The "Enfield Nine" journalists ended their two week strike over staff shortages by holding a street tea party outside the Tindle Newspapers headquarters in Farnham today.
They organised bunting, fairy cakes, cucumber sandwiches and music as part of the campaign to save their titles which are published by the Tindle owned North London & Herts Newspapers and include the Enfield Gazette, Haringey Advertiser and Barnet Press.
The campaign has included a mock funeral in Enfield which was held to warn local residents that their local papers were in danger. The strikers claim that their action has prompted a debate about the future of the local press and quality journalism.
NUJ FoC Jonathan Lovett, said: “It just shows that striking can be a positive action if the cause is right. We feel we have finally found a voice after months of fruitless negotiations and frustration.
“When we started this we didn’t realise we would hit such a nerve with journalists and readers up and down the country.
"We hope this is the start of a national debate about the future of local journalism. For too long, profit-hungry newspaper owners have been getting away with inferior products which do a disservice to their loyal readers.”
Thousands of NUJ members at the BBC are to be balloted for strike action in response to the threat of compulsory redundancies across the Corporation.
The union says that around 100 BBC journalists based in the World Service, BBC Monitoring, Online, and in Scotland and Wales are threatened with compulsory redundancy.
The NUJ, which represents the majority of journalists at the BBC, is to ballot members after it says the BBC refused to consider further moves to secure redeployment or find alternative opportunities for around 100 staff.
NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear said: "For months we have been negotiating with the BBC and have been able to resolve most cases by agreement. But the BBC’s refusal to consider workable alternatives for around 100 staff has left us with no choice but to ballot members for industrial action to defend jobs and services. There is no justification for these compulsory redundancies."
The union will begin the ballot next week.
Pic: Jeremy Dear speaking at protest against BBC World Service job cuts outside Bush House in London. (Jon Slattery)
Windsor and Maidenhead Council is to appoint an independent advertising agency to sell advertising space on its website which, the Newspaper Society claims, will compete with independent local media for revenues.
A member of the council's cabinet will vet and approve each advert and an independent advertising agency will work on a commission basis. The plans were approved at a meeting in March.
The worrying move for local media publishers comes as a new code is imposed limiting the frequency and scope of council publications after complaints that they were unfair competition for the local press.
Lynne Anderson, head of communications at the Newspaper Society said: "Local authorities must not use public funds to compete for readers and advertising with the only voices which can hold them to account - independent local newspapers and their websites. This would never be tolerated at a national level and should not be tolerated locally.
"The local media is reliant on advertising revenue to fund its journalism - revenue which has been under severe challenge as the industry fights its way out of the economic downturn. The local council should be supporting local businesses, not competing with them for vital advertising revenues."
Source: Newspaper Society.Full story in Slough Observer.
A Danish football manager has been sacked from his job a day after hitting a tv reporter during an interview.
Ove Christensen took exception to what he thought were "stupid questions" from a pitchside reporter after his Randers team lost 4-0 to Brondby on Monday and hit the reporter on the arm.
The reporter in question then said "why did you hit me?" to which Christensen replied "because you did a good job" in a sarcastic manner.
A day later Christensen was out of a job, although Randers said they sacked him to try and avoid relegation and not because of his altercation with the reporter.
"If there is a law which is used by one gender only, we should surely be very suspicious of it, as the MP Louise Bagshawe has pointed out. The feeling that women and girls should be seen and not heard, which the law seems to perpetuate with the light punishments it hands out to rapists, child abusers and wife-killers, has now been extended to take in this new development whereby men, if they are rich enough, can be heard and not seen.
"The monstrous regiment of right-wing judges who haven't heard of Emmeline Pankhurst is compounded by the liberal lawyers who seem to believe that once you have ticked the box that says brotherhood of man, you can treat women in a way that you would never dream of treating ethnic minorities."
She also tells a great story about being doorstepped by the Daily Mail: "When I had an adulterous affair in the 1990s, and the Daily Mail found out and sent a man in a grubby mac to doorstep us at my girl's flat, I actually tapped on his window when he fell asleep in his car outside, all the better to give a fellow hack a fighting chance of going back to the DM with his smutty story."
A posting on the Inside Guardian.co.uk blog says: "The Local project has always been experimental in both concept and implementation. We've learned a lot from the beatbloggers, under the expert guidance of Sarah Hartley. We have also learned from the local communities who got involved with telling their stories. And using this we have continually refined our approach over the past year.
