Friday 10 June 2011

Quotes of the Week: From Trinty Mirror's 'charity' in Scotland to the secret of writing a good intro


Roy Greenslade on the job cuts at the
Daily Record and Sunday Mail on his MediaGurdian blog: "I have no especial brief for Trinity Mirror - as I must have made clear endless numbers of times on this blog - but its willingness to continue publishing the Record and Mail could be viewed as an act of charity."


Stephen Glover in the Independent: "Guardian News and Media does not seem to understand that it is fighting for its life. Its editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, has garnered more commercial power than he is qualified to wield, presiding serenely over the boom years and, though gloomy about the future of print, slow to understand the impact of the downturn. Who can make him understand that the party is over, and will never start up again? It is practically lunatic that the Telegraph Media Group, which reported profits of £58.9 million last year, should employ 130 fewer journalists than the seriously loss-making Guardian News and Media."

Attorney General Dominic Grieve on BBC Radio 4's Law in Action: “If you’re a tweeter and you’re susceptible to the jurisdiction of our national courts in England and Wales it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that you may find yourself being brought into court for contempt; and the fact that you're doing it on Twitter doesn’t give you some blanket exemption."

Committe to Protect Journalists' special report on sexual assaults on journalists: "Over the past four months, CPJ has interviewed more than four dozen journalists who have undergone varying degrees of sexual violence—from rape by multiple attackers to aggressive groping—either in retaliation for their work or during the course of their reporting. They include 27 local journalists working in regions from the Middle East to South Asia, Africa to the Americas."

Steve Bowbrick in The Word magazine on blogs vs. social networks: "The blogs, because of their independence and energy and the sense that anything is possible, have defied the irrelevance threatened by the social networks. They represent the richness and value of human subjectivity and the potential for open and honest communication, even in the age of collapsing business models and fading media behemoths."

The new executive editor of the New York Times Jill Abramson, interviewed in the Guardian, on why she has only just started a Twitter account: "It may be weird. But I haven't felt the need until now. I'm an interior kind of person."

Commons Speaker John Bercow's view of the
Daily Mail as reported by the Guardian: "Sexist, racist, bigoted, comic cartoon strip".

Peter Sands on the advice he was given on writing tight intros by his first editor, Robin Thompson of the Shields Weekly News: "Remember Peter, this is newspapers. The only walk of life where the orgasm comes first."

No comments: