@JTownend

“Don’t start me on the subject of misrepresented titles or names.  I suffer that to this day, but there it is.”

That was Lord Justice Leveson on 20 December 2011, as noted in this year’s Inforrm media law quiz, won by Benjamin Pell.

It’s rather a bugbear to Lord Justice Leveson, who said in his opening remarks to the Inquiry:

“Although flattered that various politicians and members of the press have elevated me to the rank of peerage, I am not Lord Leveson: my judicial rank is that of a Lord Justice of Appeal.”

Legal titles can be a complete headache to get right (and it doesn’t help when members of the judiciary are actually called ‘Judge’) but for the record and legal pedantry’s sake, it’s not Lord Leveson even if Google thinks it is.

Many publications have been getting it wrong, including the Guardian, which noted back in November 2011:

“Not for the first time, the judge who is leading an inquiry into phone hacking was referred to as Lord Leveson. As noted in this column on 29 and 30 September, Brian Leveson sits on the court of appeal and has the title lord justice, but is not a peer …”

But can Leveson really expect the papers to get it right when his own Inquiry site has mis-captioned him! (Hover over his pic here & you’ll see!)

[My weekly round up for Inforrm can be found at this link. I do hope all the legal names are all proper and correct!]

For some time, I’ve been longing to set up an event around the theme of digital open justice. So I’m very excited to announce that the Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism will be hosting ‘Justice Wide Open’ on Wednesday 29 February 2012 at City University London from 9am-2pm. It’s free to attend but registration is required.

Geoffrey Robertson QC will open the event with a talk on ‘Alphabet Soup and the judicial retreat from open justice’. Three sessions will cover the history and context of the flow of legal knowledge; legal reporting and the media; and an academic perspective on open justice.

Speakers include: Hugh Tomlinson QC, Matrix Chambers; Dr David Goldberg, information rights academic and activist; Emily Allbon, law librarian, City Law School; Heather Brooke, journalist and activist; Mike Dodd, editor of PA Media Lawyer; Adam Wagner, barrister, One Crown Office Row and editor of the UK Human Rights Blog; William Perrin, founder, Talk About Local and member of the Crime and Justice Sector Panel on Transparency; Professor Ian Cram, Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law, University of Leeds; Dr Lawrence McNamara, Reader in Law and ESRC/AHRC Research Fellow, University of Reading.

Other participants will include practitioners and academics from journalism and law and there will be plenty of time for discussion during the sessions. The final session will allow us to consider the way forward for digital open justice, with view to setting out some general recommendations to the Ministry of Justice and other relevant bodies or committees.

Lawyers will be able to claim three [SRA] CPD points (I’ll have to find some star stickers or merits for the journalists and academics). And the CLJJ will be providing plenty of tea, coffee and lunch. Places are limited so you will need to register here.

For those in another country, or unable to attend, reports from the event will be available on the CLJJ blog. A set of papers will be published following the event, which will be distributed to academics, lawyers, journalists and members of government and the judiciary.

Hope to see you on the 29th February!

Pic: Ben Zvan on Flickr.

As a former rather than incumbent editor of the Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie obviously felt he could afford to take quite a cavalier approach to his Leveson evidence (perhaps playing to what he said is his “punchy”, “sort of anti-establishment” character).

His written evidence [PDF] contained 17 exclamation marks at one point; and declared that he “didn’t take into account public interest (whatever that is)”. In his oral evidence on Monday morning [PDF], he called the former chair of the Press Complaints Commission, “Baroness somebody-or-other”.

There were many questionable statements made and among them, the claim that editors aren’t thinking about selling newspapers…

Lord Justice Leveson asked him “...if you had a photograph which you felt extremely strongly would sell newspapers, that you would publish it?“

MacKenzie replied: … “you don’t think like that when you’re an editor. You don’t say ‘would sell newspapers’. What you think is it would improve your newspaper, yes, or that the readers might like it, yes, but the selling — the idea of the day-to-day thought process of selling more newspapers does not happen in that manner.”

With a pinch of tabloid memoir salt, let’s turn to Piers Morgan, who remembered MacKenzie’s priorities rather differently in this tale, recounting an encounter with Rupert Murdoch:

[Murdoch]: “Look, it’s not my job to edit the papers, Piers, but one thing I can tell you is that stiffs don’t sell papers. They sell American magazines. The National Enquirer sold out twice with Elvis’s corpse, but not papers. Ring your mate Kelvin and ask him about Grace Kelly then call me back.”