What a super-tribute to actor Hugh Bonneville in the Daily Telegraph diary on Monday, under the headline: Hugh Bonneville's simple pleasures.
The Independent in a leader today on super-injunctions says the balance between the right to privacy and the right to free expression has been lost.
It says the decision by Andrew Marr, a former editor of the Independent, to let his privacy injunction lapse highlights a growing sense of disquiet about such super-injunctions.
The Independent says: "Given that these injunctions often involve the infidelities of celebrities, some people have assumed that the only thing the public is being denied is access to salacious gossip. But that assumption is a mistake. In the case of at least one super-injunction there was an issue of genuine public interest involved. In 2009, the oil-trading firm Trafigura took out a super-injunction to prevent information being reported in relation to a toxic disaster in Ivory Coast. The existence of the legal order was only revealed because an MP, Paul Farrelly, referred to it in the House of Commons.
"Moreover, such is the secrecy surrounding super-injunctions that the public simply cannot make a judgement about whether justice is being done. Media organisations are forbidden from reporting not only the details of the case, but the reasons why an individual judge has reached a decision. Justice needs to be open if it is to command public respect. It is hard to see how super-injunctions can be compatible with a transparent legal system.
"There are parallels with the battle over the blanket secrecy that until recently prevailed in the family courts and the Court of Protection. Here, reporting restrictions had sound justifications, namely to protect the privacy of children and vulnerable adults. But that secrecy went too far and harmed the broader interests of justice. Controversial decisions were hidden from public view. Protection swamped transparency. The same thing has happened in the case of super-injunctions.
"Judges have granted several super-injunctions under the Human Rights Act, which guarantees a right to a private life. It is perfectly proper for them to take that legislation into consideration. But too often the balance between that right and the right to free expression, also enshrined in the Human Rights Act, has been lost.
"The family courts and the Court of Protection have been opened up in recent years thanks to public and media pressure. The privacy of the vulnerable has been preserved, but so too has the right of the press to bring important information into the public domain. A similar rebalancing needs to take place in our legal system over super-injunctions. The Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, will publish a report on the use of them next month. It is to be hoped that he will recommend such sensible reforms. If not, the appropriate boundary between free reporting and privacy will need to be drawn in Parliament."
Andrew Marr has told the Daily Mail that he is to let a privacy injunction, which stopped the press writing about his extra-marital affair with another journalist, lapse rather than face a legal challenge from Private Eye magazine.
Marr, the BBC broadcaster and former editor of the Independent, won a High Court injunction in January 2008 to suppress reports of a relationship with a fellow journalist five years earlier.
"She charmed me too. In October 2007, I resigned from the NUJ after 43 years of membership because I thought the union had responded negatively to the advance of digital media. Stanistreet doesn't mention that fact until we rise from the table after our talk. As a parting shot she says: 'Why don't you come back? Come on, you know you want to.'
"So, dear readers, I agreed. I have decided to return to the NUJ fold. The new general secretary has secured her first recruit."
Greenslade, a professor of journalism at City University and former editor of the Daily Mirror, announced he was quitting the NUJ in 2007 because of what he perceived as its outdated approach to new media.
He wrote on his blog: "I think it would be hypocritical to remain inside when I am now so opposed to the union's central aims.
"I do believe, most sincerely, that journalism matters. I also think the act of journalism matters. But the brave new world opened up by the internet makes protectionist organised labour on the lines of the NUJ outdated."
The catalyst to his resignation was widespread and hostile comments from the new media camp to an article in the NUJ magazine, The Journalist, entitled 'Web 2.0 is Rubbish', by Donnacha Delong, then new media representative for the NUJ, which raised concerns that traditional journalistic content and skills was under threat from user-generated content and the internet.
Delong is now the NUJ's vice-president.
Pic: Jon Slattery
"A dramatic day indeed. The residents of Tulla may never see an otter one like it," says the story on BBC News online.
Prime Minister David Cameron has said he feels "uneasy" about the development of privacy law in the UK via court injunctions which stop the media reporting on the private lives of public figures.
He argued that Parliament, not judges, should decide on the balance between the freedom of the press and the right to privacy.
Cameron was challenged about the use of injunctions during a question-and-answer session at the General Motors factory in Luton, BBC News reports.
He said that judges were using cases based on the Human Rights Act to develop a privacy law that left him feeling "a little uneasy".
