Sunday World crime reporter Patricia Devlin on the NUJ website on why she has made a formal complaint to the Police Ombudsman of Northern Ireland: "Because of my job as a journalist, exposing criminals and paramilitaries, I have been on the receiving end of threats of violence and death threats for years. In Northern Ireland, that now seems to go with the territory where press freedom comes at the price of constant and repeated threats to journalists. But, when I received a threat to rape my new-born baby, also identifying my grandmother and the location of where the sender believed she lived, I had enough. I reported the threat to the PSNI and was even able to name the individual I suspect was behind the threat. The police have had this individual’s name all this time, yet, a year on, no-one has been brought in for questioning, never mind arrested. Meanwhile, the police have given me a constantly changing and contradictory story as to why they have not acted. It is not acceptable for journalists to have to live under this sort of constant threat, to themselves and their families, simply for doing their jobs."
The Times [£] in a leader on Darren Grimes being investigated by police over his YouTube interview with David Starkey: "Mr Grimes is no reporter but to pursue an interviewer, however incompetent, for offensive remarks made by their subject would be to risk criminalising legitimate journalistic inquiry. Police forces may dislike robust public interest reporting, as Neil Basu, the Met’s assistant commissioner, made clear when he threatened to prosecute journalists who published confidential government documents last year. But questions of taste are not questions of law and the right to free speech is the essence of democracy. Neither Dr Starkey nor Mr Grimes deserves martyrdom. Heavy handed police action risks elevating them to it."
David Banks on Twitter: "Before you dismiss Darren Grimes as ‘not being a journalist’ because he lacks credentials, NCTJ exams etc, you should remember that a lot of your journalistic heroes might not have had any either. I would be very slow to dictate who is or isn’t a journalist."
Marina Hyde in the Guardian: "Alas, much of Britain has yet to come to terms with the implications of the fact it elected a newspaper journalist to run it. I honestly can’t believe Boris Johnson has turned out to be a clinical procrastinator, a short-termist headline grabber, and a total chancer who only really responds to the need to do his job three minutes after deadline. If only there’d been some clue, you know?"
Daily Mail editor Geordie Greig interviewed by Matt Kelly in GQ: “My aim is to make the Mail a force for good, a badge of great journalism, crusading, entertaining, informative. Every day I feel this on the newsroom floor – a renewed sense of pride and positivity for what we can achieve...There are times when the Mail should be abrupt, but I don’t think we should ever be acid or toxic. There’s a positive way to tell hard truths. Papers can get stuck in permanent attack mode, but that’s less effective than championing the values it does support. I want my modern Mail to be an effective agent of change for a better Britain. But please don’t think the Mail can never show brutal thunder.”
- Amber Rudd quoted in the GQ article about Greig's Mail: “It’s been a big change. It’s just less nasty. It’s more playful in a way that the former Daily Mail was unpleasant. It’s no longer positioned to egg the readers on to hate their neighbour or particular groups.”
Andrew Neil on Twitter: "I’ve spent the past two hours jumping between @MSNBC and @FoxNews. American broadcast journalism is truly screwed. Nothing but a wall of partisan propaganda masquerading as reporting."
James Murdoch interviewed in the New York Times on the US election: “I’m just concerned that the leadership that we have, to me, just seems characterized by callousness and a level of cruelty that I think is really dangerous and then it infects the population,” he said, referring to the Trump administration. “It’s not a coincidence that the number of hate crimes in this country are rising over the last three years for the first time in a long time.”
Irish Times correspondent Conor Gallagher on Twitter: "This is a cocktail called The Journalist we made tonight
Martin Kettle in the Guardian on former colleague Allegra Stratton becoming Downing Street press secretary: "I say that journalists should stick with journalism. They should not cross the floor to work for the politicians, let alone to become politicians. Far too many of my colleagues have done that over the years and the results have rarely been good – from Johnson himself downwards. I regret every one of those departures from journalism. Naturally, I especially regret the friends who have made the switch. But I even regret the people I disliked and mistrusted who have also trodden that path. The loss of each one of them is bad for the standing of journalism as an independent, truth-seeking trade."
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