Trainee Journalists were given a crash course today on good and bad practise in science reporting at the Brighton Journalist Works.

Dr Sam Mugford of the Norwich-based John Innes Centre and Prof David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University teamed up in a two-pronged attack on the irresponsibility shown by some journalists in collecting and reporting scientific data and the mutability of statistics.

Dr Mugford addressed issues like “Why scientists don’t give straight answers”, highlighting the discrepancy between careful, considered thought processes of the scientific community with the whip-crack speeds expected of journalists. He said that this trend leads to misunderstanding and manipulation of data in the search for good copy.

Citing the MMR/Autism case as an example of lack of communication and use of limited sources, he called for balance in science reporting and forethought in comparing researched and ratified scientific research with emotive human stories.

Dr Spiegelhalter followed this by taking the audience on a fascinating journey through scientific misrepresentation in the press.  Students were warned to be aware of organisations fudging numbers to push their own agendas and to pick out PR from good journalism.  We were encouraged to constantly question the data given to us; to be inquisitive and hungry for accuracy and to take personal responsibility for fact.

END

Since then I have found myself thrown in at the deep end. Fortunately I found I can swim far better in a metaphor than I can in reality.

Being a reporter is an amazing job. In six months I’ve covered a wide range of stories. I’ve found myself challenging a toothless pensioner to a “gurn off” for a feature; I’ve photographed an immigration raid by the UK Border Agency; and I’ve found myself travelling half way across the country to interview with a man who was tortured for more than three days at a house in Crawley.

I think it will be a long time before the thrill of seeing my name on the front page begins to dull.

If you go out on work experience don’t wait to be given something to do. Otherwise you will find yourself sitting there like a lemon. Newspapers are inundated with requests for work experience and the ones who show initiative will be the ones who get recommended when positions become vacant. Search for your own story or feature ideas before you get there. That way you can show you know what you’re doing (even if you feel like you don’t!). I felt out of my depth for the first couple of months but you learn as you go and everything you are taught at the Journalist Works will give you enough to get started. The rest is up to you. 

‘Just flippin do it’ was the message from Philip John to a group of wannabe multi-media student hacks.

He’s not a Nike representative but a hyper-local journalist guru who is encouraging others to start their own media sites using niche or local content.

Philip who lives in the Midlands town of Lichfield started ‘Lichfield Live’ a popular local website.

He says he started the site in response to the slow pace of news reporting in traditional media in his local area.

He started tweeting local news and was soon gaining followers many of whom then started to send him their news.  He has 735 followers on twitter.
He stressed the importance of not just observing but getting out and about and meeting people camera and audio recorder in hand.  ”Just flippin’ do it,” he told students from Brighton Journalist Works on both the MA in Journalism and on the Fast-track NCTJ Diploma in Journalism courses.

Reassuringly, he said the costs of his work are low and described how some innovative thinking can bring in revenue.

He has already brought in over £1000 from advertising without really trying and also sells ‘Love Lichfield’ T-shirts.

He recommends connecting with other similar organizations as this can raise your profile with a wider audience, improve your own work and create new networking opportunities.

It seems that Philip is on the cutting edge of where technology and local media converge and he had lots of ideas for how start-up journalists could find resources.

We thought scrapers were for cleaning your car window but apparently ScraperWiki is offering a different way of pulling and presenting data from multiple sites.

For more information visit his site: www.philipjohn.co.uk

What kind of a free Press do we want? A totally free Press left with its own self-governing body for standards of behaviour?

Or a Press without any restrictions other than the existing laws of libel?

Or a Press subject to government and legal censorship?

Think carefully before you give an opinion for this is not a black and white matter. There are huge benefits in having a totally free Press but there are also drawbacks.

There are also disastrous drawbacks in having a Press subjected to Government control and censorship.