However, Mr Cameron admitted he had not got all the the answers and said he needed to think some more about it.
Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming has said he may use parliamentary privilege to name some of those covered by privacy injunctions.
Index on Censorship reports that NMT Medical, the US company which pursued cardiologist Peter Wilmshurst in the London libel courts for almost four years, has announced that it is ceasing operations and selling off its assets.
Dr Wilmshurst has been fighting since 2007 to defend his comments about a clinical trial of a heart device manufactured by NMT Medical. Losing the case could have meant he lost his house.
It is one of the cases that has been used to highlight the need for the libel laws in the UK to be reformed.
Index says: "This news of NMT’s closure comes just weeks after Wilmshurst discovered he was facing a fourth libel suit over an interview he gave to BBC Radio 4 Today Programme piece on the chilling effects of England’s libel laws on medical science."
Wilmshurt told Index on Censorship: “It is good news that it seems that my libel case may now be over. However it has cost me all my free time for the last three and a half years. It has also cost hundreds of thousands of my own money and about £200,000 on the conditional fee agreement with my lawyers, Mark Lewis and Alastair Wilson QC. Now that NMT have gone into liquidation, we are uncertain how much of the money we will get back. There will be no compensation for the enormous amount of time my family and I have wasted in fighting the case.”
Solicitor Mark Lewis commented: “It looks like the nightmare is nearly over. After 4 years NMT looks to have gone out of business. Poor Dr Wilmshurst. The continual deployment of the libel laws to stop scientific discussion seems to be over. Peter Wilmshurst and his family enter the normal world blinking from the bright light of a case that is over.”
"The married sportsman, who plays for ****, is using controversial human rights laws to prevent details of his adulterous relationship from being made public.
"The secrecy orders override the traditional principle of open justice in favour of the right to privacy or to prevent the risk of harm to family members who may be embarrassed by the revelations.
"Politicians had pledged that human rights laws would not be used by the courts to introduce a legal right to privacy behind the back of Parliament.
"**** had been accused of having a six-month affair with Imogen Thomas, a glamour model who has appeared as a housemate in Channel 4’s Big Brother."
The Telegraph reports: "A High Court judge has issued an unprecedented gagging order in an attempt to prevent details of a television star’s private life being published, even on the internet.
"Mr Justice Eady, who has been at the centre of most recent controversial libel and privacy cases, made the injunction "against the world" rather than just against national newspapers and broadcasters."The ruling takes secrecy laws to a new level, marking a further advance in the steps the courts are prepared to take to protect high-profile figures and to restrict the right to freedom of expression."
CPJ has documented more than 80 attacks on the press since political unrest erupted in Libya in February. They include the fatalities, numerous injuries, 49 detentions, 11 assaults, two attacks on news facilities, the jamming of two international television transmissions, at least four instances of obstruction, the expulsion of two international journalists, and the interruption of Internet service. At least six local journalists are missing amid speculation they are in the custody of security forces. One international journalist and two media support workers are also unaccounted for.
"It now means that the understandable secrecy which is attached to court proceedings regarding vulnerable people who are in no position to give informed consent to publicity – has been extended to 65 members of the public, and journalists risk imprisonment if they breach the injunction.
"It is a quite breathtaking extension of their remit."
The Guardian has responded to calls for it to rethink plans to close its local sites in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Leeds by asking if local communities would raise funds to support the blogs.
Meg Pickard, head of digital engagement at the Guardian, has posted on the Inside Guardian.co.uk blog: "Thanks for all the replies. We are reading them and clearly hear how much the Guardian local sites were valued in the communities they covered.
"On that note, in conversation with editors here earlier, an interesting idea was mooted: would any of the local communities or individuals affected be interested in carrying on the Cardiff/Leeds/Edinburgh blogs? Or fundraising a sum to enable us to continue? If We could find an alternative - community-supported? - funding model, that could extend the local project....
"Worth pondering? Any thoughts?!"
Postings on the Inside Guardian.co.uk blog have praised the work of the beatbloggers - John Baron (Leeds), Hannah Waldram (Cardiff), and Michael MacLeod (Edinburgh) - on the Guardian local sites and called for them to be saved.
On Twitter a campaign to save the Cardiff blog #savegdncardiff is gaining momentum. Campaigns have been launched to save all three communities and in Leeds supporters are donating cash.