The leaked DNA test on 13-year-old alleged dad Alfie Patten has revealed a big problem with court-ordered reporting restrictions in the internet age. (NB This is a cut down version of a much longer original post on blogging and reporting restrictions).
Court orders forbidding publication of certain facts apply only to people or companies who have been sent them. But this means there is nothing to stop bloggers publishing material that mainstream news organisations would risk fines and prison for publishing.
Even if a blogger knows that there is an order, and so could be considered bound by it, an absurd catch 22 means they can’t found out the details of the order - and so they risk contempt of court and prison.
Despite the obvious problem the Ministry of Justice have told me they have no plans to address the issue. [Read more]
There are billions of pages of unsorted and unclassified information online, which make up millions of terabytes of data with almost no organisation. It is not necessarily true that some of this information is valuable whilst some is worthless, that’s just a judgement for who desires it. At the moment, the most common way to access any information is through the hegemonic search engines which act as an entry point.
Yet, despite Google’s dominace of the market and culture, the methodology of search still isn’t satisfactory. Leading technologists see the next stage of development coming, where computers will become capable of effectively analysing and understanding data rather than just presenting it to us. Search engine optimisation will eventually be replaced by the ‘semantic web’.
London’s ‘morning’ Metro newspaper goes to press so early that it missed Arsenal’s penalty shoot-out win over Roma last night - as the paper went to press, Arsenal were still playing extra time, leading to the headline:
‘Arsenal left on brink as Juan puts Roma on top’.[Read more]
This year I’m aiming to blog all of my course materials for online journalism. Yesterday was the first class, so below is the PowerPoint for what I call Passive-Aggressive Newsgathering: using RSS and social media for newsgathering.
Gather round, gather round for this month’s Carnival of Journalism, which addresses the timelyquestion of ‘How do you financially support journalism online?’. I’ll be updating this post as the carnival performers put on their outsized business heads and add their peacock-like contributions.
I recorded this at the Society of Editors conference in November, so forgive my tardiness. This is Donald Martin, a representative of UK training organisation NCTJ talking about the results of a survey they and partners PTC, BJTC and Skillset conducted into employer and university perceptions of skills needed by journalists:
The financial crisis speeds up the newspapershift. Media diverges. Newspapers become television, television becomes a press agency. And everything becomes the web. Probably not a single news websites makes enough revenue to employ the same amount of journalists traditional media like newspapers and television employ. The result is a shift. Not in demand, in distribution. What will happen, and how will this shift change organizations?
Here are some ideas and thoughts that I think make sense. Please help me sharpen this concept, or point me at my fallacies. It would be interesting to have a discussion about this. [Read more]
I once had a job interview with a national broadcaster where I was asked about the then-current Lewinsky-Clinton scandal. When I replied that I felt it was time to move on, the interviewer frowned. I didn’t get the job.
According to them, my opinion on the Lewinsky story meant I was something of a journalistic spendthrift.
Because Fengler & Russ-Mohl’s paper argues that, just as we treat publishers and newsroom managers as economically motivated, we should do the same for journalists. [Read more]
The UK’s three leading journalism training bodies have finally announced that they are to work together as part of a new ‘Joint journalism training council’.
It’s early days yet, but the statement doesn’t make encouraging reading for anyone with an interest in the potential of online journalism as a separate medium: the three “new skills and awareness that are and will be required of journalists aiming to work in multi platform news organisations” include:
“b. Developing ideas for repurposing and adding to print or broadcast news material for use on websites including the use of links, background material, writing for the website, the basics of search engine optimisation and use of basic content management systems. [my emphasis]
“c. Using video and audio equipment to produce content for websites and other platforms and publishing it.”
In other words, treating the website as a place to shovel - and possibly add to - content produced for another medium.
The statement does go on to say “It is recognised that this is not an exhaustive list”, but it’s not a promising start.
So I was speaking at Blog08 last Friday - here are my vlogged impressions upon my return…
…and here is a snippet of video to give you a taste of that A List Bloggers panel tackling, of all things, ‘Is blogging journalism?’ The American speaker is Loren Feldman - a reactionary trapped in a revolutionary’s body - the Brit is Pete Cashmore of Mashable. [Read more]
Unless your site is entertainment or the wikipedia, your visitors are not dropping by to kill time. People visit websites to solve problems: they want to learn something new, check a fact, purchase a product, or accomplish some other goal. Visitors do not come to hear your point of view for its own sake (usually), enjoy the brilliance of your branding, or le […]
three suggestions that would improve the BBC experiment and increase the likelihood of coming up with something genuinely useful: 1. Share the wisdom. Don’t keep the ideas in-house, waiting for some designated day when you pick the best of the emails. Instead curate all the ideas and make them available online. Refining other people’s work - or tweaking […]
Join us in digging through the 700,000 documents of MPs' expenses to identify individual claims, or documents that you think merit further investigation. You can work through your own MP's expenses, or just hit the button below to start reviewing. (Update, Thurs evening: More added now and more coming all the time. Check back if you haven't fo […]
In a landmark decision, Mr Justice Eady refused to grant an order to protect the anonymity of a police officer who is the author of a blog called NightJack.
Imagine my surprise this evening when I happened upon the local evening paper to find there was a whole feature about Shire Oak Reservoir, complete with lead-in on the front page. The article was clearly derived from my earlier blog post, but bore no kind of reference whatsoever to the Brownhills Blog.
With newspapers’ traditional business model in free fall, the top media minds at global design firm IDEO (designer of the Apple mouse, consultant to Fortune 500 companies) were asked to imagine: How will we get our news after the traditional model falls apart? Here's their answer.
Do blogs make reporting restrictions pointless?
