On the one hand, the newspaper was praised by media and the judge alike in last week’s cricket-fixing scam trial, which sent three top international players to prison. The newspaper had uncovered the scam by sending an undercover agent to meet with members of Pakistan’s team and their agent.

And on the other hand, there is outrage over the cushy settlement given by its owner, the Murdochs, to Rebekah Brooks, the Rupert Murdoch protege who ultimately landed the top editorial job at the newspaper and served as a director on several boards with links to it. The Guardian’s Observer reports that she was given a £1.7 million payoff and the use of an upscale office and chauffeured limosine for two years. Brooks was fired over the ongoing scandal involving newspapers and illegal phone hacking in Britain.

Investigators are also looking into payouts by newspapers to police officers. A journalist with the Sun was arrested at his home 6 November, with Business Week calling it “a development that spreads the taint of scandal to the country’s biggest-selling newspaper. UK broadcasters and newspapers identified the journalist as award-winning editor Jamie Pyatt, whose name appeared on one of The Sun’s most sensational scoops — a story with a photograph showing Prince Harry attending a costume party dressed in Nazi garb.” Pyatt’s name has been mentioned by UK media but not confirmed by his employer, Mudoch-owned News International, nor by the police.

The Guardian reports that James Murdoch, who will appear before the House of Commons for a second time, Thursday 10 November, is “likely to be questioned about previous claims that illegal practices did not take place at the Sun newspaper, where Brooks was editor between 2003 and 2009 before being elevated to the role of chief executive of News International”. The newspaper reports that Pyatt worked under Brooks while she was editor of the Sun.

“How the Asian superpowers compare on various measures of development” incidentally draws a stark picture of the rich-poor divide in the two countries, worse in India, if not great in China.

Switzerland in Chinese, for the rapidly budding Chinese travel market:

• episode one, Swiss TV star visits his mountain home for the national holiday, complete with digging garden potatoes, picking raspberries and visiting the neighboring cows, plus delivering gifts from China for the family and childhood memories of where how he became interested in China and traveling, ending with a dusk raclette chalet dinner (note: Liam is my son, so you see GL editor Ellen Wallace at home)
• episode two, visit to the famous Gemmi festival above Leukerbad, alphorn concert in the Alps, dawn cheese-making high above Crans-Montana and a picnic as the sun rises
• episode three, making sense of armed neutrality and citizen militia duty: training with the Swiss army’s search and rescue service and cooking with the world champion Swiss army chefs, taking time out for the Weeping Lion monument in Lucern, hitting the summer slopes in Zermatt near the Matterhorn (last is a preview for episode 4).
• episode four, summer sports like climbing and fast glacier-skiing/snowboarding in Zermatt with a former Swiss ski team champion, then Swiss mountain rescue services in action: Rega system with Air Zermatt, Air Glaciers and the amazing work of the Redog rescue dog teams. Preview of episode 5 – making Swiss chocolate, behind the scenes, mmmm.
• episode five, adding Chinese spice to a chocolatier‘s kitchen, awash in Swiss chocolate!, Barry and the St Bernard Hospice dogs including a new batch of extremely cute puppies, making the perfect Swiss army knife at Victorinox factory. Preview of episode 6 – Lake Geneva, high Alpine Furka pass steam train.
• episode six, at home in Saint Prex, Vetropak glass recycling, Furka steam train with conductor, dining and wining in Locarno, Geneva’s Slowup

Ed. note, 2 October: more than 1.3 people have viewed the first show alone on the Internet, possibly the most popular-ever China Travel Channel complete episode online!

The International Baccalaureate, more widespread in English in Switzerland than the British A-level for university entrance exams, doesn’t generate the same level of manic reporting as the UK exams. IB exam results came out in early July and while they generated a lot of skyping, Facebook chatter and e-mail, the celebrations and disappointments remained mostly private.

Not so for A-levels, on which a nation’s future depends, it always appears, and the nation debates what each year’s results really mean to the Empire. Some readers will enjoy Cook’s initial explanation of the leaping blonds phenomenon: “This is partly because many journalists are moral degenerates.” But the real explanation is even more intriguing.

