Congrats to Helen - will she stick as dep rep now, or not?

I have written to the Editors concerning some inaccuracies and misleading sections of this article, and look forward to further clarification.

This article was originally published as 'news' whereas it has now been changed to an opinion piece. The article has been changed as it originally suggested (deliberately or otherwise) that the author was unhappy with the recuring success of Re-Open Nominations and showed this in a manner which I agree was inappropreate. Another inaccuracy was also ammended.

This is a shame for free speech, a little tongue and cheek and we have a furore.

Its the president of ICU and everyone else involved in the process and not the author who is unhappy with the success of RON. Its the author's understanding that RON represents the fundamentals of the democratic process, whilst it may be costing time and money.

Hrm, me thinks its time for some live! sab bashing....

on the inaccuracies side of things i didn't get that many votes either!!

oh i will still be dep repping as well as being honsec...

Sid,

the problem was how it was said and the fact that I didn't think it was clear which point you were trying to make. Had it been as clear as your post I would've simply moved the article to opinion and left it as that.

To clarify Helen got 219 votes and the other statistics are correct.

You can't blame the sabbs if they're annoyed that council isn't quarate because there's only just enough elected members and they haven't all turned up! There's at least one other committee that's had to cancel its meeting this term because its volunteers were RON-ed.

but you can sympathise with the two 'councillors' who turned up to find they hadn't been elected, turned up on time, and turned up to be told about three different versions of events. And turned up to read for the first time what other people had ostensibly known for a while, only no-one had bothered to tell relevant people about these extant problems.

etc etc etc etc etc

Oh yes Helen is staying as Dep Rep!! She is too good for me to let go. *Remember the French chocolates I told you about Helen!!*

Anyone else notice that this is Live's 1000th article, Calls for a drink me thinks

Actually, there are only 979 current live posts. Some of the early numbers are missing (30 for example) which creates a bit of a hole.

You have 21 more articles to go before you reach the 1000th.

Sorry for the pedantry.

Sod the exactness, be engineers chaps. Add a bit of error here and there, a safety factor and count this as THE 1000th article. Only the number matters, kinda like the millenium celebrations. Mr. Tang, will you pls stand up and declare celebrations?

Why do editors have to edit live! articles? Is this just because someone in ICU complained?

Live editors - why not get some balls, and start standing up for free speech.

The right of free speech means a lot to us, but rights tend to go hand-in-hand with responsibilities; in this case, the responsibility to follow the Press Complanits Commission's Code of Conduct and the Staff-Student Protocol.

If you have a query as to why a particular alteration was made to an article or why a particular comment was removed, please email us (we will explain why a comment has been removed if the person making the comment left their real email address).

Well why was Sidd's fantastic article edited to say that C&G elections have a higher % turnout than ICU. As an ex guilds returning officer, from many years ago, this is true....

"why not get some balls, and start standing up for free speech"

The ideology of free speech has certainly been enshrined in HRA 1998 s12. Hence, you are legally entitled for such freedom under the statue.

However, there are legal or undesirable political consequences if expressions are made irresponsibly violating the law or other conventions.

Try writing an article inciting racial hatred.

Try committing another high profile tortuous defamation act on George Galloway.

But if the editors feel closely linked enough to the content maybe they should try editing it _before_ it gets posted.

Also a note to tell people why the story has been edited would be good. If the job of editor is done well enough it shouldn't need changed after the story is posted. It's not as if The Times can do that.

Perhaps something should be done about the comments too. I don't think they work well at the moment. There's no way to control/contact individual posters and more importantly - *no guidelines* for posts so in many cases posts just get removed without any contact with the poster to ask if they would like to edit the comment - they may still have a valid point so removing it seems a little heavy handed.

This argument has gone far too long, I did receive an email from the Live! editors informing me that changes has been made. Personally, I did not think there should have been anything offensive or discriminatory in my article. There was a discrepency on the figure of votes received by each candidate and I accepted the change.

The additional change which was made with respect to the comparison for election performance between ICU and Guilds on the other hand is a valid point and to this date I fail to understand the reason for its removal.

Perhaps some of us have way too much time and it might be a good idea not to finger old wounds...

I think you'll find The Times online artcles can and do do that. Same for any online news site (e.g. bbc). I've never noticed them jutifying every editorial decision as a matter of course.

Ideally, yes all editorial decisions would be taken before publishing...

Anyway freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom for anything you want to appear on Live!. It means (for example) freedom to put what you like on your own website for which you would then take responsibility for that. Live! editors are responsible for the content of Live! (see media group consitution) and hence they and nobody else choose what sort of editorial policy to apply.

The otehr main difference between Live! and printed media is that we try to keep it as up-to-the-minute as possible. In some cases this means putting up an article before we can be 100% certain that it will not require any further changes, and unfortunately there areoccasions when the need for changes only becomes apparent when a reader brings a matter to our attention.

Regarding reasons for removing comments, we will tell the person who made the comment if they leave their real name or email address, but sometimes they don't. The only way around this would be to force people to set up an account with a real email address before allowing them to comment: Felix do this and on several occasions I've not bothered commenting on their articles for that very reason; hardly a move in favour of 'free speech'.

I think you will find Live! is stale and boring. News is rubbish, content is poor. Gone are the funny, maybe slightly untrue stories. There was even one point where there had been no new news for over a week.

The problem is this:

Live! is no longer fun. This is because editors don't have the balls to stand up for their journalists. If you look back you will find many articles that upset ICU, College, ULU etc... This is what student media is for. If trust exists between journalists and editors, then the editors need not edit anything...

If Live! doesn't improve then it will go down the pan.... The editors are the only people who can stop it - and before you say why don't you write or try editing.... The simple answer - I have done in the past....

Sid, there's at least a couple of examples from Live's past reporting that the %age turnout for guilds elections are higher than ICU elections.

You clearly haven't seen our inboxes this year, the "comments" from ICU among others, and whilst occasionally the wording of a paragraph gets tweaked to avoid it being misconstrued in a way that was never intended in the first place, we have not removed a single article.

Admittedly the "spoof" type stories have been a little thinner on the ground lately, but a lot of the material we culd have used would have led to more complaints of becoming cliquey and relying on in-jokes. If you would be so good as to give a real name when criticising, we could look up some of your obviously superior articles for examples of how to avoid this.

I agree completely with Nichola and would like to add that it'd be great to see more spoof stories (although unlike in 'the old days' we would probably mark them as 'spoof')

We have posted articles which annoyed both college and ICU but admittedly only in the interest of reporting the news rather than being amusing.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen.....

IF you want fun and p***-takes read the Guildsheet - Out on Monday 31st January.

So has the sudden appearance of 2 allegedly humorous articles been in response to all this?