2 weeks ago the Scottish Sunday Express led with this cover story (PDF) on how the survivors of the Dunblane massacre were turning 18 and – shock, horror – drinking and making rude gestures. Reporter Paula Murray, it seemed, had “managed to inveigle her way into a Facebook friendship with teenagers from the town and write a salacious piece about their “antics”, based on information culled from their profiles.” You can read it in full here (text) and also here (PDF). The original was quickly taken down.

So far, so middle market. But what happened next was an abject lesson for the Express – and Paula – in how things have changed for journalists who will do anything for a ‘story’.

Of course, “the blogosphere erupted” as some newspapers reported (as if this was some fringe). That included comedy writer Graham Linehan, who wrote a wonderful post urging readers to take action:

“Clearly aware of the legal guidelines in place to protect those under eighteen against invasion of privacy (and the specific instructions that the Press Complaints Commission issued regarding the Dunblane children), she waited until they hit eighteen. Then she wrote this.”

His suggested actions included writing to the editorial director and publisher, joining a Facebook protest group and signing an online petition.

At the time of writing his post has had 173 comments, the Facebook protest group has over 6,800 members and the petition has had over 10,000 signatories.

Meanwhile there was extensive discussion on forums, Twitter, and more blogs.

Bloggerheads – who you may remember from their campaign against Daily Mail journalist Julie Moult – highlighted at length Paula Murray’s double standards in her own use of social media, including many images culled from her Facebook profile and Twitter account:

“In her attack on Dunblane survivors, Paula Murray castigated and demonised survivors of that tragedy who “boasted about alcoholic binges”, which is EXACTLY what she’s doing here.”

It also managed to find that the quote from an MP apparently condemning the teenagers’ behaviour were taken out of context.

And it supplied a list of Express advertisers to target.

Meanwhile, The Press Complaints Commission received over 30 complaints (60 according to Press Gazette) including 2 from those mentioned in the article.

The Express’ apology, for its size, is described by The Guardian as “strongly-worded”.

Bullshit.

It’s largely self-congratulatory: “It is 81 years since the first edition of this great newspaper rolled off the presses in Glasgow,” is the first line. The last is: “The Scottish Sunday Express is a big newspaper, with a long and illustrious history. We are also big enough to say we are truly sorry.”

Big enough to say sorry, but not big enough to allow people to comment on the apology. The door is closed. Talk to the hand.

Big enough to say sorry, but not big enough to realise that the balance of power has shifted. Your readers are your distributors. Piss them off, and you have a distribution problem. 

Big enough to say sorry, but not big enough to learn from Liverpool’s boycott of The Sun, or the mistakes made in reporting the Virginia Tech tragedy.

If I was a senior staffer on the Scottish Sunday Express I’d see this as a distribution opportunity. I would open comments on the apology and respond to them myself. I might even give Paula Murray some quick training in online communication and point out that she would do well to engage herself.

I would use the apology to link to the Facebook group and online petition to show that we were aware of them. I would also visit that Facebook group and apologise there.

I would visit as many forums and blogs as I can and apologise again.

And I would follow up and address responses to my apology that raise reasonable points I can respond to.

I would not entrust this to a PR company or marketing department, or to a junior member of staff. Because this is about distribution – and you wouldn’t entrust a negotiation with TNT to a PR person would you?

Start learning. Start talking.

A few weeks ago I wrote an 800-word piece for UK Press Gazette on how journalism has changed in the past decade. My original draft was almost 1200 words – here then is the original ‘Blogger’s Cut’ for your delectation…

The past decade has seen more change in the craft of journalism than perhaps any other. Some of the changes have erupted into the mainstream; others have nibbled at the edges. Paul Bradshaw counts the ways…

From a lecture to a conversation

Perhaps the biggest and most widely publicised change in journalism has been the increasing involvement of – and expectation of involvement by – the readers/audience. Yes, readers had always written letters, and occasionally phoned in tips, but the last ten years have seen the relationship between publisher and reader turn into something else entirely.

You could say it started with the accessibility of email, coupled with the less passive nature of the internet in general, as readers, listeners and watchers became “users”. But the change really gained momentum with…

The rise of the amateur

The blogs of September 11; the camcorder images from the Asian tsunami; the mobile phone images of July 7; the Facebook pages of Virginia Tech. If you needed to read about any of these major events, you could do so – if you wished – without opening a newspaper or watching TV.

The spread of cheap camcorders and video- and photo-enabled mobile phones, coupled with blogs and the viral distribution of the internet made publishers realise they were not only competing with each other, but with the readers themselves. And when a big story broke in public, they needed to be in a position to harvest what became known as “user generated content”. Thankfully the NUJ’s suggestion of “witness contributions” didn’t catch on…

Everyone’s a paperboy/girl now

If a newspaper didn’t reach a particular newsagent, or viewers in the Cumbria region were experiencing difficulties, that simply wasn’t a journalist’s problem. Online, however, distribution has become part of a journalist’s job description, whether they realise it or not.