I rang Kelvin MacKenzie and he chuckled. “Bloody Grace Kelly. Ha! Trouble is, he was right. I thought the photos of her lying in state would sell buckets of papers but the bloody sale fell off a cliff. And he’d warned me not to do it, so when he saw the figures he went mad. I’d ring him back and say you’ve had a rather dramatic rethink and decided not to splash on Ronnie Kray’s rotting body if I were you.”

Pic: Mark Hillary on Flickr.

Pop over to the Inforrm blog for my first round up of 2012.

The legal vacation is not over until Wednesday but there is still plenty to report. Over the winter break Inforrm offered you a review of 2011 and the media law quiz of the year. Entries to the latter will be accepted until 13 January.

The police has provided some of the week’s most noteworthy media law stories. Rebekah Brooks’ former PA was arrested and questioned on suspicion of attempting to pervert the course of justice, as part of the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Weeting.

Elizabeth Filkin’s new report on police relationships with journalists [PDF link] has been praised by the Guardian but labelled “patronising, bordering on offensive” by the Telegraph’s crime correspondent, Mark Hughes. The report makes seven key recommendations to the Metropolitan Police Service to improve communication, transparency and ethical practice. Her comments and suggestions on alcohol consumption and flirting grabbed headlines, but the report covers far wider ground.

• Full round up at this link

This morning, the Daily Mail was unusually willing to name check its rival titles, including the Independent, the Times, the Guardian and the Financial Times, for applauding the paper’s bold 1997 ‘Murderers’ headline (below left), which accused five men of killing Stephen Lawrence.

In a video and article for the Daily Mail, editor-in-chief Paul Dacre has described some of the legal considerations he and his in-house lawyer made before publishing that dramatic statement about Stephen Lawrence’s alleged killers in 1997.

It was about 8 o’clock. I reached for a layout pad. This was in the days before on-screen make-up and I literally wrote down with a thick pencil the words “Murderers” and underneath it the sub-deck: “The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue us“.

I showed it to the senior sub-editors. There was a kind of nervous laughter but then contempt of court is drilled into every newspaper executive’s thinking. And this was contempt of a cosmic order.

They obviously thought I was mad. Someone muttered libel and I remember snapping – “The bastards haven’t got any reputation to lose”.

It was now that Eddie Young, the Mail’s lawyer and one of the shrewdest men I’ve ever met, became involved. To his eternal credit, he was unfazed by the headline.

He reinforced my feeling that the five had very little reputation to defend as is required in a libel case. Some had records and came from notorious criminal families with long histories of appalling violence.

Yes, if it went to court, the Mail would have to establish that the men murdered Stephen Lawrence, but since it would be a civil case, we would only have to prove that it was probable that they had done so, which we were confident could be done.

I, Eddie and my deputy retired to my room to rehearse the arguments. The mood, surprisingly, was very calm. Clearly, there were many powerful reasons against the headline. But there wasn’t one over-riding reason NOT to do it.

Dacre then describes the mixed legal and media reaction:

… the proverbial hit the fan. The whole media went into meltdown. TV carried our front pages but with the suspects’ pictures pixelated.

The Telegraph declared I should be jailed and carried a cartoon of me flicking ink at the Old Bailey’s scales of justice. For days, the story dominated the TV and radio news shows and even made international headlines.

The former Master of the Rolls, Lord Donaldson, pronounced his surprise and horror at the front page and accused me of contempt of court.

But other distinguished lawyers supported us, as did Doreen Lawrence who said the front page was “wonderful”. Her local MP, Peter Bottomley, and Frances Lawrence, the widow of murdered headmaster Philip Lawrence, also weighed in on our side.

But perhaps the thing that thrilled me most was the intervention of a hero of mine, Britain’s greatest judge, Lord Denning, who congratulated the Mail on “a marvellous piece of journalism”, adding “it was a brave and courageous thing for the Mail to do”.

That week we published, for the first time, the devastating pictures and dialogue from a secretly filmed police video of the suspects which horrifically revealed their racism, violence and use of knives. These had never been published before because of legal restraints.

Three days later, the Prime Minister, John Major, backed the Mail. And on March 6th the fax machine in the room outside my office came to life with a letter from the Attorney General saying he had decided, after Lord Donaldson’s intervention, that there were no contempt of court implications for the Mail.

Fifteen years later, the Mail’s front page announcing the conviction of Gary Dobson and David Norris (above right) for Lawrence’s murder repeats the 1997 one-word headline, adding “now what about the other three…”?

