The Media Blog

Science journalism boost

2010-01-20T11:51:00.004Z

Science journalism and science journalism training has got a lot of attention recently with a government-sponsored report proposing a raft of measures. By science the Science and the Media Expert group means the physical sciences as well as engineering and technology.

The vast majority of the general public get its news about science from the mass media. The objective of the recommendations of the Group is to improve the understanding of science among journalists, on the one hand, and the understanding of the media by scientists.

National Coordinator for Science Journalism Training
Some heavyweights are involved. The BBC, Reuters and the British Science Association among others. The Group calls for the creation of a National Coordinator for Science Journalism Training to be run by the Royal Statistical Society. And there is a push to train science press officers as well as journalists.
Many of the recommendations are of the type that I would say “about time too”.

These include:
• Media courses for scientists. I’ve been involved in this with, among others, some serious brains at Hewlett-Packard’s Bristol Lab. The scientists get it and even enjoy it, when some of them can get over their prejudice about the media.
• Lobby broadcasters for more and better science programming.
• Start an annual summer school for science investigative reporting. Investigative reporting is an excellent way to create exclusives and make the agenda.
• Secure more access for journalists to peer-reviewed journals where they report their “findings”.

Too narrow?
As so many journalists come from an arts background this is all to be welcomed. There is a danger that, if seriously undertaken at undergraduate level, the journalists of tomorrow will be in a niche. The more vocationally oriented undergraduate journalism courses become, the less chance that graduate may have of getting a job. There are only so many science journalism jobs. And the more Universities will become vocational trainers rather than education and research institutes.

At the University of East London, where I also teach, the new Sports Journalism BA is up and running.

The old way of becoming a journalist from Oxbridge was to do the PPE and therefore have a wide understanding of politics, philosophy and economics. Then onto the Times to write leaders! Broad training or subject-oriented? You can vote on this issue at the bottom right side panel Polls on the contentetc home page.

Blatant plug
One of the best ways of achieving the aims of the Group would be to increase the number of MA courses with a specialist twist in journalism. I help run a Magazines MA at UEL. This MA attracts people who have often been in journalism for some years and want a broader perspective. They want to answer the question “What’s it all about, Alfie?”

People like Steve Connor, science editor of The Independent and with whom I have the privilege to work in the past, would not benefit from this. They know the broader scene already. But there are hundreds if not thousands of others who could.
E-learning

This type of education need not be full time nor done in the traditional way. It could be online e-learning. The BBC College of Journalism will develop its online science training content for all BBC journalists. It has launched its online training to the public for free. So far it is focused on new media issues and is not of particularly rich content.

Another blatant plug
And there is always the growing range of interactive Contentetc e-learning courses.

2009-12-17T18:41:00.003Z

By Andrew Calcutt
University of East London
Editor of Rising East and Proof Reading

Recession and Romance go together like Horse and Carriage, right? In terms of commercial entertainment, the Great Depression of the 1930s amounted to Picture Palaces inhabited by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. In the 1980s there was the fantasy couple of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. All right, they really were the leaders of their respective nations, but you get my drift: typically, recession prompts fantasies of love and marriage.

Flip this equation round the other way, and you might expect avowedly unromantic magazines to find themselves unhitched (divorced, even) from the market during times of recession. Like the times we are now living through. However, according to a newly published audit by Paul Darigan, my student and colleague at the University of East London, real life (non-romantic) magazines for women such as Love It!, That’s Life! and Pick Me Up, are holding up well. Meanwhile other more glamorous titles are going to the wall, and whole sectors feel like they are up against it.

Unreality
How come many of today’s women readers are sticking to reality rather than indulging in the sort of fantasy which their grandmothers relied on to exorcise the spectre of recession? It can’t be because the readers of today’s real life titles are relatively unaffected by the current economic downturn. They are drawn from the lower socio-economic groups which are taken to be bearing the brunt of it. Could it be that their whole experience (up to and including the recent experience of recession), has taken on an air of unreality? If so, perhaps Pick Me Up, That’s Life! and similar titles are offering their readers a reality check that is well worth the cover price of 68p.

(Such a lovely figure! Just counting out the exact money provides a gratifying reminder of what a sensible shopper you are.)

I’m suggesting that real life magazine consumers are purchasing the equivalent of that moment in Enid Blyton stories when the heroine pinches herself to make sure she is not dreaming.

