Guardian's first hyperlocal site launches in Leeds

The first of the three Guardian local sites has launched.

Leeds run by local beatblogger John Baron will be followed by Cardiff and Edinburgh in the near future

Digital editor Emily Bell explains all

The local project, although small and highly experimental, has been in the pipeline for some time, and I'm pleased to see the first of our blogs rolling out after a great deal of hard work from the team. There'll be more to tell about the progress of the project as we roll out the other launch cities of Edinburgh and Cardiff, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the blogs develop over time in line with community response and participation.

Guardian's beatbloggers announced

The first of the Guardian's beat bloggers have been appointed.

Media Guardian has announced that

as part of our experimental Guardian Local initiative. The Local project is a small-scale community approach to local newsgathering, and will focus on the three politically engaged cities of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Leeds.
Tom Allan, Hannah Waldram and John Baron have been based at the Guardian's offices in Kings Place this week to undergo training and will be starting work on their beats of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Leeds respectively from next week. The Local blogs will be launched during the first half of this year although no dates have been confirmed.

Flogging the family silver

The Independent's Stephen Glover no doubt gets his own back on the specualtion about his own paper by taking a look at the rumours concerning the Guardian from last week.

The Guardian may now be housed in fancy offices near Kings Cross, complete with their own theatre, but its spiritual home is Manchester.

he says

For him the significance is

all the greater if The Daily Telegraph, which broke the story, is correct in suggesting that the Manchester title might fetch less than £40m, though it was supposedly worth £200m several years ago

and adds that

GMG’s apparent willingness to flog off what was once thought of as the family silver suggests its management has woken up to the weakness of its position. Here is a company which by its own (possibly unwise) recent admission is losing £100,000 a day on The Guardian and The Observer, which we might round up to £40m a year. In such circumstances it has to consider selling anything

Guardian launches its mobile app

Is this the future and is this the business model?

£2.39 and apart from buying the app content is free, but there is am option left open for charging for some content and/or services.

Guardian holds onto its online lead

The latest ABCE's are out and Guardian.co.uk is still out in front when it comes to unique users of its site.

31.7m to be exact in October,a fall of around 4 per cent and just slightly in front of the Mail no doubt helped by that Jan Moir article.

Large increases in the month for the Times up nearly 13 per cent to 20.87m and the Independent over 10 per cent at 9.7m.

The page you may never want to see

The Guardian has redesigned a page that it hopes you will never see.

Martin Belam explains

In an ideal world, you'd never see one of the things that our front-end developers have recently been working on. It is a new version of the page that appears when there is an error on the site - most usually a 404 error.

He adds that

Our old 404 page had a list of links to various areas on The Guardian and Observer sites, but the new version more closely mimics the standard navigation that should be familiar from nearly every other page on the site.

Salve-Thursday's Guardian Tech

One of the casualties of the Guardian media groups cost cutting will be the stand alone Technology section on a Thursday.

It ceases publication on the 17th December as Charles Arthur explains in today's edition it won't signal the end of the paper's championing of the subject.

The final issue will mark just over 26 continuous years since Futures Micro Guardian had its first edition, on 20 October 1983. From then, you will continue to find our writing online, or through our Twitter feed, and also throughout the paper incarnations of the Guardian in the news, business, features and other sections, where we will have a renewed focus on bringing you our take on the technology issues that truly matter and which you should know about.

and as Arthur continues to say

In part it has been the internet that has hastened the end of the physical version of this section, as more classified job adverts have migrated to online job sites such as Guardian Jobs (jobs.guardian.co.uk, in case you're looking); there have also been the arctic winds of the recession, which seems to be hitting the UK harder than many other countries around the world.

PCC under fire over NOTW phone tapping

The PCC's ruling over the News of the World phone tapping scandal has according to the Guardian this morning been attacked by MP's

Its report was described as a "whitewash" and there was a promise that another inquiry, from the Commons culture, media and sport select committee, would be more rigorous.
In a report published, the PCC also said it was not "materially misled" by executives at Rupert Murdoch's tabloid and that it did not believe senior managers at the paper knew reporters had illegally intercepted phone message left on mobile phones.