In my research I keep bumping up against the confusingly thorny – if woolly – issue of the “public interest”, a concept at the heart of media debates, the Leveson Inquiry and recent privacy and libel cases. There is surprisingly little empirical research to draw upon, but I would commend this report by Morrison and Svennevig from 2002* to anyone interested in interpreting and defining the public interest: ‘The Public Interest, the Media and Privacy [PDF]‘.

Today’s encounter with the public interest came about in this Forbes post by Tim Worstall. He argues that the (wrongly) alleged deletion of the Milly Dowler voicemails by News of the World was “the crux of the allegations that led to the newspaper being closed down”.

It’s generally agreed that all of the other allegations of hacking (actually, not hacking, but the listening to of voice mail messages by using the default PIN) could have been weathered but that it was this one that drove the public mood over the edge.

How does he know? And was it “public mood” that did for NOTW?

Newspapers and their editors play a very significant role in defining the “public mood” that might justify or encourage the publication of certain information, and in turn influence commercial or political reactions.

As Daniel Bennett and I argue in a forthcoming book chapter about the newsworthiness of phone hacking, the Dowler voicemail revelations marked a tipping point in reportage of the scandal. The Times’ editor James Harding told the Society of Editors conference last November: “[Phone hacking] didn’t capture the imagination or the indignation in the way which it did after Milly Dowler.”

While we know (and are frequently reminded) that judges don’t necessarily deem what is in the public interest to be synonymous with what the public finds interesting, the concept of the “public mood” is relevant to the “public interest” defence or test.

In 2005, the (then) Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas suggested that public interest considerations in favour of disclosure might include “informing debate on key issues of the day“; “helping people understand and challenge decisions which affect them“; and “clarifying incomplete or misleading information” [See speech here].

It strikes me that these points are related to the “public mood”. While public mood is not always the same as the public interest, its influence should not be forgotten in the public interest discussion. What factors evidence it, in immediate form? As a start, we might look at:

• Editors’ interpretation and presentation
• Survey/polling results
• Public opinion expressed through radio phone-ins / online discussion / newspaper letter pages / other public forums
• Interest groups and politicians’ statements

In my view, the “public mood” plays as crucial role in media law and journalism as the “public interest” but is a complex and elastic concept subject to a multitude of influences and interpretations. Returning to Worstall’s piece, I would suggest it would be more accurate to say it was the media’s interpretation and presentation of the “public mood” that influenced the development of the scandal (especially in regards to the Guardian’s correction), rather than one “public mood”. [NB: I'm not sure how we would ever know whether it was the deletion detail that led to the tipping point, or whether the interception alone would have been as widely condemned.]

Thoughts around this welcomed, as I try and make sense of it all…

As a semi-related postscript, in my last post I flagged up things to look out for in 2012. I’d add this, which escaped my attention before Christmas: a green paper and draft bill will set out proposals for changes to parliamentary privilege. They are due to be published before the end of the Parliamentary session. Significantly (for this blog, and others interested in media law and public interest reporting) the Green Paper will discuss “whether there should be changes to the law on reporting of parliamentary proceedings in the media“.

The Government will not be proposing to constrain by legislation the ability of hon. Members to name in proceedings in Parliament individuals who are the subject of anonymity injunctions made by the courts. It will be for each House to consider whether to make changes to their internal procedures to address this issue.

Happy new year. Ideas, tips and suggestions to jt.townend@gmail.com please, or via @jtownend on Twitter.

*Hat-tip: Thanks to Martin Moore for alerting me to it at the end of last year.

I’ve rounded up the year in media over on Inforrm, month by month. Its notable features included frenzied coverage of “super injunctions”, the development of the phone hacking scandal and the launch of the Leveson Inquiry. Defamation took a back seat, as privacy law grabbed British media attention.

But what will 2012 bring? Some items to pencil in the diary:

• Lord Justice Leveson’s report – scheduled to be published in September 2012.
• Joint committee on privacy and injunctions report.
• House of Lords Communications committee report on investigative journalism.
• The progress of the draft defamation bill.
• Developments in the police investigations Weeting, Elveden and Tuleta.
• Civil actions involving phone hacking claims against News International – a trial is due to begin in February 2012.

Read my full review here. Happy new year!

Fleet Street is divided, with many bitter words being exchanged between journalists from rival titles, as the Guardian came under attack for the “unlikely” allegation that NoW had deleted messages from Milly Dowler’s phone giving her mother “false hope” that she was still alive. While the fact that NoW intercepted the voicemail messages while she was still thought missing has not been disputed, some journalists have claimed that the original story led to NoW’s closure. The Financial Times reported that the dispute “triggered the most destructive outbreak of press tribalism in living Fleet Street memory“.