An extra dose
Aren’t their lives real enough? It’s not as if these readers are living in a bubble, like the boys in the City with their botox babes and silicon bonuses. Perhaps they already are down and dirty in the nitty gritty, yet 323,171 people are prepared to pay the publishers (IPC Media) of Pick Me Up for an extra dose of it. Do they take prurient, almost ghoulish pleasure from reading a series of ghastly melodramas which have occurred, thankfully, to someone else? Possibly, but Darigan’s dissection of this title suggests that readers come to it more in search of affinity than smug complacency.

Mirrors
The fact is we all need our reality to be valued by others. We need it to be interpreted, evaluated and thus validated by them, otherwise we can’t be sure it’s really there. Besides mirrors, modern human beings require a whole range of reflective surfaces. Also, when old ones get smashed or covered over, there is a market for new kinds of looking glass, and money to be made from polishing them up.

In years gone by, the mothers and grandmothers of Pick Me Up readers would have seen themselves reflected in the fabric of working class communities, from the pub to the launderette to the Labour Party. Now Labour (ha!) is the sole property of middle class apparatchiks (seemingly to the deliberate exclusion of the white working class). Meanwhile far fewer pubs remain open and few people remain in the ones that are. For all its labour-saving benefits, consumer technology has also strengthened the trends towards domestic isolation. A wall of silence has arisen between individuated working class women and their equally atomised contemporaries. In this context, magazines like Pick Me Up do something to wire them back together again.

Strong wiring?
It’s debatable how strong the wiring really is. Maybe it lasts for only as long as it takes to read the magazine. In which case it is a gross exaggeration to refer to this kind of association as ‘community’, as various publishers are now inclined to do. But this is of no concern to the regular readers of real life magazines. For 68p, I doubt they expect a lifelong sense of belonging. At this price, it’s enough to be offered a fleeting sense of connection. Especially since so many other erstwhile sources are now unable to supply it, even fleetingly.

Of course, the ‘reality’ of reality magazines is about as genuine as a wedding reception. Readers’ life stories are subbed into shape like a pregnant bride squeezed into her wedding dress. In constructing the magazine to match readers’ requirements, there is a high degree of artificiality, a large amount of personal manipulation, and a ring of truth that is often as unpalatable as the ‘transgressions’ revealed in a best man’s speech.

Face value?
It would be easy to assume that readers from lower socio-economic groups don’t appreciate the tension between reality and artificiality in their favourite titles. Do they take at face value the lurid copy, unduly garish stories, and the cheap and somehow cheerless colour schemes? Again, I doubt it. Like the art crowd that went for ‘hyper-reality’ in the 1980s; and the trendy young people who adopted ‘the grunge aesthetic’ in the early 1990s, I reckon they are having a play at being real (they just took their time getting round to it).

Regardless of how much irony their working class readers are picking up (if so, it is another bad habit acquired from the middle classes), the continued commercial success of these titles suggests that they have identified a viable market where social solidarity used to be.

2009-12-17T12:12:00.004Z

Exclusive, original and quality content to the rescue

2009-11-19T11:13:00.006Z

By Richard Sharpe

I’m optimistic about the future of journalism.

Why, you ask, when there’s so much to be pessimistic about:

• Publishers are in a perfect storm of recession and a challenge of digital media;
• Contract/customer publishing is challenging the independence of journalism as magazines especially become an arm of branding;
• User generated content is challenging the privileged position journalists used to hold; and
• Journalists are losing their jobs at a seemingly ever increasing rate as publications fold.

Still I’m optimistic. And the clue is in the word “content”. Many journalists hate the word. “We’re not content generators,” they say, “we’re journalists.” But content is the key to a revival of the role of journalists.

Content starts the circle
Because it’s content that starts the circle of content begetting community begetting cash which is the mantra of online publishing. No quality content and no community. No community and no cash.

Publishers exploiting the online media have more often than not gone for volume. They have struggled to integrate the management of digital technologies into their organisations, often creating confusion and complex organisations. They have wanted high numbers of visitors to sell those eyeballs on.

More of the same
This has led to not a greater variety of content online but just a lot more of the same. That is the conclusion of a long research project at Goldsmiths College the results of which are now out in the book ‘Comment is free, facts are sacred: Journalistic ethics in a changing mediascape’. It is edited by Graham Miekle and Guy Redden and published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Good journalism can, however, triumph. We have a shining example in the Daily Telegraph’s MPs expenses expose. They paid for the source material: but it is not cheque-book journalism. They had to research the stories, pace the coverage and keep the campaign going in a masterly fashion to have such an impact.

