Bulletin No 107, 4 February 2005
1. New faces at MediaWise
The Board of The MediaWise Trust has been expanded, and now includes some familiar media figures who add breadth and depth to our promotion of journalism ethics.
The new Trustees include:
· Glenn Del Medico, former head of programme legal advice at the BBC;
· Nicholas Jones, former BBC political correspondent and author of Soundbites and Spin Doctors, and Sultans of Spin;
· Stephen Jukes, head of the Media School at Bournemouth University and former head of global news at Reuters;
· Jim Latham, Secretary of the Broadcast Journalism Training Council.
The Trustees have approved plans for a Supporting Membership scheme, to be launched in the spring.
2. Journalism and Public Trust (JPT) Project
MediaWise has obtained permission to reprint the MediaGuardian (10/17 Jan 05) series ‘Do they mean us?’ about attitudes towards journalists, in response to John Lloyd’s challenging book What the media are doing to our politics. Copies will be distributed at conferences and colleges, as part of our continuing efforts to promote dialogue about how to improve the standards and standing of journalism in the UK. Responses will be published on our website.
This month MediaWise Director Mike Jempson’s latest article on the topic, ‘Sinners or Spinners: PR, Journalism and Public Trust’ appears in the Journal of Communication Management.
Over the coming months student journalists around the country are to take part in our action-research project to gather data about the public expectations of journalism and journalists’ attitudes towards their job and their publics. The JPT Project is modelled on an exercise conducted by the Committee of Concerned Journalists in the USA.
And in April MediaWise is to co-sponsor a fringe meeting at the NUJ ADM in Scarborough on ‘Regulating Journalists?’ to debate the provocative paper produced by Chris Wheal, chair of the NUJ Professional Training Committee.
In December MediaWise published 28 challenging articles on Journalism and Public Trust for the NUJ Ethics Council conference in London.