Full media law round-up, with upcoming case listings, Parliamentary hearings and new public judgments at Inforrm.

• Since the time of writing the round-up, the Independent has published a piece by Stephen Glover that responds to Nick Davies’ rebuttal of an earlier column. In a letter to the Independent Davies defends the Guardian’s original editorial decision, stating: “The police have updated the record. We have updated our story. It is simply misleading to take this development and to pretend that that means our story was not true”. Now Glover responds saying “[he is] sorry Mr Davies will not admit fault” and criticises what he calls a “barrage of self-justification”. Jon Slattery has the overview here.
• Kim Jong-il has died and Fleet Street Blues looks at his unlikely past as a ” great teacher of journalists” at this link.
• Finally, something looking very much like the defunct “Solicitors from Hell” has appeared online – in another form, at a different address (via John Flood’s blog).

I’ll be putting together Inforrm’s review of the year later this week. What were your media law highlights? Tweet me @jtownend, or leave a comment below. And there’s still time to add suggestions to the media law Twitter list, too.

This post also appeared on the Media Standards Trust blog.

In March 2011, the Daily Mail and Sun were found guilty of contempt of court for publishing online photographs of a defendant posing with a gun at the start of a murder trial.

It was, the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, outlined in a speech at City University London last week, “the first time” the High Court “had been asked to consider whether an online publication was a contempt of court”.

I find it astonishing it took over 12 years after the birth of Google for such a case to be brought.

There are likely to be far more breaches, either by mainstream media publications pushing legal boundaries or by thoughtless social media users, than cases brought.

It is this latter category that interests me: how is the public educated about contempt of court? After all, as I’ve argued on this blog before, we’re all publishers now.

Jurors receive special instruction, as they did in the murder trial described above, but information outside the courtroom is disseminated rather randomly.

It relies on mainstream media reporting the details of contempt of court cases. Thanks to national media interest in this recent case, more people now know not to upload a film of yourself dancing on the chairs in the court lobby.

I raised the point about lack of legal education on Twitter, and someone immediately replied:

“The same problem applies to any area of law and the wider public (eg, copyright). Ignorance of the law cannot be used as excuse!”

It’s a fair point that anyone can google for a definition of contempt, but I suspect many breaches – not necessarily publicised through prosecution – are committed by people who don’t know that they need to look up the law before writing a contemptuous update on Facebook or Twitter.

Blog and online news comment moderators are likely to have encountered widespread ignorance of contempt.  A recent survey conducted by YouGov for Nominet attempted to quiz the public on their online legal knowledge with questions addressing injunctions and active proceedings, but I’m not convinced we can deduce too much from its findings about ‘accidental outlaws’ as I’ve explained here. Further surveying in this area would be a useful exercise.

Various breaches of contempt of court online have been highlighted by the courts: in November contempt charges against a individual tweeting during the Vincent Tabak trial were dropped, while juror Joanne Fraill became the first person to be prosecuted for contempt of court for using the internet during a trial last June.

In regards to the latter case, Grieve said:

The case highlighted important principles and again that the internet does not provide some form of immunity from prosecution.

Grieve’s speech and the responses in the Q&A afterwards repeatedly emphasised that “bloggers are not immune from the law” and are as much subject to law of land as professional media publishers.

It would be helpful, then, for the Attorney General to consider how the public might be better informed about contempt. One Guardian commenter argues underneath David Banks’ excellent article about online contempt last month that the education system could make better provisions, for example.

You can read Grieve’s full speech here. The legal blogger Carl Gardner has provided an extremely useful annotated version here, indicating the Attorney General’s deviation from script.

“I still can’t get over the feeling that Brian was a robot assembled in the basement of the New York Times to come and destroy me”

New York Times’ David Carr (@carr2n), affectionately describing his browser-flicking colleague Brian Stelter (@brianstelter), ‘Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times’.

The film (2011) neatly captures many of the dilemmas in the newspaper industry: laid-off journalists clearing their desks; editorial meetings about Wikileaks; the limitations of aggregated content sites (at an industry debate David Carr holds up a screenshot of Newser, with holes showing where all the content mainstream media content sat, much to founder Michael Wolff’s chagrin).

The new robots are slowly rising rank in the newsroom, slinging their notebooks and pens aside as they tweet and live blog as a matter of course.

But the new breed are not emotionless automatons: social interactions and the human touch are still at the heart of successful interactive journalism.

That’s what I tried to get across in my talk at Coventry University this week, which borrowed Carr’s description for the title and looked at the possibilities of digital interaction for the dissemination of information in the public interest (which might include what I’ve previously called journalism outside journalism).

