Comments on: Sutton and Cheam Guardian skewered by blogger for misreporting Election

By: Pete

Pete — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 15:02:33 +0000

This is not a new occurence re Ms Kennard, last year she did a piece on candidates in a by election in sutton in which she, having no way of directly attacking the BNP candidate, managed to trawl up an old conviction (not dishonesty BTW) of the candidates agent.
She has(had?) some connection to an unofficial twitterer in Sutton civic centre but since last year she has severely curtailed access to her tweets! Her facebook last year gave “World of Difference”, apparantly an organisation associated with Abe Foxtons Anti Defamation League as one profile items , but that too seems to have dropped off her current profile .

By: The Digital Week «

The Digital Week « — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:36:19 +0000

[...] The Sutton and Cheam Guardian, part of the South London Guardian and Surrey Comet Group, was caught out and exposed when blogger Anna Raccoon found that the local Libertarian Party candidate, one of eight, had a [...]

By: links for 2010-04-22 « Onlinejournalismtest's Blog

links for 2010-04-22 « Onlinejournalismtest's Blog — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:09:16 +0000

[...] Sutton and Cheam Guardian skewered by blogger for misreporting Election | Online Journalism Blog On the blog: Sutton & Cheam Guardian skewered by blogger for misreporting election http://bit.ly/9wfttL #ge10 (tags: via:packrati.us ge10) [...]

By: mattwardman

mattwardman — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 13:43:20 +0000

Thanks for the comments. I’ll be doing a short opinion piece later.

My eyebrows were raised more by the responses to the questions raised than by the error itself.

By: Bob

Bob — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 07:47:12 +0000

It seems that Anna has taken a, albeit very unfortunate, subbing error and turned it into some kind of loony conspiracy, naming and shaming a journalist and trying to out her as some kind of monster.

I am a journalist, I know the local press and I know the pressure sub-editing operations are under.

Matthew Knowles is a great journalist and I think Anna probably caught him at a bad moment. The paper has said it will publish a correction so what’s the problem here?

Judging by the length and details of Anna’s blog post, I would politely suggest she has a bit too much freetime on her hands. I will be posting this same comment under her original blog posting.

By: Mayweed

Mayweed — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 06:02:49 +0000

TO be fair Anna, I’m not so sure it is. You’re assuming that what happened happened out of malice – and given the editor’s reaction to you I can understand why.

But do you know for sure that the email went directly to Julia Kennard or to her newsdesk, who might have failed to pass it on? Or perhaps the notoriously small mailboxes allowed to reporters quarrantined Martin’s large res picture for being too large (this does happen, stupid as it sounds) We’ve no way of knowing whether Mr Hammond responded to her enquiry – maybe the profile she wrote on him was also garnered from the internet. Maybe she wrote a longer version of his profile that was cut back by subs who though stockings and motorways were the most interesting thing about him.

I should repeat, I don’t know Julia Kennard, had never heard of her til I read this. But you’re accusing her of being a liar and of deliberately abusing her position as a reporter to undermine someone out of malice.

That’s a very serious accusation that, as someone on your site says, will be part of teh interweb for ever and I don’t think it’s fair.

You could say her reputation is no less damaged than Martin’s and so it’s maybe tit-for-tat. But I thought the point of your blog was that her mistake was avoidable… making assumptions about a person you don’t know and have never met rather undermines that, I’d say.

By: Anna Raccoon

Anna Raccoon — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:14:22 +0000

Mayweed,
I am indebted to you for your comment both here and on my site. Having now been given an emergency lesson in the journalistic art of facebook research courtesy of one of my readers, something sadly lacking from my expertise as an amateur, I have now ‘cracked’ Ms Kennard’s message to Mr Hammond.
It is a most useful resource isn’t it?
So, Ms Kennard left that message for Mr Hammond a full day – April 12th – after she received Mr Cullip’s biography – April 11th – and yet it was still able to make it into the paper without any problem, unlike Mr Cullip’s, which she has already stated arrived ‘too late’.
Game, set and match, I think Ms Kennard?

By: mayweed

mayweed — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 16:17:37 +0000

This is a shocking tale. But to be entirely fair to Ms Kennard, if you look at the comment she posted on Brian Hammond’s facebook page on April 12 (found via Anna’s original blog ) it seems like she doesn’t know Brian at all well, let alone support him above all others for election.

I have no connection to this story, I just think if we’re going to slam reporters for not getting their facts straight, it’s only fair to make sure we’re getting the facts straight, especially if we’re suggesting she deliberately misrepresented someone to favour a friend of hers.