Louise Mensch is being tight-lipped about her new Heat Street venture beyond that she has hired Miles Goslett as UK news editor and Noah Kotch. The News Corp. backed project will, we are told, be centre-right “libertarian” and provocative with “no safe spaces”. Guido’s sources in New York tell him that Louise’s face pops up on the Wall Street Journal’s big screens off one-side of the newsroom when she video conferences with their digital innovation team. Is Mensch launching a right-of-centre Huffington Post?
Last Tuesday Dow Jones & Company, Inc. registered the Heat.St domain. Guido wishes Louise the best of luck, competition is always good for the reading general public and the political commentary space is a crowded highly competitive one. News Corp. is trying – with some difficulty – to re-configure for the digital future on both sides of the Atlantic. The Guardian shows that big newsrooms can make a high cost, high quality digital product. What is much harder is making a profit…
It wouldn’t be the British Journalism Awards without a good old barney about the nominations. Newsnight and Buzzfeed are jointly nominated for Investigation of the Year for the Kids Co scandal – a story on which they did a lot of good follow-up work but was broken by Miles Goslett in the Speccie. Five months earlier…
Congrats to Newsnight, nominated for a journalism award for its impressive (albeit belated) follow-up to the Spectator's Kids Company scoop.
— Fraser Nelson (@FraserNelson) November 4, 2015
Odd that Miles Goslett, who broke KidsCo story in Speccie, & many follow-up scoops in MoS, not shortlisted for British Journalism Awards.
— Michael Crick (@MichaelLCrick) November 4, 2015
And frankly outrageous that Newsnight nominated for Kidsco story, not Goslett. https://t.co/Xa0YNolHw8
— Peter Oborne (@OborneTweets) November 4, 2015
Buzzfeed’s ‘Head of News’ Stuart Millar is probably regretting engaging:
@stuartmillar159 maybe call it a Newsnight/BuzzFeed joint-following-up-of-The-Spectator-Kids-Co-scoop-five-months-later 😉 #SeroSedSerio.
— Fraser Nelson (@FraserNelson) November 4, 2015
@stuartmillar159 well, grapes do go a bit sour after five months…
— Fraser Nelson (@FraserNelson) November 4, 2015
Media organisations can pay £75 for a vanity-satisfying nomination, something Newsnight and Buzzfeed apparently wasted no time in doing but Miles Goslett, who is a freelancer, didn’t. As Goslett explains:
“Until February 2015, when The Spectator published my article on Kids Company, not a single bad word about it or its chief executive Camila Batmanghelidjh had appeared in the mainstream media.”
You can read the original Goslett scoop here…
