I read a fairly bland article today about a newspaper paying out damages to a politician and it reminded of one of Mike's very funny - if somewhat outrageous - responses to a similar situation.

The article on HoldtheFrontPage, a website aimed at regional journalists, included the following paragraph:

In its apology, the Observer wrote: "We accept that the allegations contained in the article were untrue and misleading and we apologise to Coun Jones for the distress and embarrassment our publication caused him. We have agreed to pay Cllr Jones a substantial sum in libel damages."

Of course, we have no idea what the term 'substantial sum' means. Is it £500? £5,000? £50,000? Or even £500,000? Almost certainly, the terms of the agreement include a gagging clause, forbidding either side from revealing the actual amount paid.

Mike always thought this sort of gag was totally unreasonable as the term 'substantial damages' can leave the impression that a big sum has been paid over when, in reality, the sum is often very small, much closer to £500 than £50,000. I don't want to give the impression that regional newspapers often libel people and pay out damages - it's actually pretty rare (the Mercury, for example, has not paid out anything in the eight months that I've been in Leicester).

But, back to Mike. We had published something inaccurate about a local councillor who demanded an apology and damages and a deal was agreed which included such a ban on revealing the amount paid out, but describing it as 'substantial.'

At the time, we published an item every day called 'word of the day.' This would take a word from an article in the paper and explain what it meant. It was usually Mike's way of explaining gobbledegook and was an interesting little feature.

On the day that we published the apology and the line about substantial damages, the word of the day was 'substantial' and it was defined simply as: £500!

As the councillor's solicitors later complained, it wasn't cricket. But it was funny.

Supermarket has the answer to newspaper problems

2009-09-30T17:31:00.005+01:00

Eureka! I've stumbled across the answer to falling revenue problems for newspapers.

We're going to introduce a rule that says if you read the Mercury for more than, let's say, half an hour, you have to pay us an extra £40. It's genius - I'll do everything I can to entice you to read for longer and longer and as soon as you slip over the half hour mark, I'll thank you by whacking out the £40 charge.

This idea came to me yesteday after my wife was charged an extra £40 for spending more than two hours in Morrison's supermarket. They waited until a couple of days after her visit and then sent her a letter thanking her for being such a good customer and inviting her to send them an extra £70, or £40 if she sent it within the next 14 days.

I can't believe that I hadn't thought of it before. How can it fail?

Of course, Morrisons didn't call this a customer loyalty payment or anything like that. They called it a parking fine.

That's right - they sent my wife, and her friend who she met at the shop, a £40 fine each for being there too long. Putting aside the fact that I feel that there is some justification for fining anybody who spends more than two hours in a supermarket, it does seem an incredible situation, especially given that they have a cafe where they encourage you to sit down for lunch. Which is exactly what my wife and her friend did - they shopped and then had lunch.

By now, you're probably wondering where this rant is going.

To be honest, I don't care about the £40 fine. If Morrisons want to be that stupid, that's up to them. If I was my wife (which would be very odd), I'd contest it and I'd be amazed if they enforced it.

However, the thing that actually enraged me about this whole episode is the behaviour of the government department involved. Yes, that's right, a government department decided to help Morrisons track down my wife so that they could send her a fine!

It was, of course, the DVLA. It turns out that they are happy to pass on your personal data to just about any old Tom, Dick or Harry.

This is what it says on their website:

Regulations allow for the release of information from DVLA’s vehicle register to the police, to local authorities for the investigation of an offence or on-road parking contravention, and to anybody who demonstrates ‘reasonable cause’ to have the information. Regulations also allow for a fee to be charged to cover the cost of processing requests, but not for a profit to be made.

As a general rule, reasonable cause for the release of data from the DVLA vehicle register relates to motoring incidents with driver or keeper liability. These can include matters of road safety, events occurring as a consequence of vehicle use, the enforcement of road traffic legislation and the collection of taxes.

You might think that sounds fair enough - we are legally obliged to give our data to the Government if we want to drive a car in the UK and they might pass it on to law enforcement officers investigating offences.

But hang on a second - my wife didn't commit an offence and Morrisons are not a law enforcement agency.

It turns out that the DVLA will send your personal details to anybody who can show they have 'reasonable cause' and that, apparently, would include Morrisons if they thought you spent too long over your lunch. If you dig around enough on the DVLA website you will find their justification for this:

Improving car park efficiency DVLA data release from the vehicle register to car parking companies helps them enforce their terms and conditions. Without us those companies would have no alternative other than to use clamping (in England and Wales) and/or vehicle removal as a means of dealing with unauthorised parking. Such methods are massively inconvenient to the driver.

Ah, so it's all for own good. I'm sorry, but I don't buy that. I'm willing to bet that there would be no way that I could get the home address of the manager of Morrisons out of the DVLA whatever I felt he'd done to me - my wife spends too long over her coffee and they're happy to send out her personal details.

If you read my blog you'll probably know that access to information and the decision making processes of public bodies bothers me and so you won't be surprised to hear that I've written to the Information Commissioner challenging the right of the DVLA to pass on personal data in private disputes. I emailed the form this morning and await a response.

In the meantime, I've taken my own direct action. On the way to work this morning, another government department was stopping cars at junction 25 of the M1 to hand out a survey on road usage. Amongst the questions was a box asking for full details of where I'd come from (my home) - at the first opportunity I ripped up the form and chucked it in the bin. Note to Government: if you think I'm going to trust you with any of my personal information which you can't demand by law, think again.

Tragic death raised questions for our reporting

2009-09-30T07:50:00.004+01:00

The fall-out from the tragic death of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter raised a couple of important questions for the Mercury news team yesterday.

The first surrounded the identity of some of the youths accused of being involved in the harassment that led to Ms Pilkington killing her daughter before committing suicide. As a rule, the Mercury, in line with the Press Complaints Commission's code of conduct, does not name children under the age of 16 involved in crime. The law itself gives protection to juveniles appearing in court and they are rarely named. However, there are occasions when a magistrate or judge will decide that a child should be named, often as part of an attempt to protect the public.

The issue here was that there was no court case, but two boys and their older brother were named in national newspapers - one of them branded 'Street Rat' on the front page of the Sun. A local councillor was also raising a petition to have the family evicted.

You may be surprised to hear that our first reaction was not to name the family and particularly the two younger boys. But after some discussion we decided to do the opposite - to name the boys and use their photographs. What was behind the decision?

Primarily, it was because any pretence that these boys had anonymity was ridiculous. Everybody in the area knew the identity of the boys even before the national papers got involved. It was clear from our discussions with neighbours that they were well-known in the area and their links to the Pilkington case were common knowledge - not naming them would have made our article look very odd and would not have 'protected' the boys in any way.

The other question we faced was more difficult. Three other vulnerable families contacted us to say that they had been harassed in a similar way and felt that they had been left to suffer with little or no protection from the police or other authorities.

The issue here was that these cases are always much more complex than they look and there was no time for the authorities to go away and investigate what was being claimed by the families and give a reasoned response or challenge the 'facts.' For example, one of the families said they had called the police 'hundreds of times.' I'm guessing, but that's probably factually inaccurate and may be no more than a figure of speech.

So the question was: should we run these claims based on nothing other than what the families said?

We decided we would because it was important to point out that the Pilkington case was not an isolated incident and although we had nothing to corroborate the individual claims of each family, in a way they corroborated each other. In a general discussion about the way the police and social services should respond to such incidents, the detailed facts are largely irrelevant - what's important here is that there are several families who felt harassed and felt that they dud not get the support they needed.

The police themselves have admitted that they have changed the way they react to claims of anti-social behaviour. The Pilkington family's calls for help were dealt with as individual complaints of anti-social behaviour and received a fairly low-level response but since their deaths, the police have changed their policy to categorise repeated offences against vulnerable people as hate crime, which receives a much more serious response.

As is often the way in these cases, the inquest has taken some years to be heard and the response of the police and councils is invariably that they have changed. So while the coroner is very critical of the way they responded to Ms Pilkington's plight they say that they have learned the lessons.

That's why we not only decided to highlight that other families suffered at the same time as the Pilkingtons, but added a line to our article asking whether anybody is still suffering.

Poor response can lead to serious consequences

2009-09-30T07:31:00.002+01:00

Newspapers are often accused of creating panic around health scares by the way they report deaths which become associated with vaccines or other treatment.

So, when news broke yesterday of the death of a schoolgirl in Coventry shortly after she had received the new cervical cancer jab, the Mercury thought long and hard about how to report it.
We were very conscious of the dangers of frightening people away from having the jab as every year more than 1,000 women die of cervical cancer and doctors say the new vaccination will cut that significantly.

We were aware that no link had been established between the girl’s death and the jab apart from the fact that she died soon after receiving it.

However, some jabs were suspended in Coventry and we turned to our local health authorities to offer some reassurance. Unfortunately, the response we got was disasterous. It offered no reassurance, but left major questions unanswered.

We were told: “Although we have had to cancel a small number of immunisation sessions at a few schools due to local circumstances, there are no plans to interrupt or suspend the national HPV immunisation programme.” We were given almost exactly the same wording twice from different senior people within our local health authorities - it was clearly an 'agreed line' and we even heard that it had come out of the Department of Health who were suggesting that all health authorities should say no more.

But what on earth were we supposed to make of that? What did they mean when they said that a small number of sessions had been cancelled due to ‘local circumstances’? They wouldn’t say.

Elsewhere in the country, health authorities announced that they had been instructed by the Department of Health to cancel sessions and check the batch numbers of their vaccines. They said that vaccinations would restart tomorrow.

But the damage is done. A poorly thought-through response to a single death which adds confusion and even the smallest reason to doubt what is being said will unsettle parents.

Of course, we have seen it all before with the MMR jab. Enough doubt was raised to persuade many parents to refuse to allow their children to receive the vaccination despite health authorities repeated statements that the dangers from measles and mumps were far greater than any danger in the jab.

So how did we handle it? Fortunately we have a very experienced health reporter in Cathy Buss and her article was well-balanced and all I can say is that it wouldn't put me off allowing my two daughters to have the jab.

Mercury owners issue trading update

2009-09-29T08:38:00.002+01:00

The Mercury's owners, Daily Mail and General Trust, issued a trading update today, with figures up to the end of August, a month before the end of our financial year.

It has been a torrid year for newspapers, but the update points to some improvements in the financials, both in terms of advertising sales trends and the profit outcome as a result of the cost cutting exercise which has led to 1,500 people losing their jobs across the national and local newspapers - this, of course, includes those who lost their job when the presses closed in Leicester and the nine journalists who were made redundant when we re-organised the way we handle the back end production of the Mercury. It has been a pretty horrible process, but it's clear from the figures that if the cuts had not been made, the newspapers would have found themselves in a pretty horrific situation by now.

For those who want to see the details, you can find them here on DMGT's website.

Do you know what's going on at the Curve theatre?

2009-09-25T18:58:00.005+01:00

At the risk of being accused of being anti-Leicester and failing to support the regeneration of the city, I've got a question to ask.

What is happening at the Curve? What makes me ask that? The awful PR dull-speak that came out of the theatre this week announcing the departure of its chief executive, Ruth Eastwood. In common with other parts of the media, we received a press release (printed in full below) from Kate Gambrell, Freelance Media Consultancy (I would link to her, but if she has a website, I can't find it.)

In this, Ms Gambrell told us that Ruth Eastwood was stepping down later this month (next week?) "to take a break for herself and to focus on her future personal development." I guess, at least, that's slightly more imaginative than the reason given by politicians who nearly always seem to want "to spend more time with their family."

Nevertheless, I can't help thinking that it's just guff.

This opinion is reinforced the next day when a senior insider tells us that there have been long-running issues between Ms Eastwood and the chairman of the trust that runs the theatre, Mr Anthony Lawton. The situation was bad enough for the Ms Eastwood to issue a grievance against the chairman, although this was later dismissed by the board.

However, nobody official is going to add anything to the annodine quotes in the press release - if I was a betting man, I'd put money on the fact that this was because of a confidentiality clause in whatever deal has been struck between the theatre and Ms Eastwood. Has there been a pay-off? Well, you wouldn't think so if Ms Eastwood had resigned ... but look again - the press release doesn't say she has resigned, just that she is stepping down.

And this is where the PR starts to unravel in my mind. If she was going because she wanted to take a break and focus on her future personal development, that sounds as if she was resigning, in which case she should not be getting a pay-off.

If, on the other hand, she is going as part of a deal following the fall-out between her and the chairman, then the theatre is almost certainly paying her off and she's not going for the reasons given. Obviously we asked, but this is how we reported the response:

"A spokesman also said that because they were an independent organisation they had no obligation to release information they feel is commercially sensitive, such as details of any pay-off Ms Eastwood could get."

That provokes two thoughts. Firstly, if there was no pay-off, the spokesman would have said so. And, secondly - you can file this in the drawer marked: red, rag, bull - 'an independent organisation with no obligation to release information?'

Independent of the city taxpayers who forked out £35-million towards the cost of building the theatre?

And then there's the running costs - it's pretty obvious that the theatre is not running at a profit. But how much is it costing to run and who's paying that?

I was surprised at how little information I could find on this in the public domain. I found something on the website of East Midlands Arts suggesting it was paying upwards of £2-million a year, but I couldn't find anything else in the hour I spent searching, other than our recent article that said the theatre had applied to the national Arts Council for £750,000 to help it through difficulties caused by the current economic downturn. It's odd how little I could find.

Hence my question in the headline - do you know what's going on at the Curve? Have you seen the business plan? There was lots of talk of success in the press release, but measured against what? We were told that there have been 120,000 ticket sales in the first year. Is that good? Is that what they were expecting?

I'll be asking somebody at the office to put together an article detailing how the running costs are being paid ... so any help would be greatly appreciated.

PS I can already feel the establishment reaction to my questions. This is not a criticism of the Curve, it is simply me asking a question I ask often - how is public money being spent? Why won't the public bodies say how much they are spending and tell us why it is worthwhile? I'm all in favour of public funding for art, but I hate it when it is hidden away as if the authorities were ashamed of it.

Here's the press release in full:

Leicester Theatre Trust Chief Executive to step down

After leading Leicester Theatre Trust (LTT) through three of the most challenging and exciting years in the organisation’s history, Ruth Eastwood will step down as Chief Executive later this month to take a break for herself and to focus on her future personal development. During her tenure she ensured the successful completion and opening season of Curve, the city's new state of the art theatre.
Curve opened in November 2008 and since then the venue has attracted over 120,000 ticket sales for Leicester Theatre Trust productions (Lift Off, Simply Cinderella, In-I, The Pillowman, As You Like It, The Light in the Piazza and the large scale community production of His Dark Materials), visiting national and international work and shows produced by Leicester’s many vibrant community arts groups. Under Ruth’s leadership Curve has also hosted a range of conferences and commercial events including this year’s Arts Marketing Association annual conference.

Ruth comments: "I am immensely proud of what we have achieved over the last three years and the fantastic success of our first season in Curve. It has been a very exciting and very intense period and I now feel that as Leicester Theatre Trust gets into its stride and moves into its second year, I can take the opportunity to step back, take some time for myself and focus on my future personal development. The team at Curve has worked tirelessly and with huge commitment and dedication to make this wonderful facility really 'sing', it has been a pleasure and an honour to have led them on this amazing journey. I'd like to thank them all, the Board and our partners and wish Curve all the best in the future.

Anthony Lawton OBE, Chair of Leicester Theatre Trust said

“On behalf of the Board and all involved with Leicester Theatre Trust I would like to thank Ruth for her hard work in successfully leading LTT into a new era with a new cutting-edge building, her efforts have given the organisation at Curve a fine start. I wish Ruth all success and happiness in her future endeavours.”

Laura Dyer, Chief Executive, Arts Council England, East Midlands added

“We are sorry to hear that Ruth Eastwood has decided to leave Curve and we would like to take this opportunity to celebrate her great achievement in taking Curve through its build phase and completing its first season, which included some stunning work. Curve is poised to build on the strong platform she has helped to create and to meet the challenges of establishing itself at the cultural heart of Leicester, the region and the Country.”

Paul Kerryson Artistic Director, Leicester Theatre Trust added

“It has been a real pleasure to work alongside Ruth who has led the company through an immensely challenging and inspiring time. She has given magnificent support to the artistic endeavours of Leicester’s unique and wonderful Curve experience.”

Stella McCabe, Deputy Chief Executive and Director of Communications, and Paul Kerryson, Artistic Director will lead the organisation in the immediate coming weeks supported by the Chair, Board of Trustees and senior executive colleagues. A further announcement regarding the recruitment of a new Chief Executive will be made in due course.

-Ends-

For further information please contact:
Kate Gambrell, Freelance Media Consultancy:

Lawyers win when common sense loses

2009-09-07T23:43:00.003+01:00

Writing the comment column of a newspaper can be difficult, but sometimes it's easy! Below is the first draft of the comment I put together for tomorrow's paper where I rail against the lunacy that has settled on the rural village of Breedon on the Hill. I do think that the situation we find ourselves in literally beggars belief.

It's difficult to see how anybody spending their own money could possibly take the stance being taken by either side in the argument, but, as we see so often, when you're spending somebody else's cash, it is easy to let bravado take the lead. Each side blames the other and both claim to be acting in a reasonable manner - they're both to blame and neither is acting reasonably.

However, I do wonder how quickly it would be sorted out if the two sides sat down in a room with no lawyers or mediators present!

"Sometimes decisions involving public money beggar belief. The Mercury's recent revelation that the Curve theatre in Leicester cost many millions more than had been expected was bad enough. At least at the end of the overspend the city has a theatre, an asset which undoubtedly adds to the cultural ethos of the city.

But the ludicrous argument over the use of a school hall in Breedon on the Hill could end up costing taxpayers more than £6-million just to get to where we started! The two sides in the argument have become so entrenched in their positions that all common sense seems to have disappeared out of the window. It seems a fairly straightforward issue: the villagers paid towards the cost of building a school hall 50 years ago on condition that they would be able to use it, now the council wants to change the way it is used.

The council claims the use of the hall by villagers is 'impairing' the running of the school and raises child safety issues. It offered the villagers £92,000 towards the cost of a new hall if they agreed to leave, but the villagers said no.

And then things got out of hand. The villagers took the council to court and the case was due to have been heard this month. The council's legal bill was expected to be in the region of £567,000, the campaigners' £3.2-million. That's right: almost £4-million to argue in court over a village hall that could be rebuilt for a fraction of that amount.

Now the court case has been delayed by six months and, according to the county council's legal department, the costs could now go up another £2.4-million to almost £6.2-million. Of course, the costs would only be paid by taxpayers if the council lost. The villagers have some form of no-win no-fee arrangement with their legal team.

But that's not the point. The whole exercise is a ludicrous waste of time and money. The two sides need to have their heads knocked together and then they need to step away from each other and reach agreement. The council should not be gambling with taxpayers money in this way. It should make a reasonable offer to build a new community hall and the villagers should accept it and that should be the end of the matter.

Millions have already been frittered away on this ridiculous stand-off, but it would still cost less to build new hall than to continue with the case. The politicians need to step in and sort it out - clearly the only winners at the moment are the lawyers."

Learning an Italian lesson

2009-09-06T07:43:00.004+01:00

Travelling in Italy last month I was struck by the state of their roads which contrast markedly with the condition of those in Britain as a whole and LeicesterShire in particular.

The Italians seem quite happy to let even the most major highways fall into serious disrepair with most carriageways pitted and potholed far worse than anything we ever experience here. In lots of ways it's not a great driving experience - it's noisy and uncomfortable - and, I guess like most foreign drivers arriving in Italy, my first reaction was to curse the authorities. Actually that wasn't my first reaction: my first reaction was to slow down. You don't have much choice. Add the state of the roads to the fact that Italian motorways have much sharper bends than their British counterparts, and you cannot feel safe driving quickly. I'm sure there are lots of benefits to driving more slowly, the most obvious being the opportunity to enjoy the stunning scenery through Tuscany and Umbria.

However, once I'd got over the initial shock and was more used to slower speeds, it made me wonder why we are so obsessed with potholes in this country. Every year, the Mercury runs stories about residents complaining about the state of the road where they live, councils run hotlines to allow potholes to be reported and, if memory serves me right, Leicestershire County Council proudly attempts to fix all potholes within 24 hours of them appearing. The city council, which is much slower to react to the complaints, finds itself under pressure and at least once in the past 12 months has had to find extra cash to resurface affected roads.

