Spalpeen

In light of the recent rumours regarding the possible demise of The Observer newspaper, I put together this brief history of the publication. The main sources were The Guardian’s “History of the Observer“, an article from The Guardian’s ad info page “A brief history of the Observer” and a Guardian piece called the “Observer timeline“.

1791
The Observer’s first issue was published on December 4th, 1791. Founded by WS Bourne, he believed that “the establishment of a Sunday newspaper would obtain him a rapid fortune”, but ended up putting him into debt only three years later. He eventually failed in an attempt to sell the title to the Government.

The first edition solicited “Advertisements and Articles of Intelligence” for future issues, and featured news regarding the manufacturer of axle-trees for carraiges and a newly patented “washing machine” alongside advertisements for a local Grocer and various remedies for corns, fits, gout, rheumatism and scurvy.

1814
The newspaper was bought by newspaper magnate William Innell Clement, who ignored the Lord Chief Justice’s reporting restrictions on the trial of the Cato Street Conspirators. Clement refused to attend the court case against him, helping to establish the principle of freedom of the press.

1861
During the American Civil from 1861-1865, the paper sided with the North, prompting a fall in readership.

1891
As the new Editor of the paper, Rachel Beer published findings that Count Esterhazy had used forged letters to condemn Captain Dreyfus to Devil’s Island.

1905
The Observer was bought by Lord Northcliffe. Northcliffe later appointed a harrowing and prophetic editorial on the Treaty of Versailles, saying that the Treaty “left the Germans no real hope except in revenge’”. After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Garvin used the paper as an outlet for his fervent anti-Nazi views.

1948
David Astor joined the Observer as Editor, aged 29 and after only a year’s experience working on the Yorkshire Post. Before he became editor, he removed the paper’s political allegiances through the vesting of its ownership in a trust, and is widely regarded as responsible for the paper’s distinctive liberal voice. He also brought on many of the newspaper’s most famous alumni, including George Orwell, Vita Sackville-West, Arthur Koestler, Philip Toynbee, Jon Davy and Kenneth Tynan.

1956
The paper became the first major national newspaper to openly oppose the Government’s action over the Suez Canal, publishing an editorial on November 4th 1965 that declared “We had not realised that our Government was capable of such folly and such crookedness”.

1963
Kim Philby, Middle East Correspondent for the Observer, defected to the Soviet Union.

1964
The newspaper was known for speaking out often against apartheid, notably publishing articles covering Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment in 1964. Editor David Astor personally sent Mandela legal books to read during his incarceration.

1987
The newspaper published a one-off mid week edition to publicise the Department of Trade and Industry report into Mohamed Al Fayed’s conduct in his battle for control of the department store Harrods.

1993
GMG acquired the newspaper after competition from The Independent, who wanted to merge the paper with The Independent on Sunday. The paper’s potential closure prompted 132 MPs to sign an early day motion supporting its continuance as an independent newspaper. The Primary Sponsor David Winnick wrote that the undersigned “recognises the importance of The Observer continuing as a separate newspaper and would be opposed to it being sold to a newspaper group which already has a Sunday paper; and therefore believes the best course available in the public interest and to provide a diversity of views within the Press is for the paper to be sold to The Guardian, which does not currently have a Sunday paper.”

1999
Published a transcript of a secretly filmed conversation with Kevin Reid, son of the Scottish Minister at the time, John Reid. Kevin Reid told an Observer reporter posing as a businessman that Beattie Media, the PR firm he worked for, was able to give privileged access to ministers.

2003
Under the editorship of Roger Alton, the Observer controversially put its support behind the invasion of Iraq.

2008
The Observer moved from its old separate office in Herbal Hill, Farringdon, to share the Guardian’s new office in King’s Cross.

In light of the release of this month’s ABCes, two updates on The Guardian’s website.

1) The Guardian’s poor linking practices (which I’ve blogged about previously) continue to hamper the www.guardian.co.uk’s usefulness. At time of writing, the story featured above on the NHS Swine Flu advice website did not feature a link to that website.

This is bad bad bad. People come to the news to be informed, and this is basic information that The Guardian is needlessly omitting. I’d say that it arguably undermines their whole product: it’s great that most of The Guardian’s excellent team of bloggers links out, but this effort is somewhat defeated if the number one story on the whole site doesn’t!

In this specific case it also opens them up to criticism, since that same story featured two links to internal Guardian links. Those are fine, but you can’t omit the core link to the story while linking to yourself!

