Thursday 25 February 2016

Media Quotes of the Week: From journalists 'self-pleasuring' Boris Johnson to are bloggers who work for nothing more authentic than paid contributors?



Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer: "Journalists have colluded in the self-pleasuring of Boris Johnson by obsessing over which side of the fence that incorrigible attention-seeker will fall."


Nick Cohen on the Spectator blog: "After the Times fired him for making up stories, Johnson ended up as the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent. Once there, he was seduced by the most corrupting desire to afflict a journalist: the urge to give readers what they want. His tales of the EU punishing the rubber industry for making undersized condoms or ordering the straightening of bananas were so flimsy that, like dandelion puffballs, they collapsed with the first puff of scrutiny."


Andrew Norfolk in The Times [£] on the guilty verdicts in the Rotherham child grooming case: "It began with a voicemail. A young woman, sounding nervous, said that she wanted to talk to a journalist about what had happened to her as a child in Rotherham. Her call led to a series of meetings and a story published in 2013 across four pages of The Times. It examined the life of one groomed girl — we called her Jessica — and the repeated failure of child-protection authorities to take action against her adult abuser, Arshid Hussain. The articles prompted a two-year police inquiry and a trial in which the same brave young woman found herself in the witness box at Sheffield crown court. She was one of nine child victims whose accounts resulted in Hussain’s conviction yesterday for 23 sex offences."


New Day editor Alison Phillips in a press release on the new paper which launches next Monday: “There are many people who aren’t currently buying a newspaper, not because they have fallen out of love with newspapers as a format, but because what is currently available on the newsstand is not meeting their needs. This paper has been created as a result of customer insight and is the first newspaper designed for people’s modern lifestyles.”


The Times[£] in a leader: "Sepp Blatter describes himself in a Times interview today as a missionary for football. In truth, the man who was once the most powerful figure in the sport is more mercenary than missionary."


Dan Hodges ‏@DPJHodges on Twitter: "New York Daily News portray Trump as the anti-Christ. When are they going to get off the fence..."


Gary Younge giving the James Cameron Memorial Lecture: "Department of Justice investigators found that every time a police dog bit someone the victim was black. It turns out that sometimes dog bites man really is the story. And we keep missing it."


Tsuneo Kita, chairman and group chief executive of Nikkei, on the Financial Times moving back to Bracken House: “It feels as if this is a gift to our partnership, and I am as excited as you are that we will be together in the heart of the City as we advance towards our goal of becoming the world’s premier business media group.”


Huffington Post editor Stephen Hull, on BBC Radio 4's Media Show: "What we do is that we have 13,000 contributors in the UK, bloggers… we don’t pay them, but you know if I was paying someone to write something because I wanted it to get advertising, that’s not a real authentic way of presenting copy. So when somebody writes something for us, we know it’s real. We know they want to write it. It’s not been forced or paid for. I think that’s something to be proud of.”

Media Mole on the New Statesman: "Your mole wonders how far the miserly head HuffPo honcho takes his logic. Presumably he can’t go out to eat at restaurants, because the food the (paid) chefs cook him is inauthentic. And when he’s ill, he must have to research his symptoms online instead of visiting a GP, because their salaries mean the diagnoses they give aren't real. He must have to walk to work because of all those pesky salaried workers driving tube trains and buses, ruining the authenticity of the daily commute."

[£]=paywall

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