ContentETC
Content can be king. That is why ETC’s new e-learning website is called ContentETC.

But it can’t be any old content nor the content everybody else has.
Three words describe the content which can revive the spirits of journalists: exclusive, original and quality.

• Exclusive: breaking stories nobody else has, as the Telegraph shows, wins readers and attention. Topping and tailing press releases just makes journalists another step in marketing campaigns.

• Original: write in an original way using more advanced writing techniques and readers will be more willing to read the whole story and be entertained at the same time.

• Quality: this means fit for purpose. Putting yourself in the shoes of the reader and telling them the impact this event has on them is another key. Just watch how the Daily Mail does it and you’ll get the point.

Start an investigative campaign
I recently consulted for a leading specialist weekly using this mantra. Their news was mostly long, flat and mostly focused on the process. “XWZ has announced...” We brainstormed methods of generating more news without adding to their burdens. They seemed convinced that the ideas generated would save them time. Then I suggested using that time to launch a series of investigative campaigns. These would generate their exclusive news. They left the session with their tails high.

Focusing on exclusive, original and quality content can re-energize journalists, transform publications and attract readers. Try it and see if I’m not right.

Victory for Singh and one in the eye for Eady

2009-10-16T08:34:00.001Z

Mr Justice Eady has got it wrong again in a libel action, says the Court of Appeal. His ruling that Simon Singh’s article in the guardian meant that the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) knowingly promoted bogus treatments has been overturned.

Singh has written extensively about the bogus claims of some chiros that their treatments can cure a range of children’s ailments. He wrote that the BCA was willingly promoting these bogus claims. The BCA is suing for libel. Eady ruled that the words meant that the BCA knew they were bogus and Singh would have to prove it.

This week the Appeal Court said Eady was wrong.

Where’s the jury?
What, anyway, was he doing sitting without a jury and deciding a matter of fact rather than law? The role of the jury is being eroded too much in libel.

This slap down follows a string of reversed decisions he made in the Desmond v Bower case.

The Court of Appeal is becoming an unlikely champion of free speech.

But just having to appeal ups the ante for the defence because of the costs.

BBC libel fees almost £1 m since start of 2008

2009-10-12T14:10:00.002Z

News that the BBC has paid out almost £1 million in costs and damages for libel from current affairs programmes in 2 years has shocked the Sunday Express. Not me.

The BBC received 71 complaints about libel since January 2008 and spent £121,000 on lawyers to defend itself, says the Sunday Express.

Consider just one fact about the output of the BBC: over 78,000 radio hours in its past financial year over 10 radio networks. And it has 8 tv networks also pumping out hours of viewing.

Current affairs is a central part of the BBC. The BBC spends £4.5 billion on operating expenditure, putting out those radio and TV hours, putting up the websites and all the support needed to do that.

For which it has to pay out, under our libel laws, just £1 million in nearly 2 years. Well worth it for a public broadcaster.

Unless you think a public broadcaster should not libel anybody. That’s not at all possible for a current affairs remit.

And unless you think a public broadcaster should not compete with the private sector. That, I suspect, is the root of this Sunday Express story.

But well done to the Sunday Express for using the Freedom of Information Act to get this information. All public bodies should be open to public scrutiny using this legislation.

Pity that private operations which as Richard Desmond’s empire are not so open.

US libel turns nasty

2009-09-04T10:49:00.005Z

You may have heard a lot recently about how lenient the US libel laws are.

Think again.

A US doctor has been awarded $10 million in damages because a Florida paper said he had left his post at a Florida hospital under investigation for illicit activity.
He sued.

The judge said he was a public official so his side had to prove the paper acted with “actual malice”.

The author of the piece is dead now. The judge excluded his notes from the trial.
The doctor won $5 million damages and another $5 million punitive damages for the malice angle.

Ruling the author’s notes out of the evidence seems a bit strong. Is Mr Justice Eady on holiday in Florida and doing a bit of freelance?

Libel morals

2009-06-05T10:06:00.001Z

Here’s a libel roundup of recent cases.

• The BBC is paying the Muslim Council of Britain’s head for comments made by Charles Moore on BBC1’s Question Time.

