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Here's the Star Letter in our local paper, the News Shopper, this week:

Thanks to Clay Harris for scanning this and posting it online. And here's the response from the News Shopper this morning (read from the bottom up):

I'm not going to go into detail as this has all been covered more comprehensively elsewhere, but there is one thing: I know how to edit a "your letters" section. I looked after one, in a national publication with a significant circulation, for years, so I think I have the qualifications to say that the News Shopper's justification here looks like nonsense.

Publishing a letter because, although you don't agree with it, it'll stimulate debate, is one thing. Fine. Publishing a bigoted letter? I'm not entirely sure that there would never be a circumstance where this would be reasonable, given enough of a caveat stating that it's not the opinion of the publication and some kind of editorial context for the discussion, but I'd want to think very long and hard about it first, and in most cases these should be consigned to the bin. Combining the two – publishing a bigoted letter simply to provoke a response – seems to me clearly inappropriate.

But here the letter hasn't just been published: it's the "Star Letter". Publishing something as a Star Letter" clearly implies some degree of endorsement. The clue's in the word "star" – if the aim was to merely highlight this as a point for discussion (not that I'm suggesting that this would be appropriate here, but still), then there are plenty of formats for that: "Debate of the week", "Your Say", "Have Your Say" and so on.

The Star, on the other hand, is the foremost, the best, the brightest of all. Star of the show. Movie star. Star columnist. Star letter. You get the idea. It's not just the place for any old talking point – and here, it even wins a prize (whose sponsor has issued a statement here*).

I'd hope that the News Shopper will realise that it has made a serious error of judgement here and do the right thing – I'd say a simple apology from the Editor would go some way. As it stands, though, it's just another depressing stage in what appears to be a protracted vault over the proverbial shark (see also the amply-chested lady on Page 3 of one edition and the whole Hitchcockamamie Attack Crow saga, for starters) and into the mire. A great shame, as with council cuts looming large a strong local press could be of great importance.

* And the pen shop is quite correct – I would never expect a Star Letter sponsor to have prior knowledge of the content of each prize letter. There's a certain amount of trust involved in this kind of relationship.

UPDATE

Later on yesterday one of my local councillors wrote this on the subject, and I got rather annoyed. Brockley Central reported it here, where I added the following comment:

As a Lewisham resident and Labour voter I find Councillor Harris's comments extremely depressing. And as such this is a long comment. Apologies.

As I've pointed out elsewhere (http://bit.ly/bLVozz), choosing a letter as the "Star" is a tacit endorsement. I know this not only because I know what "star" means in the non-celestial sense, but also because I'm an editor and sorting out letters pages was, for years, part of my job. As another editor (@adambanksdotcom) succinctly put it on Twitter today, "That's what it means".

By making this letter the Star Letter – not a "Have Your Say", or any such content – the NS has implied endorsement for it. And yes, I do believe that the perceived endorsement of bigoted views by the media gives support to those who share them. Any homophobes reading this letter, and seeing the award of a prize and the Star Letter tag, could be forgiven for believing that the paper supports their opinion. Will a reply from another reader lost on its website, or buried in the letters page next week, change that? I'm not sure it will.

But the councillor's original comment on Twitter didn't concern the Star Letter, it concerned whether it should be published at all ("The idea that my local paper the @NewsShopper should not publish a letter because it's bigoted, is far more offensive than the letter itself").

As I noted on my blog, I don't believe in a total no platform policy for offensive views – I can see occasions where publishing such a thing could be justified. One that springs to mind is to provide an opposing viewpoint to editorial content.

But that's not to say that I think that justification necessarily applies here. The News Shopper cover last week was hardly a positive piece about gay culture – rather a ridiculously sensationalist story about a cottaging website, presumably dug up via a Google Alert for "Lewisham" (and note that the version online of the story now appears to have been changed since the print copy). Not exactly the kind of glowing piece that might justify the publication of a "right of reply" letter from those with a bitter, miscellaneous grudge against gay people.

Instead, the NS's only justification seems to be that it's generated an online debate. With this conducted out of view of many of the paper's readers, I'm not sure that cuts it. Put this letter side by side with another of an opposing view – perhaps one bemoaning that ridiculous cover story – and it might have been fair.

Moreover, as anyone who's ever had to dig through the kind of garbage that's bulk-mailed to media outlets alongside genuine reader letters will know, the idea that choosing *not* to publish any letter because it's offensive is some sort of act of malicious censorship is just daft.

Newspapers, magazines and other publications attract offensive letters – often sent by email, en-masse to many publications, none of which the sender reads. Many are libellous, while some items might even count as criminal under incitement laws. Should editors be obliged to publish them all? Or perhaps a representative sample of racists and homophobes every week, month, or year?

Of course not.

Choosing which letters to print, and which to discard is not censorship: it's professional, ethical journalism. I think most people here agree that the News Shopper hasn't done terribly well on that score here.

