Bell bottom?

Lovely quote in the Press Gazette today (1/9/06 issue), allegedly from Emily Bell, editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited. Ms Bell was apparently about to appear on QTV on the media version of The Apprentice (The UK version with Sir Alan Sugar):

"I'm about to go on television with an arse the size of Africa."

Does media celebrity fit club also beckon?

Anyone acquainted with the true stature of Ms Bell's behind, please feel free to reveal.

More bizarre behaviour from the Press Gazette

The Press Gazette (PG) recently signed a deal with the Press Association to sponsor regional newspaper adverts in the magazine.

I quote from the PG's original piece:

Regional newspaper publishers will from this week be able to place vacancies across one or two pages dedicated to the sector, at no cost.

The regional press has had a tough year commercially - with widespread job cuts - and the initiative hopes to extend the reach of regional advertising beyond a handful of online-only alternatives.

I don't get it. Regional press publishers are axeing jobs but are still apparently making obscene profits so obviously they deserve to get free recruitment advertising. And obviously we should be falling over ourselves to go and work for these wonderful employers who cannot even afford or be bothered to pay a few quid to recruit staff. Not exactly an exciting prospect is it?

Also, what sort of message is the PG sending out by encouraging the practice of 'free advertising' for publishers? Revenue from recruitment advertising helps pay the wages of many of its readers who work on trade publications, for example.

The true purpose of this scheme may be to claw back some of the damage inflicted on PG's recruitment ad revenue by 'online-only' alternative holdthefrontpage.co.uk, the regional press recruitment vehicle for Newsquest, Northcliffe, Johnston Press and Trinity Mirror. Given the dominance the 'big four' have in this sector, the PG is essentially scrabbling for crumbs under the table.

As for the Press Association, wouldn't it rather be selling content to help fill the pages of under-staffed newspapers instead of encouraging 'free' recruitment?

Last week's PG boasts of having more jobs online than any other resource. At today's count, that's 52 jobs, 30 of which are from a single recruitment agency (do all those jobs really exist, or are they just collecting CVs?). The Media Guardian would probably have something to say about that, and journalism.co.uk has twice as many (105, it claims). All a bit desperate really.

Under Piers Morgan's control, the PG has been acting increasingly strangely (eg "Citizen Journalism" awards for, err, mobile camera snapshots and video - doh). But I guess the same could be said of his tenure at the Daily Mirror...

A tale of two professions..

Take a look at these quotes:

"The concerns about conflicts of interest are much more at the top of my mind than they were 10 or 15 years ago."

On close links with industry, this person says...
"...we are going to have to wean ourselves off a dependency that is generally inappropriate. This relationship is one of those things we need to clean up. The sooner the better."

"Some conflicts are unavoidable; but that doesn't make all conflicts permissible. Conflicts of interest should be avoided when possible, and the conflict resulting from the acceptance of gifts from industry is both voluntary and unnecessary."

"Disclosure is a highly limited tool for dealing with conflicts of interest,"

Many of us would think these quotes come from academic journalists? Perhaps people working in journalists' associations? Maybe just individual journalists at some meeting about ethics? But we'd be wrong. Those quotes are actually from doctors. All of them concerned about the influence industry is having on the medical profession and how it is skewing health decision-making leading to bias in research and harming patient care. Whole issues of leading medical journals have recently been donated to covering just one issue: ethics and conflicts of interest in medicine.

Similar issues are often discussed by journalists. Many of us are worried that journalists are too easily influenced by industry; too cosy with PR departments. Others are worried about professional standards. It isn't right that, on some publications, it appears to be standard practice to dream up case studies; to fiddle around with quotes to make them fit the narrative rather than the other way around; and, to ignore even basic ethical codes.

'Embellishing' is becoming accepted practice - and not just in some of the glamour titles. Its hardly worth pointing out that readers are becoming less and less sure what they can trust. Perhaps they'll start to look for alternatives.

But if some doctors and some journalists are concerned about ethics - there the similarities between the two professions ends. Colleagues argue that ethics and publishing no longer mix. Ethics is for wimps. A culture is in place where you can't question the ethics of the advertorial - even where readers aren't aware that the copy amounts to advertising.

Yet our medically qualified cousins can't stop debating the issue. Doctors commit whole journals to the subject. New professional groups such as nofreelunch.org and healthyskepticism.org are growing in strength and confidence and fighting industry influence in medicine. Doctors are increasingly questioning industry sponsorship of training, education and the notorious weekend symposium. Even more significantly, some medical journals are putting in place rigid new systems to ensure that conflicts of interest are declared. Leading journals are now starting to put real pressure on drug companies on the issue of biased research.

So what's my point? Just this - if doctors can get to grips with the issue, why the inertia among journalists?

I'm back, or should I say we're back?

I'm back from my holiday and I am a changed man. Literally. Les Hack is now the proud father of a litter of kittens and they will be relieving me of my duties here so I can put my paws to more profitable pursuits.

So farewell fluffies, my alley cat duelling days in these parts are over. Have fun with the little ones, I hope they will keep you entertained.