• Michael Owen gets damages and costs from The Daily Express for saying is career as a footballer is over.

• The British Chiropractice Association got £100,000 from Dr Simon Singh for saying it “happily promoted” “bogus” claims by chiropractitioners. He is appealing.

• Michael Parkinson is threatening to sue a local paper for comments made about his dead dad by a cousin.

The morals of these sad tales are:

• Don’t mess with touchy organisations; and

• Don’t mess with fading football stars.

What a pity that these sensitive people can’t use the media to defend themselves. Or, in the case of Owen, the football field.

Moore’s case is the most worrying. The BBC did not consult Moore about making the payments to the head of the Council, as he explains in The Spectator. He could sue the BBC for libel as it is, by implications, saying that he got it wrong.

He already refuses to pay his TV licence fee as long as Jonathan Ross is employed by the Beeb.

Odds shortening for Mosley against News of the World

2009-05-08T13:56:00.004Z

The News of the World has revealed that it deliberately did not contact Max Mosley before running its story about his S&M session. It even held the story over for the second edition so that its Sunday rivals would not get a sniff of it too early.

The reason why it did not contact him? The NoW thought Max would go for an injunction and the story was too important to “be injuncted”, as the NoW editor said.

Sinking defence
That may well sink the NoW defence in the case of libel which Mosley is bringing. Part of the Reynolds defence is that the publication should contact the subject and include the gist of the subject’s story in their story. And it surely has to be a Reynolds defence because:

• it was not justified (not a Nazi S&M session);

• not fair comment (it was an allegation);

• not a review (what a fine cut of cloth in his German uniform); and

• the NoW clearly did not have consent.

Reynolds again
Just to remind you of the tests for a Reynolds defence and how the NoW case might stack up against it:

• The seriousness of the allegations: serious charges which are untrue cause more harm; the Court has already in the privacy issue ruled that it is a serious allegation.

• Is it of public interest: No, said the High Court, it was private.

• Are the sources good ones? They took part in the S&M session.

• Has the publication tried reasonably to verify the information: Perhaps.

• Is the information of sufficient status? No, it’s private.

• Is there an urgency to publish? No.

• Did the publication get a comment from the subject. No, it deliberately did not.

• Did the article include the gist of the subject’s story? No.

• Is the tone quizzical rather than accusatory. Are you joking? It’s the NoW.

• There may be circumstances about the publication such as the timing. Err.

Not all of these tests have to be met: but only 3 out of 7 is not really enough.

Max could have told the NoW it was not a Nazi S&M fest at all, just a regular S&M fest. The NoW could then have run the story with his denial, as long as he did not go for an injunction.

Will the NoW fight the libel action? It is facing £900,000 legal fees for fighting the privacy case as well as the £60,000 in damages Max won.

And the judge who heard the privacy action, Mr Justice Eady, is the same one who hears libel cases.

The odds against the NoW are lengthening.

Libel Tourism

2009-05-06T11:07:00.001Z

The Home secretary Jacqui Smith is threatened with a libel action by US “shock jock” Michael Weiner, also known as Michael Savage in his radio show.

And known by whom in England and Wales? Who had heard of him before this? So what reputation did he have? None. So there’s no reputation to damage.

He wants £200,000 personally from the Home Secretary for the libel he says is caused by bracketing him with other unsavoury characters.

Ironic, in the English sense, given that the US Congress and many US states are trying to pass laws which would stop the libel actions on English courts affecting authors in the US.

What’s libel tourism for one is libel tourism for all.

Pirate Bay still a battle scene

2009-04-17T14:58:00.002Z

Pirate Bay’s four founders will not go down without fighting despite the decision against them today in Sweden. They have shifted the servers of their Bit-torrent-based service to other countries outside Sweden where today they were fined £2.5 million for copyright infringement and face a jail sentence of a year.

Their forthright attack on copyright has been the target of the music industry since it was set up in 2004. And what a provocative name they gave their service.

Pirate Bay topped 25 million users, a large chunk of them in China.

The outcome from the decision of the Swedish courts is:

• You can run but you cannot hide – the owners of content continue their struggle to defend what they have invested in having created;

• You can hide but you cannot run – the founders of Pirate Bay will remain free as they appeal but they remain under Swedish law despite the fact that they have migrated the servers for the service;

• MTV will be heartened by the decision in its titanic battle with You Tube/Google;

• The dog that did not bark: The Swedish Court’s decision is further evidence that the WIPO attempts to unify IP across the globe is successful, whatever the development of technology.