I hope to God that this is just crappy CMS syndrome. Really, there is absolutely no point talking about the future of newspapers (nor the prospect of The Guardian turning off its presses) if linking remains a secondary thought.

(NB: I recognise the irony of this being a story about a website going down — where a link from The Guardian might not necessarily help things. However, it’s really not The Guardian’s job to help keep Government websites up.)

2) Good news: The Guardian has slightly improved its Brightcove video solution. Videos are now viewable in full screen, although they’re not embeddable yet. They should really be cross posting all of their copyright-owned content to YouTube, but I’ll take this small victory for now!

All in all, frustratingly small steps from my favourite and most trusted news source.

O2 follows iPhone success with deal for next must-have gadget by Richard Wray in The Guardian

“Stocks of the device are limited, however, which is why gadget fans outside the US will have to wait several months before it becomes available.”

True, stocks of the device are likely to be limited, but since the Palm Pre is a CDMA device, it’ll need to be converted to GSM and go through all the different approval processes for different countries. See also: the iPhone, which took 5 months to come to the UK after its US launch.

“It also has an eye-catching way of recharging: rather than being plugged in, it has to be placed on what Palm calls its Touchstone and charges through magnetic induction.”

Touchstone is an optional and expensive extra. It doesn’t have to be charged on the pad. The base model comes with a USB charging cable.

“The new version [of the Blackberry Storm] does away with one of the original device’s most annoying features – SurePress, which required the user to press down the screen in order to type or select icons – and opts instead for a traditional touchscreen feel.”

This is a bit touch and go, but isn’t the addition of tactility to a touchscreen a good thing? I wouldn’t be surprised if the Storm’s implementation sucked though (I’ve never used one).

The other month I wrote a post about The Guardian’s poor linking practices. I’ve since heard that this issue has been raised internally at some level, but haven’t heard the results of this yet. Anyway, the issue hasn’t gone away, so I’m not going to stop writing about it.

Here’s a few more examples, similar to the ones I reported on last month:
-Note the link to The Telegraph’s homepage in the first paragraph. Rather than a link to the article that the sentence is directly addressing, there’s a generic link to the Telegraph homepage.
-No link to the house on Google Maps (even though the image in question isn’t there anymore).
-One internal link in an article thousands of words long. Not good enough. Where’s the link to Gawker’s amazing videos from inside Scientology?

The Guardian is getting better (see: a link to a press release, direct links to bank homepages), but they’re not quite there yet.

And actually, the issue about linking goes deeper than simply a lack of links to organisations. The Guardian shouldn’t simply be linking to organisations that it’s writing about (although that would be a good first step). For an idea of what I mean, take this article featuring an interview with The Wire creator David Simon.

About halfway through, there’s a sentence mentioning how David and his collaborator Ed Burns spent time hanging around rather inconspicuously on “the corner of Monroe and Fayette in west Baltimore.” My immediate thought here was to look up this exact location on Google Maps, and throw up the Google Street View service. Seeing the *exact corner* that Burns and Simon were hanging out on adds immense value to the article! So why the hell wasn’t there a direct link to this corner in the article? It took me 30 seconds to find it, copy the URL, and dump it in here. Here, I’ll even embed it!

View Larger Map

The Guardian has a huge staff of writers, rewriters, editors, subeditors, resubeditors (yes, I’m making up words here), so why can’t they add a bleeding hyperlink?

Disclaimer: I love love love The Guardian. I’m only writing this because I want to improve their product!

A great comment posted on this story about work uniforms at The Guardian. Linking is really simple. Do it often, and do it to relevant sources.

“Please, please, please can these blogs stop including idiotic hyperlinks? The Transport Salaried Staffs Association is presumably a recognised body and should warrant its own link, which would be considerably more useful than picking out the word ‘transport’ to link to that section of the Guardian’s own website. Might seem like a minor point but these links are too often virtual non-sequiturs that display little understanding of where readers might want to be taken. Please tell me they are generated automatically by some crap software rather than painstakingly added by an actual person.

Ahh, feels better to have got that no-doubt pointless rant off my chest.”

Some discussion on Twitter

• Craig McGinty retweeted the link to this story, and added that “the Guardian can’t even link to Friends Reunited when the article is all about it.”
• C.K. Sample III said this “sounds suspiciously like the linking techniques of a site that starts with eng and ends with adget.” Through my amazing skills of deduction, I’ve determined that he’s talking about Engadget. Only thing I’d say in response, is that at least they always link to the source of the story! That would be a pretty decent (and easy) principle for newspapers to adopt.
• Leon Green over at Pickled Politics.com agrees with the commenter, and says “it’s bloody annoying the way the G doesn’t do inline linking properly.” True dat.