New technology enables journalists, researchers and bloggers to challenge mainstream and tired ways of doing news, to make the process and product of journalism more diverse, and to hold powerful organisations accountable. And no, I don’t know how it will be funded.

Afterwards, Coventry lecturer John Mair asked me which five people I’d recommend them to follow. Of course, it completely depends on the students’ specialisms and interests, but five Twitterers I’d recommend for their innovative and exciting approach to journalism include:

• Andy Carvin (@acarvin), Senior strategist at NPR (US)
• Neal Mann (@fieldproducer) Digital News Editor at Sky News (UK)
• Joanna Geary (@guardianjoanna), Guardian’s Digital Development Editor (UK)
• Patrick Smith (@psmith), editor, the MediaBriefing (UK)
• Sarah Hartley (@foodiesarah) MD at Talk About Local; Community strategist at Guardian Media Group (UK)

Here are some of the links and projects I mentioned (in order of appearance):

• Recent research on regional journalists’ pay and redundancies by Francois Nel, University of Central Lancashire

• The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, funded by the Potter Foundation

• Jeff Jarvis on journalism’s myth of perfection and the strength of the blogging process

• Churnalism.com, a Media Standards Trust project

• mySociety’s admirable portfolio of civic projects

• Help Me Investigate network

• ScraperWiki

• ProPublica and Spot.us

• Finalists’ list for the ONA awards 2011

• openDemocracy’s Anthony Barnett on the changing process of journalism

Pic: Arthur40A on Flickr

[I don't maintain this blog very regularly; check out my other site, Meeja Law, for links, posts and resources on media, law and ethics]

Yesterday saw the announcement of Jill Abramson as the New York Times’ first female editor. You might say so what?

But more to the point, why not till now? Former Guardian.co.uk editor Emily Bell could list previous UK national newspaper editors in a tweet, also noting that there used to be a lot of female online editors in the early days.

Actually, there are two in the editor’s chair right now: Tina Weaver at the Sunday Mirror and Dawn Neesom at the Daily Star. And men head the 19 other national daily and Sunday newspaper titles.

I was always amazed when attending media conferences how many male-dominated panels there were – in the top digital, as well as print, jobs.

But let us not forget the first lady of Fleet Street (HT: Adrian Monck), Rachel Beer, who edited the Observer and the Sunday Times in the 1890s.

Anyway, if like me, you’re curious about just how many there have been, see above for a list of UK national newspaper female editors – feel free to edit and add more if I’ve missed any.

My source for the table was Wikipedia and this rather good – and later updated – article in the Guardian by Hadley Freeman.

PS. I don’t blog very regularly on this site anymore – check out Meeja Law for media law and ethics related news and commentary.

Predictably, the panel at last week’s Future of Journalism discussion at the Frontline Club didn’t reach any firm conclusion as to the industry’s path ahead. Mary Hamilton has a good commentary here and BBC College of Journalism has a write-up here. Raymond Snoddy discusses Twitter’s role in the profession here.

My own view is that there are many exciting futures ahead, with the development and increased recognition of digital tools. The economic question is more troubling of course, and while the big media companies may still have pots of money it isn’t always used to support quality journalism. Regional newspaper journalists are feeling that particularly keenly.

When addressing the question of building better quality content, it’s more interesting, I think, to categorise news and commentary by publishers’ aim and style, rather than their chosen media form. Good journalism may be found in things not called journalism. That is to say, a more positive vision for journalism may be seen through mySociety’s range of sites and a multiplicity of open data projects (eg openlyLocal), rather than (some) inward looking newspapers, frequently limited by traditional news formats (eg. finding the case study for the story, rather than the other way around). At a conference I attended later in the week, participants talked about ‘small media’ which helped avoid slipping into that boring and pointless blogger v journalist debate.

In my own field, media law research, I’ve heard people raises concerns with the state of newspaper court reporting and the demise of the legal correspondent. But at the same time, lawyers and legal commentators are reporting and discussing more information online than ever. Sure, legal blogs are funded differently from traditional media organisations, but they’re also part of the future of journalism. (I think all of this links to something a recent POLIS research report calls Networked Journalism).

Anyway, there’s a book out on the whole topic and I’ve written a chapter about Twitter. The book is called ‘Face the Future; Tools for the Modern Media Age’ edited by John Mair and Richard Lance Keeble (Abramis £17.95). This is an opening extract from my bit.