The new ruling centred around the Guardian's revelation that the paper had paid out £1m in confidential damages and legal fees to Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association, and two others, over hacking claims.

However

While acknowledging the Guardian had "produced one new significant fact" in its revelations of the Gordon Taylor settlement, and had performed a "perfectly legitimate function" in further scrutinising activity at the Sunday paper, it added that in presenting its story, the Guardian had obligations requiring it to "take care not to publish distorted or misleading information".

Guardian drops its America.com strategy

Rather surprising to see this report from Paid Content that Guardian News & Media (GNM) is abandoning its GuardianAmerica.com strategy.

I recall writing about this on the blog when the strategy first came out but as they point out

GuardianAmerica.com was The Guardian’s first big attempt to target the large U.S. audience it has found itself with online. It hired Michael Tomasky to edit the site from Washington, DC.
But the page was really only ever a breakaway index, aggregating U.S.-centric stories already found across Guardian.co.uk.

A victory for freedom but the speaker now has some questions to ponder

The news that the block on the Guardian's reporting of Labour MP Paul Farrelly's question regarding Trafigura can be seen as another win for freedom of speech.

The pressure is now on the Common's speaker John Bercow who has been urged by his fellow MP's this afternoon to either block future legal attempts to prevent the reporting of parliament, or to curtail MPs parliamentary privilege to speak freely.

Trafigura's legal firm, Carter-Ruck,decided no longer to persue the case earlier today after what was a concerted effort during the day to stand up for the rights of free speech.

As the Guardian reports

Labour MP Paul Farrelly put down a question yesterday to the justice secretary, Jack Straw. It asked about the injunction obtained by "Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton Report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura

Guardian gagged

The Guardian believes that it is being gagged from reporting Parliamentary proceedings today.

According to the paper

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.
The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The paper believes that these legal grounds appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Rushbridger quantifies the Guardian's losses

Astounding figures coming from Guardian editor Alan Rushbridger on how the paper has lost £20m since 2002.

The revelation came after a comment left on Roy Greenslade's blog said of the paper

It's ploughed so much into its internet operation that it is now having to lay off journalists

Rushbridger replied that

That's not actually right. Since 2002/3 our spending on guardian.co.uk (operational and capex) has exceeded revenue by just £20m. There's a crisis in the industry, and the Guardian is no more immune than anyone else, but it's a myth that we've plouged lunatic sums into digital.

Ht-Paid Content

First rule of journalism-check your sources.

Though it seems that some of our top outfits failed to do this very thing as they were drawn into the Chris Grayling speech about parts of Britain being like Wired.

Blogger Alex Hilton launched a bogus site claiming to be that of the Major of Baltimore who was not particularly happy about the Conservative spokesman's comments.

(For those already confused-Baltimore is the setting of the fictional drama)

Amongst those falling for the ruse,despite as I understand some rather gigantic clues were the Guardian and the BBC,though the content has now been taken down.

Observer's ex editor looks at the paper's fraught relationship with its big brother

The marriage of two like-minded papers seemed to be a union made in heaven, assuring a continued existence of the title.

writes Ex-editor of the Observer Jonathan Fenby in the Independent this morning.

He reveals the difficulty of the paper's relationship with the Guardian

causes for ill feeling between the daily and Sunday multiplied as the weeks and months went by. To meet the targets which the management of Guardian Group had presented to the trust, to justify the purchase, there were sharp editorial cuts, cushioned by Lonrho's generous redundancy terms.

and continues to spill the beans

When they were moved to the Farringdon Road building of the paper's new sibling to save money, Observer journalists found themselves shoe-horned into half the promised space, with some departments put into separate rooms down the street. As for the editor, goodbye to my predecessor's private shower room at the Battersea palace. The Guardian foreign desk told joint stringers that their first loyalty was to the daily.