So on Saturday I went and photographed some flowers and petals and stuff.

Which was all very nice, and nobody got manhandled by bunch of police officers.

Jules Mattsson, on the other hand, is a photojournalist, so on Saturday he went to take some photos of the Armed Forces Day parade. Here's how it went:

Note the veritable  smörgåsbord of pseudo-legal bullshit offered up as cause for his detention. There's coverage of the incident on the British Journal of Photography, here, and also advice for photographers here.

10.30am or so this morning, on the internets:

Which would be, if true, something of a scoop for the Daily Mail. So let's take a look at the article – here's the first few paras:

Which is great – the source is Mr Jobs himself. On Twitter. Except that, as anyone working in tech journalism should know, Steve Jobs doesn't have a verified Twitter account. It took all of 10 seconds to find the source -  this update:

There are many clues that @ceostevejobs is a parody account – not least the phrase "of course this is a parody account" in his biography. Apparently, though, nobody at the Mail bothered to check. I published a link on Twitter. People laughed and mocked. Sarcastic comments appeared on the article. Still it sat unchanged. A few hours later a colleague pointed out that it also contained a howling typo – that, too, sat uncorrected.

All in all, then, an astronomical fuckup that lead to an incorrect article being published. So where's the correction? There isn't one. Instead it took around four hours for the Mail's web team to notice – or perhaps to decide that the traffic they were getting no longer outweighed the potential embarrassment – and the page disappeared offline at around 2pm.

So there you have it: shoddy reporting, no fact checking, an incorrect news story sitting online for hours and no apology. At least, for once, it doesn't really matter that much.

Yesterday, in the office:

Not bad for an afternoon's work. My proper review of the Firebox Muvi Atom camera will be online in a week or so.

Hot news in The Telegraph on the 10th March 2010 – but it was also in Computeractive way back on the 7th April 2009. That's what happens when you write up "news" based on a blog post on a US television network's website.

Also, note the Telegraph's claim that "critics warned it was an invasion of privacy". I called several privacy groups when writing my story last year, and none gave two hoots – none of the data collected is personally identifiable.

Still, makes a change from theme park PR stories.

This article about marriage is pretty depressing. Not because the number of marriages is falling, you understand. That doesn't really bother me. But let's take a look.

For the first time ever fewer than 2 in 100 women, over the age of 16, got married in a single year. In 2008 the marriage rate for women fell from 2 per cent to 1.96 per cent, less than half the rate 25 years ago.

The rate for men has shown a similar decline, according to the annual figures published by the Office for National Statistics.

Which is all fine, except perhaps from the commas after "women" and "16". Onward.

The figures highlight how marriage has substantially fallen out of favour. From a peak in 1940, when 426,1000 young couples – spurred on by the urgency of World War II – married for the first time, just 147,130 marriages in 2008 were where both partners were getting wed for the first time.

In total, just 228,204 marriages took place during 2008 in England and Wales.

The pedant in me wonders if all 426,000 (assuming the "1" in the figure is a typo) first marriages in 1940 were spurred on by the Second World War. The rest of me wonders whether an increase in second marriages actually suggests that marriage has fallen into favour – so much so that people are getting hitched twice, no less. But more importantly:

The escalating cost of weddings, and the failure of the Government to support the institution of marriage were among the factors blamed. Though, long-term changes in society, especially the increase in the number of women working and their desire to get married later in life, are also key factors.

And here's the serious bit. Who exactly blamed the Government, or the increased cost? Not the source ONS document. Not anyone named here. So who – the author of this piece? Ditto for the "key factors".

The average age of women marrying for the first time has nearly hit the symbolic 30-year-old barrier, at 29.9, up from 29.8 during 2007. For men, the average age of getting married for the first time was 32.1 years, up from 32 the previous year.

Many expressed sadness at the statistics.

Blah average ages blah. But wait, many have expressed sadness. Hold on for the avalanche of researchers, politicians, religious busybodies and the like:

Dave Percival, a campaigner for marriage, said: "Living together and marriage are increasingly seen as the same by the public, yet the outcomes are radically different. Two thirds of all the first marriages in 2008 can be expected to last a lifetime. Less than 10 per cent of cohabiting relationships last even to their tenth anniversary."

Or just Dave, as it turns out, who is a 'campaigner for marriage'. He has an awkwardly named website, www.2-in-2-1.co.uk, and appears to be involved with www.marriage-week-hosting.co.uk, which put out a press release in 2004. And that's it. Nobody else is mentioned, and there's no quote from anyone who might dare to suggest that the declining rate of marriages is really nothing to be too concerned about.

Incidentally, that statistic about cohabiting relationships appears to come from a study by the University of Essex in 1998, so it's so far out of date that we could phone the surveyed couples up and see how they're doing after 20 years.