Battle of (t)wits? Using Twitter as a journalistic tool

Judith Townend

Newspapers love to talk about Twitter. A search for the word Twitter in national newspapers returns over 3,000 articles for the past year, too many for the Nexis® UK database to count – 1,696 in one month alone. Twitter has appeared in 900 national newspaper headlines in the last year, while 24 articles in the same period refer to “Twitter twits” (see, for example, the Sun 2010). “Twit” may be a milder term than the one David Cameron chose to describe users of the service (Siddique and Agencies 2009), but it is an unfair label. Generalising about Twitter users is as pointless an exercise as uniformly describing all people who pick up the telephone, or appear on television. Twitter is a communication tool; it is the way it is used that defines whether it is a productive or daft activity. This chapter attempts to show the different ways Twitter is being used by journalists, both effectively and ineffectively, and argues that while Twitter does host a lot of trivial activity by “twits”, it also gives opportunity to create good journalism and enables better communication with the world outside the newsroom.

Part of the process

As Jeff Jarvis has outlined, journalism’s product is not perfect, despite the popular myth, and blogging facilitates “beta journalism” in which writers admit what they don’t know, as well as what they do, and invite collaborations that will help improve their work (Jarvis 2009a). “Online, the story, the reporting, the knowledge are never done and never perfect,” he writes. In his view, that does not mean that bloggers “revel in imperfection” or have no standards:

It just means that we do journalism differently, because we can. We have our standards, too, and they include collaboration, transparency, letting readers into the process, and trying to say what we don’t know when we publish – as caveats – rather than afterward – as corrections (ibid).

Twitter is an ideal tool to use in this “beta journalism” process: it can be used to let readers and followers know what you are looking for, to receive tip-offs and ideas and to publicise your work once it is finished. Some journalists have also experimented with conducting interviews by Twitter (Townend 2009a) although this method has its limitations. Not only is it difficult to express an idea in 140 characters, it can be difficult to co-ordinate the timing of answers and questions and involve onlooker contributions. Newspaper columnists have frequently mocked the limits and triviality of Twitter updates – sometimes before reversing their opinion of the service (cf. Knight 2008 and Johncock 2010). However, the word limit is longer than many news headlines and subheadlines and photo captions. Furthermore, the information contained within one tweet can be far more extensive because hyperlinks to additional content can be included in the message.

An extract from Face the Future; Tools for the Modern Media Age’ edited by John Mair and Richard Lance Keeble (Abramis £17.95).

I’m at SOAS, London at the Small Media Symposium 2011. You can find the programme and more information here. Academics and media practitioners are presenting papers about “small media”, also known as – as the event’s site says – “alternative media”, “participatory media”, and “social movement media”. This Cover It Live should pick up some of the tweets…

Live blog at this link…

Since I covered this issue on my blog at the weekend and I’ve noticed debate springing up elsewhere (Press Gazette / FSB: 1 & 2) I thought I’d post the work placement guidelines that have  just arrived in my inbox from the NUJ. Here’s one part that jumped out:

Placements can be unpaid provided the individual is not a ‘worker,’ as defined by the National Minimum Wage legislation as outlined below. However, work experience placements should be time limited and should not exceed 160 hours, carried out either full-time over a four week period or part-time over a three month period. If the terms of the placement are such that the individual is performing as a ‘worker’, and the placement is not being carried out as part of a further or higher education course, then the National Minimum Wage should be adopted throughout the duration of the placement. In both cases, reasonable and pre-agreed expenses should be reimbursed.

I’ve half followed the debate about unpaid internships and Girish Gupta’s fight against the Indy.

Initially, I couldn’t see how such cases would be successful, given that there’s no contract for payment, and the internships are advertised or offered as such. But the NUJ is bullish. Claim back your cash, it advises me in the latest issue of the mag:

Have you worked as an unpaid intern within the past six years? You could be entitled to claim back the National Minimum Wage, regardless of the terms of your internship agreement.

The National Union of Journalists wants to hear from any former journalism intern who would like legal support from the union to claim unpaid wages.  It could be possible to recover up to £232 per 40-hour week of the internship.

Wow. A quick sum. Before getting paid part and full time jobs in journalism, I did about six or seven weeks on regional newspapers; four weeks at a national; six weeks at a newspaper overseas (air fare and accommodation were paid); and two or three weeks at a broadcaster. 18-20 weeks in all*.

I wouldn’t mind getting £4,176 back now! I probably would have felt more exploited if I’d done longer stretches in one place. While I filed lots of copy in those places, I also benefited from many journalists’ time and help while I was learning/training.

Obviously, I was lucky to be able to do those stints (numerous kind friends/family putting me up in various cities) but I don’t regret the experiences and have been very grateful for the support of some of the journalists/friends I met along the way.

