Max Raymond

1. Alan Rusbridger is sceptical about paying for online news, but is welcome to ideas – Whilst he admitted that he has ‘no idea whether it’s going to work’ the Guardian editor-in-chief expressed some slight concern about Rupert Murdoch’s plans. He said that his ideas ‘may be right but it’s not a given’ and he hopes for ‘a variety of business models’ in the coming months. He expressed the same feelings when asked about the Evening Standard’s recent decision to operate as a freesheet paper.
2. Alan Rusbridger is also keeping tight-lipped about who The Guardian will support at the election – At the same time however, he described The Sun’s recent decision to back the Conservatives and slam Gordon Brown at every opportunity as ‘not an intelligent move personally’.
3. More newsrooms are making it essential for reporters to have Twitter – Throughout the course of the day we learnt that big news organisations like The Guardian and Sky News have now made having a Twitter account an essential requirement for reporters. It quite easily shows how increasingly important Twitter is to news organisations.
4. Paul Morley wrote his Patrick Wolf piece on Drowned In Sound deliberately for a reaction – Paul Morley, as engrossing to listen to as ever, was at the conference. After the seminar that featured him had finished (a sort of critics’ masterclass I guess) we talked about the ‘controversial’ article that he wrote for Drowned In Sound about Patrick Wolf, a biography-style piece, that was so badly received the website took it down (but, after much searching, I’ve found and have put up on Google Documents for you to read). After asking whether such a piece was deliberate, he answered with a pretty self-assured ‘yes’. He admits he was quite surprised by the reaction that the piece got, which he argued was written to match the flamboyance of Wolf himself.
5. Krissi Murison isn’t interested in pleasing PR companies – The new NME editor said during the critics’ masterclass that she thinks that if the NME runs a piece that pleases the band’s PR, they know that they’re simply not doing their job right. I thought that was an interesting anecdote.
6. 12% of news stories or not shown to be checked – This startling statistic was stated by Nick Davies, author of Flat Earth News, who delivered a fantastic keynote speech about the bad practices of the industry, of which there are several.
7. I now know what ‘ninja turtle syndrome’ is – Publishing stories regardless of whether they’re merited, purely because elsewhere has covered them/
8. Twitter is still all the rage – Twitter was a big talking point at this year’s conference and you just couldn’t escape the subject. Ironically, this was something I tweeted to Matt Wells, head of audio at The Guardian and, sure enough, he tweeted back, saying: “it was the big breakthrough thing of the last year in media.” It’s very difficult to argue against that.
9. Students aspire to traditional jobs as oppose to digital economy jobs – a vox pop recorded at the conference for Media Talk showed that most students aspire to more traditional jobs like newspaper writer/editor as opposed to jobs that cater to the online sector.
10. The catering services were exceptional – lunch was free and words cannot begin to describe how tasty the lasagne that I had was.

Did you go? What did you learn? Feel free to comment.