But why? What is the real problem with potholes? Wouldn't the cash be better spent elsewhere? There's no doubt that we spend many millions of pounds in Britain keeping our roads looking like Grand Prix tracks - why doesn't the council simply say: No. I know we'd all be up in arms at first, but isn't there an argument to be made? Wouldn't we get used to it? The Italians appear to have accepted it.

I don't suppose it will be long before the health and safety experts point out that potholes cause accidents (do they?), but wouldn't this be offset by the reduction in speed? Isn't this similar to the argument about allowing parking on narrow streets - there are those who say it makes the road dangerous, but it also slows down traffic, presumably making the streets safer. What ever happened to that experiment where a city (in Germany?) took away all street markings as they felt it would make drivers and pedestrians more aware of their surroundings and, therefore, contrary to popular belief, make the roads safer? Wasn't it the Scandinavians who started to make children's playgrounds a little less safe on the grounds that it taught children to be more alert and careful ... and, therefore, more safe?

I'm sure this argument has now deteriorated into a ramble - probably full of potholes and proving the point that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing - but is there a discussion to be had on deliberately allowing our roads to fall into disrepair?

And one of the things that I noticed that the Italians did seem to spend a lot of money on was preserving the character of their towns and cities. It was clear that lots of money had been spent on restoring and converting for modern use the ancient buildings of Todi, Assisi, Perugia, Rome, Siena, Venice et al.

I guess when it comes down to it, it's simply a matter of priorities. And we choose to spend our money on potholes.

How should we report hate crime?

2009-09-05T08:26:00.006+01:00

Hate crime has been high up the political agenda ever since the authorities botched their reaction to the Stephen Lawrence murder in 1993 and it can throw up interesting decisions for a newspaper when it comes to reporting.

In the early hours of yesterday morning, a number of anti-gay posters were put up on various walls and windows in Leicester city centre and around the railway station. The Mercury received calls fairly early on from people getting off trains and it was clear that the posters had been seen by lots of people.

I'm guessing the posters were timed to coincide with today's Gay Pride parade through the city and, on another day, they could just as easily have been racist or sexist and we would have been faced with the same decisions.

We talked first thing about how we should cover the story and agreed the following:

It was important that we covered it - the posters were very public
We would slant our coverage to reflect the general disgust at the posters
We would not repeat any of the words on the posters
We would not print any pictures which showed the words
We would run the article towards the front of paper

In the end, this is what we ran on Page 2 of today's paper.

However, the reaction in some quarters of the police was different. As you'd expect, they were treating this as a serious crime - they were already studying cctv images and had sent one of the posters off to be tested forensically to see if there were any clues as to the perpetrators - and we got a call from a senior officer who clearly thought we should not be reporting it.

There seemed to be two arguments against publication, the first of which, rather oddly, seemed to be that it wouldn't show Leicester up in a very good light! The second was the more predictable suggestion that our coverage would give 'the oxygen of publicity' to the posters, helping those who produced them to achieve their goal.

I don't understand the first argument. I don't believe that it sheds any light on Leicester at all. It simply shows that some pretty horrible person or people, who may or may not be from Leicester, did something horrible. Perhaps we shouldn't cover any crime? Was this worse than rape or murder? Actually, as we reported, what it actually showed was that many of the posters were ripped down by right-thinking people in Leicester.

I have more sympathy with the second argument, but I don't think that ignoring bad things and hoping they will go away is generally helpful. I'm pretty sure that the decisions we had already taken on how to handle the story negated any concerns and I don't think we did anything which would boost the standing of those who put up the posters.

I caught an interesting take on this argument on BBC Radio 5's phone-in programme earlier in the week when they were discussing football chants in relation to a CD that is being sold by Amazon which includes football fans accusing a well-known manager of being a paedophile. The Radio 5 line was clearly that this was disgusting and that Amazon should take the CD off the shelves, so to speak. And how did they illustrate this? Well, of course, they played the clip from the CD, named the manager and let everyone listen to the fans chanting the offending words!

UPDATE: On the Radio 5 show, the presenter read out a statement from Amazon saying that it would not remove the CD as that would be censorship and that the company believed in free speech - a claim that went completely unchallenged by the BBC despite its obvious absurdity. Does Amazon sell openly homophobic or racist material? I notice this morning that Amazon has in fact removed the CD from sale following a complaint from the football club concerned which pointed out that the chant was defamatory. However, Amazon adds: "We would not remove a product from our site because some, or many, people find it to be distasteful or otherwise objectionable. We believe it is censorship to make a product unavailable for those reasons."

The dangers of jigsaw identification

2009-08-21T12:49:00.003+01:00

The Baby P case threw up some interesting points on who can and can't be identified during court cases, particularly those involving children.

Like most regional newspapers, the Leicester Mercury has a policy that says we won't name children involved in criminal cases as either victims or witnesses even if the law says we can.

There are clearly cases where we abandon this policy where naming the child may do more good than harm - the Maddy McCann case being the obvious local example. But we would also usually name a child where he court case involves the death of that child, which is why the Baby P case was so confusing.

Despite the fact that Baby P had died, the court oredered that he should not be named. Indeed, the court banned the media from naming anyone involved in the case and for those not closely connected, it was not immediately obvious why. At the time of the case last year, I was not editing newspapers and knew no more than any member of the public about the reasons behind the decision. I guessed, correctly as it turned out, that it was because some of those charged with the neglect of Baby P were due to face further charges on an unrelated crime at a later date. The theory was that if they were publicly named and found guilty of causing the baby's death, they would find it difficult to get a fair trial for the later charges.

Now that those later charges have been dealt with, the names of all those involved in the Baby P case are in the public domain.

However, the naming of those involved brought up another issue - something we call jigsaw identification.

This arises when different media outlets give different pieces of information which when added together identify someone who the courts believe should not be indentified. The most common situation where this arises is where a family member abuses a child. Our policy, and that recommended by the Press Complaints Commission, is to name the adult involved without giving their relationship to the child. We might leave out other information which would give away the child's name such as their age, the number of brothers and sisters they have or, sometimes, the school they go to. This will often mean that very few details of the actual crime are given - which you may think is a good thing anyway in a family newspaper.

The problem then arises where another media outlet - perhaps a national tabloid - decides to put far more details into their story, but leaves out the name of the adult. At this point they may well include the fact that the crime was committed by the father and give the age of the child. You can see that by putting the two reports together, it is easy to identify the child involved.

This tends to be much less of an issue nowadays as most news organisations will stick to the PCC code of conduct and, therefore, everyone will name the adult and leave out the details.

However, it appears that in the Baby P case, one of those involved - who was named by some newspapers, including the Mercury - has committed unconnected crimes which certain other papers decided to detail without naming the person concerned. That makes it very difficult for media outlets. We didn't make a choice in this case - we named the person as the other crimes were unconnected and we were not aware of them. My guess is that most other newspapers were in a similar position, but the one or two which did know about the other crimes put us all in a position where we may have, unwittingly, identified a child victim.

I think, fortunately, in this case, it is unlikely that anyone will put two and two together, but it does show how easy it is to fall foul of the law.

Dismissed with a wave of the hand

2009-08-20T07:44:00.002+01:00

That's it. With a disimissive wave of his hand, Leicester City Council's Director of Legal Services has consigned our concerns about openness and transparency to the bin.

Like an exasperated Victorian parent faced with one question too many from a recalitrant child, the director has answered: 'Because I say so.'

He repeats his assertion that there is no unlawful blanket policy of taking discussions of certain sorts of financial information into private and refers me back to his original letter without dealing with any of the details we put before him.

'At the Cabinet meeting on 3rd August, when your reporter was present, I explained clearly the presumption that all business must be dealt with in public unless there are good reasons why information in a report should be dealt with as “exempt” and that the public interest in maintaining a statutory exemption outweighs the public interest in disclosing information.'

And so he did. But, once again, he doesn't explain how the 'balancing' act between openess and privacy was done. That, in my view, is because it wasn't.

It would have been quite easy to set it out with a list of the things which were said to be on the side of openess, followed by a list of the those which demanded secrecy and an explanation of why. But it's not going to happen. The director has spoken.

So, is that it? Well, possibly not. As I mentioned before, the leader of the city council, Councillor Ross Wilmott, also wrote to me and although he said much the same as the council's legal advisor, he did at least offer to meet with me to discuss the situation. I've accepted, suggesting that we meet one to one. Councillor Wilmott is, of course, the key to all of this - as leader of the council he could easily persuade those around him to be more open and I will take the opportunity to ask in detail the questions we have already raised in the hope of persuading him that the decision on Bowstring could have been taken more in the open and that, in future, a more rigorous questioning of reasons given for meeting in private might lead to more transparency.

Council letter filed in drawer marked: You would say that, wouldn't you?

2009-08-12T07:41:00.006+01:00

Surprise, surprise! I'm hearing rumours that the city council's reaction to our complaints that they are too secretive is to ... become even more secretive!

Apparently, the council has now reduced the number of people who get to see confidential documents so that even fewer people are in a position to question what they are doing and how. I don't know who has been removed from the distribution list or why as, obviously, the council isn't publicising its decision!

Below is my full response to the council's letter outlined in my previous post, showing why:

The Bowstring Bridge decision should not have been taken in private
The council's hysterical claims around the damage we did in reporting what happened was just that - hysterical
It's rubbish for the council to claim that they were not making a decision to knock down the bridge last week.

WARNING: If my last post sent you to sleep, skip this one! It goes into even greater detail as to what we don't like about the council's position!

Dear Mr. Nicholls,

I have been provided with a copy of your letter dated August 5^th to our solicitors, Foot Anstey. I have filed it in the drawer marked ‘you would say that, wouldn’t you.’

It seems to me that you seek to find the most obstructive reading possible of the Local Government Act 1972 to prevent public access to Council meetings.

Furthermore, I would point out that simply making statements does not make them true.

Let us first deal with your assertion that the council does not have a blanket policy which automatically excludes certain forms of exempt information without first considering the public interest test on each occasion. Whilst it may be true that the Council does not have an explicitly stated policy to such an effect, the council does, de facto, operate such a policy as evidenced by the following points:

As you yourself point out, the Act requires that the Council consider, in all the circumstances of the case (my emphasis), whether the public interest in maintaining the exemption outweighs the public interest in disclosing the information. This clearly requires a balancing act, a consideration of both sides of the argument – the benefits of confidentiality and the benefits of openness so that you can decide in each case whether or not the balance comes down in favour of openness. The advice to the cabinet on Monday – and indeed your statement in your letter – simply lists those points which you believe make it against the public interest for openness. Where were the Councillors advised of benefits to be had from public discussion in this case? They were not. So how could the councillors, in all the circumstances of the case, make a decision? They could not. They made the decision based on some of the circumstances, ignoring all those which may have swung the balance in favour of openness.

This is always the case at all meetings of Leicester City Council and its committees. Councillors are always told that a report is marked not for publication because it contains exempt information as defined by Part 1 of Schedule 12A of the Local Government Act 1972 – they are never told the meaning of the legal requirement for them to consider the public interest test. The contra arguments, those in favour of openness, are never listed on the documents.

My Political Correspondent, Martin Robinson, has attended hundreds of meetings under the auspices of your authority and has never once heard a discussion around the public interest test in which the authority has spelled out the benefits of openness so that councillors could carry out the public interest test taking into consideration all the circumstances of the case.

I have studied dozens of sets of minutes and cannot find a single instance where councillors have decided that the public interest test comes down in favour of openness – this, I would suggest, is because councillors are not asked to perform the public interest test taking into account all the circumstances of the case. See above, they are given one side of the argument.

The current chair of the scrutiny committee told me that he cannot ever remember having had the public interest test explained to him: ‘I cannot remember it though it may have been mentioned. If it was it was a very low hurdle to get over.’ I asked him whether he was talked through the test on each and every occasion that he agreed to put something into the private part of a meeting as is required by law. He replied: ‘Definitely not.’ I further asked him whether or not he was ever advised on the benefit of hearing any such item in public as opposed to in private. He replied: ‘Definitely not.’

Former council lead on resources, Councillor Peter Coley, told us that the public interest test was explained on a few occasions ‘most usually as part of a wider discussion instigated by ourselves.’ He further states: ‘Officers did not specifically talk me through the test on every occasion that it was suggested an item should appear (in private), but would nearly always offer some justification for wanting an item heard in private. On the odd occasion when it was not clear why an item should (be heard in private) then I would challenge the reasoning and the officer would provide a rationale which sometimes led to discussions as to whether the public interest outweighed the given reason to hear an item in private.’ He added that on ‘a number of occasions’ the then council leader would challenge the officer’s decision and the public interest test would be carried out. In other words, as a matter of course, there was no public interest test and it only happened on the occasion that a councillor challenged an officer.

It is clear that there is no evidence whatsoever of the Council collectively or its officers /councillors individually carrying out the public interest test and taking into account all the circumstances of the case. There is plenty of evidence of them failing to carry out the test, including your own description of what happened in the meeting that we challenged on Monday.

Moving on to your assertion that our publication of leaked material has seriously undermined the council’s financial and business position. This statement is made without evidence and I do not accept it.

Let’s look at the figures we ‘revealed’ and consider how they might undermine the council’s position.

Our articles have detailed only four figures:

A cost of ‘up to £472,000’ for demolishing the Bowstring Bridge
An initial payment from DMU of £1 for land
Two further payments of £250,000 and £500,000 by DMU as the project progresses.

The first of these figures – the ‘up to £472,000’ to demolish the bridge – appears to be the one that is causing most concern to councillors and would appear to me to be the only one which you might claim ‘would have the potential of unnecessarily enhancing public costs.’

But this figure has been in the public domain for several years – placed there by the city council. In November 2007, a senior councillor was quoted in the Leicester Mercury as having said it would cost about £500,000 to demolish the bridge.

Furthermore, the authority has consistently quoted publicly in its Corporate Capital Plan that the cost of the demolition would be £466,000.

See, for example, the meeting of cabinet on January 27 2003, agenda item 172:

5.2 Duns Lane (Bowstring Bridge) £466,000

Further surveys are being carried out, but the likelihood is that the bridge will need to be demolished for Health and Safety reasons.

Again, see the minutes for the meeting of the economic development and planning scrutiny committee on March 22 2007, agenda item 125

3.23 Duns Lane (Bowstring Bridge) £466,000

This will need to be demolished for health and safety reasons.

Although I have highlighted two occasions in which the authority has put this ‘confidential’ information into the public domain, the figure appears in the publicly available papers of dozens of meetings over the past few years. Indeed, the confidential papers of Monday’s meeting recommend that councillors agree for the immediate release of funds ‘allocated in the capital programme for 2009/2010 to undertake the demolition of the Bowstring Bridge.’ So, what the councillors agreed to do was to spend up to the amount contained in the publicly available document.

I think it is fair for us to repeat our suggestion that it is rubbish that our ‘revelation’ of this figure might cost the council – and taxpayer – money.

In further statements issued to the Mercury since the meeting, it is clear that the council was already well on with the process of selecting contractors to demolish the bridge. We have been told that demolition is due to start ‘around September 21’, a little over six weeks away. This suggests that considerable preparatory work has already been done in terms of the procurement process as it is difficult to see how else a tendering company would have time to undertake the appropriate level of due diligence, come up with a quote and get their workforce into place is such a short timescale. It is difficult to believe that a company that far down the road would not already have seen the publicly available estimate of £466,000.

This statement does, however, conflict with another given to us by the council which says that notice to quit was given to the occupant of the arches last week – before the decision to go ahead with the demolition was taken – and that the arches would be vacated by the ‘end of September’ and ‘we are hoping to start demolition work as soon as possible after this time.’

It is clear from this latter statement that public discussion of this point would have no affect whatsoever on the outcome.

The other three figures contained within our reports relate to the deal you have negotiated with DMU – they have already seen these figures and agreed to them. It is difficult to see how our reporting of them could damage the deal in anything other than a hypothetical way, underlying our assertion above that a proper consideration of the public interest test may well have led to a decision to hold the discussions in public.

Finally, I come to your claim that: Further, it appears [the newspaper] has misled the public into thinking that yesterday’s decision was to demolish the bridge, whereas authority was given by Cabinet as long ago as July, 2005.

(We will put aside the fact that you emailed the letter to our solicitors on Wednesday, which suggests to me that you wrote it on Tuesday but needed to get it signed off by your senior colleagues and/or political masters, thereby delaying it by 24 hours).

As far as I am concerned, your claim that the meeting on Monday did not approve the demolition of the bridge is the sort of political double-speak that leads to people not trusting politicians.

It is true that cabinet did approve the demolition in 2005, but, in each year since then, the bridge has not been demolished. The decision in 2005 was taken because council officials said the bridge would ‘fall down within a year’ if it was not demolished. It had nothing to do with a potential deal with DMU so, while a decision was taken in 2005, in each year since then, the council has decided, by default through its actions, not to demolish the bridge. On Monday, a decision was taken that would lead directly to the demolition of the bridge – councillors finally agreed to spend the money they had set aside to knock it down.

Furthermore, the report to committee in July 2005 makes it clear that a decision to demolish the bridge had also been taken on January 9 1997. ‘Eight years have now passed since the original decision was taken to demolish the bridge,’ the report in 2005 stated. Yet despite this decision, the July 2005 meeting ‘decided’ again! Now another four years have passed, but this time the council says the decision did not need to be taken again.

However, it is clear that the bridge could not be demolished without the decision taken on Monday as this was the point at which councillors agreed to spend the money.

It is, therefore, hardly surprising that in the years since 2005, officers and members of the council have been confused about whether or not the bridge was to be demolished. There are numerous reports in our newspaper where senior councillors, especially Councillor Patrick Kitterick, are quoted as using terminology which implies that the bridge may not be demolished. Specifically in March 2008, Councillor Kitterick said that a temporary stopping order on a footpath over the bridge was being applied for to give the authority more time to ‘make a decision about the permanent stopping order.’ If the bridge was definitely being demolished, why did the authority need more time to make a decision? If it was definitely being demolished, the council definitely needed the permanent stopping up order. In October 2007, Councillor Kitterick said: ‘Development plans are being discussed with DMU which may involve the bridge being removed. Nothing has been settled yet.’ In September 2005, council finance spokesman Councillor Pete Coley said: ‘We’re keen to look at every viable suggestion that could save the bridge …’

It can be seen that senior councillors were of the opinion that the bridge might not be demolished even after the decision of 2005.

And they were not alone.

Council officers also seem confused as to the status of the decision:

In a report to the meeting of the cabinet on March 13 2006 – several months after the ‘decision’ council officials put the following line into a document outlining the council’s corporate capital programme:

3.28 Duns Lane (Bowstring Bridge) - £466,000

Further surveys are being carried out, but the likelihood is that the bridge will need to be demolished for Health and Safety reasons.

The same report had been sent to the cabinet meeting on March 2005 – before the ‘decision’ of July 2005 – indicating that council officers did not see that the situation had changed.

The same report also went to the full council on March 16 2006, indicating that neither members of the cabinet nor the full council saw anything wrong with the official’s appraisal that it was likely the bridge would need demolishing – this again is several months after the decision which you say was final from July 2005.

By the meeting of economic development and planning scrutiny committee of March 22 2007, this has changed to:

3.23 Duns Lane (Bowstring Bridge) - £466,000

This will need to be demolished for health and safety reasons.

Presumably something happened during that 12-month period? If the surveys referred to in the meetings of March 2006 had found that the bridge was not in danger of falling down, would it have been left standing? If not, why did council officers consistently say only that it was ‘likely’ the bridge would be demolished? How is a member of the public or press supposed to interpret that? Surely, if you are correct about the status of the ‘decision’ taken in 2005, the health and safety surveys were irrelevant – the bridge was being demolished. Why was the council spending further money on surveys to decide whether or not the bridge needed demolishing?

Finally on this point, we have several articles in the Leicester Mercury in which De Montfort University, when speaking about their planned £6-million development of the site (it’s interesting that this figure can be given in public without endangering the procurement procedures of the university) have said repeatedly that they would not comment until the fate of the bridge had been decided. This they continued to say long after the July 2005 ‘decision’.

All in all, it is clear that while a ‘decision’ was taken in July 2005, nobody at the council – members or officers – nor anybody outside the council (DMU and campaigners) thought it was a final decision. The decision on Monday was the one which sealed the fate of the bridge.

