The IMPRESS Project: a viable, independent model of press regulation?

Jonathan Heawood is director of the IMPRESS Project, which is building a regulatory body for the UK press. Last week, he spoke with the LSE Media Policy Project and members of the industry, academia and civil society about the project’s progress and goals. Here is an excerpt of his remarks

Summer reading ideas from the LSE Media Policy Project

At the Media Policy Project we are often asked for readings by those wishing to get up to speed on complex policy issues: this is why we produce our policy briefs and topic guides. As many of our readers are likely to be taking summer holidays this month and next, IMPRESS Project Founding Director Jonathan Heawood (writing here in a personal capacity) suggests reflecting on current tensions in journalism through the novels of Raymond Chandler

That Feeling When You Are Held Accountable – IMPRESS CEO

jonathan heawoodEarlier this week the Press Recognition Panel agreed to recognise IMPRESS as an approved press regulator, convinced that it satisfied the 23 criteria set out under the Royal Charter. IMPRESS CEO Jonathan Heawood reflects on the process. See here for background to the decision

Media Wealth Building: The Report of the Local News Plans Project

Between September 2022 and January 2023, the Public Interest News Foundation (PINF) worked with local communities in Bangor, Bristol, Folkestone, Glasgow, Manchester and Newry, to create 'Local News Plans' for their areas.                                                                                           We facilitated discussions between local stakeholders, including news providers, businesses, community groups, councillors and others, to find out what they think about the state of local news, what impact this is having on their communities, and what they believe is needed to build a more sustainable local news economy.We're excited to share the full Local News Plans project report, written by Jonathan Heawood and Sameer Padania  in collaboration with NewsNow, the UK's independent news discovery platform. We found that:People believe that local news should be truly local. They don't want 'cookiecutter' local news, but original local news that truly reflects their area. Despite their passion and commitment, local news providers are struggling to meet this need. Commercial providers are chasing page views, whilst independent providers are burning themselves out with long hours and low pay.Local stakeholders are keen to support new funding models for local news. They recognise that old revenue models have been disrupted, but they believe that, in many places, new sources of local funding can be found for local news.The Local News Planning process unlocks collaboration. It brings people together in a powerful spirit of creativity, agency and optimism.These findings confirm the scale of the challenge facing local news, but they also ?contain the seeds of a new approach that we call 'media wealth building'

On the size of identifying codes in triangle-free graphs

In an undirected graph $G$, a subset $C\subseteq V(G)$ such that $C$ is a dominating set of $G$, and each vertex in $V(G)$ is dominated by a distinct subset of vertices from $C$, is called an identifying code of $G$. The concept of identifying codes was introduced by Karpovsky, Chakrabarty and Levitin in 1998. For a given identifiable graph $G$, let \M(G) be the minimum cardinality of an identifying code in $G$. In this paper, we show that for any connected identifiable triangle-free graph $G$ on $n$ vertices having maximum degree $\Delta\geq 3$, \M(G)\le n-\tfrac{n}{\Delta+o(\Delta)}. This bound is asymptotically tight up to constants due to various classes of graphs including $(\Delta-1)$-ary trees, which are known to have their minimum identifying code of size $n-\tfrac{n}{\Delta-1+o(1)}$. We also provide improved bounds for restricted subfamilies of triangle-free graphs, and conjecture that there exists some constant $c$ such that the bound \M(G)\le n-\tfrac{n}{\Delta}+c holds for any nontrivial connected identifiable graph $G$

Differential expression of Toll-like receptors and inflammatory cytokines in ovine interdigital dermatitis and footrot.

Footrot is a common inflammatory bacterial disease affecting the health and welfare of sheep worldwide. The pathogenesis of footrot is complex and multifactorial. The primary causal pathogen is the anaerobic bacterium Dichelobacter nodosus, with Fusobacterium necrophorum also shown to play a key role in disease. Since immune-mediated pathology is implicated, the aim of this research was to investigate the role of the host response in interdigital dermatitis (ID) and footrot. We compared the expression of Toll-like receptors (TLRs) and pro-inflammatory cytokines and the histological appearance of clinically normal in comparison to ID and footrot affected tissues. Severe ID and footrot were characterised by significantly increased transcript levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines TNFα and IL1β and the pattern recognition receptors TLR2 and TLR4 in the interdigital skin. This was reflected in the histopathological appearance, with ID and footrot presenting progressive chronic-active pododermatitis with a mixed lymphocytic and neutrophilic infiltration, gradually increasing from a mild form in clinically normal feet, to moderate in ID and to a focally severe form with frequent areas of purulence in footrot. Stimulation with F. necrophorum and/or D. nodosus extracts demonstrated that dermal fibroblasts, the resident cell type of the dermis, also contribute to the inflammatory response to footrot bacteria by increased expression of TNFα, IL1β and TLR2. Overall, ID and footrot lead to a local inflammatory response given that expression levels of TLRs and IL1β were dependent on the disease state of the foot not the animal.This is the final version published by Elsevier in Veterinary Immunology and Immunopathology under a CC BY license. It was originally published here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165242714001706

Phase diagram of the chromatic polynomial on a torus

We study the zero-temperature partition function of the Potts antiferromagnet (i.e., the chromatic polynomial) on a torus using a transfer-matrix approach. We consider square- and triangular-lattice strips with fixed width L, arbitrary length N, and fully periodic boundary conditions. On the mathematical side, we obtain exact expressions for the chromatic polynomial of widths L=5,6,7 for the square and triangular lattices. On the physical side, we obtain the exact ``phase diagrams'' for these strips of width L and infinite length, and from these results we extract useful information about the infinite-volume phase diagram of this model: in particular, the number and position of the different phases.Comment: 72 pages (LaTeX2e). Includes tex file, three sty files, and 26 Postscript figures. Also included are Mathematica files transfer6_sq.m and transfer6_tri.m. Final version to appear in Nucl. Phys.

The Complexity of the Empire Colouring Problem

We investigate the computational complexity of the empire colouring problem (as defined by Percy Heawood in 1890) for maps containing empires formed by exactly $r > 1$ countries each. We prove that the problem can be solved in polynomial time using $s$ colours on maps whose underlying adjacency graph has no induced subgraph of average degree larger than $s/r$. However, if $s \geq 3$, the problem is NP-hard even if the graph is a forest of paths of arbitrary lengths (for any $r \geq 2$, provided $s < 2r - \sqrt(2r + 1/4+ 3/2)$. Furthermore we obtain a complete characterization of the problem's complexity for the case when the input graph is a tree, whereas our result for arbitrary planar graphs fall just short of a similar dichotomy. Specifically, we prove that the empire colouring problem is NP-hard for trees, for any $r \geq 2$, if $3 \leq s \leq 2r-1$ (and polynomial time solvable otherwise). For arbitrary planar graphs we prove NP-hardness if $s<7$ for $r=2$, and $s < 6r-3$, for $r \geq 3$. The result for planar graphs also proves the NP-hardness of colouring with less than 7 colours graphs of thickness two and less than $6r-3$ colours graphs of thickness $r \geq 3$.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figure