Ishan Nandra Unit 3 Exam Blog: February 2015

At some stage, I hope to write the intimate story of a Sun reporter who has been cleared by a jury on charges following Operation Elveden. It might change the perception of those who confuse hacking with the paying of public officials. There is an enormous difference.

But I am glad to see that Press Gazette’s editor, Dominic Ponsford, has now interviewed another Sun reporter, John Troup, who was similarly found not guilty by a jury of a charge that, to be frank, would be regarded as laughable if its consequences were not so serious.

It also happens to be an indictment of Rupert Murdoch’s flawed Management and Standards Committee (MSC), which supplied the flimsy information on which Troup was arrested and charged.

Will.i.am stars in Wall Street Journal's global ad push

Will.i.am in the Wall Street Journal's 'Make Time' ad

The Wall Street Journal has recruited Will.i.am for a global ad campaign urging people to “make time” to read the business title.

Fashion designer Tory Burch also features in the campaign, which suggests subscribing to the WSJ “puts you in a community with other ambitious people”.

The campaign launched on digital, print and social channels on Tuesday before launching on TV and outdoor ads.

Other businesspeople to appear in the campaign include Mike McCue, co-founder and chief executive of social magazine app Flipboard; Bill McDermott, chief executive of software company SAP; and Zhang Xin, co-founder and chief executive of property group SOHO China.

It comes as the WSJ faces increasing competition, not just from established business news sources such as the Financial Times, Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg, but also from new players such as Atlantic Media’s Quartz.

Suzi Watford, chief marketing officer of Dow Jones, said: “This campaign highlights the value of making time to read the Journal, no matter how busy people are. It also confirms that subscribing to the Journal puts you in a community with other ambitious people who prioritise being at the top of their game. Our subscribers are in very good company.”

Press regulator to look at Daily Telegraph and HSBC allegations

Ipso chairman Sir Alan Moses: seeking more information about allegations against the Daily Telegraph

The press regulator is to look at allegations that the Daily Telegraph allowed commercial pressures to dictate editorial decisions following Peter Oborne’s resignation over its coverage of HSBC.

Sir Alan Moses, the chairman of the Independent Press Standards Organisation, said he wanted to hear from Oborne, the paper’s former chief political commentator, other journalists and Telegraph management over claims that the Barclay brothers-owned newspaper refused to run stories about the banking giant because of concerns over advertising.

“We haven’t had multiple complaints … we should look at it but we haven’t had the meeting or got in the information that we should have got in,” Moses told MPs on the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee on Tuesday.

Daily Mail coverage of Cliff Richard raid report highly inaccurate, says author

A BBC umbrella covers a TV camera outside the Berkshire estate where Sir Cliff Richard has an apartment.

The author of a report on a deal between the BBC and a police force which led to the filming of a raid on Sir Cliff Richard’s home has said the Daily Mail’s coverage of his inquiry was “highly inaccurate”.

Under the deal between the broadcaster and South Yorkshire police, the BBC agreed to delay, by a month, publishing details of an investigation into an allegation that Richard sexually abused a 16-year-old boy in the 1980s. In return, the force tipped off the broadcaster about the timing of the raid on Richard’s Berkshire home, allowing it to broadcast live helicopter footage of the operation in August 2014.

Richard has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. He had not been interviewed by the police before the raid, which he watched unfold on TV while he was on holiday in Portugal.

Peter Molyneux interview: 'It's over, I will not speak to the press again'

When things go wrong for modern game developers they go spectacularly wrong. This is an era of endless rolling news and mass social media judgement. There is no respite. Peter Molyneux knows this now – if he didn’t before. The veteran designer, famed for inventing the “god game” genre with his 1989 title, Populous, has spent the last three days under intense press scrutiny. His latest project, Godus, is in disarray, his reputation in tatters. Everyone wants a piece.

“The only answer is for me to retreat,” he says, speaking via Skype from his office in Guildford. “I love my games and I love sharing them with people. It’s this amazing incredible thing I get to do with my life, creating ideas and sharing them with people. The problem is, it just hasn’t worked.”

Awarded an OBE in 2004, Molyneux is one of the most prominent members of the UK games industry. In the 26 years following Populous, he oversaw classic strategy and adventure titles like Dungeon Keeper, Black & White, and most recently the Fable series. But ever since leaving his seminal studio Bullfrog in 1997, he has become just as well-known for enthusiastically hyping his projects, only to deliver products that fail to live up to the impossibly grand expectations.

Google warns sex bloggers: clean up or get out

A man observes the window of a porn shop in Copenhagen in 1969.