Despite all of this argument about the rights and wrongs of your actions under the law, the most depressing aspect of the issue is that the council claims to believe in open and transparent government and yet continues to look for the harshest possible reading of the 1972 Act to meet in private.

You should know that I consider the final paragraph of your letter to be nothing but a thinly veiled threat to this newspaper, by which you attempt to restrict our right to independent reporting of the Council’s affairs. It will not succeed. We will continue to reveal, at every opportunity, the hypocrisy of a council that says it believes in open and transparent government, but ignores the very law introduced to give the public rights to see decisions being made.

Finally, being aware of your professional obligations, I confirm that you may henceforth correspond directly with me; there is no need for you to write to Foot Anstey, or copy them in on correspondence.

Council issues thinly-veiled threat in attempt to silence Mercury

2009-08-08T08:38:00.008+01:00

Leicester City Council has rolled out its big guns in an attempt to stop the Mercury challenging the way it retreats into private at the drop of a hat when discussing emotive subjects in the city.

We received two letters within a matter of minutes on Thursday - one from council leader Ross Wilmott, the other (sent to our solicitors and subject of this post) from the Director of Legal Services, Peter Nicholls.

From the hysterical - read that how you like - reaction of the council you'd think I'd been sneaking into their homes at night and eating their children as they sleep! I haven't - I'm simply asking that they use the law to make their decisions more open and transparent, rather than using it to hide behind and dodge the scrutiny of the public.

I don't know why I am surprised. I know it's sad - and I'm not recommending you do the same unless you suffer from insomnia or share my morbid fascination with local democracy in action - but I recently spent a couple of evenings watching more than seven hours of webcasting of a couple of the city council's most recent meetings. What struck me more than anything else was the total lack of respect shown by councillors for members from the opposite side of the chamber - it doesn't matter how reasonable a question is, the response always begins with a childish, snide comment. It was a bit like watching Prime Minister's Question Time from the House of Commons without the intellect or wit.

It reminded me of Dennis Healey's great put down of Geoffrey Howe in 1978 when he likened criticism from the Tory grandee to 'being savaged by a dead sheep' ... which brings me neatly back to Mr Nicholls letter.

You can read it in full here - and my next post will be the response I have sent to him - but it concludes with the threat:

'(Monday's) Cabinet meeting handled the question as to whether the public be allowed access to the meeting lawfully, very much in the public interest, and I ask that (the Mercury) will support and work with the Authority to avoid unnecessary publication of leaked information which has the effect of undermining the democratic process and unnecessarily wasting public money.

'A failure by (the Mercury) to respond positively and provide an assurance to this affect will be regarded as a refusal to accept the seriousness of the position and your client will be held responsible.'

Whatever can he mean? Held responsible? I am always responsible for what goes in the Mercury - I know that I go to prison if the paper gets it wrong and commits contempt of court, I know that I can be personally sued if we libel somebody, and, in a wider sense, I know that everybody thinks I am responsible for everything in the paper.

Mr Nicholls, you ask that I work with the authority to avoid unnecessary publication of leaked information. I will. I am. The only reason that it is necessary to publish leaked information is that you, as an authority, put too much information into the private part of your meetings. If you stop doing that, we won't publish leaked information - we'll publish the information that is in the public domain. I am working with you - it is me that is bringing up the issue and asking you to put public interest information into the public domain, thereby removing the need for us to publish leaked information.

You're right, of course, all this 'private' information does have the effect of undermining the democratic process. There is nothing democratic about private meetings. I am happy to work with you to bring much more of it into the public.

The crux of this spat is the Mercury's claim that the council operates an unlawful blanket policy of sticking stuff into private meetings without first considering - as it is legally obliged to do - whether or not the public interest would be better served by the debate being in public.

In his letter, Mr Nicholls himself describes this as a balancing act - you need to weigh what damage might be done by publication of the information and put that against the benefit of public debate. And, of course, Mr Nicholls goes on to say that the council always does this.

Then he goes on to show, very precisely, exactly how they do NOT by detailing how the balancing act was done in Monday's meeting.

Remember, the debate into this at the meeting was prompted by our legal challenge. Mr Nicholls says he summarised our letter to the councillors and that they then carried out the balancing act, weighing out the two sides of the argument.

He says that cabinet members noted that the report included commercially sensitive (see my next post as to why that's not true) and business issues, which he then lists. Ok, that's one side of the balance dealt with.

And on the other side? In favour of debating in public? Oh, nothing? Councillors were not told of any argument in favour of open debate? Not even the council's much-vaunted supposed belief in open and transparent government? Or the weight of public interest in the topic?

The Information Commissioner - the man given the responsibility for policing such things as the Freedom of Information Act - suggests things which should be considered when applying the public interest test (although he is talking about the FoI at the time):

'Examples of arguments that could weigh in favour of disclosure

• General arguments in favour of promoting transparency, accountability and participation
• Disclosure might enhance the quality of discussions and decision making generally.
• The balance might be tipped in favour of disclosure by financial issues. For instance, if the information requested involved a large amount of public money, this might favour disclosure.
• The specific circumstances of the case and the content of the information requested in relation to those circumstances.
• The age of the information might tip the balance in favour of disclosure. The passage of time may impact upon the strength of the public interest arguments.
• The impact (beneficial or otherwise) of disclosure upon individuals and /or the wider public.'

We get none of this. The council carries out a balancing act without ever looking at the other side of the scales - the net result is, de facto, an unlawful blanket policy that always puts certain sorts of information into private discussion, excluding the voters and taxpayers from having their say.

I want to go further and say that the council never properly scrutinises those factors which it says mean something should be heard in private - I will go into this in much more detail in my next post, but here's one example.

Councillors were particularly upset that we revealed that it would cost up to £472,000 to demolish Bowstring Bridge. Councillor Patrick Kitterick was scandalised by our scant regard for 'confidentiality' of this figure, going as far as to suggest that our 'revelation' could cost taxpayers' a 'six-figure sum' as the council actually hoped to get it much cheaper than that. According to the senior cabinet member, demolition companies in the country will now form a cartel and agree not to bid less than that - I kid you not, he actually said this. He said they would band together, break the law, and diddle the taxpayers of Leicester of more than £100,000.

Putting aside the ludicrous nature of this claim, let's take a quick look at just how confidential that figure was.

For at least the last five years, the council itself has listed the cost of demolishing the bridge at £466,000 in literally dozens of public papers. That's right: the council. You can see it here, and here, and here ... and in many other places on the council's website.

Were councillors told this when deciding the weight of this point for the public interest test? No. They just went along with the assumption that any figure relating procurement must be confidential. As I've said, I'll be posting later showing that the same could be said about most of the arguments used by the council to discuss the fate of the bridge in private.

As I've also said before, what depresses me most about this whole affair is not whether or not the bridge is demolished, or even whether or not it is discussed in public, it is the fact that the council cannot step back, leave aside its petty politicking for one moment, and consider seriously its commitment to open and transparent government. They are so outraged that anyone should dare to challenge them, that they will not stop and look at the issue.

Predictable reaction to calls for open government

2009-08-03T19:48:00.003+01:00

There was a depressing predictability to Leicester City Council's dismissal of our legal challenge to their plan to discuss demolishing an historic bridge in the city. And the petty politicking that went along with the decision just made it worse.

Our objection to their decision was put to members of the council's cabinet before they agreed to throw out the press and public so that there would be no witness to their discussions.

In removing us from the chamber they called us irresponsible, erroneous and a rag. Apparently no other newspaper 'in the world' would act the way we do! Of course, I don't really care that they call us names - if I did, you wouldn't be reading about it here because you wouldn't see it anywhere else since we are usually the only people who attend their meetings.

What depresses me is the fact that they cannot bring themselves to step back and consider what is going on. Our complaint is that they are making a huge decision about an area of Leicester without allowing anybody else a say - it just doesn't sit with their claims to support open governance.

As I've said in tomorrow's opinion piece in the paper, if they really believed in openness they would find a way to allow the substantive part of the debate - should they knock down the bridge and allow a sports centre to be built - to be heard in public. They could separate out the bits that they really think need to be kept confidential into a different paper, but they don't, they throw out the baby with the bathwater. We don't accept that any of it needs to be kept confidential at this late stage in their negotiations, but it would at least be better for the residents if they split out the debate. All I am saying is that I wish they would look for ways to hold debates in public rather than looking for ways to hold them in secret.

But that's not going to happen. They sat in private this afternoon and agreed to knock down the bridge. There's no going back on it now ... and now is when Councillor Kitterick says everyone can have their say. Now that the decision has been taken.

We could challenge the decision to sit in private further, but it would probably be pretty pointless. We would have to apply for a judicial review, but, even if we were successful, that would only force them to consider the public interest test (see below) ... and then dismiss it and decide that they were right in the first place. The judicial review would probably fail anyway because they were forced to consider the public interest test by our letter and the fact that we don't like, or agree with, the decision that they came to, they have, nevertheless, carried out their obligation to consider it.

If councillors looked at some of the questions that we have asked of them recently they would see that there is a theme. We don't like the way they make decisions - we are not querying the actual decisions, just the way they make them behind closed doors and without proper communication.

We've queried the way they told everybody involved in the organisation of the special olympics that they would underwrite the games without telling the tax payers, we've queried the way they have not told people about the detailed plans for (and spiralling costs of) the new art gallery in New Walk (although, again we have not queried the actual decision to spend the money), and now we have asked questions about the need for secrecy around the Bowstring Bridge decision.

It doesn't mean that we don't support the city, or even the things they are trying to do ... we just don't like the way they do it.

Mercury issues legal challenge to council over 'secret' debate

2009-08-03T11:52:00.003+01:00

Following on from my post over the weekend, our lawyers have this morning written to Leicester City Council challenging their right to debate the future of the city's Bowstring Bridge in private.

We have asked that they either let our reporter (and the public) into the meeting (which starts at 1pm today) or postpone any discussion of the issue until after they have considered our challenge.

For those interested in reading the letter, you can find it here (pdf).

It may be policy ... but is it legal?

2009-08-01T08:00:00.010+01:00

The way councils pay lip service to open government while riding roughshod over the right of the public to have a say in their decisions is one of those things that drive me mad.

Take Leicester City Council's decision to meet in private to discuss plans to knock down an historic local bridge and sell off the land to De Montford University so that it can build a £6million sports centre and swimming pool.

Would it be a good decision to pave the way for the new sports facilities? I don't know, but I do know that there is a huge amount of opposition locally to the plan because something similar has been mooted before and there was uproar.

But it's not the outcome that is worrying me, it's the council's decision to discuss this in private, excluding the public from the discussion and marking the papers 'not for publication' so that nobody can see the details. Why don't I like that?

Firstly: it may be illegal.
Secondly: and probably more importantly, it flies in the face of the council's alleged belief in open government.

Let's tackle the law first. Of course, the Mercury is not allowed to see the papers because they are confidential ... but somebody has chosen to leak them to us because they feel that the debate should be aired in public. The report author, Jeannette Franklin, a principal valuer at the city council, says her work is marked 'Not for Publication' because it contains exempt information as defined in Paragraph 3 of Part 1 of Schedule 12A of the Local Government Act 1972 because it details 'information relating to the financial or business affairs of any particular person (including the authority holding that information).

I know, I know, stay with me - it is important.

With all due respect to Ms Franklin, it's unlikely that she made the decision that this information should be kept secret. The report is put forward in the name of Neil Gamble, the interim director of strategic asset management. But even then, my guess is that he didn't make the decision - it's quite normal in councils for a senior councillor (eg chair of the relevant committee) and a senior council officer (eg chief exec or relevant director) to get together and decide what is going into the secret part of any meeting.

However, we need to back up a little. The paper is said to contain exempt information, but exempt from what?

Well, the Local Goverment Act 1972 contains the following line: Copies of the agenda for a meeting of a council and ... copies of any report for the meeting shall be open to inspection by members of the public.

It goes on to say: If the officer thinks fit, there may be excluded from the copies of reports provided ... the whole of any report which, or any part which, relates only to items during which, in his opinion, the meeting is likely not to be open to the public.

So, the Act says that all papers being considered by the council must be available for public inspection unless those papers will be discussed in a part of the meeting which will be private. And, earlier in the Act, it says that all meetings must be open to the public unless that part of the meeting will discuss information which is exempt as defined in Schedule 12A of the Act ... which is what Ms Franklin refers to.

On the face of it, you'd say she was right. She says the document contains information about financial or business affairs.

And it does. It tells us that the council will sell some land to the university for £1, spend £472,000 knocking down the bridge and then receive something like £750,000 from the university as part of the deal.

And that is, I am sure, how the council sees it. We queried the decision to hold the meeting in private and were told as much - the report contains financial information and it is council policy to hold such discussions in private. We pointed out that the financial information had been all over the front page of the Mercury and were told it made no difference - that's the council policy.

And there, in a nutshell, is my issue with councils. They cannot have a policy that says all discussions involving such financial details will be held in private - it's not legal. It's against the law.

I know that my own analysis above shows that, on the face of it, the 1972 Act says they can discuss this in private, but there is another part of the Act which over-rules the bit they are quoting ... and it's something they always ignore.

Part 1 of Schedule 12A lists those bits of information that can be exempt from the requirement to be made public ... but Part 2 adds some qualifications to those exemptions.

It specifically says the information is exempt information if and so long, as in all the circumstances of the case, the public interest in maintaining the exemption outweighs the public interest in disclosing the information.

In other words, if the public interest is better served by the information being open, they cannot discuss it in private or hide the papers away. And they are required to consider this every time they make the decision to squirrel away information into a secret meeting. And they don't.

So let's look at this case. Why is this financial information better hidden away? Would it's publication endanger the deal? Not a chance - the deal is done, it's agreed. Would it jeopardise future deals? How? I can't see it.

There are a few other businesses involved who will be made to leave premises that will be knocked down (not least the Pump and Tap pub). But the report makes it clear that they get no say - they are going whether they like it or not. So what is the council saying? Is it best that these businesses don't find out until after the decision is made?

So there seems little to substantiate the argument that there is good public interest cause to discuss this in private, but what about the public interest in discussing this in the open?

Well, as I've already pointed out, there is massive public interest in the decision. There is a great deal of opposition - more than 3,000 people belong to a Facebook group opposing the plan, nearly 1,300 signed a petition on the Prime Minister's website, Leicester Civic Society is desperately trying to get the bridge designated as a listed building and, it appears, English Heritage is about to make a decision.

So exactly how do the scales of public interest come down on the side of the council's lightweight argument for secrecy?

Which brings me to the second part of my dismay - why do councils insist on saying they believe in open government and then decide to talk about controversial decisions in private?

Leicester's cabinet member for regeneration, Councillor Patrick Kitterick, sums up the attitude in Friday's Mercury when he says it is in private because the document includes the price of selling the land. 'That's always been our policy and there will be more opportunities for people to have their say.'

Yeah, right, thanks a bunch. You don't care what the law is and we can have our say after you've made the decision. Great.

UPDATE: The Mercury's political writer Martin Robinson has commented on the same issue on is blog: http://martinwsrobinson.blogspot.com/

And our new football writer is ... not a Leicester City fan

2009-07-30T22:23:00.003+01:00

I'm really pleased to say that we've found a great talent to take over as our chief Leicester City writer.

Rob Tanner will be joining us from the Birmingham Post and Mail in the next couple of weeks - he's been covering West Midlands football for the past decade.

Following on from my earlier post, I can confirm that he is not a Leicester City fan. I got an interesting response to my post on this point, with 'readers' being split 50:50 on the importance of his allegiance, and journalists being 100% certain it was totally unimportant! In the end, I think the most important thing was whether or not we could find a great football writer. I had next to no City fans apply for the job which sort of made the decision for me, but it is clear that Rob has a good knowledge of football and it won't take him long to get up to speed on City.

I'm really excited that we've got a new writer to go along with a new season in a higher division ... and we're planning expanded coverage including a 16 page sports supplement for every Monday.

Here is the name of our secret source ...

2009-07-30T19:18:00.003+01:00

Dear Mr Goodman

Thank you for your letter asking me to name the person who handed over the confidential documents which showed that Leicestershire Fire and Rescue Service was considering closing two fire stations in the county.

As requested, here is the name of the person who gave us the document: Ivor Story. He's an admin grade officer based at County Hall and his mobile number is 07976 78789. I hope that helps with your investigation.

Yes, that's right, journalists are always happy to name their sources. In fact, while I'm at it, would you like to know the name of the person who handed over the confidential documents that form the basis of our front page lead in tomorrow's Leicester Mercury? Or, perhaps, the real identity of Deep Throat?

What is it with council officials? Don't they have a proper job to do? Is Guy Goodman, solicitor and monitoring officer at the fire authority, so under-worked that he has time to waste writing to me asking me to reveal our source? Of course, he didn't decide to do it off his own bat - he was told to conduct an investigation by the Chief Fire and Rescue Officer, with the agreement of the Chairman of the Combined Fire Authority no less!

In a very formal letter addressed to me and marked 'Personal, Private and Confidential', Mr Goodman says: 'The unauthorised disclosure of this confidential report was a serious breach of both the Members' and Officers' Codes of Conduct. It is important that the source is identified and appropriate action taken.'

Important to who?

For the avoidance of doubt, it wasn't Mr Story. I made that up. Ivor Story (get it?)

Why won't I tell you? Apart from the obvious answer that says that nobody would leak information to the media if we revealed our sources, the Press Complaints Commission code of conduct, paragraph 14, Confidential Sources, says: 'Journalists have a moral obligation to protect confidential souces of information.'

And it's not just the code of conduct, the law is on my side (although I guess you already know that since you're a lawyer).

It seems likely that Section 10 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 would back our decision:

'No court may require a person to disclose ... the source of information contained in a publication for which he is responsible, unless it be established to the satisfaction of the court that disclosure is necessary in the interests of justice or national security or for the prevention of disorder or crime.'

And Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights would seem to add further to our defence:

'(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority ...'

The approach of the European Court of Human Rights as to the role of article 10 in achieving this was clearly set out by the court in Goodwin v United Kingdom (1966) 22 EHRR 123 in these terms:

"39. The court recalls that freedom of expression constitutes one of the essential foundations of a democratic society and that the safeguards to be afforded to the press are of particular importance.

So, Mr Goodman you will have to continue your investigation without our help. Unless, of course, you could find a better way to spend your time.

The moral outrage often expressed by council officials and elected members when they decide to hunt down somebody responsible for a leak is, at best, often disingenuous. So many of them leak documents when it suits them that they can't really expect to be treated seriously when they mount a high horse. I remember, many years ago, sitting in a council chamber listening to a council leader describing me as public enemy number one and saying that he would not rest until he had tracked down the source of a particular leak. There were two people in that chamber who knew who the source was - me, and the person who leaked it ... the council leader.

DMGT interim statement shows 33% reduction in year-on-year ad revenues for regional papers

2009-07-23T20:38:00.004+01:00

Our parent company, DMGT, put out an interim management statement today, covering our third quarter trading, which ended on June 30th.

I think I've explained before that the Leicester Mercury and its sister publications in the city (primarily the Messengers, Mails and Leicestershire and Rutland Life) are part of Northcliffe Media, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Daily Mail and General Trust plc.

You can read the full statement here, but below is the bit about Northcliffe:

Northcliffe Media
Northcliffe Media’s total revenues for the quarter were down by 27% to £79 million. Of this, UK revenues were down 28% and International down 22% (down an underlying 19% in local currency).

UK
UK advertising revenues for the quarter were 33% lower than the same period last year, compared with a year-on-year decline of 36% in the previous quarter. As we indicated in May, absolute weekly levels of advertising revenue appear to have stabilised. Retail, now the largest category, was down by 16%, recruitment down 56%, property down 46% and motors down by 28%. June and the first three weeks of July have seen revenues respectively 30% and 28% lower than the corresponding weeks last year.

UK digital revenues for the quarter were just 6% lower than the same period last year, with recruitment revenues 43% lower but a 60% growth in other categories. Unique visitor levels to Northcliffe’s network of “thisis” websites in June 2009 were 37% higher than the previous June.

UK circulation revenues for the quarter were 8% below last year. Daily and weekly paid for titles sale (unaudited) declined by 9% and 8% respectively in the January to June 2009 ABC period.