The largest age group was over 50 but respondents were fairly evenly divided among three groups, ages 26-35, 36-49 and 50+. Most live in Europe (78%), with Switzerland as the place 78% of those people call home.

Those who responded came to the survey through GenevaLunch.com, the web site or the Facebook or Twitter pages, so there is some prejudice towards online news, clearly. One of the under-26 respondents assured me the response in this age group would be low: “We hate surveys!” and he was right, but it’s difficult to judge if this reflects the readers of GenevaLunch.com or just the age group.

One regret: we were unable to create the questions in such a way that we could match age groups to responses.

Mobile apps: lukewarm use

Contrary to popular marketing reports, respondents are not all getting all their news from mobile phone apps, but from a mix of sources. Online news remains the most important, with well over twice the number of people who said newspapers, radio and TV are their main source, and mobile apps are at the bottom of the heap although 63 people admit to getting their news this way: 10 people say it is their second source of information, 15 say they turn to these sometimes, and 30 say they use these once in a blue moon for news.

The survey responses

1. What generation are you part of?

under 26 (hot!)		07.0%	7
26-35 (very cool)		24.0%	24
36-50 (getting wiser by the minute)		33.0%	33
+50 (ripening nicely)		36.0%	36

answered question 100
skipped question 0

2. Where is the place you call home, where you spend most of your time, or where you’ve spent the most time in the past 12 months (up to you to define home here)?

Asia		02.0%	2
Europe		77.6%	76
North America		16.3%	16
South America		00.0%	0
Other (please specify)		04.1%	4

answered question 98
skipped question 2

Other: Middle East, England, Pacific, Africa

3. If you’re calling Europe home, which of these is the place you had in mind?

Switzerland		78.3%	65
France		08.4%	7
Germany		03.6%	3
Ireland		01.2%	1
Italy		00.0%	0
Sweden		00.0%	0
UK		03.6%	3
other		04.8%	4

answered question 83
skipped question 17

4. The biggest or most exciting event in the past 50 years has just occurred and you heard about it from – (actually, we just want you to tell us how you usually get your news, please)

Note: highlighted figures are the largest response for each group.

4 responses to “other”: ctrl-news; in conversation; newsmagazines = newsweek; internet

Thank you again to those who took part and to Monkey Survey for providing the tool for an anonymous online survey.

“Guardian News and Media announced last week that it is to cease publishing its international print editions as part of its new digital-first strategy. In line with its focus on digital platforms and subscription-based products, the final international editions of The Guardian and The Observer, printed in New York, Frankfurt, Madrid, Malta and Cyprus, will be published on 30th September 2011. The distribution of The Guardian Weekly will be increased.”

no comment

A growing challenge to legitimate local news sources is aggregators that parade as local news providers. There are now a few of these that publish “Swiss” news.

Mostly we don’t say much about them and hope you spot the difference.

Sometimes they help us to help you figure it out, see left.

Update, Thursday 19:50:  Fox just ran a story about a Swiss news report on bees and cell phones, sounds remarkably familiar, but the source mentioned four times isn’t GenevaLunch.com.

I haven’t included Apidologie here, the scientific journal, but the lineup of the three articles below offers an example of some of the issues involved in correctly sourcing news articles.

Click on images of articles to view larger

Version published by Fox News in the US, 23 June

Version published by thelocal.ch, managed out of Sweden and Germany, published 23 June

Compared to 2000

We have technical tools that media use: Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Google Analytics for circulation + 3 skills – writing, photography, audio and video

We have to consider multi-layered news “reception” – radio, TV,  newspaper + now web site (CMS), blogs (separate technology), FB, Twitter, mobile

Workload of journalists has tripled, so we attend far fewer press conferences and we do as little as possible by phone: covering a beat is no longer physical work except for sports reporters; the number of journalists has been sharply reduced

Citizen journalism, bloggers, comments: journalist no longer has the final word or is viewed (even skeptically or wrongly!) as the expert and often doesn’t even have the best access to sources

Accreditation, recognition as “legitimate” journalists is in a state of chaos, causing problems for PR people (who to work with), but also causing problems for local media because Internet size/traffic are used to measure impact, and these are easily manipulated – local, smaller media suffer as a result

The scoop has lost its value and ownership, copyright, the original source of reporting is fast disappearing: too difficult and costly to chase abusers, but also lines are blurred between broadcast and print, both of them online, which means old rules are not being applied and there are no new ones except market rules.