With a censored Press you can end up like Stalinist Russia which had two government controlled newspapers: Izvestia and Pravda. These words meant truth and news. Hence the Muscovites used to joke: there is no news in the truth and there is no truth in the news.
Press lords like prostitutes
Stanley Baldwin, regarded by some as safe pair of hands as a Prime Minister and by others as a pusillanimous ditherer said that Press lords were like prostitutes – they wanted power without responsibility. He was referring in particular to those two newspaper titans of the day, Lord Northcliffe of the Daily Mail group and Lord Beaverbrook of the Daily Express. Both achieved more for Britain than Baldwin ever did.
Another wit used to proclaim:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
Thank God, the British journalist,
But seeing what the man will do unbribed,
There’s no occasion to.

This debate has come about of course during the furore over phone tapping which led to the closure of the News of the World and huge payments made by Rupert Murdoch’s company, News International to alleged victims of the phone tapping.
Leveson inquiry
Now we have the Leveson inquiry which in due course will report to the Government. The good Lord Leveson has been listening to evidence from all quarters as he delves into the word of news.

I am left with the unmistakeable impression that this has nothing to do with whether or not we should have a free Press but a form of revenge from MPs who by and large were shown to be dishonest in the presentation of their expenses to Parliament..

In case you have forgotten the statistics let me remind you. Out of 646 Members of parliament only 50 minimised their expenses – and even one of those, the saintly Vince Cable, has just been fined for not completing his tax return correctly.

This was not petty cash we were talking about. Some of them invented fictitious mortgages which they expected you and me to pay for, another claimed for clearing his moat while another built a house on his pond for the ducks.

Yet another had to pay back £80,000 – others – but too few – were sent to jail.
Big stick
Since that day members of all parties have been looking for a big stick to beat the Press with.

The phone tapping gave them a great excuse because stupidly the News of the World used phone tapping to check on victims of crime.
They could have got this information – if necessary – from orthodox reporting methods.

And do not think that the News of the World was the only newspaper to employ these tactics.

Equally, newspapers have helped many an investigation where the police have been unable to trace criminals or solve crimes.
Smart phones
Modern technology has already made phone tapping out of date. If you own a smart phone you can buy at a reasonable price the kit to monitor anybody’s e mails. Dodgy politicians, errant husbands or wives and other miscreants can be easily monitored.

Not only does the march of IT progress make the phone tapping inquiry redundant, other advances in media platforms for citizen journalists mean the days of newspapers as we know them are numbered.

Soon we will have one tabloid paper – call it the Sun-Mirror: one middle of the road paper – call it the Mail-Express and one heavyweight paper, call it The Times Telegraph.

It is worth quoting some of the evidence given by leading journalists to the Leveson inquiry.

The most trenchant came from Kelvin MacKenzie, a former successful editor of the Sun and now a columnist on the Daily Mail.
arse kissing or arse kicking
In typical fashion he cast doubts on Leveson to produce anything worthwhile and points out that politicians behaviour to Press lords varies from arse kissing to arse kicking, depending on when they want their support. That, in my experience is a pretty fair summing up.

Of course, super injunctions and the courts are being wrongly used to prevent the truth coming out in the public domain. If some successful sportsman is held up as a shining light to our young people and endorses products from football boots to hair restorer I think it is a matter of public interest to correct the image if he is a lying, cheating, adulterous, tax dodging, drug taking imbecile.

Not that any of our shining young men qualify in all categories.

And if Wayne Rooney, Rio Ferdinand, Andrew Marr and Jeremy Clarkson want to appear whiter than white they must mend their ways, admit they are human and not hide behind the law. Marr and Clarkson have admitted their errors.

The associate editor of the Sun – and a shrewd political commentator, — Trevor Kavanagh – points out that but for the Free Press in the United States Dominic Strauss Khan’s conduct, widely known among the chattering classes in Paris was deemed under French law to be of no concern to the people who were going to be asked to elect him President.

Kavanagh makes the reasonable point that if people are going to persuade us to part with our cash or give them our votes we should know something about their characters.