Northcliffe has continued to transform its cost base. UK publishing costs were 19% lower in the quarter than last year with all major cost categories down. The closure of presses in Leicester and Bristol has further reduced printing costs.

I think that it's fair to say that although Leicester continues to perform relatively well, we all still face a very challenging time despite the slightly slowing rate of decline in revenues.

All in a day's work

2009-07-21T20:03:00.007+01:00

My conversations today illustrate why being a newspaper editor is such a good job.

I know this wouldn't be everybody's cup of tea, but I spent an hour and a half talking with the chief exec of the soon-to-be defunct East Midlands Regional Assembly about the issue of getting people interested in a body which covers a region that nobody believes exists. The Assembly is currently made up of about 110 members drawn from the various local authorities across the 'East Midlands' which stretches from the south of Northampton to the edge of Manchester. On March 31st next year, the Assembly disappears. The next day, April 1st - I kid you not - the 110 members will be replaced by 14 council leaders who will form the new Local Authority Leaders' Board.

This board will be responsible for putting together those strategies which are too small to be described as national, but too big to be left to individual councils, such as housing or transport. Perhaps the most interesting thing from Leicester's point of view will be how our city council leader, Ross Wilmott, reacts to being party to decisions made by a board which is dominated by Tories ... I think I'm right in saying that there will be 11 Tories and possibly only two Labour leaders.

Ok, ok, I know that doesn't sound like the most interesting start to a working day ...

But look at these three decisions I had to be involved in afterwards:

Firstly, I had a letter - yes, a real letter, hand-written on paper and sent with a stamp on it (I get quite a few) - from a reader who had attached a website article. What he wanted to know was why the Leicester Mercury had not reported on the attached article. 'I can see no reason not to believe it,' said the reader.

What was it that they believed and wanted us to report?

It was a report about an allegedly fearless Austrian investigative reporter, Jane Burgermeister, who has filed filed criminal charges against the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations (UN), and several of the highest ranking government and corporate officials concerning bioterrorism and attempts to commit mass murder. She has also prepared an injunction against forced vaccination in America. These actions follow her charges filed in April against Baxter AG and Avir Green Hills Biotechnology of Austria for producing contaminated bird flu vaccine, alleging this was a deliberate act to cause and profit from a pandemic.

In her charges, Burgermeister presents evidence of acts of bioterrorism that is in violation of U.S. law by a group operating within the U.S. under the direction of international bankers who control the Federal Reserve, as well as WHO, UN and NATO. This bioterrorism is for the purpose of carrying out a mass genocide against the U.S. population by use of a genetically engineered flu pandemic virus with the intent of causing death. This group has annexed high government offices in the U.S.

And all of this for financial and political gain.

How do you reply to that? What do I say to the reader who can see no reason not to believe it? How do I reply without insulting the reader?

Then on a more serious note I had to deal with a complaint from another reader who was furious about something we carried in the paper on Monday which he said made someone in his family look like a white supremacist and, therefore, put them in danger.

He demanded that we carried a full and prominent apology, setting the situation right. The problem was that we could see nothing wrong with our report and could see no way it could be interpreted in the way that the family was interpreting it. We checked with our lawyers - they agreed with us. We even rang the Press Complaints Commission to discuss it with them and, although they couldn't actually comment as they could end up adjudicating on any complaint, we are confident that we have not breached the code.

I showed the offending article to several people and none of them agreed with the reader ... but the reader countered that everybody he had shown it to thought our reporting was outrageous.

That's a very difficult situation. I have often said that when we are in the wrong, we should admit it and apologise, but what happens when you are sure you are not in the wrong. It's easy to be bull-headed about it - go ahead and sue, we'll see you in court. Take it to the PCC, we're confident.

But there's the other side to this - these are readers who are upset. Why would want these people telling everybody they know how horrible we are? We wouldn't. I suggested a half-way house - we're not going to run a correction and apology when we don't think we've done anything wrong, but I would consider publishing something from the family explaining how they feel. The reader wasn't overjoyed by the suggestion - he'll still probably complain to the PCC - but he did say he would have a go at writing something. My fear is that he'll write something I won't feel we can publish ...

And then finally ...

We were faced with deciding how to deal with a story about Miss Leicestershire, Jade Elliott, who suffered, what I believe is euphemistically referred to as a wardrobe malfunction while competing in the final of Miss England. You can probably imagine what happened from the picture below ... what we had to decide was how to report it in a family newspaper (which is clearly not something that was bothering plenty of websites last night!) Suffice to say, we're not using the pictures that many others are.

You've got to admit, my job's nothing if not varied!

Phew ... the economy is recovering

2009-07-19T09:22:00.003+01:00

A bit of light relief for all those who thought the economy was going through a tough time ...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Pyramid Economy

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Joke of the Day

You can't please all of the people ... Part 1

2009-07-17T21:59:00.009+01:00

We had 117 comments in three days on my post on plans to introduce registration to the comments system on thisisleicestershire ... and they illustrated the issues we face on every level.

Before I talk about what I made of the comments, I have to say this: I have no idea how many different people made the comments, how often people posed as other people to make comments or which comments were meant to be taken seriously. I do know that I tried to respond to four comments, but on each occasion the email address given by the poster turned out to be fake and my replies bounced back.

Despite all of that, I think it has been an interesting and useful exercise.

I think there were a number of trends that could be seen in the comments:

A lot of people think we moderate unfairly at the moment.
Very few people said they would not register to use the comments system.
Some people think we moderate too much
Some people think we don't moderate enough

Despite this, I think there was a lot of underlying agreement on the way forward.

In this post, I'm going to deal with the first of these: the question of how we currently moderate is a difficult one for me as I don't recognise the claims being made as accurately reflecting our policy. What is clear is that we need to spell out what we think is acceptable and what we think is unacceptable - I'll come back to what that might be later, but, first, here's a selection of what some commenters said:

I have submitted comments on numerous subjects, but very few have appeared. I stick to the point, am honest and make every effort not to offend - Susan, Leicester
I too have been a victim of my comments being removed - Bobbi, LE1
I have said this time again you need guidelines, the Mercury do not play fare at all I have had comments removed with no reason what so ever, where other comments have stayed, which I believed to be more offensive! I would LOVE for a spokes person from the Mercury to explain why they have removed some of my comments and not others? Not just - CJ, Leics
LM you have lost so many of your readers as you censor way too much and it is clear that the moderators are nothing other than crazy do gooders who only allow their own ideas to be published. Remember you are running a business LM and if you continue to shut down half of your customers comments they will simply go elsewhere. A newspaper is supposed to be inpartial to views but you are clearly not - Rob, Leic
Does one presume, that you've actually noticed how many people have stopped commenting because of your censorship? - Mr A, leics
Great idea, as your moderation of the site has, on occasion, seemed a little inconsistent in the past - Lol, Groby
I won't object to having to register but please allow people to air their opinions without fear of having their posts deleted or edited for no good reason other than the fact that the moderator doesn't agree with them - Bill, leicester
I still maintain however that the LM openly asks for people to put their views on this website and then proceeds to delete them if there not deemed pc enough or may cause a heated debate which is totally wrong - Daniel, Leicester

Adam from Leicester left the following:

"I do not believe Pops was suggesting you ban do gooders - it is clear what he is saying and it is a view that many of us share and it is a view that has resulted in many, many people turning away from both your site and paper. Pops is clearly stating that the LM only appear to allow the views of the liberal left and any other views including more right wing views are simply deleted all the time - thus there is no balanced debate. It is so clear from viewing comments over the last few weeks that any right wing view is immediately deleted by the LM and any left wing view is
left on - so Pops was clearly saying that whilst the moderators are so clearly extreme pc and left wing that no normal people (non left wing) will bother to read, comment or buy your paper.

"It is common sense - either allow all comments and views to be aired without censorship (within legal boundaries naturally) or simply do not bother with having a forum as presently you only have extreme do gooders battering us all with their aggressive nonsense and like pops and myself and many others - we can not be bothered to even read your paper - let alone comment on it."

And, finally on this topic, Tel, of Leicester, said: 'There is a lot of censorship going on.'

Clearly there is an issue. Something appears to be going wrong somewhere as I don't believe we have any policy internally that would lead us to moderate in a way that would make it so that someone like Susan could claim that she sticks to the point, is honest and makes every effort not to offend and then finds that her comments are deleted. I did try to write to a number of posters (not Susan) to ask them to give me examples of this, but unfortunately all those that I chose turned out to have fake email addresses.

So where do we go from here?

Firstly, I will carry out an audit of what exactly it is that we are deleting. That's not as easy as it should be, but we will do it.

Secondly, whatever decision we take on registration and moderation, we will post a set of guidelines which state exactly what we think is acceptable and not acceptable. Before we do this, we will post a set of suggested guidelines for discussion by users - I don't expect there to be unanimous agreement on this, but I believe there will be a lot of common ground.

Thirdly, if we do introduce mandatory registration, we will consider writing to individual posters explaining why their comment was deleted.

Looking to expand the conversation

2009-07-12T08:02:00.004+01:00

We are planning to alter the way we allow people to comment on our main website, but would like to know what you think before we introduce any changes.

We would like to make the comment functionality on thisisleicestershire available 24-hours-a-day and for us to have a lighter touch in our moderation. We think the best way to do this would be to introduce mandatory registration for those who wish to comment and then ask for community volunteers to help with the moderation.

We also plan to introduce clear guidelines for what's acceptable - these will not be onerous, but are likely to include a ban on anything libellous or illegal, along with most swearing and personal abuse. They will not prevent people from criticising the Leicester Mercury or each other.

Currently, you do not need to register with our site to comment - anybody can come along and add their views in just a few moments, cloaked in anonymity and without us having any idea who they are. As such, a significant minority of people abuse the system and this, in turn, leads us to a situation where we feel the need to check every single comment added and, since we cannot have staff working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we restrict comments to normal office hours as we can guarantee that somebody will be available to moderate.

We believe that asking people to register and validate their email address is more likely to create some form of bond with the site and will lead to more self-moderation and, therefore, a more reasoned debate. Combining this with some volunteer community moderators would, we hope, allow us to open up our comments on a 24/7 basis.

Over time, we plan to improve our comment functionality and to add forums and, hopefully, to allow people to use existing web profiles such as those created through Facebook, Twitter or their blog to comment.

What we'd like to know is whether or not you think these proposed changes are a good idea. Please leave your comments here (24 hours a day!) or on thisisleicestershire when we add this post to that site on Monday.

Using illegal phone hacks to find a story ...

2009-07-08T20:09:00.004+01:00

Nick Davies, a freelance reporter and author of Flat Earth News, is not always the most popular of journalists amongst his peers. His book claims to take "the lid off newspapers and broadcasters, exposing the mechanics of falsehood, distortion and propaganda; naming names and telling the stories behind stories."

His latest article will presumably see him removed from even more journalists' Christmas card lists! Writing on the Guardian.co.uk today, Davies says that Murdoch-owned papers have paid out £1-million to gag what he calls 'phone-hacking victims'. He says the money was paid to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of journalists' repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.

"The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures and to gain unlawful access to confidential personal data including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.

Today, the Guardian reveals details of the suppressed evidence which may open the door to hundreds more legal actions by victims of News Group, the Murdoch company that publishes the News of the World and the Sun, as well as provoking police inquiries into reporters who were involved and the senior executives responsible for them."

It is a detailed and sensational story and I'm not in a position to comment on its veracity, but it does have the hallmarks of a well-researched and accurate account.

There's no doubt that the level of trust in journalists has eroded over recent years and, if it wasn't for the scandalous behaviour of some Members of Parliament, it's possible that no profession - no, not even estate agents - would come below journalists in a league table of 'trustworthiness'. In turn, this makes people question what we write more and more - see for example my post earlier this week on the reaction of readers to our article on swine flu in Leicester. Clearly articles like the one by Nick Davies don't help and few people are likely to spend much time wondering whether or not they should tar all journalists with the same brush any more than they would worry about generalising a claim that 'all MPs are on the take.'

I only really want to say one thing about the Nick Davies article and that is this: no journalist at the Leicester Mercury uses illegal methods to find stories.

How can I be so sure? If you get a moment, read media pundit Roy Greenslade's comments on Davies' revelations:

"In my years on popular papers - as an editor and a senior executive on the Daily Mirror, The Sun and the Daily Star - it was inconceivable that any journalist could have produced an exclusive story without revealing its provenance.

It was the first question an executive asked of a reporter? How did you get it? And when the executive, be it news editor, features editor, assistant editor, whoever, presented that story at a conference, any editor worth his/her salt would ask the same."

Agreed.

You can't always shoot the messenger!

2009-07-05T08:33:00.005+01:00

Our story last week about the sudden increase in suspected cases of swine flu elicited a surprisingly vigorous response from a number of readers.

What our article stated was that public health officials (two of whom were named) had said that they felt the 20 confirmed cases of swine flu in Leicester were just the tip of the iceberg and that they thought the real number was 'in the hundreds' ... and that it was no longer possible to contain the spread of the virus.

It stated quite clearly that three schools had a small number of confirmed cases: Moat Community College had three, Lancaster School had four, and City of Leicester College had one. However, the officials went on to tell us that 15% of pupils at Lancaster and Moat were off with suspected cases.

The key to this is that the number of suspected cases had grown so rapidly across the city that the health authority had taken the decision NOT to test for the virus any more, but to tell doctors to make their diagnosis via a telephone interview with the patient.

Within 24 hours, the Government used very similar language to announce nationally that the virus could no longer by contained and that we could expect to see as many as 100,000 new cases a day by August. The whole country moved to 'diagnose by phone' method.

Despite this, our readers were not happy.

The very first comment on our story online came from an anonymous person calling themselves a teacher at Moat Community College: "I do not know where the papers have got their information from but 15% of our students are NOT off with Swine Flu, Thanks to this in the paper the students in Moat are very stressed out, thank you leicester mercury, but your input was not needed the students do not need to worry, there is no problem and no need for this report."

We then had this from Joanne: "my daughter is at c.o.l school i have just rang them to send her home but the school is promised my there is no cases of swine flu at the school.and very annoyed this storey has been printed."

And this: "I am a student at the city of leicester college, however i want to be kept anonymous. These falose allegations are rediculous and are worrying some people at our school. We have fath in our headteacher and we know she would keep us safe. She wouldnt open the school if she knew we were in danger. The person who apparently has the virus hasn't been diagnosed but however, is being tested.

After reading this i am glad i did not pick media as one of my gcse's. I woukld hate to be a lying journalist, scaring people into thinking things that are not true."

Finally, Chris Bell from Chochrane in Canada waded in with: "Yet again journalistic panic mongering. an obligation to inform the public or an attempt to create hysteria? me thinks the latter"

We have no interest in creating hysteria and I find it difficult to follow an argument that says we shouldn't report the fact that health officials believe the number of swine flu cases has jumped so dramatically and that they now believe the virus can no longer be contained, or, for that matter, the fact that they believe that these schools have a high number of cases.

The health authority came to us with the statements because they felt the public at large needed to know - they recognise that the Leicester Mercury is still the best way to get a message out quickly. Dr Philip Monk of the Health Protection Agency said: “It is important people realise we now have swine flu in Leicester. People should not panic, but they should be sensible and take precautions, such as good hygiene. There is evidence swine flu is spreading, particularly at Moat Community College and Lancaster School, where there are high absentee rates of pupils that have the flu. This is more widespread than we thought."

We didn't make it up and we carried the message that people shouldn't panic but should take sensible precautions several times in the article.

[The final irony came in our own newsroom where a senior member of our staff started a discussion about whether or not we were over-stating the case ... just a few hours later he was on the phone to his doctor who confirmed he had swine flu! Oh, and he has a direct connection with Lancaster Boys ...] UPDATE: It turns out that our senior staff member does NOT have swine flu! Final proof for the doubters that we have just made the whole thing up!

You are the Editor ...

2009-06-30T21:39:00.005+01:00

There was an interesting discussion in our newsroom today about how to deal with a story about a Leicester man who died after falling from a mountain and I'm interested in how people feel we should have reacted.

It reminded me of something that happened about 15 years ago when I was Editor of the South Wales Echo in Cardiff. One of our reporters had been to the Coroner's court in the city to cover the inquest into the death of a self-employed tiler who had died, along with a young apprentice who was the passenger in his van, when he crashed while speeding on one of the main roads into the city. The inquest was reasonably straight forward and we reported what we heard.

Two days later, the widow of the tiler asked if she could come to see me. Of course, I agreed and spent a harrowing hour listening to her telling me the other side of the story as she cried her eyes out and told me how unfair our report was. It wasn't inaccurate - she agreed that we had reported what was said in the court - but it wasn't fair because the court had looked only at the cause of the crash. It didn't tell the whole story of who her husband was or why he came to be speeding on that road, rather it left him looking like an idiot who risked his own life and that of a young lad while driving like a boy racer. Nobody in court mentioned that the young apprentice had been unemployed until her husband had taken him on and taught him a trade, that the boy thought the world of her husband who had treated him like a son. Nor did anyone explain that the reason that the tiler was speeding was because on his way to work that morning on a lucrative big contract on a major development in the city, the man had taken a phone call from an elderly widow who said that he had tiled her bathroom five years earlier and a tile had fallen off. He had turned the van round, driven the 15 miles to refit the tile and was, therefore, late for his contract. It doesn't excuse his speeding, but it does put it into context.

I asked the woman if she minded speaking to all my reporting staff so that they could hear the hurt that could be caused by an accurate report. She agreed and it was a difficult lesson for reporters.

More recently here in Leicester we have had the case of the teacher banned from teaching by the General Teaching Council - our article was an accurate report of what was said, but the reaction of parents and friends told us very quickly that the story was not fair and we have apologised and done what we can to put it right. For details see the interesting blog post by Ian Wishart, our education correspondent, on how he felt about what happened.

Today, we heard that a man from Leicester had died after falling from a mountain. We got the details - including the man's address - from the police where the accident happened and we went round to his home to talk to his family. Many people might be surprised to hear that families often welcome the local paper into their home at a time of tragedy, but this was not the case today. The family was adamant that they didn't want anything in the paper, not even a paragraph recording the fact of his death.

What would you do in this instance? The death happened in a public place, involved the emergency services and had been reported on a police website. All of my journalistic instincts say that we should publish.

But should we? The family rang the office later in the day again to ask that we don't publish anything. It is not quite the same as the two examples above, but it is about whether a perfectly accurate story would cause such hurt that we shouldn't publish.

What do you think? What would your response be?

Michael Jackson publishing conundrum

2009-06-27T15:23:00.006+01:00

The timing of Michael Jackson's death left us - and many other regional newspapers - with a difficult decision.

At the Leicester Mercury, we see ourselves as a local newspaper. We report on Leicester and Leicestershire and rarely stray beyond these boundaries other than to put a local angle on to national or international events. But sometimes, things happen that are just so big that it is impossible to ignore them.

Princess Diana's death, the country going to war, 9/11, the London tube bombings, Lockerbie, the Hungerford and Dunblane shootings - these are all examples of things which are not local, but which are so enormous in terms of public conscientiousness and reaction, that I believe a newspaper not leading on them looks odd.

I don't think Michael Jackson's death comes quite into the same category despite the level of reaction, but, nevertheless, we took the decision late on Thursday evening to lead the paper on the night's events. Why was that? It was at least in part because it happened so late that I thought that it might miss the early editions of the national newspapers, but it was also because I felt that it was a big enough story to mean that it would be the only thing people were talking about the next day.

Was that the right decision? I don't know. Many other regional papers disagreed and didn't change up and it's too early to see what effect it had on our sales figures. However, I would say that when I saw the bills in the streets later in the day, I felt the decision was right.

What made the decision more difficult was knowing that whatever we put on the front at 2 or 3 in the morning, was going to stay there all day. I would have felt more comfortable if we could have had the shock news of Jackson's death on our front page first thing in the morning when people were still digesting the news, but later in the day, or early in the evening, when many people read the paper, moved on to looking at the reaction ... but that's no longer possible with our overnight printing.

I've posted before about the fact that I believe that early morning printing means that we should be able to get later news into the paper than previously on most occasions, but this does highlight the downside of a single print run and it doesn't make the decision any easier!

As an aside, I noticed that the version of the article that we put on our website at midnight, but replaced by about 8am, was read almost 700 times.