There will be no end to this struggle between content owners and content users set off by the first copyright act as long ago as 1709.

Separate publication online uphead

2009-03-13T15:05:00.002Z

A European court ruling has underlined that there is a separate publication in online archives.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has in its formal statement ruled that the UK libel law, which says an Internet archive of a paper publication is a separate publication, is OK. Publishers, editors, writers and sources can therefore be sued twice: once for on paper and once for the online archive of the paper.

This has been the position of UK courts for a long time. It all goes back to an 1840s case: the Duke of Brunswick. Now it involves The Times and a Russian. The Russian objected to an article in the paper headed “Second Russian Link to Money Laundering”. The Russian sued. Then sued again for the article appearing in the online archive.

This is a restriction on the freedom of speech to have an online article, argued The Times. Such archives are mighty useful, says the ECHR. But they are a separate publication.

The Times pointed to the US law which chucked out the Duke of Brunswick ruling as long ago as the 1940s. In US law there is only one publication, not two separate ones.

The Telegraph has been hit by this double dipping in the past. So be warned: take it out of the archive when there’s a problem.

Pity the ECHR didn’t take the opportunity to really examine English and Welsh libel law. It could have done us all a service. But then the anti-European papers would be screaming about European interference: quite an irony.

Double publication online and on paper unheld

2009-03-11T14:51:00.002Z

A European court ruling has underlined that there is a separate publication in online archives.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled in a new judgement that the UK libel law, which says an Internet archive of a paper publication is a separate publication, is OK. Publishers, editors, writers and sources can therefore be sued twice: once for on paper and once for the online archive of the paper.

This has been the position of UK courts for a long time. It all goes back to an 1840s case: the Duke of Brunswick. Now it involves The Times and a Russian. The Russian objected to an article in the paper headed “Second Russian Link to Money Laundering”. The Russian sued. Then sued again for the article appearing in the online archive.

This is a restriction on the freedom of speech to have an online article, argued The Times. Such archives are mighty useful, says the ECHR. But they are a separate publication.

The Times pointed to the US law which chucked out the Duke of Brunswick ruling as long ago as the 1940s. In US law there is only one publication, not two separate ones.

The Telegraph has been hit by this double dipping in the past. So be warned: take it out of the archive when there’s a problem.

Pity the ECHR didn’t take the opportunity to really examine English and Welsh libel law. It could have done us all a service. But then the anti-European papers would be screaming about European interference: quite an irony.

Copyright going strong since 1709

2009-03-03T11:35:00.002Z

It’s remarkable that the fundamentals of a law passed in 1709 is still fit for the 21st century. I’m talking about copyright.

The PPA has got its act together to respond to the Government’s Copyright the Future document.
Copyright fit for purpose
Basically it says that IP, particularly copyright, is “fundamentally fit for purpose in the digital age”. Any large reforms would cause uncertainty.

The first copyright act I can trace was passed in England in 1709. It was part of then opening up of society after the 1688 Glorious Revolution. I bang on about that on my media law courses. They didn’t think they were going to get a dose of English history, but they do.

We have to see copyright historically. The Act was passed in 1709 to protect the property of printers/publishers. And it is still about property, whatever the media. That’s why the PPA says it is still fit for purpose.

Book plug
You can see more on this in the chapter “Inequalities in the Globalised Knowledge-based Economy” which I wrote in the book “The Myths of Technology”. Published by Peter Lang.

The PPA is right in saying that copyright needs to be clarified rather than torn up. Where is the real boundary to be set? The boundary between “the public” which needs protection and “the public” which wants to use material.

WIPO sets copyright framework
The UK could not contemplate wholesale changes in copyright because we are a member of the World Intellectual Property Organisation. And WIPO has set out the copyright framework which is being implemented worldwide.

Attack on Pirate Bay next step in copyright wars

2009-02-19T14:24:00.002Z

Media owners are taking a step further in their attack on alleged copyright infringers. They are going after the popular Swedish site web site.

Pirate Bay holds no files of its own. It’s called a tracker: a site where users can search for the locations where they can get downloads of music, films etc. The choice of title mayn have angered the copyright owners even more.

This is a step well beyond the Viacom v YouTube action still groaning on in the USA. No trial date has yet been set for this one. They are still going through the lengthy “discovery” period.