Google is banning public explicit photos and videos from its blogging service Blogger, and giving affected users just one month to comply.

The new rules require any blog with “sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video” to take them down by 23 March, or the blog will be made private by Google. A private blog can only be seen by the owner or admins of the blog, and people who the owner has shared the blog with.

Google promises that the majority of users of the service, which Google acquired from Twitter co-founder Evan Williams’ Pyra Labs in 2003, won’t see any change from the new rules. But many users are concerned that the new rules represent a huge about-turn from Google’s previously stated support of explicit material on its platform. The company’s previous policy said: “We do allow adult content on Blogger, including images or videos that contain nudity or sexual activity … All blogs marked as ‘adult’ will be placed behind an ‘adult content’ warning interstitial.” Its only exceptions were to ban illegal explicit content, explicit images shared without the subject’s consent (commonly known as “revenge porn”) and making money on adult content.

Apple ordered to pay $530m for iTunes patents

Apple has been ordered to pay more than $530m after a federal jury in Texas found its iTunes software infringed three patents owned by a patent licensing company called Smartflash.

Although Smartflash had been asking for $852m in damages, the verdict handed down on Tuesday night was still a blow to Apple.

The jury, which deliberated for eight hours, determined Apple had not only used Smartflash’s patents without permission, but did so wilfully.

The patents concerned digital rights management, data storage and payment systems.

Apple, which said it would appeal, said the outcome was another reason that reform was needed in the patent system to curb litigation by companies that do not make products themselves.

“Smartflash makes no products, has no employees, creates no jobs, has no US presence, and is exploiting our patent system to seek royalties for technology Apple invented,” said Apple’s Kristin Huguet. “We refused to pay off this company for the ideas our employees spent years innovating, and unfortunately we have been left with no choice but to take this fight up through the court system.”

Reddit and Blogger tighten up rules on pornography

Social network site Reddit and Google’s Blogger service will not allow naked images where the person involved has not given consent.

Social networking and news site Reddit has said it will remove photos, videos and links with explicit content if the person in the image has not given permission for it to be posted.

Google, meanwhile, is going to ban most nude photos and video from publicly accessible sites on its Blogger service.

The crackdown marks a shift in attitude for two services that have traditionally been freewheeling forums.

The lax approach has opened the door for nude and sexually explicit photos and video to be posted on Reddit and Blogger, even if the subjects featured in the images intended them to remain private.

Until now, Reddit has had a hands-off approach to privacy, largely allowing its 160m users to police their own forums within certain guidelines such as no child pornography or spam.

The change comes about six months after hackers obtained nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities and posted them to social media sites including Reddit and Twitter.

Without specifically calling out Reddit or Twitter, Lawrence lashed out at the sites that permitted nude photos to be posted of her. She likened the unauthorised use of photos of her body as a “sex crime.”

Wednesday 4 February 2015

INDEX

13 Video games are not making us more violent, study shows

14 Spotify CEO speaks out on Taylor Swift albums removal: 'I'm really frustrated'

15 Jennifer Lawrence: 'I will never get Twitter. The internet has scorned me'

16 Copywriting is dead? Don’t tell the journalists

17 YouTubers ads for Oreo banned for not making clear purpose of videos

18 What’s the right relationship between technology companies and journalism?

19 Digital journalists have great chance to develop much-needed transparency

20 Microsoft and Yahoo respond to European 'right to be forgotten' requests

21 The future of marketing depends on ideas, not tinkering with technology

22 Government must fund hyperlocal news, urges new report

23 Instagram now has 300m users sharing 70m photos and videos a day

24 More than 200 journalists in prison worldwide for third consecutive year

25 Yemeni reporter killed - the first journalistic fatality of 2015

Sky profits rise 16% after strong UK customer growth

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/04/sky-profits-rise-uk-and-germany-pay-tv

Sky’s highest customer growth in the UK in nearly a decade helped the satellite broadcaster post a 16% rise in adjusted operating profit in its first results since its £5bn acquisition of Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland.

The pay-TV company, which now has a customer base of nearly 25 million across Europe, reported first half adjusted operating profits of £675m in the six months to the end of December last year, ahead of forecasts of £644m.

Sky, which captured exclusive live rights to the Open golf for the first time on Tuesday and will table its bid for live Premier League football rights on Friday, added another 204,000 domestic customers in the final three months of 2014, its strongest growth in nine years.

Revenues were up 5% to £5.6bn for the six-month period. It said there had been a significant group wide reduction in churn – the proportion of customers leaving the business - was 9.2%, its lowest level for a decade.