Would we have wanted to have John Stonehouse, Jeremy Thorpe or John Profumo in power if we had known what they were really like?
freedom of information
Alan Rushbridger of the Guardian claimed to Leveson that the laws in Britain actually hindered investigative reporting and pointed out that in a world league table we came in joint 28th place when it came to freedom of information.

Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail put things in perspective. He roundly condemned phone tapping but pointed out:

No British cities were looted, nobody died, and no banks were in danger of collapsing and elected politicians continued to steal from the public. And moreover the nation did not go to war.

And yet the Leveson inquiry has wider powers than any inquiry into these problems.
rank smell of hypocrisy
He sums up neatly:

Am I alone in detecting the rank smell of hypocrisy and revenge in the political class’s current moral indignation over a British Press that dared to expose their greed and corruption?

Well what do you think?

Talking of greed and corruption did you read about the Pakistani cricketers?

After the jury were out for 17 hours at Southwark Crown court in London they were found guilty of a match-fixing plot in a Test match against England and jailed.

Now, cricket authorities for years have suspected something like this – ever since the disgraced South African captain Hansie Cronje was implicated. So have the police

There were also some very strange happenings concerning a cricket tournament in the Middle East.

Suddenly the term it’s not cricket seem to foreshadow something much more sinister than a batsman refusing to walk after being given out.

The trouble stemmed from the huge illegal betting on the Asian sub continent.
investigative journalism
Whether the cricket authorities were naïve in ignoring the implications, or whether they did not want publicity to harm potential television rights we shall never know, but the whole affair would have gone on – again and again – and unpunished, had it not been for some clever investigative reporting by a Sunday newspaper. That newspaper was the News of the World.

As we cannot trust our MPs or international cricketers I think we should be very careful of muzzling the Press.

ends

When I turned up for my first day at Brighton Journalist Works I still wasn’t completely sure what ‘subbing’ involved. I think I even tried to change the font size on the first piece I worked on, to try to make the copy fit. I was working as a waitress at the time, writing for a couple of local papers on the side — and just excited about the prospect of a job where I didn’t come home smelling of beer and gravy every day.

Eight very short months later I’ve been offered the junior sub-editor position at Men’s Health magazine, and I honestly can’t wait to get to work every morning. You don’t need a degree or years of work/life experience under your belt — just a lot of enthusiasm and an eagerness to learn. So for those of you who think subbing may be your thing, here’s the best advice I have for you… bearing in mind that I am still very new to this!

1. Read the magazine before you start your work-experience placement. Really read it. And think like a sub while you do so — look at the heads, sells and picture captions. Take note of whether they are funny, informative, a smart play on words or straight to the point. Ask yourself who buys this magazine, and what they expect to gain from reading it.

2. Find out who works there and what they do. Not just the editor and the chief sub, but the creative director, features editor, the head of the fashion team… You’ll save yourself a lot of time if you know who to address your questions to.

3. Read the style guide and try to memorise as much of it as you can. Do they favour “learnt” or “learned”, m-dashes or n-dashes? Is it “photographs by” or “photography by”?

4. Fact-check absolutely everything. Names, places, statistics. And if you read anything that doesn’t make sense, ask someone. No one will think you’re stupid. They’ll just think you’re thorough.

5. Brush up on your spelling and grammar. That’s not to imply that you have to be some sort of grammar wizard to get a job, but it helps to know the difference between “which” and “that” and how to use a hyphen correctly.

6. Learn the language, so when people start talking about folios, flatplans and ABC figures you’ll know what they’re on about. Take the one-week Business of Magazines course if you can, or if not, ask Paula or Dinah very nicely if you can look at a copy of the ‘key terms’ sheet.

7. Have confidence in yourself and your opinions. I know it’s a bit of a cliché, but your opinions matter. If something doesn’t look right, doesn’t read well, doesn’t make sense or doesn’t sit comfortably with the tone of the magazine then tell someone — whether the piece was written by the former editor, a celebrity panelist or the work-experience student is irrelevant. Everyone makes mistakes and it’s the sub’s job to flag them up.