Is tracking infringing copyright?

Pirate Bay only has an index of where the files of films etc can be downloaded from. Is the keeping of an index of material which may infringe copyright also an infringement? That’s the question to be decided by Swedish courts now that four men behind Pirate Bay have been dragged into court.

Implications for media owners:
• If the case against Pirate Bay is won, there will be greater incentives to go after trackers;
• Find out who is tracking your material.

The implications for the trackers such as Pirate Bay:
• Move your servers around as fast and as anonymously as you can, as Pirate Bay has already done.

The implications for the rest of us:
• The struggle between the owners of copyright and the users will continue, ever fuelled by the changes in technology.

Jack opens the privacy Pandora box

2009-01-27T15:03:00.002Z

Jack Straw, the justice minister, has opened up a review of privacy. He wants to “nudge” judges presumably towards restricting the defence of privacy.

As for “judges” read Mr Justice Eady. He heard the Mosley case which prompted this review.

As for the reason for opening up the review, read Paul Dacre, editor in chief of the Daily Mail.

There are so many currents flowing around this issue that it will be confused. Dacre dislikes the European project and most of what it stands for. The Human Rights Act (HRA) is part of that European project – bringing it into UK law was one of the first things the first Blair government did.

But Dacre is also a newspaper editor who wants to defend the press.

Here I leap to the defence of Justice Eady. He is interpreting the law passed by Parliament. It was clear when the HRA was passed that UK privacy would go more in the direction of continental European privacy. That’s explicitly what Parliament told Eady and his fellow judges to do.

Should we be able to know what Mosley does in his spare time? Yes, if it is as described by the original reporting in the News of the World. No, if it was a bit of innocent S&M. (Innocent S&M? Is that an oxymoron?)

Confused? You will be. There are too many side issues on this topic for it to be debated/reviewed without confusion.

Here are some principles by which this review should be conducted:

• Single cases make bad law: don’t change the law because of single prominent cases.
• Distinguish between public and private people: if you head an organisation which seeks privacy you can’t throw the full blanket of privacy over your life.
• Always have juries: involve the public in judicial decision making in all such cases because juries are often, not always, more clued up than judges or editors in chief.
• Look at the motives of all contributors to the review – and think the worst.

Don’t expect this battle to end – it will be a continuous fight. Free speech is never an absolute. Yet the powerful would like the public to know as little as possible about their affairs.

Top 10 tips for media law online

2008-10-28T10:08:00.000Z

Here’s 10 top tips for online media law.

1 Don’t rely on the news statements of other writers. GO TO THE ORIGINAL source/press release etc when you can. It’s often only a click away. And you may get a better story. You certainly could get a different story.

2 Don’t forget that HYPERLINKS AND PIX CAN CHANGE THE MEANING of a story. A general rant about a sector with a link to a story with a mention of a specific company can be dangerous. And a pic can give a particular meaning.

3 Don’t forget that because you CAN you may NOT HAVE PERMISSION to copy. It’s easy to copy. And the material is still on the original web site. But it can be a copyright infringement.

4 Don’t forget indifference to the copying of your material can lead others to steal your IP. You need to DEFEND your content. Otherwise you don’t have anything original.

5 Don’t forget that the visitor to your site needs to see things in CONTEXT. If it is meant to be funny, make sure they would see it like that. If serious, then be serious. The context can change the meaning.

6 Don’t forget to MODERATE or not to moderate forums etc. There should be no in between. If you do a bit of moderation then you may be liable as the publisher of it all. And don’t forget to say clearly whether moderated or not.

7 Don’t forget that what seems OK on the Internet CAN LOOK BAD IN COURT. The High Court is accepting that some forums are like chatting in a bar. With give and take. But don’t rely on it.

8 Don’t forget the difference between AN ACCUSATION AND REASONABLE GROUNDS FOR SUSPICION. If you say he did it, you may have to prove it. If there’s reasonable grounds for suspicion, say so. And say what they are.

9 Don’t forget how much looser is US LIBEL. Things on US sites may not trigger a libel there which could trigger a libel here.

10 And don’t forget REYNOLDS – THE REASONABLE JOURNALISM DEFENCE. Use good sources. Get a comment from the subject and include it. Don’t adopt the story too much.

BBC faces justification nighmare

2008-10-09T09:24:00.001Z

The BBC faces the toughest of all libel challenges: the justification defence.

