Sunday Times Research Articles

Trends in news agenda setting by the Sunday Times and Rapport in 2000

This article examines news trends in South Africa's two major Sunday papers, the Sunday Times and Rapport, in 2000. The front pages and main news sections were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. Trends identified included inter alia that Rapport gave more front-page coverage to rugby, while the Sunday Times preferred political stories. Both papers relied heavily on human interest on page three, while the Sunday Times clearly gave a higher priority to educational and health matters in general. It is concluded that the papers reflect different backgrounds, which means that reading both probably provide different national and international perspectives. Hierdie artikel ontleed nuustendense in Suid-Afrika se twee vernaamste Sondagkoerante, naamlik Sunday Times en Rapport, in 2000. Die voorblaaie sowel as die vernaamste nuusafdelings is kwalitatief en kwantitatief ontleed. Daar is onder meer bepaal dat Rapport meer voorbladdekking gee aan rugby, terwyl die Sunday Times politieke stories verkies. Albei fokus sterk op ‘human interest’ op bladsy drie, terwyl die Sunday Times duideliker prioriteit gee aan opvoedkundige en gesondheidsake. In die algemeen word die gevolgtrekking gemaak dat deur albei koerante te lees, lesers verskillende perspektiewe kry op Suid-Afrikaanse en internasionale nuusgebeure.

The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century

In this book, Robert Cooper sets out his radical interpretation of the new world order that has emerged from the debris of communism. It is an essential account of the times in which we live. 'A fluent, stimulating and often original book' Brendan Simms, Sunday Times 'An excellent new analysis of the cracks in today's geopolitical landscape.'Philip Stephens, Financial Times 'Intelligent and stylish' Robert Skidelsky, New Statesman'A seminal work: a brilliant and successful attempt to bring intellectual order to the chaos of the twenty-first century.' Francois Heisbourg, International Institute for Strategic Studies

Trends in news agenda setting by the Sunday Times and Rapport in 2000

Trends in news agenda setting by the Sunday Times and Rapport in 2000

Attacmng the devil

In its last issue, the British Journalism Review invited readers to vote for the greatest newspaper editor of all time. Subsequently a similar invitation was made to its readers by Press Gazette. The results of the combined poll contained some surprises. Until the week before this issue went to press, no current editor had received a legitimate vote. The final tally in this area was: Paul Dacre, Daily Mail, 1; the rest, 0. More than 20 editors featured in the voting, none of whom was female. Of these, seven dominated. Although current editors were expressly asked in the BJR not to vote for themselves, one did. No prizes for guessing whom. And there was a handful of votes for the worst editor of all time, including one for a current incumbent. Wild horses couldn't drag the name from us. Of the magnificent seven, three tied for fifth place: Arthur Christiansen, long-serving editor of the Daily Express (1932-56); Hugh Cudlipp, who edited the Sunday Pictorial and later was editor-in-chief of that paper and the Daily Mirror; and Larry Lamb, first editor of the modern Sun (Thomas Barnes, The Times, 1817-41, was only a vote behind and draws level if the vote in the piece below is taken into account). Another Sun editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, shared third place with David English, editor of the Daily Mail, 1971-92. Considerably ahead of these came C P Scott, who edited the then Manchester Guardian from 1872 until 1929 and was also proprietor from 1905. But the clear winner, by a margin similar to Scott's over those in third place, was Harold Evans, the only person to have edited both The Sunday Times and The Times. We asked Evans, in America, to comment on the results. — BILL HAGERTY

What is Real?

What is Real?

Confidentiality and security of clinical information in mental health practice

‘Security holds the key’ was the title of a newspaper article concerned with e-commerce (D. Sumner-Smith, The Sunday Times, 6 February, 2000, p. 3.13). However, it applies just as readily to the health sector. The need to safeguard the confidentiality of information that patients share with clinicians is as fundamental as the principle of consent. This issue has come to the fore in the context of the rapid developments and applications of information and communication technologies within society in general and within the health sector in particular. There are also changing societal expectations regarding access to information, confidentiality and disclosure. The emerging scenarios present significant challenges in relation to the traditional methods used to deal with the privacy and confidentiality of personal information (Anderson, 1995). In addition to the impact of new technologies, consideration also needs to be given to the impact of changes in health care organisation and practice, for example multidisciplinary and multi-agency working. Mental health services are in many respects at the vanguard of these changes, where the ideals of community care, shared care and seamless care depend fundamentally on good communication and information sharing. Failures in communicating information, particularly across sectoral boundaries, have led to significant problems in patient care, as revealed in several recent enquiries into homicides (Northamptonshire Health Authority & Northamptonshire Social Services, 1999)

Life with - and without - Harry

In 1986, when Andrew Neil called Sunday Times journalists to a meeting around the corner from the paper's Grays Inn Road offices and commanded them to go to Fortress Wapping or else — the silence was broken by a mild-mannered, bespectacled senior editor. With 17 years' service behind him, Don Berry accused Neil of treating the journalists with contempt: they had been lied to, their house agreement had been flagrantly violated, and their herding to Wapping was a Murdoch ruse to evade redundancy payments. Though Berry was cheered to the rafters, it was the end of his career with the Sunday Times. But his talents and high prinicples were quickly seized by Max Hastings, newly appointed editor of The Daily Telegraph, whose reliance on Berry then was proven later when Hastings took him to the Evening Standard. Below me publish Berry's retirement speech describing his first days on five different papers.