From your Facebook profile to the way you respond to comments on your blog, a journalist’s activity online has formed a key element in any news organisation’s distribution (although few have yet realised this). Meanwhile, newspaper webpages have come out in a rash of ‘Digg/Blog this’ buttons, and Facebook applications from the likes of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have demonstrated how important it’s become for newspapers to be where the reader is, rather than the other way around.

Just a click away

Amidst all the Web 2.0 hype it’s easy to forget the fundamental characteristic of news in the online era: everything is connected; and the reader is only a click or a search away from something else. This has created major opportunities and challenges for journalists.

On the one hand, journalists can now link to full documents, previous reports, and unedited material. On the other, so can the readers. Material culled from wire copy is more easily spotted; and, as Dan Rather discovered, holes in your story can be quickly highlighted.

And while doorstepping used to be between you and the Dear Departed’s family, its digital equivalent is so much more public. The game has been raised – but have news organisations responded?

Really Simple Syndication

RSS is one of the most underestimated innovations in journalism. At it’s most basic level it means journalists can subscribe to a range of RSS feeds in one RSS reader – and therefore not have to keep checking back to dozens of original websites for updates. But the more people play with the technology, the more is being achieved.

For one thing, RSS enables very specific consumption: readers can now subscribe to just one section of a newspaper – or even one writer. In the Sun’s case, they can subscribe to search results. In terms of production, RSS enables different bits of news to be aggregated: pick a source, any source, and mash it up into a single feed. It works for Google News, why shouldn’t it work again?

Mapping

2007 saw some real experimentation with mapping in UK newspapers: the Manchester Evening News mapped fatal shootings in Manchester, the Grantham Journal

tracked a “killer heron” and the Lancashire Evening Post mapped roadworks and speed cameras. The Shropshire Star used it to map fuel prices.

But 2008 should mark the year mapping and geotagging gets serious. Leading the pack are Archant, with their much-awaited geotag-based website relaunches. Journalists, says Web Editor James Goffin, can now draw on a map when they submit a story, or supply postcodes. He argues it will “make for a better archive and make reporters’ lives easier in handling cuttings and follow ups.” The Telegraph launched the first stage of their dynamic Flash-based political map of Britain, while the BBC are using similar technologies for their proposed local website plans, which looks likely to further increase the pressures on regional publishers.

Hyperlocal, international

The internet has released news organisations from the limitations of physical distribution and broadcast – to the extent that news organisations have seen a new market for their old print products.

The Guardian, emboldened by statistics about website visitors, took its step across the Atlantic in 2003; The Times followed in 2006, and the BBC announced plans to sell advertising on its international site last year. And figures released last month showed visitors from outside the UK outnumbering the domestic audience for the BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times and The Daily Mail.

Conversely, “hyperlocal” has entered the nomenclature of the news executive. Trinity Mirror’s Teesside Gazette’s experiments with hyperlocal, postcode-based news led to print equivalents, and likely extension to the group’s other newspapers.

Databases

The biggest untapped potential in journalism online is that of databases. So far we’ve seen some impressive demonstrations: ChicagoCrime.org famously drew information from a crime database onto a map of the area – and was followed by similar efforts at the LA Times and Washington Post (who added house sales and schools); The Herald Tribune, meanwhile, used databases in their coverage of how complaints against teachers were handled - readers could drill down to data in a specific school.

In the UK it’s The Telegraph leading the way, with football coverage that pulls up player statistics to rival ProZone, an A levels results map, and a recently unveiled political map that presents information on how local services ratings have improved or declined. Developments such as these have generated debate about whether journalists should be taught how to program. The conclusion seemed to be that it was easier to teach programmers how to do journalism.

Measurability

Most read, most commented, most emailed. Hits, pageviews and unique visitors. If you felt your editor’s news sense was as bad as his fashion sense, the measurability of the web gave you valuable ammunition; but if you thought Performance Related Pay was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Multimedia

If the pen is mightier than the sword, what does that make a microphone, camcorder and laptop… in a wifi hotspot? Newspapers dabbled in podcasts in 2005, before really mucking in 2006 when video took off and print journalists started worrying for the first time about tea staining their teeth. Now print journalists are learning about white balance, and broadcast journalists are learning about local news. And everyone is waiting for an almighty fight.

A recent discussion on the NUJ New Media mailing list prompted me to jot down some thoughts on the current private-public confusion thrown up by online communication channels. I think some education is required here on both sides.

Lesson 1: It’s public. Whatever you may think about codes of conducts, etc. etc. if you say something on a forum you should be aware that it may be quoted, that it may be indexed by search engines, databases, etc and potentially findable. You cannot rely on people’s good manners. So be careful what you say, or be prepared to stand by what you say.

Lesson 2: It’s private. Journalists got a lot of flak for wandering into blogs and forums after Virginia Tech because they saw it as being ‘in the public domain’ and therefore ethical (Tony Harcup had this view when I spoke to him at the time). But people using those platforms have a different view of what is ‘public domain’. So be courteous and sensitive.

An addendum: legal issues are still to be resolved around much of this. Employers and lecturers who look at people’s social networking profiles could be breaking the law; Facebook ads might be doing the same.

This post is part of a ‘blog carnival’. Read more at CarnivalOfJournalism.com.