An IVF doctor is suing over a Panorama programme which claimed he was pressurising patients into paying for unnecessary treatment.

The BBC was going for both a Reynolds and a justification defence. But after months of legal work it has dropped Reynolds, the “responsible journalism” defence under qualified privilege.

One of the medical experts it quoted turned out to be an administrative assistant. That breaches one of the Nichols tests for Reynolds of having reliable sources who would really know.

Even before coming to court it is having to pay the other side’s costs in preparing for the Reynolds defence. The Times says £500,000 so far.

And it faces the daunting prospect of the justification defence. It will have to prove the allegations.

Justification is dangerous for three reasons:

• If the BBC losees the damages will be increased because it persisted with an untrue statement after it was told it is untrue;

• Judges can cut into witness lists to speed up the legal process; and

• When it comes to a journalist’s word and that of almost anybody else, juries tend to believe the claimant.

So, the BBC’s reputation is again on the line. I hope it does not get the type of mauling which Hutton gave it. Over to Mr Justice Eady again.

Chit-chat is slander

2008-09-01T09:48:00.001Z

Bulletin board comment on the Internet may covered by slander under English and Welsh law not libel. That’s a recent ruling by Mr Justice Eady in the High Court.
They “are rather like contributions to a casual conversation which people simply note before moving on,” he ruled.

Slander, apart from in four instances, demands that the claimant proves special damage. Special damage means actual loss of money or damage capable of being quantified in money terms. Unlike libel where the claimant does not have to prove damage. So slander cases are harder to prove than libel cases.

The four instances where the claimant does not have to prove special damage are:
• If the defendant said or implied that the claimant performed a criminal act for which the punishment could be imprisonment;
• If the claimant was said to have certain contagious diseases;
• If the defendant said of a woman that she was unchaste; or
• If the remarks were to disparage a person in any office, profession, calling, trade or business.

Eady did not rule out all blogging from libel. But where the comments are in a context of “a certain amount of repartee or ‘give and take’” then there is no libel but only slander, he ruled.

Facebook in the libel and privacy net

2008-07-27T09:48:00.002Z

Here’s one you might have missed while the Mosley case was going through.

A man has won damages of £22,000 and costs for a false entry in Fasebook. He won both libel and privacy damages, as did his company.
I can’t emphasise enough, the Internet is as much a publishing media as paper. Libel and privacy extends to the Internet just as to paper.

That might rub against the grain of the Internet’s founders and of the creative commons advocates.
But it is the law, like it or lump it.

iPodders versus Brussels

2008-07-22T09:29:00.001Z

The war over copyright continues to rage on, well past its 300th birthday.

The latest battle in the fight between openness and protection is prompted by the European Union. It is proposing to bring the protection of recordings “into line with” that of literary works. It wants member states to give 95 years to recordings, now only 50 years.

Literary works are 70 years from the death of the author. The first copyright act, in 1709, gave the copyholder just 14 years. Since then the length of copyright has been the cause of own warfare between owners and users.

On the other side of the battle against the EU is a battalion of heavy European academics. They have gone public today with a letter to The Times. They are very unhappy about two things:
They were not consulted; and
The move will alienate a younger generation that fails to see a principled basis to the extension.

So it’s the iPoders versus Brussels. In the spirit of the famous “Up Yours Delors” campaign of The Sun I have a proposal.

At a set time everybody goes outside, takes out their iPod, mobile phone etc and waves it in the direction of Brussels chanting “Bugger off Barroso”.

Lawyers clean up in McCann cases

2008-07-16T08:57:00.001Z

Only the libel lawyers have got any cheer out of the continuing tragedy of the McCann case.
They have been able to pick up £550,000 in damages for Robert Murat from 12 UK newspapers. And their fees. This follows a similar payout by Express Newspapers to the McCann parents for allegations that they were involved in their daughter’s disappearance.
There was a feeding frenzy in Fleet Street over the McCann case. The fierce competition between papers led reporters and editors to go well over the top.
Editors seemed to think that just because the McCanns and Murat were in Portugal they were free to speculate. They seemed to have forgotten that both Murat and the McCanns had reputations in the UK.
The feeding frenzy led them to think that acting as a herd they would be invulnerable. Now they realise they are not.
Unfortunately this incident will lead to more caution of the wrong type in the news room. Publishers may well instruct editors that caution is the watchword. The role of the press as investigators is likely to be further eroded.
The public is not best served by cautious papers which foolishly forgot their libel law.
Sue, Rabbit and Run are the winners again.
I hope they have taken the offending articles out of their online services or the libel lawyers will be after them for seconds. But to do so is an attempt to rewrite history, as if to say we never printed that story. But they did, and now they are paying.