Paul Bradshaw

This time last year I was temping in an insurance office – slowly dying in front of a spreadsheet and making a trip to the coffee machine the highlight of my day. I had to take a paperclip off every bundle of work that landed on my desk, and by the time I quit to join the Brighton Journalist Works I’d managed to fill five plastic cups. A few hectic months of lessons, exams and internships later found me working as a freelance writer for Total Film magazine. Sure, talking to movie stars and going to glitzy premieres is all good fun – but I’m never going to get those paperclips back.

Following on from Al Horner’s excellent advice for anyone wanting a career as a music journalist, BJW asked me if I had any tips for students wanting to get into film criticism.

Get Writing (again)

I’m going to repeat Al’s point because it’s so important. Months before I started the fast-track course I begged every editor in the country to let me write for them. Of course, they all ignored me. Building a quick website and filling it with what looked like a few months’ back catalogue of movie reviews, I eventually got the attention of The Argus – who gave me enough regular work to turn up at Total Film a year later with a fistful of clippings. As long as you don’t mind working for free (and you shouldn’t) there’s always going to be plenty of people willing to exploit your time and talent in exchange for some invaluable experience. Blogging and tweeting is all good stuff, but don’t expect editors to be too impressed with a random collection of irregular musings. Try and be as focussed as possible. Set yourself a word limit and a deadline, and always try to avoid the first person – especially if you’re writing a review.

Book your work experience…now

Editors are busy people. So busy, in fact, that all those cleverly written emails you keep bombarding them with are probably not even getting read. Luckily, there’s a pretty easy way to get your foot through the door. You might be unlucky enough to turn up during a hectic press week, find all the bigwigs away on holiday or get stuck pouring coffee all day – but making the most of your work experience almost guarantees you an opportunity to get yourself noticed. Most magazines have a regular supply of interns booked out months in advance. The advantage you have over everybody else is the same one that gets you through an intensive NCTJ course. You’re not there just to give it a go and you’re not there just to put it on your CV. You’ve read the last few issues cover to cover, you know the sections and you know their style. You know the names of the editors and you’ve got a stack of ideas for features or stories to pitch them. There probably won’t even be a job going, but treating your work experience like a two-week interview instead of a gap year filler is never going to be a waste of time.

Make yourself valuable

As a newbie freelancer, I’m always competing for work with a list of names on the editor’s desk and you don’t want to give them any reason to not call you first. It goes without saying, but the quicker you submit the work – the more chance you’re going to get given something else. If you get asked to write about something obscure at a moment’s notice, or offered work over the weekend you already made plans for – make sure you never say no.

Any other tips?Keep up to date with the news, always make sure your voice recorder’s charged, don’t try to interview a film director the day after you come back from a music festival and if you’re still wondering whether BJW is the best thing for you or not, you shouldn’t be. Unless, of course, you really think you’re going to miss those paperclips….

We were given a situation which required us to call a member of the (Journalist Works) police force (who looked alarmingly like my tutor) for information on an attack which had taken place, and had eight minutes to prepare some questions. When our time was up, the interview began.

Asking the right questions was key to this exercise, and questions which you’d think were insignificant to ask, turned out to be useful in creating a picture of the bigger story and getting as much info as possible out of the ‘officer’. With no idea of what the interviewee would have to say on the events which had taken place, it was difficult to not be thrown by some answers, and at times I found myself off track. This time of the interview was apparent as one of my notes read ‘yes’. Useful.

I’ll always dislike phone calls, and it’ll probably be a good few years before I stop losing phones, but I learnt a lot from this exercise. Aside from realising it is possible to probe a stranger for information and people aren’t that scary, I knew from this day on I’d need a contract with more minutes.

by Chloe McLaren

I never would have imagined that asking someone questions on the phone could be so difficult, writes Emma Walker. That was until the second week of my NCTJ Diploma at Brighton Journalist Works when our tutors set us a phone interview challenge.

