Swinson swings for payday pirates

UK CONSUMER ISSUES

Consumer minister Jo Swinson has called a summit to investigate if greater regulation is needed to control payday lenders.

The industry is currently under the remit of the Office of Fair Trading, who is set to hand control over to the FCA next year. In March of this year the OFT proposed referring payday lenders to the Competition Commission believing there to be: ‘evidence of deep-rooted problems in how lenders compete with each other’.

They also accused lenders of:

• lenders failing to conduct adequate assessments of affordability before lending or before rolling over loans
• failing to explain adequately how payments will be collected
• using aggressive debt collection practices
• not treating borrowers in financial difficulty with forbearance.

Swinson has invited payday loan companies, financial regulators, debt charities to the meeting. Among the topics being discussed it is expected that the powers the FCA will have when they take over regulation next…

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Insurance ambiguity brought by new Act

UK CONSUMER ISSUES

Insurers are being advised to make sure they are up to speed on the Consumer Insurance Act (CIA) which came into effect earlier this month.

The CIA is a big boost for consumers as they are no longer duty bound to disclose everything relevant about their application.  The onus will now be on insurers and brokers to ask the right questions, though claims will still be forfeit if it is found the claimant deliberately withheld information.

There have been a few voices raised in concern about the ambiguity the CIA has brought between insurers and brokers. Martin Oliver, chief executive of brokers A&A Group, says that insurers are not being clear with brokers as to what is expected of them. “I can only remember seeing one document on this issue from an insurer as to what they expect to see. The activity around this has been patchy but these…

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Consumer rights bill marches on

UK CONSUMER ISSUES

The new consumer rights bill continues to work its way into the law of the land and this week consumer minister Jo Swinson has outlined some of the measures to be included. The aim is to streamline eight rather complicated pieces of legislation into one, while doing more to include online downloads and streaming services.

Swinson said: “For too long the rules that apply when buying goods and services have been murky for both consumers and businesses. The situation is even worse in relation to digital content. It is about time consumers knew what their rights are and businesses had clearer information on what is expected of them when problems inevitably do arise. That is why we have put clarity and fairness at the heart of the proposed consumer bill of rights.”

Among the more important points are the measures being made to clear up any ambiguity in the…

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911 conspiracy clap-trap

I recently went through a painfully idiotic discussion with, an otherwise highly intelligent, friend of mine. He put me onto the Zeitgeist films which I was finding interesting if not a tad debatable until…. they started on 911 conspiracy theories.

When discussing the films (via the medium of Facebook instant messenger) to my horror I discovered my learned friend believed this nonsense. At first I thought he was joking but no. My dear friend believes that the US government not only were responsible for flying the planes into the towers but also that they had the building rigged to explode. On top of this he backs the idea that there was no plane at the Pentagon or in Shanksville. He found the official Bin-Laden line unbelievable.

That is unbelievable compared to the notion that the government went to all the trouble to rig the towers to collapse (because flying two planes into them was not enough to convince the civilised world to go to war over oil). But when it came to the Pentagon they decided just to blow it up and pretend there was a plane. This is the US government, why did they not just fly a plane into the Pentagon? Why pretend there was one? Why do that on top of what happened in New York? What was the fourth plane in Shanksville all about?

Maybe they ran out of money after the New York element? I mean the US government must plan all their conspiracies on a budget? Maybe they went over budget on the explosives to bring down the towers but they had a lot left over so decided instead of ruining a perfectly good plane on the Pentagon attacks they would just use up the excess explosive? Or maybe (and I think this is the one he could have won me over with) they stored the left over explosive from New York in the Pentagon but forgot to unplug the timer and they went off with the rest of them? After all this meticulous planning did they get the sense this wasn’t enough?

“Hey I ain’t happy with this plan yet boys, ideas?”

“Maybe we should also pretend a plane crashed into a field Mr. President?”

“My word Joe, give yourself a raise.”

“Thank you very much Mr. President.”

“Actually you can’t, we used up all the money on the explosive.”

“Awwwww.”

He made the point to me that if I ask any pilot of a 737 or a 777 they would tell me how difficult it is to fly a plane directly into a building. I responded that I didn’t know any pilots of 737s or 777s and perhaps I could discuss it with the pilot they had discussed it with. It turns out they didn’t actually know a pilot.

And the US government did all this to start a war over oil? Yes because the US has always had a policy of make sure everyone is on side before they make a move. Anyway off to war they went in the famously oil rich country of Afghanistan. But why didn’t they save themselves all the trouble and just pretend to go in under the guise of removing the Taliban? No one would have believed that is why they were doing it but we could all have lived with the lie that they were acting out of wanting to protect the people of Afghanistan from a human rights crisis.

On the question of the Iraq war and their oil, why would the Bush administration, after carrying out the 911 attacks, pretend that Bin-Laden was in Iraq? Leave the Afghanistan’s out of the picture. If we’re willing to believe he was behind the attacks we’ll believe he’s in Iraq.

Finally there is the question of the number of people involved in the conspiracy. My friend spoke about air traffic control doing nothing, so they were all in on it. Who flew the planes into the towers? Obviously highly trained 737 or 777 pilots, quite happy to sacrifice their lives so America can have some more oil. Whatever else you do don’t forget the Jews who didn’t go to work that day, they were all in on it too.