Stony-faced Eady presides over Mosley case

2008-07-08T07:49:00.003Z

One sentence leapt out of the coverage today of the Max Mosley privacy action against the News of the World. “Mr Justice Eady sat stony-faced as he heard that the woman was known for arranging bondage sessions involving a man dressed in a judge’s gown and several girls,” wrote Dominic Kennedy in The Times.

To see what a stony-faced Mr J Eady looks like click here.

Mr J Eady presides over defamation and privacy cases in the High Court. He has taken a leading role in extending the law of privacy. He has taken the Act’s eight article “Everyone has the right for respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence” and applied it with vigour.

Previous form

Before the Mosley case Mr J Eady’s most extensive development of privacy was in McKennitt v Ash. In it he said a very high degree of misbehaviour would have to be demonstrated for a defendant in a privacy case to use a public interest defence. “The mere fact, that a celebrity falls short, from time to time, could not possible justify exposure.”

Will Mr J Eady consider Mosley’s behaviour as falling short? Or will he consider it part of normal behaviour, as the Mosley camp argues? The irony is if he considers it part of normal behaviour and is “broad minded” about it, then it does fall within privacy.

Just look at the photo of Mr J Eady again and place your bets.

There’s more to come because, as they say at the end of the reporting, “The case continues”.

Libel or price of Carter-Ruck a crime?

2008-06-26T14:44:00.002Z

I had to dip into one of the bibles of libel, Carter-Ruck on Libel and Slander, today and got quite a shock. “Libel is a crime,” he writes.

It must be one of the shortest sentences in all of the 737 pages of his book. I knew libel as a civil action: and knew of the 1840s Criminal Libel Act. But “libel is a crime” really hit me.

Indeed it is a crime. The 1843 Act has not been appealed. Lord Scarman, who was known for his liberality, said a criminal libel is “a grave, not a trivial libel”.

And there follows in Carter-Ruck’s book a chapter on blasphemous, seditious or obscene libel.

Surely time for all of these to be off the statute book.

Perhaps the most annoying aspect is that I had to pay for this book twice. I left a copy on a plane. Second hand copies are currently knocking out at £237 for the fifth edition. That price is a crime.

Protect your IP and survive

2007-12-10T16:36:00.000Z

Defending intellectual property (IP) is not given as much emphasis as using the IP of others or creating IP. It should have equal weight in the policies and practices of every journalist, editor and publisher.

We all know who defends IP: Walt Disney does and others don't mess with their content as a result. Publishers need to build a reputation as strong as Disney if they want to defend their property

There are six simple and quite inexpensive steps to take to defend IP in publishing.

First, develop a culture of defending IP within the company. Everybody has their role. Journalists looking at the competition's paper publications and Web sites play a key role. Every member of staff should be on the look out. Possible infringements should be flagged up right away.

Second, register the trade mark of the titles of magazines. It's quite cheap, only £200. And it can be done in a few months. The UK Government's Intellectual Property Office has some clear guidance on this.

Third, make clear the terms and conditions of use in paper publications and on Web sites. Write these in English, not the normal legalese which people cannot understand. Put them in the flannel panel of paper publications and in a small but visible slot on the home page. Say, clearly, what is in the public domain and what is not.

Fourth, keep an eye out for passing off. If you have established a presence in the market and others come to copy it, then you can act. VNU did over Computer Active and so did Red over Real.

Fifth, when you get the big interview, when you publish anything you think others will be particularly interested in, mark it clearly as your copyright. You don't have to under current copyright law, but it does give a clear warning to others that you consider it yours alone.

Finally, act to defend your IP. Send out clear and prompt emails and letters to anybody using you IP without permission. Send clear notices even to the small fry. If the individual user puts it in the public domain without your permission, you may get to the appoint where you cannot defend your property because it has been copied too much.

If you don't want to protect your IP, that's OK. Clearly mark material with the creative commons sign at whatever level you choose if you are happy that it is used by others.

In other words: Protect and survive.