We were given some basic facts for a news story and left to find out the rest from one of the experienced journalist tutors, who would be posing as a fictional interviewee, in a staged phone interview.

This exercise has been one of the many useful tasks that I have been set by Journalist Works and I’ve now pulled together a list of tips on how to conduct a professional phone interview.

• Prepare some questions to keep a structure to the interview but remember you don’t have to rigidly stick to them.
• Be upfront by saying exactly who you and why you are calling, this will put your interviewee at ease.
• Remember it is okay to ask for something to be repeated (i.e. names, address and spellings). Make sure you get your facts right as it is better to be accurate than to upset your source and embarrass yourself.
• Ask open-ended questions that avoid just simple yes or no answers.
• Remember human interest is the key, stories are about people.
• Leave the most contentious questions to the end, to keep the tone positive from the start.
• Be polite, thank them for their time.
• Remember to ask if they have anything to add, this leaves a window for any extra information you may have missed.
• Ask if it would be okay for you to ring back in case any new information emerges – get a number and ask when the best time to call is.

With all this in mind I feel so much more confident about phone interviews now; Brighton Journalist Works really are preparing us for what the real world of Journalism is like.

There is nothing quite like being thrown in at the deep end.

Emma Walker

About a year ago I was lucky enough to interview a top band, says Rhys Morgan. It was a phone interview between me and three members of the band.. No loud-speaker lead to awkward silences as the phone was passed from person to person. I froze during the interview, laughed awkwardly at jokes that I didn’t get and stuck rigidly to the pre-planned questions I had chosen.

Since my lesson on phone interviewing at BJW I think I’ve improved. The three best bits of advice given to us were: always introduce yourself and let your interviewee know where you are calling from; don’t stick to the planned questions – if you discover something interesting during the interview, don’t be afraid to veer off and explore new avenues of questioning; always be sure to finish by asking if there is anything else the interviewee can add to the information.

As a junior writer, the thought of interviewing (probably anyone) still conjures up a sense of doom., says Becky Freeth.  I defy anyone not to become flustered, forget questions and develop a stammer. I am reassured though that interviewing is a skill that everyone needs practise to perfect. That is why a workshop on interviewing technique was a great way to launch into ‘the art of the interview’.

The workshop highlighted the importance of being able to ‘ad-lib’ and develop leads. I hope this will be a natural progression as we broaden our experience as writers and reporters. Equally, losing the natural stammer and sense of doom will be part of becoming comfortable with an interview situation. Thanks to the workshop, the prospect of conducting an impromptu interview has become a lot less daunting. It was a great way to get familiar with the nature of interviewing and a really valuable exercise all round. Thanks for another great day in the hub!

I got offered a position at Q Magazine after doing a couple of weeks on work experience placement there. I now spend my days bleating on about bands, putting questions to pop stars and making endless cups of coffee. BJW asked me  if I had any advice to pass on to prospective students, so here’s a few pointers, albeit from someone on the very bottom rung of the ladder.

Take a leap of faith

I was working in a Blockbuster video store at the beginning of the year – not a bad occupation by any means, but there is only so many times you can shoo errant children away from the pick ‘n’ mix stand before wanting to sellotape together a makeshift weapon out of Nicolas Cage DVDs. I decided to give journalism a go, writing stories in newspapers instead of potentially appearing in them (“DVD STORE EMPLOYEE CLOBBERS SWEET-TOOTHED CHILD”).

My point is, I really wasn’t sure about doing the Journalist Works course initially. Three months is a long time to commit to a course, and it’s a lot of money to spend on something that you might end up deciding isn’t for you. But if you have a serious interest in writing, reporting or if you’re a grammar pedant, give it a go. You won’t regret it.