In fact I’m beginning to feel like I’m the only person who wasn’t in on it.

Last word to Charlie Brooker.

American interview

Here is an interview with Marcus Massner about about the challenges facing the industry and what paywalls will do.

Europe keeping an eye on us

The Murdoch led paywall move is begining to attract more interest.

Times V Guardian

I’ve payed my subscription for The Times and am now looking at their coverage of the killing of Bin Laden and comparing it to The Guardian.

The Times has gone for a live blog approach, updating events in real time. They include every aspect of the story, Pakistan’s refusal that they had any knowledge, children searching the compound and further statements from the Americans.

The Guardian has written individual, traditional type journalistic pieces.

There are some great graphics on The Times site, I can’t link to them and I don’t want to copy and paste in case I get sued but I can tell where they’ve put a lot of effort in. Above the main story there are four buttons. Article, video, pictures and graphics.

The Times is easier to navigate than the Guardian. The Guardian tend to riddle their text with links which can be disracting.

Moving over to sport and again The Times looks better and is easier to navigate. The page layout is very similar to a print page. There are headlines and columns as you would expect. The Guardian is nearly the same but not as much space given over to the main articles.

The Times doesn’t feel like an overload of information and is not as colourful as The Guardian. This is a good thing as the colourful Guardian will give me a slight head-ache. I think for £2 a week Times is value for money.

The live blog and news day experiences

You will see my live blogs over the last few posts. The reason I picked this for my individual project is I wanted an intense 90 minutes of online work and I couldn’t figure out coveritlive in the one day session we did. I decided the best way to get to grips with it was to live blog an event.

There are a number of live blogs for games out there. Sky Sports must be the king, they live blog every league game in England on a Saturday. This is done through their fantastic score centre, which is free.

The Daily Mail do a good effort and include some match pictures, though these are added afterwards.

They each have very different styles, Sky do short posts every minute or two whereas The Mail will have longer posts but every three to four minutes.

My first attempt was the Liverpool V United game. I’ve left this up in its original form to show the mistakes I was making. Firstly the spelling, I am not a very good typist, so there are lots of ‘teh’ when I meant ‘the’. Another problem was the foreign names; Kyriakos, Hernandez etc. are a bit difficult to type when you are trying to watch the action.

My second attempt was the United V Marseilles game. What I’d learned from my first attempt was not to try to include every single kick of the ball. This is where I would have liked an extra person to do my links and I could concentrate on the game, get it more like The Mail model I liked.  I spent a bit more time getting to know coveritlive and you can see how I have interactive games. I concentrated a bit more on build up, getting the team sheets up. also I began to add links, such as odds from book makers.

For the main event I chose the Wales V England game. I was lucky this game happened when it did, I know all the players and am familiar with their names (the Welsh defender does spell his name Morison, I know it looks wrong but I assure you that’s how it’s spelt). I spent the day before getting a few links ready: Gareth Bale being injured, war of words between Bellamy and Terry. Jim reckons that professional live blogs have two people working them, one to type and one to find the links, twitter feeds etc. I could have done with somebody but did get very lucky to stumble upon someone (@tombrown21) inside the ground tweeting great stuff about the game and the atmosphere.

The game was the intense 90 minutes as expected but the work I’d done the day before and my two dry runs at live blogging really helped. My biggest downfall was my typing speed. There are other elements I would ike to improve. I thought some of the images I used for the likes of substitutions were a bit big. I would have preferred a little graphic in the side of the text but coveritlive doesn’t do this.

To sum up,  my biggest downfall, without question, was my typing speed but being able to go back over it and tidy up helps. Does it work? Liverpool V United, no way. Wales V England, I like to think so. Looking at them now it is like they are written by two different people. Having the Mail and Sky to compare my work to really helped but if I wanted to improve it I would draft in a second person and that would  allow me to do the longer posts which I think work better for anybody reading the blog.

Finally it’s not all sport this live live blogging lark, It can work in the world of politics as well.

NEWS DAY

At the end of the year we had to do two news days. On the first of these days I worked on a story about a party being thrown in Queensbury for the cricket world cup final. The story was for the WNOL site. This involved using the interview techniques we worked on I first year. It was a reasonably easy interview to do as my interviewee gat to advertise his restaurant and was quite willing to talk. The rest or the day was online subbing, again first year skills.

For the second day I was involved in the social media aspect of the online journalism. I was able to take advantage of this as I had to do a lot of work with the radio team. I read the sports report for them and got involved in a debate about Wayne Rooney being suspended for swearing. I was able to go in between rooms updating the Twitter feed about the weekend’s sports. I put up highlights of the football that was coming up; there was also one of the majors in the golf going on out in America.

I worked with Matt in finding updates for his blog. I kept him informed of what I was doing and what was coming up in the radio broadcasts. Working directly with the radio team on the second day gave me more to do with the social media team. The cross media aspect is important and when the two teams talk to each other it gives a better overall final product.

The view from the other side

In the interests of objectivity and balance here’s a anti-paywall rant.