Compared to 1990

We have the Internet, with a massive shift in distribution, but it’s also changed how people read, physically (sentence structure), where they are when they are getting their news, frequency of news reception and immediacy – the latter is the most important.

We have online libraries compared to physical ones, for research

We no longer have to know HTML and focus on the technology behind our tools thanks to Windows, etc.

Newsrooms, with groups sharing facilities, have lost their importance except for broadcast and wire services, and more journalists work alone – the salles de presse at the UN Palais in Geneva are now empty compared to 1990

Compared to 1980

We have computers; my first was 1982, Radio Shack Toshiba 2-line screen and before that IBM typewriters, so the noise level has died down in group work areas. Journalists have a new responsibility, to put their reporting work into the system themselves, compared to days when teletext or typesetting people, an extinct species, did it.

We have email: information, news alerts, etc. comes in this way rather than via tickertapes, teletext and fax

We can upload stories when we are on the go, by mobile phones or much smaller computers, compared to phoning in stories and dictating them to sub-editors

Compared to 1960

Telephone and TV are now widespread and affordable: they are regular journalists’ tools for reaching sources, getting information

Large presses have made print cheap, very fast but it doesn’t appear to be enough to have saved them

Compared to 1930

News companies are large – first on a national scale rather than local, then international, starting with the growth of US and British radio in the 30s, the roots of the major TV channels that grew in the 60s and with this a whole world of advertising (we used to have highway billboards before the Interstate in the US)

Today, a swing back to local and very local (Huffington Post babies) because electronic media make this possible, even easy, but we’re moving into a new era where news is again being dominated by the big guys.

Compared to 1900

Our idea of news, particularly in non-urban areas, is no longer limited to what’s happened locally

Literacy rate has risen and broadcast plus Internet visuals plus mobile have made news far more widely accessible.

Zurich is a financial capital, but definitely not the seat of government for Switzerland!

At long last, someone put together a picture for us of the Qaddafi family, all of whom are on lists for frozen assets in Switzerland: thanks go to Ria Novosti, Russian news agency. Aunts, uncles and the rest of the clan are not here, but the children are all here, with photos and their birthdates.

Bern, centrally located and on the language divide, is the capital of Switzerland

A news story mistake became the story this week, giving us a reminder of why local news providers (that’s us!) are often more credible. Associated Press in the US ran a story about Google Street View and mentioned Zurich, with the editors at a safe distance, in New York. The story noted that Zurich is the capital of Switzerland. Oops. A correction was sent out, and since the first story was picked up by several US media, word for word, a lot of corrections then appeared. Google News for Zurich suddenly had a stream of stories that started with the intriguing one-liner “Zurich is not the capital of Switzerland.”

The problem wasn’t the reporter, I hasten to add: Frank Jordans, who reported the story, has been in Geneva for several years and he’s covered enough political stories from Bern to know it’s the capital. I can only assume an inexperienced sub-editor in the US thought the world might not know the capital of Switzerland, so thought to add it.

Years from now, though, I’m willing to bet a lot of people will still be insisting that Zurich is indeed the capital of that little Alpine nation because after all, they once saw it on the news.

The mistake also underscores the growing problem of aggregated and massaged (rewritten) news stories from sites that do not themselves produce news or have journalists behind them: the story in its original form is still out there, no corrections made.

Pssst: Bern is the capital.

The BBC gives us a fun little travel story

Ice roads: here’s one of those great little feature articles we used to see regularly in mainstream media, but since editors can’t afford to pay for them anymore, they’ve become the domain of bloggers and travel groups, which is too bad. This is one of the BBC’s “from our own correspondent” series, and I fear that with BBC cutbacks in several countries we might see fewer of these, too.