Michael Jackson reported dead - late night

2009-06-26T00:48:00.003+01:00

The first sign I saw that there was something seriously wrong with Michael Jackson last night was on Twitter. At about 10.30pm UK time people were starting to say that he was in a coma ... and some were saying he was dead.

An hour later, there was an absolute storm of tweets, but what was most interesting was that the initial story was broken by the LA Times newspaper on its website and virtually every tweet was about whether or not traditional media outlets had or had not confirmed Michael Jackson's death.

Person after person came on to say that this outlet had confirmed it, or that one had not. And they were not talking about blogs or Twitter, they were scouring the newspaper and TV sites. The story seemed to be accepted only when the LA Times confirmed it.

I'm not sure what that says, but it says something!

I got calls from our chief photographer, Jason Senior, at about 11.30 telling me that national news agencies were confirming the death. Deputy Editor Richard Bettsworth was still in the office and after various conversations, he called the chief sub, Matt Sulley, back into the office and began redoing Page 1 for tomorrow, despite the fact that the news had yet to be confirmed. I updated the website based on the LA Times article.

It will be interesting to see how many of the morning papers have the news tomorrow ...

Should a local newspaper really be neutral?

2009-06-22T20:51:00.002+01:00

When I posted a couple of weeks ago about the way we intended to cover the BNP, @goodfella66 posed this question:

Interesting blog but in terms of a supposedly, neutral local paper don't you think it would be better just to report the interview as is & then let the reader make their mind up on whether he is racist, fascist, bigot, general good guy etc?

And, this morning, I received a letter from a reader who said that they had never written to a newspaper before, but that they were outraged by a 'so-called neutral' local newspaper taking a stance that allowed one of our feature writers to 'ridicule' our new BNP county councillor.

It's interesting that both questioned the neutrality of the newspaper and yet I'm not sure that local newspapers make a claim to be neutral, other than in the sense that we tend not to be political in terms of supporting a particular political party. It's clear from our leader columns that we take a stance on all sorts of issues - we, for example, support Leicester's bid to bring the world cup to the city. Does that affect the way that we cover that issue? Well, yes and no. Yes in that we tend to look for positive articles to write about the bid and give them prominence; no in that it does not prevent us from asking questions (and writing articles) about the downside of the bid. Perhaps a better example would be the Special Olympics which are taking place in Leicester next month. The paper supports the bringing of the games to the city, but it does not prevent us from reporting that the sponsorship efforts for the game have failed and that local taxpayers are left with a bill of up to £1million.

In general, we would want to be supportive of things that we thought were good for the city and we would be anti those things which we thought were bad.

So, we would not support - or indeed publish - views that we thought were divisive. Sexism, racism, terrorism, crime etc. I don't think you'd expect any different.

The problem comes when you get to something like the BNP which is attempting - and, in some people's views, succeeding - to legitimise itself. At this point, there are those who don't accept that it's ok for us to unilaterally decide that the BNP is not acceptable and that we will not treat them in a neutral way.

It's a difficult area and it is, to a large extent, a subjective decision. It's not that long ago that many papers treated Greenpeace as if they were a bunch of tree-hugging left-wing loonies intent on bringing down the capitalist state ... but in more recent years they have become a sort of media darling whose statements are not only actively sought, but accepted almost without question. They are often now portrayed as the heroes of many issues.

I guess, when it comes down to it, this is a decision that I have to make as Editor of the paper - get it right, and most people are happy; get it wrong, and we'd lose a lot of readers!

Whoops! You mean THAT Edward Garnier?

2009-06-22T20:36:00.003+01:00

It's not the question you want to hear from your lawyers when you ring them for advice after you've upset Edward Garnier: Is that THE Edward Garnier QC, and pre-eminent libel barrister?

Worse still, the answer was yes!

That's right, Edward Garnier, MP for Harborough is a barrister specialising in libel ... and we made a pretty poor error in our report on his expense and allowance claims. He wasn't happy! Fortunately, we reached agreement quickly and the error was corrected the next day, along with an apology, and that seems to be the end of the matter.

Open and transparent? Yeah, right.

2009-06-19T08:47:00.004+01:00

I know Wikipedia has all sorts of problems around accuracy and that the dictionary version, Wiktionary, is sometimes not much better.

But, every now and then, crowd sourcing throws up the perfect definition. Here's one of the entries for redaction: The removal of evidence of criminal deception or embarrassing lewd behaviour from a document.

Quite.

The details of MPs expenses have been so heavily redacted (read censored) that it makes a mockery of any claim for openness or transparency. In a recent Times article, Heather Brooke, the journalist credited with sparking the whole allowances row, said: "When it comes to politicians advocating open government the best advice is to ignore what they say and focus on what they do."

I've talked about politicians paying lip service to open government before, but if you get five minutes, read about Ms Brooke's four year battle against MPs and the Government to see their expenses and compare it with the 'road to Damascus' type statements of almost all MPs today.

Where does redaction fit with those statements?

Ms Brooke's Times article is also worth a read especially if you have a fondness for 'Yes, Minister' and the sort of tangled thinking that leaves us with a secret public consultation ...

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind

2009-06-18T22:48:00.003+01:00

I come from a simpler time, a time when wicked meant, well, wicked. It meant the opposite of good. Then my children started to use it to mean the opposite of wicked. Suddenly it meant good. And then today I heard it used in a completely different way on the radio when someone referred to a wicked problem ... which I find defined on Wikipedia as a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognise.

This definition appears to have been around since the 1960s and is usually reserved, apparently, for discussions on social planning but I intend to borrow it to describe the way I feel about the challenges facing newspapers as they consider the digital future. In contrast to the web itself, which changes at an incredible speed, we take time to consider where we should be going and even more time to implement any decisions we take. It's easy to be sucked into a feeling that we should be constantly trying new things, that the creators of great services on the web know exactly what they are doing, but for every Google, or Amazon, or Facebook or Twitter, there are a thousand, no, probably hundred of thousands, of ideas that fell flat on their face with barely more than a handful of people hearing about them.

We don't have the resource - or may be it is luck - to take that many risks.

One issue that I worry about is our place in the conversations that go on in a community. Traditionally, we have played a key role in local conversation. The Leicester Mercury has been the main source for local news for the best part of a century and a massive amount of conversation is based around news. Don't get me wrong - the Mercury still has more than 150,000 readers every day and probably well over 200,000 every week and we can - and do - still put ourselves at the centre of many conversations.

But there is no doubt that social media has enabled a whole new set of conversations and, at the moment, most newspapers are not part of those discussions, or, if they are, it is at the edges. We have a limited amount of social interaction on our sites, usually in the form of comments on news articles, but we are constantly looking for ways to be more involved and you can find examples of newspapers setting up sites which are largely fed by user-generated content and the interaction of users with that content and each other. Perhaps the best example that I have been involved in is Lasting Tribute - a site based around the death announcements from our newspapers, but which relies almost entirely for its success on the content of its users.

However, the more I look at this issue, the more convinced I become that the mistake that we often make is that we attempt to bring our readers to our sites to create this content when we should probably be going to the places where they are already having these conversations, eg Twitter and on blogs. Why would somebody who habitually uses Twitter come to our site to say something that they have already told all their friends elsewhere?

Which is how I came to be sitting in a room in the Institute of Creative Technologies at Leicester's De Montfort University this afternoon surrounded by people who go online under names such as CaffeineBomb, Sleepydog and Solobasssteve. There were about 40 people in the room, gathered for an event run under the NLab badge which was ostensibly looking at how social media could be used to build resilience in small businesses.

In fact, the conversation was much wider and was looking at how social media could be used, for example, to empower individuals to have a better say in government, both locally and nationally.

I am sure that newspapers like the Mercury have a large part to play in these discussions because:

Social media is not universal and we are already looking at a digital divide between the haves and have nots
Information overload is already an issue - it is easy to be swamped and there is something to be said for somebody helping to filter data and conversation
Social media is by its nature fragmented - it is not easy to follow dozens of conversations going on in dozens of different places. Simply because you write online doesn't mean you will be read - there may well be a role for an organisation that can help give visibility
There is clearly still a very large number of people who want to read a newspaper
We are skilled in activities which are vital whatever the distribution platform, not least of which are journalism and sales.

I've already mentioned that we have 200,000+ newspaper readers every week, but we also have more than 20,000 unique visitors to our news websites every day and many times more than that to our various other sites, such as Jobsite, Findapropery and PrimeLocation.

I don't know where we fit in the equation online, but I am sure we have a role to play.

What do you think?

Rallying to the aid of the Boston Globe

2009-06-16T23:32:00.008+01:00

Crowdsourcing and the wisdom of the crowd are pretty alien concepts to many journalists who see a lack of professional vigour undermining the validity of the results obtained when you ask the general public for an opinion.

Only yesterday, I was reading about the Editor of the Birmingham Post, Marc Reeves, who was crowdsourcing photos for his paper, news that was met with outrage from some journalists - the very first comment saying: 'Great way to fill up a page on restricted resources. 'Let's slash the workforce, keep the managers, and make the papers a scrapbook for sumitted letters, photos and match reports.'

There was some support for the Editor:

'I read these comments and feel quite sad. For too long, journalists have behaved as though they are the only ones with a right to appear in a newspaper. If the Post chooses to pick pictures to print, and people are happy for their pictures to be used, then surely there's not a problem. Newspapers need to be part of a community online to survive, and you can't be part of a community if you believe that you are better than everyone else.'

Meanwhile, over in the States, the New York Times company has threatened to close the Boston Globe because between them they are making such big losses ... and one of the most interesting responses has come from the blogoshpere where a number of local bloggers have launched a blog rally.

The instigator appears to be Paul Levy, the president and CEO of the local Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre. Here, in his own words is what is going on:

'We have all read recently about the threat of possible closure faced by the Boston Globe. A number of Boston-based bloggers who care about the continued existence of the Globe have banded together in conducting a blog rally. We are simultaneously posting this paragraph to solicit your ideas of steps the Globe could take to improve its financial picture:

We view the Globe as an important community resource, and we think that lots of people in the region agree and might have creative ideas that might help in this situation. So, here's your chance. Please don't write with nasty comments and sarcasm: Use this forum for thoughtful and interesting steps you would recommend to the management that would improve readership, enhance the Globe's community presence, and make money. Who knows, someone here might come up with an idea that will work, or at least help. Thank you.'

Well, the people of Boston have certainly come up with lots of ideas - there are currently 62 on Paul Levy's blog alone - and they make for very interesting reading. Although one poster asks who is co-ordinating all the responses and is told: 'Co-ordination is not part of social media', I've decided to try to pull them all together ...

My co-ordination is not scientific. I haven't managed to find all the comments as they are spread across many different blogs (most of which, like my blog, have no form of search), but I have captured a few hundred points. I have tried to split them into three different sorts of comments: those that have suggestions for how to improve the print edition; those which primarily suggest going digital; and those that cover other areas such as ownership.

There are a few points that need to be born in mind while reading the comments: Leicester is not America, the Mercury is not the Globe (two very big differences are that the Mercury makes a profit and it is almost entirely devoted to local news), and, of course, those commenting are part of a self-selecting technorati who almost certainly don't represent everyone in Boston (let alone Leicester).

Having said that, UK newspapers face many of the same issues as those in the States and the future of news and our papers is often the main topic of conversation whenever senior media people get together. It's not that often that we get the opportunity to hear what so many readers think ... and they do come up with a lot of very interesting ideas.

To see all the comments that I managed to collate click here, published via Google docs. I apologise that the document doesn't look that pretty, but I haven't found any time to format it yet.

To be honest, I started collating the comments out of personal interest, but thought others might find them useful, given that so many people that I speak to want to discuss the future of newspapers and where our digital offerings fit in our thinking. My own feeling about the comments is that I feel optimistic and doomed in equal proportions as I read through them.

I'd love to hear your views on the future of newspapers in general, and the Mercury in particular and, if that's too big a topic, just let me know of any ways you think we can improve the service we offer in print or online now.

Thanks.

By the way, the image at the top of this page was produced at Wordle and is a graphical illustration of the words found in the all the comments on my Google doc. It's a sort of tag cloud except it's not as good as it is only an image and doesn't link to the words!

Update on our new Leicester City writer

2009-06-15T22:25:00.004+01:00

Since I asked the question about whether or not the Leicester Mercury's next football writer should be a Leicester City fan, I've had a decent mix of replies from readers with pretty much a 50:50 split for and against.

The answers have ranged from the definite: 'Yes, if the Mercury is to have a future'; to the more common: 'It doesn't really matter providing they are a good writer'.

The former came from AJC who helpfully suggested on his own blog how I might improve my chances of survival:

'So what's a struggling editor supposed to do? Well, the first thing is to employ a couple of undergraduates over the summer to show them how to produce a Kindle edition, then in the autumn, roll out trials of downloads and hyperlocal print-on-demand terminals. And of course, the most important thing of all is to get serious about the website and change it from a low rent car boot sale to a conduit that the local community cares about.'

But more of that later.

Returning to the question of the football writer, about 10 years ago I set up a website aimed at regional journalists: www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk (HtFP). It is very widely read by said journalists and is now jointly owned by the UK's four big regional newspaper publishers - Northcliffe, Trinity Mirror, Newsquest and Johnston Press. Today, HtFP picked up on my question about the football writer and re-phrased it:

'What do you think? Should football writers' jobs always go to fans of the local side - especially in one-club cities - or do writers who are more dispassionate about the game generally do a better job?'

To be honest, I wasn't that bothered about what the journalists thought - my guess was that they would all, predictably, think the same as me: it doesn't matter, all that is important is that we get a great writer. And, surprise, surprise, that's pretty much what they all say on HtFP. Equally predictably the conversation collapses into a discussion around the use - or misuse - of apostrophes by a recent graduate looking for a break into the profession:

'If newspaper's only employed football writer's who support the club they cover on their back pages, then how are the journalist's who have taken sport journalism degree's meant to break into the industry?'

Quite. (Although, I'm not sure that isn't a fake post aimed at riling journalists!)

Anyway, as I said, I was more interested in what the readers of the Mercury thought and I'm grateful for those who expressed a point of view even though there was no consensus. As is the way of my blog, most of those who replied did so either via Twitter (@tipexxed) or email. There's still time to add your thoughts.

Face to face with the BNP

2009-06-13T08:54:00.004+01:00

Today's Leicester Mercury carries Adam Wakelin's interview with Leicestershire's first ever BNP county councillor, Graham Partner ... sitting directly opposite a full-page interview with the authority's first Asian councillor for more than 10 years, Jewel Miah.

As Adam says:

It’s tempting to present Graham and Jewel as polar opposites, the yin and yang of last week’s elections: fear versus hope, exclusion versus inclusion, division versus diversity, nasty versus nice.

The reality is probably a bit less black and white.

There was an understandable horror at the result when it was announced, but I hope that over the past few days, the Mercury has been able to put it into some sort of context - the BNP have not swept into power in the county on a wave of popular support ... a mix of circumstances allowed one councillor to be elected with little more than 1,000 votes and a wafer thin majority. Perhaps our focus should be on the changing attitudes that have seen a Bangladeshi immigrant, taunted with swastikas when he arrived in Loughborough, rise to be elected to represent those around him.

Even as I post this, I'm cringing!

2009-06-13T00:12:00.007+01:00

I've taken this from the Jeff Jarvis blog, www.buzzmachine.com, so I know it's not going to be a sales pitch for newspapers in their current form, but it is a decent starting point for a conversation on what newspapers are for. I've talked about the problems we face on timing before, but this clip uses comedy to make the point far more forcefully.

Before I put forward my own thoughts, I thought it would be interesting to see what people had to say about this from a local newspaper's point of view.

Brian Greenberg comments on Jeff's blog:

Right tool for the job, folks. The past mission of the newspaper is not the future mission. News reporting wants to be immediate and online, and so it shall be. Investigative reporting, well-researched background pieces or profiles, long-term analyses - these can be online as well, but they can also be in print (newsprint, magazines, even books).

That's one thought, but what role - if any - do you see papers like the Leicester Mercury playing in the future?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

End Times

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview

PS Brian Greenberg also has a great 'favourite quote' on his profile: “In theory, practice and theory are basically the same. In practice, they are not.”

Tackling the BNP in the paper

2009-06-10T22:48:00.007+01:00

I always knew that dealing with the BNP would be difficult. Until now, we have mostly ignored them, but I sense that we have reached a tipping point and that it makes more sense now to challenge their policies and be sure that those voting for them know exactly what they are voting for.

I blogged about this dilemna - to report or to ignore - previously and received a reasonable amount of feedback, almost all of which came down on the side of reporting, with the notable exception of someone employed full-time to worry about social cohesion who felt that it was still best to ignore. With the election of a BNP county councillor in Coalville, we have decided that we cannot ignore the situation.

Tomorrow, we run a two-page thought piece on how it was that Coalville came to elect a BNP councillor. The two main parties both say that they didn't take the far-right organisation seriously enough and paid the penalty. The sitting Labour candidate admits that half way through the count when he knew he'd lost, he found himself in the peculiar position of hoping his Tory opponent would take the seat. It wasn't to be. It is easy to run away with the idea that the BNP candidate, Graham Partner, was swept to power by a huge protest vote. In fact, 62% of the electorate didn't vote for anyone and 73% of those who did vote, didn't vote for the BNP. The votes that were cast were spread amongst the candidates, leaving Mr Partner elected with a majority of 86. To be fair, the BNP is not the first party to benefit from our first-past-the-post electorial system which frequently sees people elected with a very small percentage of the possible vote.

Tomorrow's article by Lee Marlow makes for an interesting read, but it is the follow-up piece by Adam Wakelin that we are planning for Saturday which presents a bigger challenge for me as editor. Adam is a great writer, but his article is not an analysis, it's an interview with Mr Partner. I read an early draft this afternoon and was left feeling a little uneasy.

It's not that Adam hasn't asked the right questions or that he doesn't have the right background - he's got a great line about repatriation based round the fact that his own wife is 'brown-skinned' - it's more to do with the fact that Mr Partner is, in Adam's words, not a monster. Mr Partner describes BNP leader Nick Griffin as a prat, Hitler as a lunatic and he voted Labour most of his life before becoming interested in the BNP five years ago.

This all chimes with a discussion I had with the editor of the Stoke Sentinel whose paper circulates in an area which has elected a number of BNP councillors to its city council. He told me that it is very difficult because BNP councillors don't spend their time making racist comments, they spend their time being seen to do good things in the community. Of course, they don't want to spend their time talking about their racist policies and it's difficult to mention them every time you write about something they say which is not racist.

I've asked that Adam goes back on his feature and is more explicit about the racist policies and gets Mr Partner to talk more about them. In the meantime, I'm grateful that our lawyers have agreed that it is ok to say that the BNP are racist, fascist bigots ...

Teasing out a sale

2009-06-09T22:30:00.004+01:00

It wasn't the best way to start the day. As I drove down one of Leicester's main arterial roads, I passed an ad for the Leicester Mercury which asked the question: 'Why did city vote Labour?'

The ad took the form of what we call a bill - the A2-sized posters that you see outside newsagents.

This particular bill reminded me of some training I did back in the days when reporters still used typewriters and the only computer in the building was the size of a room and had less memory than my iPhone! We were looking at how easy it is to write meaning one thing, only for readers to see something completely different. The example we were given was this:

GIANT
WAVES
DOWN
FUNNEL

Clearly intended to conjure up a picture of disaster at sea, I still can't see the words without imagining a giant of the jolly green variety happily waving down the funnel! It's easy to see at least four meanings of this single bill and I don't doubt there will be those who see many more.

I knew the story behind our bill this morning - our political correspondent Martin Robinson had been looking at why it was that Leicester bucked the national trend in the Euro elections, giving Labour an increased share of the vote in the city at a time when their share elsewhere had fallen significantly. (We concluded that the main reason was that at the last election something like 7,000 Labour supporters in Leicester had voted for the anti-war Respect party, which didn't put up a candidate this time round, leaving the voters to return to Labour).

My problem with the bill was that I read it as if it was castigating Leicester for voting Labour, as if we thought the voters had done something wrong. It might have been a question we would have asked if the BNP had won the vote.