McCall on how GMG will come out of the recession smaller

There has been much debate about Guardian media in recent days.

Talk of closing the Observer was floated over the weekend,this coming on the back of last week's £89m loss.

Paid Content interestingly reports the comments of CEO Carolyn McCall who in an internal memo to staff suggested that the group will come out of the downturn as a slimmed down version of the one that entered it.

“When the economy recovers, so – to a degree – will our advertising revenues. However, due to structural change, these revenues will not be at the levels they were in the past. GNM’s costs will need to reflect this if losses are to be kept within sustainable limits.”

Breaking the law can be justified in certain circumstances

According to Brendan O'Neill the Guardian is a greater threat to our society than the News of the World.

Writing in the First Post,O'Neill says that

That oh-so-worthy broadsheet's campaign against the News of the World poses a potentially far greater threat to liberty and press freedom than anything the tacky Sunday tabloid might have done.

arguing that

If journalists did not sometimes break the law then the truth would remain hidden

Now that can be a fair point sometimes but when it appears that it is used for undercover celeb scandals or sportspeople then the argument is surely blown out of the water.

Roy Greenslade is quick to the defence of his employers as he writes that

The point about the News of the World's activities is that they were not investigating high crime and misdemeanours. They were not exposing police corruption. They were not acting in the public interest.
What O'Neill needs to grasp is that unprincipled and trivial journalism by the News of the World puts serious, inquiring journalism on the back foot.

Run and run and run and run

I haven't had chance as yet to blog about Nick Davies scoop in the Guardian this morning.

According to former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil,this is going to run and run and writes that

If, as the Guardian claims, between 2,000 and 3,000 people were targeted and had their privacy breached in various ways, then some of the names already mentioned could get together to mount a multi-million pound class action against the Murdoch company. Just starting that process would almost certainly unseal the documents. Then more than the cat would be out of the bag ... and the potential damages unlimited.

The Spectator's James Forsyth meanwhile looks at David Cameron as he is stuck in a pincer movement between two extremes of journalism

David Cameron finds himself caught up in a war between two media tribes following the revelations about the phone hacking at the News of the World during Andy Coulson’s editorship. On the one side, there’s The Guardian—whose scoop it was—and the BBC; for the BBC this episode is a chance to both make an ideological point against tabloid journalism and the Murdoch press as well as gain some revenge for the fun that The Sun and The Times had with the BBC’s expenses. On the other is News International with other newspapers that have used similar methods looking nervously on from the sidelines.

Guardian rage

Thanks to Bob Piper for picking up this letter in the Guardian

Has anyone else suffered Guardian rage from strangers? While queueing to buy the paper recently I was accosted in one shop by a lady in trousers cut from a plaid horse blanket who insisted on detailing all the illegal hunting activity in my area, and in another accused by a Mervyn King lookalike of personally driving the country to economic ruin. More worrying was being shouted at by an old lady for having it tucked under my arm while buying the Big Issue. Glancing back as I fled, I saw her buying a copy of the magazine and chatting with the seller. So it was definitely the newspaper that upset her. Are we to be reduced to carrying it home in shame and a plain brown wrapper?
John Brooke
Bewdley, Worcestershire

Spot the difference

Rather a major cock up by the Guardian this morning,spotted by Paul Waugh and corrected over two editions

Guardian media expands into the US market

Guardian media have just confirmed that they have paid £30m for Content Next.

According to the paper

The deal gives GNM access to ContentNext's influential audience of professionals and senior executives in the digital media and entertainment industries.
GNM has been growing its US presence as part of its aim of becoming "the world's leading liberal voice", expanding its Washington bureau and launching US-focused website Guardian America last year

The American market has already been a lucrative one for the Guardian with nearly a third of its website traffic emanating from that direction.This will no doubt add to the company's American exposure.

ReadWriteWeb adds that

it's a great move by all parties involved. Industry watchers have wondered both how leading blogs will be monetized long term and how newspapers will survive. This is one part of that unfolding story.

(ht-Paul Bradshaw)