A New Paradigm for Delivering Recovery Oriented Services for People with Serious Mental Illness: Implications for Service Delivery

ut now I look back on it with a real sense of achievement. It was a 24-carat crack-up and I’m proud of the fact I got through it, rebuilt myself, did ok as a journalist again, and went on to do what I do now. I couldn’t have done what I’ve done in this job without believing what I believe very strongly, and being tough-minded, focused, mentally and physically fit. I feel the breakdown and the recovery played a big part in all that.’ Alastair Campbell, the prime minister’s director of communications and strategy. Sunday Times Magazine 6 January 2002. The concept of recovery and the development of recovery-oriented services and practices are well advanced in some parts of the world, particularly in a significant number of states in the US and in New Zealand. In the UK the concept is only just gaining recognition as demonstrated in the last 12 months by the number of conferences on the subject. This article aims to bring together what is currently known about recovery from serious mental illness and identifies practice that is likely to increase the rates of recovery within the context of developing mental health services in England. B Introduction

Parole And Probation In A Prison Nation

I spent six weeks in July/August 2001 teaching summer school at Northern Kentucky University, and learning, at first hand as often as possible, something about criminal justice in this corner of the United States. Although Kentucky-based, the nearest urban centre was Cincinnati, just across the state border, and I had most contact with criminal justice people in Ohio. I was not doing systematic research, and all I assembled was a patchwork of impressions, lacking in comprehensiveness – but supplemented by reading newspapers and books that are not easily accessed in Britain. One of them, by Wall Street journalist Joseph Hallinan (2001), characterises America as a “Prison Nation”, because it imprisons (on average) 600 per 100,000 people, and because it is now building prisons to galvanise flagging rural economies as much as to combat crime in a coherent and effective way. With only 126 per 100,000 in prison, England and Wales is clearly not in the same league. However, with the highest prison population in Europe – the daily rate passed 70,000 in March 2002 – there can be no room for complacency, especially when reputable Sunday Times columnists suggest that we should emulate America: “perhaps the time has come to tolerate the idea of zero tolerance and build the jails to make it work” (Marrin, 2002). I offer these impressions to others who are also working to understand what it takes to keep criminal justice decent, and prison populations low.

Oxford offers places for cash

Oxford University is once again at the centre of controversy after a report in the Sunday Times which claimed that one of its colleges was prepared to offer a place to a student in return for a cash donation.1 An undercover reporter, posing as a wealthy banker, was allegedly told by senior staff at Pembroke College that they could create an extra place for his son in return for a donation …

Britspace™?

Britspace™?

New evidence on Sir Cyril Burt: His 1964 Speech to the Association of Educational Psychologists

After reviewing the debate that raged over Cyril Burt's [Br. J. Psychol. 57 (1966) 137] finding of a correlation of .771 for IQ scores in 53 pairs of monozygotic twins raised apart, this paper provides the transcript of a previously unpublished speech by Burt given on May 2, 1964, at the age of 81, on the occasion of his appointment as Patron to the Association of Educational Psychologists (AEP). Burt's speech is of special interest because it occurred just prior to the publication of a paper later alleged to be built on fraudulent data. Kamin [The Science and Politics of IQ (1974). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum] declared Burt's correlation of .771 to be implausibly high and implausibly invariant from that reported in his 1943 work. Hearnshaw [Cyril Burt: Psychologist (1979). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press] concluded that Burt had made up his data, and the Sunday Times (1976) even alleged that Burt had conjured his research assistants up out of thin air. Then, independent books by Joynson [The Burt Affair (1989). London: Routledge] and by Fletcher [Science, Ideology and The Media: The Cyril Burt Scandal (1991). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction] vindicated Burt (the “missing” research assistants were found and the twin data had not been “cooked”). More recently, Mackintosh [Cyril Burt: Fraud or Framed? (1995). Oxford: Oxford University Press] reiterated Hearnshaw's allegations of fraud, including the claim that Burt did not have access to new data after his retirement in 1950. However, as Fletcher pointed out, Burt was openly requesting educational psychologists to help him locate additional pairs of twins raised apart. Moreover, in the 1964 talk presented here, which allows Burt to speak for himself, Burt describes his wide access to the schools, teachers, and social workers of the London County Council from 1913 onwards and states how, half a century later, analyses were still going on. He describes the “potted history” of educational psychology in Britain, his 1913 appointment as psychologist for the London County Council, and some of his findings as Britain's first educational psychologist. With the whole panoply of his intellectual life on display and no quotes taken out of context, Burt's talk may incline some readers to take him at his word and to dismiss the accusations against him as “not proven.”

