Category Archives: Daily Telegraph

Financial Times: Statistics chief’s warning over misuse of figures

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"Ministers, officials and journalists need to be on their guard when misusing statistics after [Andrew Dilnot,] the new chairman of the UK Statistics Authority warned he would name and shame offenders. ... Speaking to MPs on Tuesday, he cited a calculation error on a front-page news story which suggested public service pensions cost every family in Britain £4,000 a year, when the real number was £360. When asked by the FT why he had not been willing to identify the miscreant – the Daily Telegraph – in his evidence session in parliament, Mr Dilnot insisted this was the last time he would be so reticent."

Telegraph: Government ‘will take 35 years to recoup tuition fee losses’

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"Official estimates suggest the amount of money loaned to students will balloon to a record level by 2047 before the Treasury starts to recoup the losses from graduates. ... Estimates obtained after a Freedom of Information request show that the size of the loans bill will grow for 35 years. This is based on the Government paying out an average fee loan of just over £7,500. "

Guardian Government Computing: Boundary Commission defends release of pdfs of new constituency boundaries

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"The Boundary Commission for England (BCE) has defended its decision to release more than 500 pdf maps of proposed Parliamentary constituencies, stating that they believe they provided "an appropriate level of detail". ... The decision was criticised by data journalists at the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph for lack of transparency, after the BCE did not provide a more user-friendly single UK map of the new constituency boundaries."

Telegraph: AV referendum: What if a general election were held today under AV?

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Interesting analysis on a Fusion Tables based map: "This new analysis suggests the result of the 2010 general election would have resulted in the Labour Party gaining more seats than the Conservative Party, using predictions for second and third preferences. "

The Guardian: How live blogging has transformed journalism

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"The reward is huge traffic spikes, hundreds of comments – so far in March, live blogs (including minute-by-minute coverage of sporting events) on guardian.co.uk account for 3.6 million unique users, 9% of the total – and the wrath of some traditional readers who clamour for a straight-up-and-down, conventionally written article. One blogger even described live blogs as the 'death of journalism'."

Journalism.co.uk: Telegraph to recruit multimedia staff following site redesign

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Ed Roussel: "We are interested in recruiting, not an army, but a small number of people in interactive graphics and looking at what we can do to do a better job with video. ... The three biggest challenges for us editorially in the next year will be multimedia, multi-device tablets and smart phones and social media."

Observer: Will Lewis fell into the gap between Euston and Victoria

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Peter Preston on Will Lewis's departure from the Telegraph: "Can newspapers, with their business professionalism, their shareholders, unions, cost controls, structures, traditions, somehow re-invent themselves as internet entrepreneurs, finding a fresh kind of genius to set digital cash registers ringing? How do legacy giants find a freewheeling future? And, ironically, can you defend good journalism by saying farewell to a very good journalist indeed?"

Guardian: The Hugh Cudlipp lecture: Does journalism exist?

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Alan Rusbridger: "My commercial colleagues at the Guardian ... can't presently see the benefits of choking off growth in return for the relatively modest sums we think we would get from universal charging for digital content. Last year we earned £25m from digital advertising – not enough to sustain the legacy print business, but not trivial. ... They've done lots of modelling around at least six different pay wall proposals and they are currently unpersuaded."

paidContent:UK: Guardian.co.uk’s iPhone App Could Be A £2 Million-A-Year Business

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"Guardian.co.uk says it’s sold 68,979 copies of its premium iPhone app since launching in December. ... Over 300,000 downloaded Telegraph.co.uk’s free, ad-supported iPhone app between its February 2009 launch and December 2009 - the company says it’s recouped 10 times it development costs."

bit.ly blog: Announcing bit.ly Pro

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"The Pro service provides custom short URLs powered by bit.ly. Publishers and bloggers will be able to use their own short domain names to point to pages on their sites. ... Users and publishers benefit from the additional transparency that this private-label service provides. When you see a short URL like nyti.ms, you know the destination web site before clicking on the link. "