May be I was looking for it because I hadn't liked one of the bills we wrote the day before which read:

POORLY
BOY
SEES
POPE

I was definitely looking for that one because I'd seen someone laughing at it on Twiterfall, the live feed of tweets from Twitter that I have running in the background on my PC picking up every time somebody says anything about Leicester. The tweeter had a fair point - it's hardly headline news and, worse still, it was difficult to see how it could possibly sell us any papers ... which after all is the purpose of the bills. We're looking to catch the eye of a passer-by, to persuade the casual buyer.

Talking of Twitter, those who use that particular social medium will know just how difficult it can be to get your message across in 140 characters or less - bill writing is a skill that requires you to sell a newspaper in 20 or 30 characters and that's not always easy.

I mentioned that I had been trained in bill writing and in April of this year I did write to the relevant staff at the Mercury with a copy of a training document based on work by Peter Sands, a well-known editorial coach.

That included such tips as:

Headlines tell it, bills sell it. They are not the same.
Will it sell? If not, find something else. Poor bills drive sales away.

... and my personal favourite:

Tease the reader. Don't give away the whole story. 'The bill is like the bikini; what it reveals is provocative; what it conceals is vital' - former Sunday Times editor, Harold Evans.

Clearly, bill writing has not been our top priority, but we spent a bit of time talking about it today and, hopefully, while they might not cause as much amusement from tomorrow, our bills might sell a few extra papers.

Should our Leicester City writer be a Leicester City fan?

2009-06-06T08:05:00.004+01:00

I had lunch yesterday with an old geek friend, Dan, who's also a massive football fan.

In the spirit of openness and amidst the furore around allowances, I'll declare that I was on a day's holiday and paid for the lunch myself and there won't be an expenses claim to cover it, despite the fact that we sat and talked for more than three hours almost entirely about work-related things. Oddly, he turned up with £18,000 in cash in a laptop bag ... but that's another story!

Inevitably the conversation got round to the fact that the Leicester Mercury is currently looking to replace our long-term football writer Bill Anderson who has retired after covering Leicester City for more than 30 years. I placed an advert on a web site called www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk -it's a site I set up about 10 years ago - asking for applications from experienced football writers. We've been flooded with people wanting the job. Almost 140 have applied.

I don't know why I'm surprised - it's a great job if you're a football writer. You get to cover one of the bigger clubs in the football league on a day-to-day basis for one of the largest regional papers in the country. For a lot of people, it is a dream of a job.

I was commenting on how difficult it is to work down from 138 to a sensible short-list and the criteria we are using, when Dan asked: 'Are you looking for a Leicester City fan?'

I have to admit, that wasn't something that I'd thought about, but Dan was adamant that, as a football fan, he wanted his local newspaper writer to be a fan.

Was he right? Should the Mercury's next football writer be a Leicester City fan?

So, what is this blog?

2009-06-04T23:01:00.007+01:00

I've been asked a fair few times about the status of this blog since I first starting putting my thoughts online as editor of the Mercury. Not everybody is entirely happy that I use this medium to talk about what I see going on around me.

I think there is a nervousness in some quarters about the different tone that blogging allows journalists to take compared with the articles they write in our newspapers. As editor of a local paper, the only place I get to express an opinion in print is when writing the leader column, but that is really about giving the newspaper a stance on issues rather than expressing a personal thought and it's not really an appropriate outlet for holding a discussion about what does - or even what should - make a newspaper.

I'm quite clear about one thing - I am blogging as the editor of the paper and see this blog as being as much a part of the company's output as the newspaper itself, our free weekly titles, the monthly magazine or our other websites: thisisleicestershire and thebluearmy. Other people on the paper blog and those who do so in their capacity as employees - education correspondent Ian Wishart and political writer Martin Robinson - hold the same view. I know they do as we sat down and discussed it. We agreed that probably the best analogy was to view the blogs as columns of the newspaper. This means that while they have much more freedom to express themselves and their opinion, it still has to be done within the boundaries of what would be acceptable for the Leicester Mercury. For them, that has an important consequence: they know that I am editor of their blogs and that, if it comes to it, I will get the last say in what they can and cannot blog.

I suspect for a lot of people involved in social media that might seem odd, but I think it is an inevitable consequence of them blogging on the back of their reputation as an employee of the paper. They both seem quite happy with the situation and they blog because they want to, not because I tell them to (which I don't). I don't expect to be involved in what they are saying and I certainly don't read anything before they post ... and so far I haven't intervened in any way on either blog. They are both bright, articulate guys and I'm really pleased that they think blogging is worthwhile.

I see my own blog in a similar way. I see it as a column of the paper.

On the other hand, our news editor, Mark Charlton, blogs in a personal capacity. He doesn't really spend time talking about his role at work - he's much more likely to be found chatting about the twins that he and his wife are expecting ... or some very odd connection that he has with a German football team. Don't ask. Whatever, Mark's blog is not part of the Mercury.

The odd thing for me is this: I hadn't really intended to put my thoughts into the public domain ... yet. Don't get me wrong, I think editors should blog and I think there are massive benefits to be had from holding a public discussion about the paper and how we work. I think the tools of social media give us the opportunity to be far more open and transparent and things like blogging and Twitter allow me to have conversations with far more people than I would be able to without them. I believe that transparency builds trust which itself is the bedrock of the relationship between a newspaper and its readers.

But I wasn't ready yet.

There are two things about blogging that worry me. Firstly, will people find it interesting? And, secondly, will I have time to blog often enough to make it worthwhile? What I had intended to do was to blog 'privately' for a couple of months so that I could judge for myself before putting my thoughts out into the open for feedback. I didn't want to spend too long messing about setting myself up so I picked up an old blog, deleted all the old posts and began writing.

OK, I know I could have gone into my settings and made it a completely private blog, but I - fairly naively as it turned out - thought nobody would notice while I carried out my little trial. Very quickly, I had more than 500 visitors coming to the blog each week - it's not a massive number, but it's enough for me to consider it public rather than private!

To be honest, I enjoy blogging (even if I nearly always end up doing it very late at night - it's now 11.50pm) and I see it as a start. I believe that 'social media' will play a massive part in the success of our newspaper going forward and the key to that success will be conversation ... and conversation is a two-way street which is enabled on a large scale by things such as this blog, Twitter and Facebook.

I'm listening. Talk to me.

Talking to readers

2009-06-03T22:11:00.006+01:00

I pulled up at the security cabin in the DMU carpark this afternoon to be greeted by two men. There was the dreaded sound of air being sucked in through gritted teeth as I explained that no, I didn't think I had a space booked, but I did have a meeting to get to. "Don't know about that, Sir, where are you from?" "The Leicester Mercury." "Right, you've got a new Editor haven't you?" "I am the new Editor." "Right, well when are you going to put something interesting in the paper then?"

We were off to a flying start! To be fair, they were helpful, found me a car park space and then explained that they both had the paper delivered every day - had done for years - but they didn't sound convinced about the content. As I got out of the car, one of them wandered over and asked my a question that I'd already been asked today: 'Have you moved the printing of the Mercury away to Derby? Doesn't that mean that the paper's full of old news?'

Yes and no.

Yes, we have moved the printing, but no it doesn't mean our news will be old. In fact, I believe our news will be more up to date - I'll explain below.

But first, why have we moved the printing? It's obviously about saving costs - running a press is an expensive business and for some time regional newspaper companies have been reducing the number of presses so that the those remaining can be used for more of each day, reducing the amount of time that they stand idle. The presses at the Mercury building have for some time printed other newspapers - including, for example, the Hull Daily Mail, the Grimsby Evening Telegraph and the Lincolnshire Echo. The Nottingham Post has not had its own press for at least the last 15 years and has been printed at Derby. All of these newspapers are part of the same group as the Leicester Mercury, Northcliffe Media Group.

Our sister company in Derby has better, faster presses than those at Leicester and, by moving the Nottingham paper to another of the group's presses in Stoke, we were able to save a lot of money by reducing the number of presses from three to two.

It's wasn't a nice decision - more than 60 people lost their jobs - but it was part of cost-cutting programme that the group has gone through to ensure that it has a healthy future and to guarantee that Leicester keeps an independent local newspaper. I mentioned in my earlier post that we have concentrated on making sure that those things that make the Mercury a Leicester newspaper, remain intact and in Leicester. That means that the reporters, the photographers, the feature writers, the sports team, and the editorial management team - including me - all remain in in Leicester. We also design all the main pages and proof read all pages.

Of course, the one thing that closing the Leicester press did affect was our deadlines. The Mercury now starts printing at about 3am - it takes a few hours to complete the run, but it does mean that the paper is on sale much earlier in the day. In some shops, it is available by 7am and you can find it on the counter of all shops by not long after 10am.

So how can I argue that this gives us the opportunity to have fresher rather than older news?

When I arrived at the Mercury in February, the shift patterns in our newsroom went something like this. The pages in the paper were split into two sorts: live pages and what we call overnight pages. As you might expect, live pages were those that were done on the day of publication. The overnight pages were, as the name implies, done the day before and these accounted for the vast majority of pages. In fact, the number of live pages on the first edition of the paper was usually not more than three.

Most of our staff would work a normal 'office hours' day, which meant that pretty much all of the overnight pages had to be complete by about 5 or 6pm. Obviously we could not put all of our pages together at the last minute and the overnight pages were done throughout the day prior to publication - in fact, on the first Monday that I arrived at the Mercury, the first news conference that I attended was at 9.30am and it was to discuss the news for Tuesday's paper. The only stories that the news editor could confidently tell me about must have come from over the weekend - or worse still, Friday - as he had so little time on Monday to prepare them before the 9.30am conference. As the week went by, it was clear that stories would be held out from one day to give the news editor the opportunity to fill early overnight pages the next day.

Even if the newsdesk wanted to get stories into the paper as quickly as possible, there were plenty of things that happened late in the afternoon, and which were not strong enough to go on the three live pages the next morning, which would therefore be held out for another full day..

For example, a reporter in court who filed her story at 5pm on a Monday would not usually expect it to appear in the paper on Tuesday unless it was strong enough to go on pages 1, 2 or 3. It would appear in Wednesday's paper.

In fact, because our deadlines for the first edition live pages were so early the next morning, some of our staff had to come in at 6am to prepare them. Of course, at that time in the morning, most sane people are still fast asleep, or at least only just getting up ... which meant we got very little news as there was nobody to speak to! This meant in reality that even the news for the live pages was usually prepared the night before and very little changed in the morning.

As I have mentioned we worked what were pretty typical hours for an 'evening' paper - starting reasonably early in the morning, but largely leaving by 5 or 6pm.

Now, however, we are moving increasingly to work as a morning paper - that means that we don't start anything like as early, but we work much later in the evening.

So, the court reporter who files her story at 6pm can be far more confident now that it will appear on Tuesday, not Wednesday as happened under the previous system. It has the potential to bring much of our news forwards, often meaning that it will be published a day earlier. This is not an instant change for us - we have not moved immediately to bring our staff in much later (they could file as late as 2am under the new system), but the paper is moving towards later deadlines, giving us the opportunity to get news into the paper more quickly.

Of course, there will always be the exceptions. Big news that breaks in the middle of the night - under the old system it would have got into the paper the next day on the live pages ... now, the paper would be printed and it would be too late. But you'd be surprised how rarely news breaks in the middle of the night, especially between 2am and 7am.

We will see an interesting test of our new systems on Sunday when the count for the Euro elections takes place. We fear that the count for the East Midlands seats - which is taking place in Leicester - may not finish until 2am. If it is that late, we will get it into Monday's paper ... if it's 2.30am we'll probably still just manage it, but if it's any later ...

Update on Patricia Hewitt exclusive

2009-06-02T12:57:00.005+01:00

While writing the bit below on Ms Hewitt's decision to stand down at the next general election, I wrote to her asking why she came to the Mercury, rather than go to a wider audience through the national press. Here's her response:

"Happy to help with the blog! It's the people of Leicester West who elect me and pay for me, so I had to make my announcement directly to them, rather than just using the national media. I have always felt lucky to have a strong local newspaper like the Leicester Mercury that really campaigns on local issues - so there really was only one choice about how to make my news public."

Ok, there will be those that say that I was looking for a cheap compliment for the Mercury and that the response is a bit sickly - but that wasn't what I was doing, I was just trying to avoid putting words into Ms Hewitt's mouth even though I was fairly sure I knew what the answer would be. While Ms Hewitt's response may be instinctive, or even political, we have plenty of research to show that what differentiates our newspaper from other media around about us is that we are trustworthy, traditional and, most of all, local.

We may be slow in comparison with much of the digital media that we all consume nowadays, but actually slow is not always bad. Note for example the growing 'slow-food' campaign or 'slowdown' - our newspaper habits give us time to look a little more carefully at the stories in front of us. Our reporter spent the best part of an hour speaking to Ms Hewitt yesterday and then plenty more time putting the articles together - he was then helped by our policital correspondent, Martin Robinson, the newsdesk and variuos production people to finish off his work.

So, while the digital response is rapid, much of what was discussed this morning referenced back to the work that we put in yesterday and it was our work that ensured that the conversation that went on was at least based on fact. Even the online versions of the national papers pointed back to us as the original source.

We seek to combine this with our presence online - our exclusive this morning was available on thisisleicestershire long before it was picked up elsewhere and we have used my blog and twitter to look for reaction to help inform tomorrow's article on reaction to Ms Hewitt's decision. It is a difficult balance, but we are looking to combine the best of the old with the best of the new ...

A good old-fashioned exclusive

2009-06-02T06:39:00.006+01:00

The Leicester Mercury has a big political exclusive today - Patricia Hewitt is to stand down at the next general election. It's an exclusive in the old-fashioned sense of the word. That is, it hasn't appeared anywhere else first, although I suspect that within a few minutes of the paper hitting the newsagents and the story appearing on our website, it will be everywhere - all over the Internet, tv, radio and, of course, the national papers (although they will have to wait until tomorrow).

I can't claim that this exclusive is the result of good old-fashioned investigative reporting. Well, not directly anyway. The truth is Ms Hewitt sent me an email over the weekend asking if she could come to see me yesterday as she had an 'announcement' to make which she thought should be done through the Leicester Mercury.

Given the clamour of doomsayers who have been writing the obituary of local newspapers over the past few years, why do people like Ms Hewitt turn to papers like the Leicester Mercury when they have something to say? Clearly the fact that 170,000 people read the Mercury every day plays a big part in that - we are still the best way to talk to the people of Leicester.

And, despite our occasional falling out with those who would rather that we didn't report what we see and hear, most people know that if they come to us we are going to report in a fair and considered manner. Ms Hewitt is not the only person to turn to us recently - it happens every day and it helps make the Mercury what it is. Our aim is to find unique content about Leicester and while much of that content comes from our reporters, much more comes from the people of Leicester themselves.

Our story on Ms Hewitt today reports the fact that she is to quit and gives a brief overview of her political career in the city, but has little in the way of reflection on what will happen next or reaction from anyone on what she has achieved. Why is that? Well, it's the nature of an exclusive. If we had started to ring people yesterday and ask about Ms Hewitt, her decision would have started to appear elsewhere last night and we would have lost the exclusive nature of our story.

Of course, today we will be looking back at her career in more detail and rounding up people's reaction to the news - I think it's fair to say that she hasn't always been the country's favourite politician! If you've got a view, why not add it in the comments to our article online or email it to me for the paper? As I said above, while our reporters will be doing their bit, the people of Leicester will add to the story in their own unique way.

2009-05-31T08:56:00.006+01:00

Do we give our MPs fair coverage?

I've blogged previously on the fairly predictable response by our readers to Keith Vaz's open letter in the Leicester Mercury last Saturday, but I've been back to re-read the letter because there was a part of it that was bugging me.

While I don't agree with much of what he threw at the Mercury - he says we have been unfair and claims to have answered our questions. I, along with the majority of our readers, disagree. Although we know what he spent money on, he has not explained why he thought it right to spend it other than to say it was within the rules. For me, one of the most telling lines in the letter was: 'All MPs get the same budget. It is for them to decide how they spend it.' Is it a budget?

Anyway, that's an ongoing debate which I don't want to get bogged down in today. The issue hasn't gone away - readers are still writing to me about it and I expect we'll see it reflected in next week's election results.

The point I want to pick up on in this post is the one that Mr Vaz makes about our lack of coverage of the work he does as an MP. He says this:

"In the last nine days I travelled to Amsterdam to visit Europol, chaired a European conference on human trafficking, published a 400-page report on the subject, chaired a series of meetings with Joanna Lumley and the Gurkha veterans, spent three days lobbying ministers to agree to the Gurkhas being given rights of settlement, interviewed the Metropolitan Police commissioner and spoken eight times in Parliament."

And that, of course, is on top of any work he did as a constituency MP.

He has a point. We didn't cover any of that.

It is easy to dismiss it as 'not local', as Mr Vaz acting in his capacity as a national politician, of more interest to the national press than his local paper. But that's not entirely fair. Mr Vaz is very active compared with most MPs - in the past year he appears to have spoken in 75 debates, asked more than 246 written questions and he sits on two select committees, including the Home Affairs Committee, which he chairs.

I can find Mr Vaz talking about, or asking quesitons about, Leicester in the House of Commons almost 30 times so far in 2009. In May alone, I can find these:

A quesiton about the number of children suspended in Leicester schools following racist incidents (if I read the answer correctly, far fewer than in the rest of England)
Urging the Government to pay attention to professor of genetics at the University of Leicester, Alec Jeffreys, when considering changing the rules on the retention of DNA samples by the police
A question about the number of independent and internal investigations into the NHS in Leicester - no answer was given.
A question about the number of care homes in Leicester operated by local authorities and private enterprises, and the number of people over 60 years old in them
A question asking for the number of people in Leicester diagnosed with schizophrenia and being held in secure hospitals
A question on the number of racist incidents recorded in Leicester schools. The Government replied that the data was not collected, but promised to consult on whether schools should be forced to record the data
A question on how much public money funds third sector organisations (charities, vluntary sector, not for profit organisations) in Leicester and Leicestershire
A question on the number of third party organisations in Leicester - the Government doesn't know

I'm not sure that we covered any of those in the Mercury.

As a standalone question, it is difficult to see what Mr Vaz was getting at with many of the above, but you have to assume there was a purpose behind the questions and I think he has a point when he says we haven't given him enough coverage.

Don't get me wrong - I don't think that we have treated Mr Vaz unfairly in our coverage on his allowance claims. Apart from anything else, we have twice handed over pages to him to have his say, unedited by us. On each occasion, our readers have reacted with anger at what he has said - it is easy for him to blame the messenger, but, on this occasion, I am afraid people really didn't like the message.

But, having said all of that, I don't think we are giving over enough space to the work of our MPs - and I suspect Mr Vaz will be amongst the most active. I'm going to talk to our newsdesk and our lobby correspondent to explore the possibility of doing a weekly column which rounds up what the MPs are up to.

What do you think, would it be interesting?

And given our article yesterday about the fact that nobody can even name our Euro MPs, perhaps we should be looking at them too!

2009-05-28T21:38:00.006+01:00

Apology for blocking citicism of the Mercury

ajnorman has taken me to task over one of my earlier posts about freedom of speech in which I said that we moderate posts on thisisleicestershire after they show up on the website, 'removing only those which we think create a legal issue or which are in some other way offensive.'

This is what he/she says:

'Or critical of the way the newspaper has covered a story. I don't know who does your moderating, but one of the things that has turned me away from engaging with the website is that even mild criticism of the paper is removed instantly, however well-justified, while all sorts of racist bile is left on the site (see all the pro-BNP comments today, or the comments on any article to do with travellers, for example).'

Firstly, let me apologise. I am sorry that we have removed any comment that was critical of the way the Mercury has covered any story, unless that criticism contained baseless personal criticism of a member of staff. I am assuming in this case that it did not since ajnorman says that we remove even mild criticism.

I promise you that is not my policy. I am happy to allow criticism of the newspaper - the guidance I have given to my staff since the day I arrived in February is that they should engage with readers who have an issue with our coverage. That is, if there is criticism of us on our site, leave it there and explain our stance and, if we got it wrong, apologise and correct it. We're not infallible, we make mistakes, sometimes factual sometimes on matters of judgement. As I said, if that has not been ajnorman's experience since I arrived, I'm sorry and, if you can let me have more details, I will look into your complaint more thoroughly. I would have replied directly to you, but I don't have any contact details.

In the meantime, I will remind those who moderate our site, of the way I feel.