Around two weeks ago I formally* applied to the NUJ, stating my occupation as “blogger”, and that my full salary came from blogging in a freelance role. A week later I received a call from Paul at the NUJ, confirming that I couldn’t be a full member of the NUJ if I was in full time education, and neither could I get a student membership if I wasn’t a doing a media course / on the student paper. Because my “situation” clashed with the NUJ’s rulebook, I had to admit that I’m taking a year out of my course, and therefore I won’t technically be a student this year (I’m off to work at Mahalo in Santa Monica, lucky me). I have to tell them I’m a student again when I get back and resume my course, which means I’ll probably be reapplying: depending on whether I find the union useful or not of course.

I received a letter a few days back, suggesting I attend a London freelancers meeting today (Friday 12th November) at 6.45PM. Unfortunately I can’t attend, so I phoned up the NUJ to see whether this would affect my application. It will, to the extent that I won’t be able to answer any potential objections that may or may not be raised.

Then, I get an email from Martin Stabe at the Press Gazette, quoting Jeremy Dear, General Secretary of the NUJ.

“I also approved the application of the first NUJ member who has blogger as their job title. Whilst we have hundreds, if not thousands of members who write blogs, this is the first person who earns their entire living solely from freelance blogging. Who says we’re not attracting new media workers? Membership in new media was up almost 11% over the past year.”

It sounds like I may officially be the first member of the NUJ with blogging as his/her only profession (as long as no objections are raised at this meeting tonight). But am I really the first to join the NUJ as a full-time blogger? It seems like half The Guardian’s online staff are bloggers by profession (including the co-signer of my application), and I’m sure there are plenty of other mainstream media reporters out there who are members of the NUJ, yet their primary job role is blogging. What’s different about me?

I may be the first person to apply as a new member with the vast majority of my experience being at a blog — that has always been a blog, and will always be a blog — but that doesn’t mean I’m the first blogger member of the NUJ.

Is Jeremy Dear saying that I am the first person who earns a salary solely from a blog (which isn’t associated with a mainstream entity) to apply to the NUJ? But wait, you say that Engadget isn’t associated with a mainstream entity? I thought you got your paychecks from AOL, you corporate whore, you! That’s true. So is it a requirement that every blogger who wants to be in the NUJ must be associated with a “big” media company with shareholders and stuff? It seems so. Either that, or no other non-MSM associated blogger has bothered to apply for the NUJ. That scenario honestly wouldn’t surprise me, considering the archaic application process.

The most surprising thing for me is that I was told to my face, on video by Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur) and Richard Sambrook (the director of the BBC’s Global News division) that I’m not a blogger, because of my blog’s mainstream media association, and the fact that my paychecks exist and come from AOL.

So why did I apply? Mainly to see what it was like and whether I would succeed, partly in an attempt to enact some basic changes at the NUJ using a method other than arguing online with Donnacha DeLong (setting up a form based online application system, publishing The Journalist magazine online, and allowing international members would be a great start), and peripherally because I want advice on unions. Surely in an ideal world, that peripheral motivation would be the only motivation?

Let’s see how it goes.

*Apparently, “formally” means writing a letter, on paper, and getting it signed by myself and two other NUJ members (thanks to Jemima and her colleague!) using a pen. I also had to stick an AOL payslip inside.

The Guardian redesigned its website’s front page the other week. I wrote about how tabloidy it is, but Jeff Jarvis in his Media column put the view across much more effectively today. He talks about news being more of a feed than any other format. Instead of having a homepage with some big, large image pointing to the biggest issue of the day, Jeff suggests that they should redesign around a feed format. Allow people to customize what they see on the homepage. Add video, audio, and text commentary from other sources on the web to add context. Make it collaborative. He cites figures where only 20% of readers come to the front page of the site sites. The rest all read The Guardian through links that were originally collated through feeds and deeper linking on other sites, using RSS or otherwise.

These are all nice ideas, but it’ll take a significant culture change within a paper like The Guardian in order to effect a move away from what editors have always understood: a front page, with a leading story. Unfortunately for newspapers, the days where the newspapers get to decide this story are coming to an end. What makes it all the more depressing is that “All this can be done today. And doesn’t that make the notion of the home page, the web site, and the site sound antiquated and quaint like, oh, a newspaper?”

Jeff’s got it right. The real change that has to come at newspapers is cultural, so it’s rather strange that Jeff’s voice comes from within The Guardian. I hope the old hands on the front page read his articles.