Get writing

“You learn by doing” and “you only get out what you put in” are the sort of clichés that news writing tutor Louisa Hannah would balk at if you put them in an article, but they ring true. Get involved with local magazines, hound the Argus news desk with stories, start blogging, get going. I wrote for several music websites unpaid just to hone my writing style, and continue to write for them now, just for fun.

Twitter is also great, not only for updating the world on what you put on your toast that morning. So much in news and feature writing is about being succinct and to the point, so if you tend to rattle on like I do, getting into the habit of conveying a point in 140 characters is oddly beneficial – even if it is only about toast.

Sharpen your coffee-making prowess

On work experience, you can be a budding Jon Ronson, the next Caitlin Moran or even George Orwell reincarnate – it doesn’t matter, you’re still going to end up on tea and coffee-making duties. It’s actually a really good way of meeting people and getting your face about the office. You’ll see fellow journalists in the kitchen, you’ll get chatting and maybe they will remember you when it comes to freelance commissions and work opportunities.

If any future BJW students end up in Q on work experience and, you know, if you’re offering, I take mine with milk and two sugars, thanks… just kidding. Seriously though, don’t dismiss the persuasive power of a half-decent Americano.

by Becky Barnes

The power of the internet and social networking never cease to amaze me, and certainly have not failed me at the start of my journalistic journey.  Following six months of post-uni travels, I returned to the UK four months ago, seeking a career in journalism.  While I trawled the internet for potential ways into the industry, I thought it wise to start  a blog.

My first post was a little bit unsure.  What should I write about?  Would people really want to read about me and my opinions?  I decided to name the post ‘Rediscovery Channel’ saying I would chart my rediscovery of popular culture after my time away from it in rural India.

If I was to take this blog seriously, I would need to go to events I thought would interest people, so I decided to buy a ticket to The Great Escape Festival in Brighton as I was going to a taster day at Brighton Journalist Works at the same time.  BJW had caught my eye firstly because it was in Brighton, but mostly because it seemed that the course could fast-track me to where I wanted to be.  I spent the evenings at the Festival and a day at BJW.  The day was interesting and interactive and I signed on the line straight away (for the test that is!)

At the same time, I reviewed The Great Escape.  I submitted my review to a website and got into an e-mail conversation with one of the people that ran it.  This conversation led to a summer of free tickets in return for festival reviews, and of course invaluable writing experience.

So, there I was; blogging and waiting to start my journalism course.  As the course approached, a flood of helpful e-mails from BJW prompted me to get on Twitter.  I had used it before when I was a Marketing Assistant for an arts festival but not for personal use.  Wondering where to start, I started following lots of Brighton people and gig venues, as well as newspapers and journalists.

It was a good move to write ‘Writes festival and gig reviews’ in my description, as I got contacted by a Brighton gig review website after tweeting about music and gigs.  Never underestimate the power of mentioning people in tweets – it’s a great way of networking, and gaining followers.  I now have a string of dates in the diary of gigs I am reviewing, which will be more writing experience.

It helped me to mention I was about to start an NCTJ Diploma, so anyone waiting to start their course at BJW, get writing.  Get on Twitter and follow people in your field of interest.  You never know where it might lead.

Blog: dancingwithmissb.wordpress.com Twitter: @beckybarnesb

When the announcement came that this weekend was to see the last edition of the News of the World I was not surprised but very sad.
The scandalous revelations concerning phone hacking into private telephone conversations was too serious to be ignored.

For the first time in something like 50 years connected with the media I feel ashamed to admit that I am a journalist and I have been a reporter and an executive on both tabloid and broadsheet newspapers.

Why Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International did not resign or was not sacked in the early days of these revelations I cannot understand.

Brooks defence – or Rebekah Wade as she was when editor of the News of the World, was that she didn’t know that it was happening. I find that totally unconvincing.

The News of the World was a weekly paper, it came out once every seven days. There is plenty of time for an editor to find out who is providing stories and where they come from. If she truly didn’t know then she must have been the most incompetent national newspaper editor of all time.