I'll also take another look at your point about us allowing 'racist bile' in case we have misjudged that as well.

UPDATE 10.48pm: Checked for racist bile - ajnorman was right. I've taken the lot down. A few BNP supporters masquerading as lots of different people stimulating a thread that looked as if more and more people said they would vote BNP. Once I'd removed that, the thread made no sense, so had to take the rest down to.

I hate it when we get it that wrong. Sorry. (Stands back and waits for hate storm!)

2009-05-27T19:38:00.005+01:00

Readers' letters and that MP

Most of my day today was spent in a meeting with Northcliffe's senior editors having what was described as a robust discussion around our print and digital strategies. One thing you can always say about editors is that they are incredibly passionate about what they do ... and you could also say that anyone trying to get general agreement from them on anything has a task akin to herding cats!

The few moments that I did spend in the newsroom of the Mercury was spent going through all the letters and emails submitted by our readers for publication in the paper. I'm guessing, but I've probably read through somewhere in the region of 60 today which is probably pretty typical of the numbers we see every day. More than half of these will have been submitted by snail mail, although we do see an increasing number arriving through our inboxes.

The advantage of spending a bit of time doing this task is that it does let me see what our readers have got on their minds.

What surprised me today was that, unlike the editors, a huge percentage of readers agreed with each other on the main topic of conversation. More than half of the letters came from people who were still exercised by the Keith Vaz allowance claims ... and I didn't see one letter of support. I did see one that didn't like Mr Vaz very much, but felt that the Mercury was a Tory rag which was revelling in putting him through the wringer.

We're not. Well, not entirely.

What I mean is that we do not support the Conservative Party. In fact, the Mercury doesn't support any political party and won't while I'm editor. We'll call it as we see it on individual issues. Obviously with Labour in power at both a local city council level and nationally, we are more likely to be seen criticising them than the Tories simply because they are doing more. But you will equally see us supporting some decisions of the city council - see this or this (and indeed tomorrow's editorial which supports work being done to clamp down on noisy neighbours).

So, we're not a Tory rag, but are we a rag? You know what, I don't mind that term as it is normally used in the context of the 'local rag' and, while it might be mildly insulting, it is also sort of affectionate ... it's the sort of mild insult you might use about a close friend! And, above all, I like people to comment on the paper - and this blog - because it means that we are doing something worth commenting on and I'd hate for the paper to fade into irrelevance.

2009-05-26T20:21:00.009+01:00

Writing the leader column

The last thing I did before leaving the office tonight was to write the leader column for tomorrow's Leicester Mercury. Unlike most national papers we don't have a specialist opinion writer and it is usually written by me or the deputy editor, Richard Bettsworth.

You may have noticed from various previous posts on this blog that I am currently exercised by an uneasy feeling with the way things operate in Leicester and tomorrow's opinion column reflects this.

Here's a sneak preview:

It has become increasingly clear over recent days that the scandal surrounding MPs’ allowances is not simply going to fade away. The anger expressed by voters everywhere demands fundamental change. Tory leader David Cameron continues to attempt to wrestle the initiative away from Gordon Brown by suggesting changes that he hopes will restore some confidence in Parliament. Today he has suggested moving power away from London back to local communities.

On the face of it, we would support such a change. Too much local policy is effectively set in Westminster by the Government issuing public targets for local councils and then using funding threats and restrictions to force the local authorities to comply.

However, many local councils have a pretty poor record when it comes to openness and changes in the way they operate over the past decade have meant that more and more decisions are taken behind closed doors ...

All councils pay lip service to open government. They all claim that they are transparent and that local voters can see for themselves how decisions are made, but actions often do not match the rhetoric ... If Mr Cameron is going to send more power back to our local councils, he will also have to reform they way they work.

I'll try to blog soon on the difference between the newspaper's opinion column (the newspaper's stance on a given issue) and this blog (the Editor's opinion on various issues), especially as they will often, but not always, be similar.

2009-05-25T08:54:00.004+01:00

Dirty tricks? But it's all within the rules! Sound familiar?

The Leicester Mercury's front page article on Saturday outlined alleged dirty tricks involving the Tory administration at Leicestershire County Council ahead of next month's elections.

We have a whole series of emails between an independent Conservative candidate and the Tory leader and deputy leader of the council after which the independent candidate decides to withdraw from the election.

In a nutshell, the candidate, Simon Jones, put himself up to fight against the council's deputy leader because the community he lives in, Breedon on the Hill, is in the middle of a long-standing - and possibly very expensive - High Court battle with the council over a community hall in the village. In the emails, the leader of the council, Councillor David Parsons, promises that a new community hall will be built. The deputy leader, Councillor Nicholas Rushton, wrote to Mr Jones to say: 'I sincerely hope that you will now withdraw your candidacy.' Mr Jones withdrew.

In today's Mercury, the Tories' prospective parliamentary candidate for the area, Andrew Brigden, describes a police investigation into the matter as a complete wast of time. Mr Bridgen says the investigation is “something about nothing”... “To call it election dirty tricks is ridiculous. I think for a politician standing for election to pledge there will be a replacement of the facility if it is removed is quite legitimate.”

The paperwork leaked to the Mercury shows a trail of e-mails starting on May 11, following a conversation between the council's deputy leader, Councillor Nicholas Rushton, and Simon Jones, who are contesting the same Valley seat in the county council elections.

Mr Jones suggests to Coun Rushton that they should meet and writes: "You say that you are prepared to put your energies behind a campaign to get things brought to a conclusion, and that you will guarantee that a community building will be constructed whatever the outcome of legal proceedings.
"If we can achieve this together then fantastic."
Later that day, Coun Rushton replies: "Great news! Should get something to you this evening from David Parsons (the leader of the council). It will promise all you want."
Later on May 11, council leader David Parsons writes to Simon Jones and Coun Rushton: "I am happy to give my personal commitment and that of the administration at County Hall to the provision of new community facilities at Breedon within the lifetime of the next council."
Coun Rushton also writes to Simon Jones saying: "I sincerely hope that you will now withdraw your candidacy and we can all move forward united and together."
The next morning, Simon Jones writes to Coun Rushton saying that he is ready withdraw his candidacy.
Coun Rushton replied to Simon Jones saying: "You have a written guarantee from me and the leader that a new facility will be delivered."

I'm no election law specialist so I have no idea whether or not anything illegal has happened, but clearly somebody at the county council is not happy with what went on - according to the police, it wasn't an opposition councillor who reported the issue to them, it was 'the county council.'

And, in the middle of the MPs' expenses scandal where the public has been so outraged by the defence that claims were 'within the rules', it is hard not to reach the conclusion that whether or not the law has been broken in Breedon, what happened was not right.

2009-05-25T08:17:00.005+01:00

Looking after the pennies ...

One of my all-time favourite journalism books is Prof John Paulos' 'A Mathematician Reads the Newspapers', a sometimes quirky review of the way journalists pass on their misunderstanding of numbers to their readers.

I was reminded of this when reading Stuart Glendinning Hall's post on how to pay special attention to your top community contributors which reports on an HP Labs study which, in turn, concludes that people's propensity to keep participating increases with the more they contribute. The paper demonstrates that submitters who stop receiving attention tend to stop contributing, while prolific contributors attract an ever increasing number of followers and their attention in a feedback loop.

Well, anyway, that's what the paper claims.

The conclusion is interesting - if perhaps a little predictable - but it was the mathematical computations that led to the conclusions which brought Prof Paulos' book to mind. The learned prof argues that journalists' grasp of fairly simple maths is so poor that articles are often riddled with ridiculous mistakes. While that is undoubtedly true, the HP Labs documents shows conversely that mathematicians and other experts often make lousy communicators and they usually need a journalist to misunderstand the maths, but get the message across!

Stuart doesn't give away a lot about himself in his online profile, but his post reads as if he understands the maths behind the HP paper. Me? I read the paper, but skipped the maths which lost me in the first few lines!

2009-05-24T09:16:00.004+01:00

The gentleman's club which leads to poor reporting

Peter Preston writes an excellent article in today's Observer questioning how the MPs' expenses scandal could have gone on for so long under the noses of the lobby correspondents which newspapers pay to cover Parliament full-time.

Disclosure: the Leicester Mercury has a lobby correspondent. We share him with Northcliffe's other Midlands titles (including Nottingham and Derby). He is based full-time in the Houses of Parliament, but works under the direction of the local Editors, including me.

Preston asks: 'Didn't anyone, updating his flipping contacts list, ask why Hazel Blears was always on the move? Why the chancellor's home telephone number kept changing? How Hon Members on £64,000 a year could afford to clear their moats, build duck islands or tackle dry rot 100 miles from Luton?'

Further down he says: 'They're expert, self-regulated members of one gentlemen's club, monitoring another one. They need to cultivate sources, buy drinks and keep onside to keep the chat coming. They are part of the institution, in a way.'

And then: 'But editors back at their desks are surely entitled to ask themselves a few questions now. Does the lobby - its briefings, its access, its exclusivities - still deliver the goods I need? If everything else is changing, can the snug set-up that missed the story be left untouched? '

He has a point. And I intend to ask the questions.

But it is a difficult situation and one that journalists come across all the time - striking the balance between having a relationship that allows mutual trust and access to 'exclusive' stories with the need to be detached enough to ask the difficult question or report the fact that will obviously upset and anger your 'contact'.

The lobby is not the only place where this issue exists.

Take football reporting. The Mercury's long-serving football writer Bill Anderson has just retired. When we reported this in the paper - and online - readers reacted by wishing Bill luck in his retirement, but rather harshly (in my opinion) criticising him for his closeness to the club. Even Bill recognised that supporters often felt he had been at a different game from them. But Bill probably spent more time with the club than he spent in the office of the Mercury and, inevitably, if you spend that much time with people, you build a relationship, even friendship. It is never easy to be very critical of friends and it is even more difficult to be critical in public. What is the alternative? The football writer relies on contact with players, the manager and the club and knows that it will take little to upset that relationship, leaving him out in the cold with nobody to talk to. It's easy for the Sun to parachute somebody into Leicester, be as critical as they like about the club, and then disappear back to London without having to care about the fact that they might want to ask about team news or transfers the next day. Many of our readers have a seemingly insatiable appetite for news about Leicester City and our football writer is expected to find stories every day. Yes, every day. Even in the summer when all the players and the manager are away on holiday. How easy is that if you don't have their mobile phone numbers?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to defend this sort of journalism, I'm just explaining why I think it happens.

Personally, I think it is about the relationship you build with your contacts. I think you have to have the discussion with them about 'bad' news and why you will report it. My own experience is that most people understand this and the more you talk about it, the easier it is to get through difficult issues.

In the short time that I have been in Leicester, I've been impressed with the level of partnership in the city, between public and private sector and between both of these and the various faith organisations - it's clearly a big part of what makes the city tick and I wouldn't want to do anything to undermine it. But I've also expressed some concern about what I see as a lack of scrutiny, about how many decisions are made behind closed doors and are not seen by the public until they have been carefully sanitised and wrapped up in neat little packages, with everyone sharing the same point of view. It makes me uneasy.

So, the question posed by Peter Preston needs asking not just about our lobby correspondent, but about all our reporters. And me.

2009-05-22T23:09:00.002+01:00

Local politics dominate - Vaz, Taylor and the county council

At the risk of being boring, I'm going to mention Keith Vaz again. He's really not very happy with me or the Leicester Mercury and to make his point he has written another, much longer, open letter to our readers explaining how he feels we have been unfair to him. I'm obviously happy to publish that letter - see the Mercury tomorrow (Saturday) for the letter in full, unedited and without comment.

The key to his argument is that we have concentrated unreasonably on the expense scandal when there was much more important news about him to cover, including work that he has done to help reverse the Government stance on the Ghurkas, the publishing of a 400 page report on human trafficking, interviewing the Metropolitan Police commissioner and speaking eight times in Parliament.

He concludes by saying that while he accepts that it is 'absolutely legitimate' for the paper to inquire into the question of the expense and allowance claims, 'it is right that that you should be fair.' I agree. We should be fair. I guess our readers will decide whether or not we have been.

While Mr Vaz has been in the public spotlight, his colleague in North West Leicestershire, David Taylor, has not. But tomorrow, we have full details of Mr Taylor's expense claims ... and they come to a very similar amount as those of Mr Vaz, almost £80,000.

To give him credit, we have the full details because Mr Taylor brought them to us today. Some of the details are not pretty and he's aware that some peope will be very angry about his claims. Again, you can see it in tomorrow's Mercury.

But neither of these stories has made it to the front as we feel there is an even more important local policitical story - police investigations into alleged dirty tricks in the upcoming county council elections.

2009-05-21T23:17:00.004+01:00

That Keith Vaz open letter

I suggested last night that the reaction to Mr Vaz's open letter in the Leicester Mercury might not be great. We received 72 comments, one of which was largely supportive of the MP and another of which accused the Mercury of racism in our coverage of the issue - the rest were as you might expect!

2009-05-21T14:17:00.003+01:00

Free speech - Part 2

Interesting to see that 'community guru' Patrick O'Keefe has commented on my earlier post on the problems we have around reader comments on the McCann family. He picked up on Stuart Glendinning Hall's blog reference to my post and I think he said he agreed with what I'd said.

He said: "The important thing is to cultivate the proper community that fits within whatever your looking to accomplish or what your brand is. Do you want a website where people can’t feel safe browsing from work or around their family? There is no right answer there, just what your audience is. If so, there are things you’ll need to remove. Do you want a website that is riddled with personal attacks and bitter, nasty arguments? Again, no right answer, but whatever you decide will require maintenance."

For more, visit Stuart's blog.

2009-05-21T09:26:00.005+01:00

Newspaper profit details

The Leicester Mercury is part of the Northcliffe Media Group, which in turn is part of the Daily Mail and General Trust - owners of, amongst other things, The Daily Mail.

I've mentioned elsewhere that times are tough in the newspaper business at the moment, just how tough can be seen from today's half year figures from our parent company. See here for the Guardian's take on our performance, or here for the group's announcement (you'll need to scroll down to find Northcliffe Media details). UPDATE: Press Gazette has a more Northcliffe-centred version.

It's not pretty and we've had to make some unpleasant decisions ... and we're not out of the woods yet.

2009-05-21T07:46:00.004+01:00

Why the secrecy?

Finally, the city council has come out and said that it will fund the Special Olympics in Leicester with up to £1m of taxpayers money, but why did it take so long to say it?

Ever since I arrived in the city three months ago, it has been clear that there was a large hole in the funding plans for the games. In only my second week I met with a representative of the organisers who bubbled with enthusiasm for the 'best games ever' and talked about their aspirations for a 'world class' event, but squirmed horribly when I asked about the funding. They had hoped for a £2m injection from Visa, but it had not been forthcoming. Over the next couple of weeks I spoke to several people about the funding. Nobody seemed that keen to talk about it, but nobody seemed that bothered about it either - it was clear that somebody had said they would underwrite the costs and it didn't take much to work out that it was the city council, but nobody would confirm it officially.

Why not? Well, I'm guessing that everybody was worried that if the council said out loud that it would fund the games, any slim hopes of getting anybody else to put money in would just disappear. At the time, the organisers were still talking about commercial sponsorship, even though the games were no more than a dozen weeks away, but apart from the sterling efforts of the Lord Mayor, it was pretty clear that nothing was going to be forthcoming.

I don't have a problem with the city council putting the money in. In fact, I think it was the right thing to do (and we've said so in our leader column in today's Mercury), but I'm uneasy about the way it happened. £1m is a not an insignificant amount of money from an authority that worries about its income and feels the need to push up council tax at a time of deflation and recession. So where will the money come from? Which departments or projects will lose out?

Everyone, whatever business they are in, knows that it is a matter of priorities - the council has a finite amount of money, it has to set priorities. Having decided the games are a priority (a decision we support) I'd like to see the discussion around where the money is coming from. I don't like the fact that these sort of discussions go on increasingly behind closed doors away from the public gaze. This is not an issue confined to the city council, local authorities across the land have switched from the old committee system to a new cabinet controlled form of government. In itself, that didn't need to mean that there was much less public debate, but our councils have taken the opportunity to make sure that this was the outcome.

And perhaps there is a bigger lesson to be learned from this. It's important that the city goes into major decisions with its eyes wide open. Take the bid to make Leicester a host city if England win the right to host the 2018 World Cup. On the face of it, this looks like a fantastic opportunity and the Mercury supports the bid. But, the first piece of work that needs doing - and it is already underway and may well cost the best part of £100,000 - is to gather a thorough understanding of what might be involved. We already know that the Walkers stadium will need to be expanded. Mr Mandaric is on record as saying that this would happen if Leicester City are promoted into the top division (and look like staying there?), but what if they are not promoted or, as happens with many clubs, they yo-yo in and out of the top division while they try to establish themselves? Will we be in the same position as we are with the Special Olympics where we really have no choice but to go through with the event? Who will pay to enlarge the stadium if Leicester City do not? How much other work will need to be done in terms of infrastucture around the city to handle the expected influx of fans?

None of this means that Leicester should not be looking at making a bid to be a host city, but there should be a full and public discussion about the possible cost as well as the undoubted upside that the tournament would bring.

2009-05-20T18:21:00.004+01:00

Keith Vaz open letter to Mercury readers.

Oh dear, oh dear. After more than a week chasing round after Leicester East MP Keith Vaz, we have finally managed to persuade him to respond to the rage that has swept the country over MPs' expense claims. You can read the letter in full, unedited, in tomorrow's Mercury (ie Thursday).

I fear his response will not satisfy everyone (anyone?).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he takes a swipe at the Mercury. We've concentrated too much on this single issue: 'From the moment this information was published in another newspaper I have responded. My office deals regularly with the local press.

'The problem is the coverage of politics has declined in both the national and local press. In the past week, I have been involved in a number of issues including Gurkhas, Sri Lanka, policing and human trafficking. Sadly, none of this has been reported locally.'

Mea culpa. Let's see how our readers react tomorrow.

Interestingly, another leading local politician rang me only yesterday to thank us for treating the upcoming county council elections seriously, highlighting the issues that are being presented on the doorstep and how each party intends to deal with them.

2009-05-19T22:26:00.004+01:00

Free speech?

One very irate reader - probably ex-reader - emailed me with a bitter complaint about the Mercury's 'decision to deny freedom of speech' to our readers.

She wrote: 'I am of course referring to your apparent decision to omit an 'add comment' facility for the most recent story about the McCanns ... the British media's generally misplaced sympathy for the McCanns and lack of ability to acknowledge that the parents deserve to be criticised (and convicted) for their negligence makes me suspicious that this a deliberate move by the Mercury to gag their readers. We should be proud of our right of free speech in this country and if you have made the decision to exercise selective censorship you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourselves. Yours disgustedly etc'

I'm not convinced the name or email address supplied were genuine, but she was clearly very angry. It is a very difficult area for us - we give our readers the ability to comment on articles on our website without requiring them to register and without us putting in any form of pre-moderation (ie we moderate posts after they show up on the website, removing those which we think create a legal issue or which are in some other way offensive).

We certainly allow things on to the website which we would not allow into the paper - I guess we think it is clear that it is the opinion of the reader and not something that we would necessarily agree with. But we do have to draw the line somewhere. The problem with legal issues is that we are legally responsible for our website and we are more likely to be sued than the comment writer - I don't think it is clear cut, but the risk is there for us. I don't think too many people would expect us to accept clearly libellous posts.

But there are those comments which we remove for other less easily defined reasons and this is the area where we run into trouble with disgruntled posters. There are things that no right-minded person is going to object to us removing: racism and homophobia, for example. Personal insults would not generally be accepted, but we have let some pretty nasty comments about Keith Vaz and Alan Duncan go over the past week or so. The fact that they put themselves into the public eye probably means that we allow our posters more freedom than we might if the subject was simply Joe Public.

So what about the McCanns? It is true that we don't allow comments on any stories about Maddy or her parents. Why is that? We used to allow posts, but there is a small group of people out there who are convinced that they know what happened to Maddy - they have no evidence, but they are happy to make their allegations publicly and forcefully. Every time we have allowed comments on our stories about this family, the articles have become swamped with baseless accusations.

Of course, our decision to close down the comments has meant that we are preventing reasonable people from using our website to have perfectly reasonable discussions about the case - in fact, the complainant I quote above, accuses the McCanns of negligence, presumably because the children were left alone at night. You may or may not agree with this opinion, but it an opinion that a reasonable person might hold. To that extent, our complainant is right, we are suppressing free speech.