Advertising effectiveness of South African newspapers in the higher business education market

The article reports on the advertising effectiveness of the press media in the RSA with regard to the Telematic MBA degree offered by the Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education. The MBA degree is offered to students countrywide (even internationally) via telematic learning with study centres all over the RSA. Students apply for acceptance during November each year and successful candidates commence their MBA studies at the beginning of the next year. The advertising campaign runs from August to October, and includes a variety of media. The press plays a significant role in this campaign. The article reports on the effectiveness of the different press media, namely, daily newspapers and Sunday newspapers. In addition, the effects of the physical advertisement positioning in the papers (section of the newspaper as well as page the layout), are examined and quantified into money terms per enquiry per advertisement. Direct response evaluation is used to determine the effectiveness of an advertisement and its medium. Analysis revealed that the Sunday Times are the most cost-effective option with regard to Sunday newspapers, while in daily newspapers the Sowetan, Business Day and Beeld are also favourable options. This results correlate favourably with the CPM ratings on readership. This value of this article is therefore that it supplies a frame of reference that could be applied to future marketing campaigns in educational programmes. It also serves as a reference frame that could be used to estimate market response from advertisements in a specific newspaper. South African Journal of Higher Education Vol.16(3) 2002: 103-108

The New Jersey Famine Curriculum: A Report

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. OSCAR WILDE Is 1995, when first learned that New Jersey Education Commission had been empowered by legislature to consider course materials on wide range of genocides, contacted Dr. Paul Winkler, Executive Director of Commission, and asked him if Great Irish Famine could be included. He immediately asked me, Are you claiming genocide? said, I would like teachers and students to make up their own minds. He agreed, and encouraged development of our Irish Famine Curriculum. The 116-page curriculum is available on Web site of Nebraska Department of Education. Any teacher or student with a computer and modem can read, print, or download all of it using HTML or PDF formats. The Illinois, Colorado, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Idaho Departments of Education have linked to curriculum on Nebraska site, along with National Archives of Republic of Ireland and Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) at Syracuse University. The curriculum is indexed by Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) at Indiana University, which has distributed microfiche copies to one thousand subscribing college and university libraries. The New Jersey curriculum was approved by state Commission on 10 September 1996 and distributed to state schools. The following month, New York Governor George Pataki signed a law mandating instruction on mass starvation in Ireland. The Sunday Times of London responded on 13 October with a staff editorial entitled An Irish Hell, but not a which stated: To compare, as Mr. Pataki has done, Britain's policy to that of Hitler towards Jews is as unhistorical as it is offensive. Not least to Jews, tragedy of whose is necessarily lessened by comparison with an Irish catastrophe that was neither premeditated nor man-made. Yet Governor Pataki had not compared Great Famine to in either his written or spoken remarks. A week later, British Ambassador John Kerr wrote to Pataki, saying: It seems to me rather insulting to many millions who suffered and died in concentration camps across Europe to imply that their man-made fate was in any way analogous to natural disaster in Ireland a century before. The Famine, unlike Holocaust, was not deliberate, not premeditated, not man-made, not genocide, (1) On 10 March 1997 Washington Times published a full-page Insight magazine editorial deriding Pataki as the greatest liar in America and ridiculing idea of Irish Famine education. You say Potato, They say Holocaust was illustrated by a photograph of a potato wrapped in barbed wire. On 26 August, Boston Globe published Unnecessary Curriculum Bill, attacking Massachusetts State Senator Warren Tolman for promoting instruction on Great Irish Famine, Armenian Genocide, and Holocaust: As Tolman bill is now worded, teachers might be encouraged to treat Irish famine on same level of moral depravity as Armenian genocide and Holocaust. That would be a misreading of historical record. While British approach to mass starvation was often brutal, arrogant and unfeeling, no state-run death camps disfigured Irish countryside. The argument that classroom discussion of mass starvation should be discouraged because British behavior did not match barbarity of Nazis during is central to all objections against famine education. Because is best documented, most systematic, cruel, and ruthless genocide of twentieth century, it has almost become very definition of genocide. Opponents of famine education raise with intention of demonstrating that, if Great Irish Famine was not comparable (no state-run death camps), then famine was not a matter of genocide. …

An Assimilated Jew Speaks: Notes on "Jews Without Memory"