I once worked for a Sunday newspaper – the Sunday Express under the editor John Junor when it sold more than 4 million each day. Junor read every line that went into that paper whether it was written by a lowly reporter, a provincial correspondent, an international news agency or a specially commissioned politician.

He read it in raw copy, on page proofs and on the page. Nothing escaped his eyes. Woe betide anybody who got something wrong or stepped beyond the bounds of decent behaviour. Instant dismissal was a fact of life. He was not a popular man among his staff.

But popularity is not a requisite for a good editor. When he gave an instruction it was certainly not a subject for debate. But his judgement of events and people was legendary.

My first editor, on the Dorset County Chronicle in its heyday was Heber Bruce, a Quaker and a man of great integrity…I was once offered money to keep a court case out of the paper. When I told him he took my copy and elevated it from a two paragraph filler to an inside page lead.

The tragedy of the N o W affair is not that they exposed people like randy footballers and actors – or cheating and lying politicians – but that they stepped into the blameless lives of ordinary people, some beset by grief.

At a stroke this has undone much of the good which newspapers do to preserve our democracy and given politicians a big stick to beat the Press and to step even closer to laws of privacy which will hide their own wrongdoings.

To have seen John Prescott and Max Clifford and Hugh Grant on screen, posing as white knights denouncing newspapers and posing as arbiters of good taste stuck in the craw.

And Fords, Virgin and other advertisers have set a dangerous example in withdrawing their advertising. Does this mean we are now to have newspapers subject to censorship by advertisers?

So if Ford motor company produce a car which a motoring correspondent describes as a bag of nails will they use that s a reason not to advertise?

There is also a great attempt to paint Rupert Murdoch as some kind of ogre who leads poor naïve politicians astray and Labour politicians are quick to say he has Cameron in his pocket.

Press Lords have always courted politicians just as politicians have courted them. He was good old Roop to left wingers when the Sun supported Tony Blair and the Labour Party, having been weaned away from Margaret Thatcher.

But when his newspapers switched allegiance he became a devil with horns.

And it’s often forgotten that while Murdoch’s News International publishes the N o W and the Sun, he also publishes the Times and the Sunday Times.

The fact that the two sober papers sell around 1.5million copies with each publication while the other two were the biggest sellers daily and on Sunday says more about Britain than it does about Murdoch.

It also did not come as a surprise to me to learn that policemen had been paid by the News of the World.

In my days as a reporter in London’s East End I knew that some officers were given a drink by national newspapers – in the jargon of the time that translated into – anything from £25 to £1,000 or a holiday with some excellent shooting.

And in the days before mobile phones it was not unknown for one agency in London to monitor police radios in order to be first on a crime scene.

As far as I was concerned the offer came the other way. A Detective Inspector in the East End offered me money for information which might help his team to feel a few collars. We settled amicably for an arrangement which meant that he gave me useful background while I tipped him off about anything I discovered about crime. It was all done over the odd civilised pint or two. Neither of us ever broke a confidence.

Now you have the ridiculous situation of police spokesmen who give out a statement which is usually too late and useless.

Conversely we now have police officers hogging the cameras at the end of a court case giving their views on the crime. This may be good for their egos and promotion but I would prefer such reporting to be concentrated on the judge’s remarks.

Now which will be the next newspaper to close? Unfortunately it could be the Observer, which has never been a happy bedfellow of the Guardian. It was always a better newspaper than its daily partner: it rang with authority whether n politics, defence, the arts or sport and it had the guts to support the abolition of hanging before most politicians jumped on the bandwagon.

Recently it has been starved of resources as the Guardian, which once survived on the back of the Manchester Evening News, has found its losses mounting.

It will not be many years – or maybe months – before we have one tabloid newspaper , probably the Sun-Mirror, and one mid range paper: the Mail/Express and one decent quality journal: the Telegraph/Times.

Unfortunately television and radio will not take the place of the missing titles.