While I can see it’s tempting for ex-interns to go for the Murdochs of this world, these payouts could be devastating for small media companies. So I’m sitting on the fence on this one. The unpaid culture needs to change, but I’m not convinced this is the best way to do it.

It did cheer me slightly (at the same time as boiling my blood) that Tories had paid thousands of pounds for their children to do unpaid internships, as a party fundraiser… Or how about £8,000 to work for free at City AM for a fortnight?**

No thanks!

*{update} looks like any work experience conducted as part of a journalism course would be excluded. Not sure how much of mine falls into that category. Some of the time on the newspapers was obligatory as part of the course, although we arranged it ourselves, and we were also expected to have completed a certain amount of experience before starting the course.

**That last one was for charity Help for Heroes.

This post marks (belatedly) the tenth year anniversary since the Titanic Express Massacre in Burundi.

Ten years have passed since the ill-fated Titanic Express bus was attacked as it travelled from Kigali in Rwanda to Burundi’s capital city, Bujumbura. Twenty-one people were killed including 27 year old British aid worker Charlotte Wilson and her fiance, Richard Ndereyimana, a Burundian teacher.

Amnesty International describes what happened on 28th December 2000:

The attack took place in Bujumbura Rural, a former stronghold of the then armed opposition group, the Palipehutu-National Liberation Forces (Palipehutu-FNL). Those onboard were separated according to their ethnicity. Hutu were released, while Tutsi passengers and one British woman were killed. The Burundian authorities, diplomatic sources and some international organisations have attributed responsibility to the then Palipehutu- FNL. The FNL denies involvement. Ten years later, those responsible have not been investigated and brought to justice.

This devastating event was only one in a series of mass killings during the Burundian civil war, says the human rights organisation. Along with his family, Charlotte Wilson’s brother, Richard, a blogger, author and human rights activist, continues to campaign for justice. On the 10th anniversary of the killings he said:

“Despite repeated promises from Burundi’s government, no serious effort has been made to deliver justice for the 21 victims of the Titanic Express massacre. Tragically, those responsible for Charlotte’s murder have killed many more innocent people over the last ten years, while countless others have died in reprisal attacks, highlighting the deadly consequences of Burundi’s culture of impunity. The Burundians we know tell us that justice can help end the cycle of violence.

“In solidarity with all those who have lost loved ones in this brutal conflict, my family calls on President Nkurunziza to honour the memory of the victims, and move swiftly to establish the Special Chamber and TRC [Truth and Reconciliation Council].”

Amnesty International UK supports this call for the Burundian government to establish the Special Tribunal, and stipulates that such a body should be “mandated to independently investigate and prosecute serious human rights violations without prior referral from the TRC”.

Richard Wilson is also campaigning for the release of journalist Jean-Claude Kavumbagu. He writes on his blog:

Tragically, while the war criminals remain free, one of the Burundian journalists who has done most to highlight the Titanic Express massacre, Jean-Claude Kavumbagu, has been languishing in prison since July. He is facing a criminal trial for “defamation” and “treason” after making critical comments about Burundi’s army.

The Amnesty appeal for Kavumbagu’s release can be found here.

To mark the anniversary of the massacre Richard Wilson conducted a 24 hour ‘Twitterthon’, using Twitter to post messages about Burundi and its recent history every 15 minutes from 1.30pm on the 28th (the time that the attack began) to 1.30pm on December 29th 2010. His Twitter feed can be found here, @dontgetfooled. His aim was to detail human rights reports, expose the ongoing activity of the FNL and call for press freedom in Burundi.

I’m at Coventry University for its annual journalism conference. You can follow on Twitter via the tag #facethefuture, or watch the video afterwards on the BBC College of Journalism (will be up tomorrow). There will also be reports on http://cutoday.wordpress.com/.

I’m going to be speaking about Twitter and its value to journalism, although it seems Alan Rusbridger beat me to it last week…

Liveblog at this link.

Today journalist and author Clare Sambrook won the Bevins Prize for Investigative Journalism 2010 and was presented with the Rat Up a Drainpipe trophy, for her reports on the website openDemocracy and its UK section, OurKingdom.

Last week she won the 2010 Paul Foot Award for campaigning journalism and its £5,000 prize. This is the first time a web journalist has won either award.

Anthony Barnett has written about her journalistic approach on openDemocracy, copied below, under the terms of the Creative Commons licence.