Without Memory may be the most forgetful essay I've ever read. Only in the last two sections of it, however, did I notice that what induces both its amnesia its infelicitous mix of ethnic narcissism paranoia isn't William Styron, Sophie's Choice (1979), liberal anti-Judaism, or even Nazi genocide; it's assimilated Jews. The two final sections also show that when the essay, shaky from the start, at last addresses the matter which most troubles it, it comes completely, informatively, unhinged. Charges of guilt by association, for example, which appear as early as the opening page, now predominate. Assimilated Jews, Styron, John Rawls, the New Left are lumped together as sharing the view enunciated not by any of those stigmatized, but rather by an anti-Jewish Charleston, South Carolina, Sunday Times editorial written in 1845 to the effect that Jews must remember, you shall not disturb the Christian. As this instance of reductionism in overdrive indicates, the essay's grip on history, never firm, has loosened altogether. Another case in point appears in the closing words of Without Memory: [F]irst the Enlightenment now the New Left would oblige [the Jews] to abandon the sources of their memory. In the face of so grandiose a historical synthesis one is entitled to ask: and now the New Left? In the year 2001 is there a New Left, let alone one capable of obliging anyone to do anything? And does the essay really believe that the Jews have a single, unified, Holocaust-centered collective memory? Or consider the apparently historical insight that is presented earlier in the essay with unwarranted glee: that the Left has failed to understand how exclusivist Jews, by their refusal to adapt to modernity's Christian anti-Jewish ways, have been the real opponents of the modern state. It's hard to take this seriously as a

The Great Food Gamble

We are on the brink of what could prove to be a medical catastrophe…. The superbugs are with us.” Ominous words from John Humphrys, voice of Radio Four's Today programme, Sunday Times columnist and, we now discover, one time Welsh dairy farmer and angry agriculturalist. In a readable book that seeks to expose and condemn the “effect of modern food production methods on our health,” Humphrys attributes the evolution of multidrug resistant “superbugs” partly to overprescribing, but mostly to the alarmingly liberal use of antibiotics in poultry farming. Those of us in the medical profession may find references to a potential “medical catastrophe” …

Doctor Foster went to Gloucester

Over the summer the maternity services suddenly began receiving the kind of attention last experienced in the early 1990s when the Health Select Committee published their report and the Government responded with Changing Childbirth (Department of Health, 1993). On 18 July, the Department of Health Children's Taskforce team held an ‘open space’ event to begin to define the scope of the National Service Framework for Children that will include maternity care, and Sheila Adam, Chair of the Maternity and Neonatal Workforce Group, addressed a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Maternity (APPG) at Westminster. The same week, the Dr Foster website was launched providing comparative birth statistics for most UK maternity units, accompanied by a Good Birth Guide supplement in the Sunday Times (15 July) and a Channel 4 television programme.

The bride of science: romance, reason, and Byron's daughter

Romantic heroine and computer pioneer, this is a remarkable of Lord Byron's daughter. Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron was born in 1815 just after the Battle of Waterloo, and died aged 36, soon after the Great Exhibition of 1851. She was connected with some of the most influential and colourful characters of the age including: Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin and Charles Babbage. It was her work with Babbage that led to her being credited with the invention of computer programming and to her name being adopted for the programming language that controls the US military machine. However, what makes her so fascinating is the way she personified the seismic historical changes taking place. This was the era when fissures began to open up in culture: romance split away from reason, instinct from intellect, and, art from science. Ada came to embody these new polarities. Woolley has a great to tell and does it with racy vigour. - Maggie Gee, Daily Telegraph. A splendid and enthralling portrait. - Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times. An amazing story - Ruth Padel, The Independent. An entertaining and thoughtful biography, - The Guardian.

Evaluating consumer website logs: a case study of The Times/The Sunday Times website

Evaluating consumer website logs: a case study of The Times/The Sunday Times website

Evaluating consumer website logs: a case study of The Times/The Sunday Times website

Information professionals have featured strongly in the evaluation of the use of commercial online hosts and online public access catalogues, but not so strongly in the evaluation of the use of websites. This paper describes a piece of research that was conducted on The Times/The Sunday Times websites, to determine the most appropriate methods for evaluating use and to establish what forms of analysis could best be derived. A database of one million subscribers and three months’ worth of logs, constituting 65 million lines of data, were obtained and the data were analysed using parsing techniques and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. There were problems associated with the analysis, largely because of the difficulties in establishing the identity of Web users, determining what actually constitutes use and measuring the time spent online. Men in their 30s were the sites’ most numerous subscribers. The majority of subscribers were foreign and came from commercial organisations. Use varied considerably from hour to hour and day to day and from country to country: in the UK, midweek lunchtimes proved very popular. On average, a user conducted 2.35 sessions over the survey period, spent 15 minutes on a search session and 0.5-2.1 minutes on reading a page. Commercial organisations and Americans were the heaviest users and news pages proved to be the most popular.