And so we have unreferenced opinion, a quote that's barely attributed – where's the link to Dave's website that would show readers who he is and what he does? – and a complete lack of balance. Happy Valentine's day, world. And, not that it matters a jot to the argument, I've been happily married since 2006 – I just don't feel that everyone should be obliged to do the same.

“[Esquire] thought they made their statement where there should be copy and type all over the cover where you can’t read a goddamn word. I don’t get it. What are you trying to say to me? What’s the point? Is that an idea?

“Why do you put all those cover lines on? They say, ‘Well, if I don’t get somebody interested in this one, I’ll get somebody interested in that one.’

“The covers [of The New Yorker] are the only thing that looks different on the newsstand. David Remnick, three or four years ago asked me, ‘Gee, do you think I should be using photography on the covers now?’ I said, ‘What, are you out of your fucking mind?’

This Blackbook interview with George Lois, who designed Esquire from '62 to '72, is fascinating. Recommended to anyone with an interest in magazines, and especially those who work on them – and covers in particular.

.. or is there something really, horribly wrong with the first three paragraphs of this news story? Reproduced below in case it (hopefully) gets changed:

Just to be clear: the lede's OK, if a slightly tacky sensationalist way to report a serious crime (rape is rape, no matter where, or in which fast-food chain, it occurred). The second para could really do with some further explanation (found further down in the story), but then there's the third, which starts "The 33-year-old who is an asylum seeker from an African country".

As far as I'm concerned, this is completely extraneous and should have been struck down with a red pen (or on screen, in this case) by the first editor that happened across it. Unless the writer is about to contend that the man's immigration status or continent of origin are somehow relevant information to the crime – and I'd love to know how that could be – it shouldn't be here.

Now, I hate complaining. Completely fucking hate it. Don't do it. But, in the hope that an editor might see the complaint, take a look at the article and update it accordingly, I made my first ever complaint to the BBC. Here it is, as formatted by the BBC's automatic email thingy:

{Feedback Type:} I would like to… Make a complaint

{Summary:} Identification of nationality and asylum seeker status is
unwarranted

{URL:} http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8350714.stm

{Complaint:} This is a story about an alleged rape. The third para
begins:

"The 33-year-old who is an asylum seeker from an African country"

This is utterly irrelevant to the story and has no place in the article,
let alone in such a prominent position.

And, credit where it's due, I got a reply. Sadly, though, it comprised of the following:

It is the only information we have about the identity of the suspect in this case; if it been said in court he was a candlestick maker from County Tyrone we would have reported that too.

So, here's the thing. These are the conclusions I've come to:

1) This story shouldn't have been published as-is. Leaving aside all other complaints for one second, the information given in the third para is unrelated and should be cut.

2) identifying the accused as "an asylum seeker from an African country" just barely skirts around clause ten of the NUJ's code of conduct:

A journalist shall only mention a person's age, race, colour, creed, illegitimacy, marital status (or lack of it), gender or sexual orientation if this information is strictly relevant. A journalist shall neither originate nor process material which encourages discrimination, ridicule, prejudice or hatred on any of the above-mentioned grounds.

.. and, code regardless, I'm amazed that any journalist or editor's sense of ethics would permit it.

3) The response I got from the BBC doesn't address the complaint, instead making an unrelated comparison – it's standard court reporting to print the gender, age and approximate location of the accused unless this is restricted in some way, but not to mention immigration status or a "continent of origin".

4) The story should be fixed or pulled.

Would welcome any comments on whether you agree or not.

I'm researching an article on the history of broadband. A few interesting things I've come across:

• In 2000 a 512Mbps Blueyonder connection cost £50/month
• In 2001 broadband accounted for less than 1% of UK internet connections. 81% were dial-up (ONS)
• By 2005 half of UK connections were broadband (ONS)
• In 2009 56% of UK households have broadband access (ONS), and the average UK connection speed is 3746Kbps (Akamai)
• Virgin is currently testing <200Mbps FTTC, with BT working on VDSL.

Not bad going. But on the other hand: the average connection speed in South Korea, Q1 2009 is 10956Kbps, with SK and Japan both offering >100Mbps consumer products today (SK uses VDSL, Japan has a strange FTTC-like infrastructure). That's fast.

I spent Tuesday rushing to France and back on the Eurostar, attending a Dell press conference at Versailles. About three hours in I spotted this plaque: it turns out the hotel ballroom was used to draft the famous Treaty – now it's a site for business meetings.

At the end of the afternoon a few of us had an hour spare, so we went around the corner to the palace. It's predictably spectacular:

.. and the gardens are something else:

.. but sadly we had no time to do any more than take a quick glance around. At 7pm it was back in a taxi, back to the Gare du Nord, back on the Eurostar and back to London. Eighteen hours, about 1,000km, three press conferences, one interview, two news stories, three glasses of wine underneath the channel and twelve photos here. Not bad for one day.