However, the right to free speech comes with a responsibility and the bile that is poured out by a minority on this issue, leaves us with little choice. I don't like the decision, but I don't see what else we can do without using resources we don't have to moderate more quickly. I am considering changing our comment system to allow only those who have registered to comment. This, I think, would give our readers more commitment to the site and it would be much easier to build a system of trust that meant we didn't need to moderate at all or where the readers themselves could moderate.

But that's for the future. For now, I'm sticking with the ban even though it cost us a reader.

2009-05-18T22:33:00.003+01:00

BNP - to report or not to report?

I spent much of the day getting to and from London for a meeting with Northcliffe's MD, Michael Pelosi, at the group's HQ in Kensington. In my previous job on the digital side of the business, I spent two or three days a week in the London office, but since arriving in Leicester three months ago, I've only been down twice, including today. The travelling certainly eats into your day, but it was a positive meeting.

However, it meant I spent little time 'editing' the paper today, but one or two interesting emails arrived. One of the questions we need to answer very quickly is what our stance is going to be on giving coverage to the BNP during the current Euro and county council election campaigns. Conventional wisdom has ruled that it was best to starve them of publicity, but I sense a change in the mood both inside and outside newspapers, suggesting that this has allowed the BNP to cloak itself in respectability and make outrageous claims that have gone unchallenged. I've read a couple of reports recently - including one from Leicester City Council which described the BNP's activities in the city as 'chilling' - which say that the best way to prevent the BNP gaining a foothold in local politics would be to show them up for what they are.

While I was out of the office today, my deputy, Richard Bettsworth sent out an email to senior members of our team at the Mercury outlining some of the BNP policies:

Restoration of national service
Deportation of illegal immigrants
Voluntary repatriation of legal immigrants
Clamp down on asylum seekers
Introduction of corporal punishment for minor offences
Capital punishment for murderers, terrorists and paedophiles
Selective exclusion of foreign goods from Britain
Withdrawal from Nato
Withdrawal from EU
Foreign aid given only to those countires which accept repatriation of immigrants

Richard asked for comments from our senior staff on what our position should be.

I wonder what our readers think? I'd be happy to hear from you.

2009-05-17T23:23:00.002+01:00

2018 World Cup bid by Leicester?

No, I don't mean we'll be putting in a team to play against the likes of Brazil, Italy and England, but there's plenty of rumours flying around the web about the chances of Leicester bidding to be a host city should England win the right to host the whole tournament in 2018.

To find out what's really going on, see tomorrow's (Monday) Leicester Mercury.

2009-05-17T09:27:00.003+01:00

Why we use the FoI to ask questions

Earlier, I commented on a post by Coun Rory Palmer on his blog where he mentioned the fact that the Leicester Mercury has put in a request under the Freedom of Information Act for details of expenses claimed by councillors on Leicester City Council.

This is what he said: 'From reading the journo's blogs it appears they will be (somewhat predictably) looking at councillor's expenses. According to Keith Perch's blog the Mercury has submitted a Freedom of Information request for councillor's expenses. Councillor's allowances and expenses are published each year by law but I fully recognise why the paper want to do this in the current climate. For the record, I am the first and to my understanding, the only councillor in Leicester to have published details of my expenses on my council website.'

Credit where credit is due - Coun Palmer does disclose his claims describing what money he gets and what he uses it for. You can see it here. To be fair, his claims are pretty modest, he gives details and it looks transparent - I wouldn't expect to discover anything alarming when we see the detail we've asked for.

However, experience tells me that this may not be the case with everyone. Coun Palmer says that the law demands that councillors allowances and expenses are published every year, but they won't be published in the sort of detail that we think they should. What we have asked for is a copy of all expense claims AND the receipts used to back up those claims. Why? Because the summary that is published can hide a multitude of sins.

Take this example. A few years ago, we asked to see the detailed receipts behind the expense claims of a chief constable - not in Leicestershire. We were interested in a trip he had made to the USA. On the face of it, everything on the expense claim looked fine: flights, a hotel, conference fees, meals etc. But a closer study of the receipts (which evidently nobody in the audit or finance department of the police authority had done) showed that he had actually claimed for two return flights to the US, most of the meals were for two people and we'd paid for a double room and a 'partner's' package at the conference. The chief constable had taken his wife with him and charged the ratepayers. It wasn't the only thing we found - he regularly took his wife to London with him on business trips - and the chief constable resigned.

I remember a senior councillor - not in Leicester - being jailed after we found him working in a burger van after he had claimed that he had been forced to give up work so that he could concentrate on council work, which, in turn, allowed him to claim more money from the council. A council leader who had to resign after many years in charge after we discovered that he was being paid by a company effectively owned by the council.

I could go on.

My point here is not that all councillors are corrupt. I don't believe that for a minute, but there are some bad apples out there. Even if we find nothing wrong with any of the claims made by our local councillors, it will have been a worthwhile exercise - look at what happened in Westminster where nobody was able to check! It is part of what newspapers do, we help to keep people honest.

One other point: Coun Palmer says it is predictable that we would make an FoI request for the details. What is more predictable is that the only way we are likely to see such details is through a formal request under the law. Despite all their claims that our councils believe in open government, we know that when we ask for this sort of information informally, there's no way that the council will respond by saying: 'Of course, come in and take a look.' No, they'll force us to go down the legal route and they'll take as long as possible to give us the answer.

Finally, earlier I used Twitter to say that I'd commented on Coun Palmer's blog ... except I called him Coun Taylor! I can think of a few politicians who would be happy for us to misname at the moment, but I don't suppose Coun Palmer is one of them! I'm sorry for the error.

2009-05-16T07:09:00.003+01:00

Ok, you can make us look stupid

A couple of readers pointed out yesterday that we had carried a letter in the Mercury with a not very subtle reference to 'uphill gardening' - a not very pleasant homophobic insult - purporting to be a comment on expense claims by MP Alan Duncan. Fair enough, we were pretty stupid, or at least very naive, for not spotting the gag, but what was the point?

We try to give pretty free reign to our readers through both the letters in the paper and through the comments on our website. The letter would have been read by at least three people at the Mercury before it ended up in print and obviously none of them picked up on the reference even though it was pretty obvious once somebody had pointed it out. So what? It's a term that I hope none of them would use and it's possible that they may not even have heard it before (although, I had).

It reminds me of a website that I once saw which was put together by a group of people who spent their time trying to place as many small ads in a newspaper on a given day containing a pretty obscure smutty term. I'm sure it made them giggle, but I don't get it - I can't even remember what the term was, but I'd never heard it used and I'm sure the vast majority of the newspaper's readers hadn't either. What they'd managed to do was con someone in the advertising department into thinking it was a genuine ad. Well done. It's why I don't really like April Fool stories in newspapers - what do they prove? Apart, that is, from the fact that our readers tend to trust us and believe what we write. May be naively, we tend to trust our readers, especially in those parts of the newspaper where they write under their own name, rather than ours.

Anyway, the letter in the Mercury this week was pretty obnoxious and I apologise to both Alan Duncan and any reader who was offended. I'm sorry.

2009-05-15T14:06:00.003+01:00

Beat bobby of the year update

I mentioned in an earlier blog that I'd been on the selection panel for the Leicester Mercury Community Police Officer of the Year ... and the winner has now been announced.

PC Harvey Watson was the unanimous choice of the panel and was nominated by more than 50 people, but I'm not sure our article (or that on the police website) give enough credit to the two other shortlisted officers, PCs Andy Raybould and Ian Hamilton - it was a very close call and I'm not sure that anyone could have argued if the results had been reversed!

2009-05-15T08:37:00.004+01:00

A matter of trust

I visited Leicester College yesterday - 26,000 students, mostly from Leicester - to get an update from Maggie Galliers, the Principal. It has been a good week for the College with Princess Anne opening its new Abbey Park campus.

Ms Galliers mentioned a mutual acquaintance which reminded me of one of the cornerstones of the Leicester Mercury's success.

The person concerned is Mark Haysom, who recently resigned from his position as chief executive of the Learning and Skills Council following a debacle over funding which has left many colleges throughout Britain teetering on the brink of disaster after Government cash for building projects dried up after they had been started.

According to The Times newspaper, Mr Haysom received a payoff of 'more than £100,000, equal to six months salary.' That means he was paid more than £200,000 a year. Nice work if you can get it! He resigned because there had been failures in the way his organisation had managed its work, prompting one commenter to say he had received a 'payment for failure.'

Anyway, I digress. I knew Mr Haysom in a former life - he was managing director of the company in Cardiff which ran the South Wales Echo, the paper of which I was Editor in the mid-1990s. As managing director, he appointed me to my post and held the right to sack me as well - the Editor reported to the managing director. This can be a fairly uncomfortable postion to find yourself in as it then effectively gives the MD the final say on what the paper covers - should we run that expose of the local company that spends £10,000 a year advertising with us?

To be fair to Mr Haysom, although we met every week to discuss what I was doing and where I was taking the paper, he never once 'told' me to do anything. Nevertheless, the ultimate sanction remained with him. The South Wales Echo was owned by Trinity Mirror.

The Leicester Mercury, on the other hand, is part of Northcliffe Media Group and there is a fundamental difference in the way it runs its papers - the Editors are appointed by the group's managing director, Michael Pelosi. Mr Pelosi is one step removed from the day to day running of the paper.

This means that the local managing director, Steve Hollingsworth, the man with direct responsibility for the commercial success of the Mercury, does not get a direct say in the editorial policies and does not have the power to say: 'You can't run that article.'

As it happens, Steve and I go back a long way. We have worked together in other parts of the Northcliffe business over many years and we get along well personally as well as professionally. Steve knows that I value his input into what I'm doing editorially and we often discuss the direction in which I'm taking the paper and the changes I am making, but we both know where the line is drawn. I think this separation of church and state is one of the fundamental reasons for the Mercury's success - readers know they can trust the editorial to be honest and independent.

2009-05-14T08:09:00.002+01:00

Upsetting all sides

Interesting blog from our education correspondent Ian Wishart on the perils of reporting on the controversial topic of the proposed closure of Riverside College - neither side in the affair is very happy witht he way Ian covered a recent council meeting. On balance, I think Ian probably got it right - he can only report what he sees and hears. The fact that he upset both sides of the argument probably means it was a fair report!

2009-05-14T07:07:00.004+01:00

Working with vision

I spent a few hours yesterday being introduced to an incredible Leicester business. Behind the unassuming facade of Clifton Packaging on the Meridian Estate near Fosse Park, is a business that is so alive with ideas and passion that it is difficult to take it all on board.

On the face of it, Clifton produces innovative packaging for food companies, including the likes of Kellogs, but the family-run business has a vision which lifts it above most organisations. MD Shahid Sheikh told me that the family likes to excel in one of four areas every month: business, community, charity or sport. This is not PR waffle for a company paying lip-service to the idea of social responsibility, it is the embodiment of the spirit of a family which has dragged itself from the depths of being expelled from their homeland to the heights of a business that turns over millions of pounds, but more importantly adds to the success of Leicester itself, employing about 60 people.

And when the family talks about giving back to the community, they mean it. Spend five minuts with his elder brother, Khalid, the company chairman, and he'll tell you of his plans to transform the fortunes of Africa - yes, that's right, transform the continent! He sees terrible injustice, legalised robbery by the West on the commercial front and a removal of dignity by the use of aid on the 'humanitarian' front. His is the driving force behind a vision to build the economy of Africa by passing knowledge to the locals, allowing them to extract the value from the raw materials that they possess rather than alllowing this value to be added and extracted once the goods have left Africa's shores. BABA - buy African, build Africa. Khalid has a head full of facts and figures and illustrates his visions simply - farmers in Uganda receive £1,000 a tonne for fresh pineapples, by the time the West has dried the fruit and packaged it, we pay £10,000 a tonne in our shops. He wants to help the Africans add some of the value, to turn their raw material into the finished product, before they are shipped out. May be he can make it so that they are paid £5,000 a tonne, may be £6,000. Whatever, it will make a massive difference to the people of Africa.

Can he do it? Well, the thing about the Sheikh family is that they are doers, not talkers. I wouldn't bet against their success!

Anyway, I'll be asking our business editor, Ian Griffin, to follow the story carefully so you'll be able to read about it in the Mercury ... and I've asked our award-winning feature writer Lee Marlow to bring to life the incredible story of how a family of Ugandan Asians, kicked out of their homeland in 1972 by Idi Amin, will return to the country in 2009 as guests of the current head of state, President Yoweri Museveni.

2009-05-12T16:34:00.003+01:00

Beat bobby of the year

I took an hour at lunchtime today to help judge the Leicester Mercury Community Police Officer of the Year Award - it made a nice change to talk about three officers who were putting so much back into the community amid all the noise surrounding the MPs. It was a difficult choice and the award might have gone to any of those on the shortlist - you'll have to wait to find out just who did win until we make the formal announcement.

It's encouraging that abuot 10 per cent of the community officers in Leicester were nominated for the award, something the police will, I think, see as recognition of all the efforts they have put in over the past 18 months to improve their relationship with those they serve.

2009-05-12T14:37:00.003+01:00

The first call I took this morning, almost before I'd had a chance to switch on my computer or read the paper, came, somewhat unsurprisingly from Keith Vaz, MP. Mr Vaz had been the subject of yesterday's Page 1 story outlining the £80k worth of expenses he has claimed for his second home over the past four years, a story which whipped up an enormous amount of public comment.

Perhaps more surprising was his tone. Mr Vaz was not jumping up and down or trying to suggest that he had been badly done to by the Mercury. He seemed more concerned that the current scandal over MPs' expenses should be seen as non-party political - this was not a story about the Labour party, it was about MPs of all hues. I assured him that I agreed and pointed out that our main story on the issue today centred on Tory Alan Duncan.

I suspect that most MPs caught up in the scandal now regret their claims, most of which were probably made without thought in an atmosphere of 'everybody's doing it.'

My favourite comment on the matter so far came from a reader called Keith - not me, I promise - who said of Mr Vaz's claim for 22 silk cushions: 'Perhaps he will need the cushions to sit on after the spanking he will get (hopefully) in the next general electon.'

2009-05-11T22:43:00.002+01:00

Council expenses?

On the subject of expenses, our political reporter Martin Robinson has been asking for details of the expenses paid to the councillors on Leicester City Council. He has made a request for the full details, including the receipts used to back up the claims, under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

There are two things about this which make me a bit uneasy. Firstly, why do we have to use the Act to ask for these details? When we ask, why wouldn't the council just say: 'Yes, here they are'? They tell us they believe in open government, but there's not always that much sign of it.

Secondly, why does it take so long for the information to be made available? The law is quite specific. It says that information requested under the Act must be handed over promptly and 'in any event, not later than the 20th working day' after the request is made. The Information Commissioner - the man responsible for policing the Act - has said that it is not acceptable for public bodies to routinely wait until the 20th working day to hand over the documents ... we're not at the 20th day yet, but nor are we in the first 10 days.

2009-05-11T21:46:00.004+01:00

The furore over MPs' expenses in recent days spilled onto our website today when we ran the story about Keith Vaz's £80,000 claims for the past four years.

The article probably attracted more comment than any other in recent months ... but they weren't all printable! We use a system of post-moderation on our site: that is we allow people to comment directly on to the site and then we go on afterwards and check them for decency and libel issues. This means that we quite often end up removing comments a little while after they have appeared and this in itself often leads to our readers complaining that their comments have been taken down. Usually they accuse us of censorship.

In fact, we usually remove comments either because they are not appropriate - they might be racist, or full of personal abuse, for example - or because they leave us open to being sued for defamation.

It's quite easy to confuse a statement of opinion, which can't really be said to be libellous, and a statement of fact, dressed up as opinion, which may well be defamatory. Let's, for a moment, consider an imaginary MP. It is quite acceptable to say that you think it is disgraceful that this MP has claimed expenses and that you feel he should be sacked from the Government and that voters should refuse to re-elect him at the next general election. You can go on to say that you think he is an idiot who has shown a complete lack of common sense. However, it would almost certainly by libellous to say that an MP was on the fiddle or that you always knew he was corrupt and open to bribery - that is to say, it would be libellous unless you could prove that it was true.

There's no doubt that there is a great deal of anger out there over the claims made by MPs and we are happy to reflect this - we've said in our own leader articles what we think - but the arguments for reform remain much stronger if we don't allow our comments to sink into personal abuse or allow the MPs to deflect the criticism by suing the newspaper over errors of fact.

2009-05-08T16:55:00.007+01:00

Great writers

Just heard that one of our journalists - Lee Marlow - has won Feature Writer of the Year at the regional press awards in London today! Fantastic news and a deserved accolade for Lee who writes a great feature - in fact I was just enjoying reading some of his work for tomorrow's paper when I was told the news. Watch out for his double page interview with some of Leicester's homeless people tomorrow.

Lee was also shortlisted for the sports writers award.

Our Deputy Features Editor, Jeremy Clay, joined Lee on the shortlist for Feature Writer of the Year and was also shortlisted for the Columnist of the Year award. Congratulations to them both.

The features team, headed by Alex Dawson, certainly adds a massive dose of quality writing to the Mercury. To find two of the top six features writers in the country on one newspaper says something for that quality and, as Lee said, any member of the features team might have won the accolade!

2009-05-08T10:52:00.009+01:00

Don't believe everything you hear!

The local state-funded radio station in Leicester has been on the phone again wanting to run stories saying that the end is nigh, the Mercury is moving out of Leicester and we've taken the first steps towards becoming a regional newspaper published in Nottingham but covering Nottingham, Leicester and Derby.

It's all drivel.

There are no plans to move out of Leicester. Full stop.

Everybody who creates the Leicester Mercury is here in our office in George Street or in one of our district offices around the county. That is all the writers (news, sport and features), the photographers, the editorial managers who make decisions and, of course, me. The news editor, the picture editor, the sports editor - they're all in Leicester. The main page designer is in Leicester. We decide what we are covering, how we will cover it, who will cover it and what it will look like here in Leicester. Once all of that is done and the pages are produced, we proof read those pages here in Leicester.

So what's all the fuss?

Well, in common with lots of businesses, we are finding it tough in the current economic downturn and we've been looking at ways of producing better papers with fewer costs. We looked hard to see which parts of the process don't affect the outcome of the paper and decided that actually putting the completed articles and photographs on to the pages and adding headlines could probably be done more effeciently (ie we could do more with fewer people) if we pooled our resources across more than one newspaper. This is because our papers have different deadlines and the work flows at different rates.

So we took that part of our work out of our three newspapers in Nottingham, Derby and Leicester and put it into a central pool ... which happens to be based in Nottingham. It could just as easily have been in Leicester or Derby, but Nottingham is slightly more central for staff moving into the new set-up.

The real problem for us is that we call that part of our work 'production' which allows the likes of BBC Radio Leicester, funded by the taxpayer and unaffected by the downturn, to say we have moved the production of the Leicester Mercury to Nottingham or, worse still, that the Leicester Mercury is now produced in Nottingham.

Neither statement is true - we have moved a small part of the back end production to Nottingham. The vast majority of our journalists are unaffected by the changes and remain here in Leicester or in one of our district offices.

Incidentally, after these changes we still have six or seven times as many journalists in Leicester than any radio station - we still cover dozens of stories every day that never get anywhere near the radio and we still have complete control over our content ... unlike our state-controlled friends.

I sat in a meeting recently with a number of community leaders from Leicester. The discussion got round to coverage of the upcoming European and local elections.

Somebody asked whether the local media would give space to the BNP during their election coverage. Radio Leicester said they would - they had no choice. It doesn't matter what the local managers think, they are given their rules of engagement centrally.

For the Leicester Mercury, on the other hand, this is a local decision. I first worked for the parent company way back in the 1970s and I have never been instructed by anyone about how we should cover politics and whether or not we should give coverage to the various extreme parties - I'd go further than that and say that I have never been given guidance or had anyone even discuss it with me.

Will we give coverage to the BNP? I haven't decided yet, but going on my past decisions, it's unlikely. The point I am making, however, is that this is a local decision - at the Leicester Mercury, we'll make the decision that is best for the newspaper and for the city, and they are usually the same thing.

Of course, it also means that if you don't like the decision, you know who to tell!