By Anthony Barnett, founder of openDemocracy and the co-editor of its UK section, Our Kingdom. 9 November 2010:

Clare Sambrook has just won the Bevins Prize for Investigative Journalism, as well as scooping up the Paul Foot Award last week, both of them for her stories exposing the scandal of child detention in Britain. It is a terrific recognition of her and her team of unpaid fellow campaigners at End Child Detention Now. openDemocracy is proud of being her main publisher, in our UK section OurKingdom. Her reports are listed here.

It is the first time that either award has gone to journalism primarily published on the web. The changing balance between the new and mainstream media, much chattered about, is now becoming real. In the process the nature of journalism is being changed. For the better.

We have heard a lot of complaints about the downside, the supposed lowering of standards as superficial, vitriolic comments fill the blogosphere. But even if the internet does give voice to the “swinish multitude” it is opening up the public realm to well-researched demands for honesty and integrity.

Clare’s kind of active reporting is changing journalism in two respects. Hitherto a shibboleth of the journalist profession has been the separation of fact and comment. Clare does not do this. In her words, what she does is “investigative comment”. She says, “If we respect the reader, then all journalism ought to be investigative — probing, curious, digging —except where it is plainly reporting what happened, such as a match report or a court report.”

She also queries the point of pure comment, “Unless the analysis is brilliant and revelatory, why should readers bother to read someone who hasn’t troubled to find anything out, something that’s only opinion?” She adds “when the government explicitly works to take control of the narrative, it’s bonkers to demand that investigative work should be ‘fair and balanced’.”

This is a crucial point. We live in a world where, as Mike Edwards reports, vested interests seek to “dominate the entire intellectual environment”. In the face of this, neutrality becomes a way of playing their game or at least accepting such domination.

Independent journalism challenges official control of the narrative. Investigative comment does not hide the advocacy motivating its research. On the contrary, its own arguments are tested by the facts it reports. I would argue that this makes it more transparent – OK, I mean more honest – both as to its use of facts and the way it presents arguments, than most official journalism.

This also distinguishes it from the special pleading of many campaigns and NGOs.

But ‘investigative comment’ is not new or a just web phenomenon. It dates back at least to William Cobbett. Today, in the Observer, Henry Porter has demonstrated the effectiveness of investigative comment. When Heather Brooke asked about MPs’ expenses and wanted the actual receipts under the new Freedom of Information Act, she was simply doing research for a book on the right to know. But, as she says, “if you are at all interested in power, access to information is the key” (Silent State, p226).

Her advocacy and comment about freedom of information was factually driven. As such, it changed our parliamentary culture for good.

The Guardian’s father figure, J.P Scott famously argued that “facts are sacred”. So much so, indeed, that they are locked away. Our role should be to expose them, publicise them, deconsecrate them and make the truth ordinary.

To achieve this you need a point of view – or, at the very least, a suspicion and a purpose.

The web is a natural home of such ‘investigative comment’. But it also needs a culture of how to publish such material in a way that is itself open to counter-challenge. Otherwise such a self-declared approach can easily become another vehicle for authoritarian or populist agendas.

This is where openDemocracy comes in, as now perhaps Britain’s oldest web publication. I report on how openDemocracy survived, in a response to Alan Rusbridger’s draft lecture on the media and the web. As Tony Curzon Price, its Editor in Chief has argued, oD is distinct in having ‘openness’ as its operating principle.

Openness is different from neutrality or balance. openDemocracy does not ask its contributors to be neutral or seek an impossible ‘balance’ in their coverage. Instead, it looks for an engaged, well-argued case, based on information that is open to rebuttal, disagreement and a counter-case, should one be offered.

This is why I was delighted when I read the first piece by Clare, when it arrived in my inbox. I had learnt of the scandal of child detention in 2008 when I saw Juliet Stevenson and Natasha Walter’s play Motherland, which I reviewed in the Guardian online and blogged in OK. I learnt, for example, that Labour amended its own Children’s Act to ensure that its safeguards did not apply to kids in prison as asylum seekers, which means the government knew what was going on.

It is one thing to learn about a scandal. It is quite another to do the reporting that keeps the story up to date, against all official pressures and obstacles. Clare, helped by her colleagues, set about it in clear, compelling prose. If they were wrong they could be challenged. It was not the kind of comment that fits into an ‘op ed’ page. Clare wasn’t well known. Her reporting was urgent and argued, which ruled it out for the news pages. These three disqualifications from the point of view of the mainstream media were all positives for our website.

As I’m arguing for a development of the best of traditional journalism, not an opposition, I’ll end with a quote from Judith Townend who did a lot of the online publicity for End Child Detention Now, “So many journalists still have this ‘blogger vs journalist’ thing in their heads. We should push them past that. It’s not one or the other; it’s about communicating the story and the message…”