Author Archives: Judith Townend

Ministry of Justice to reduce success fees in defamation cases

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The latest on changes to libel and defamation, from the Ministry of Justice:

Justice secretary Jack Straw has taken action to lower the maximum success fees that lawyers can charge in defamation cases from 100 per cent to 10 per cent.

Straw’s Statutory Order amends the Conditional Fee Agreements (CFA) Order 2000 and is subject to approval from Parliament.

Full release at this link…

The Ministry of Justice has also published responses to its ‘Controlling costs in defamation proceedings’ consultation. More than 53 per cent of 57 responses were in favour of reducing maximum success fees.

Making money from registered (non-paying) users

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Subscription revenues for FT.com have risen 43 per cent year-on-year, helping the newspaper keep in profit for 2009, the Guardian reports.

But its management has also flagged up the potential in other areas, too: BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan Jones’ interview with FT.com managing director Rob Grimshaw touches on the money-making potential of registered news site users – who don’t necessarily pay.

What’s interesting is that the middle group, those who register but don’t pay, are still proving lucrative. The 1.9 million people registered users have given some very basic information such as their job title.

That’s enough, according to Mr Grimshaw, to allow the FT to run a targeted advertising and marketing operation with high yields.

While the FT’s higher tier of paying subscribers brings in around £20 million a year, it is still thinking about the freeloading clientele.

So are non-paywalled publishers missing a trick by not setting up registration systems, for fear of traffic drop-off?

It’s perhaps worth going back to my interview with Rob Grimshaw in January:

User analytics
Monitoring the behaviour of 1.8 million registered users and 121,000 subscribers is a big part of the FT’s marketing strategy, he said.

“Their details are in a database: we have a lot of demographic information about them; we’re also able to combine that with their normal activity on the website. That data base is a goldmine that brings benefits to many parts of the business.”

Specific advertising can be exposed to a certain audience and direct communication can be made by email, he said. “1.8 million users have self-selected as people who are interested in our content and our business,” he added. “It is an area where there are enormous benefits to be gained.”

He argued that privacy is not infringed by the publication’s methods: “We never focus on behaviour of particular individuals: we are always looking at things in aggregate; how a sector of our database of users behaves.

“We would never allow an advertiser access to that [user information]. That would be both unacceptable and illegal.”

The success of companies like Amazon was due to carefully targeted marketing, he said:

“Some of the most successful companies out there have built their businesses by understanding the behaviour of their users in a very defined way; using their insight to develop their business decision making.”

British Journalism Review: Calls for libel law reform are misguided

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Investigative journalist Bruce Page assesses calls for libel law reform and finds that they might be misguided, in his view.

“Journalism is intended to be harmful and journalists who don’t like risk should go elsewhere.”

One of the problems is that journalism spends too much time on “insubstantial doomsday scenarios” and not enough developing knowledge to expose “self-defamatory” claims, in science for example.

Making it easier for nervous people to publish accusations isn’t going to change any of that. Lawsuit economics still give excessive advantage to wealth and power. Introducing no-win-no-fee litigation has reduced that old abuse – and brought some fresh ones into play. Let’s reform them. But the law itself isn’t broke. Don’t fix it.

Full post at this link…

Columbia Journalism Review: The Counter-Plagiarism Handbook

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The excellent Craig Silverman has written a short guide to avoiding and detecting plagiarism and fabrication for the Columbia Journalism Review. To his knowledge no-one has yet written a “definitive guide,” he says.

Among the tips:

Use a different font and text color for your research files. This will help you instantly recognize other people’s words when you paste them into your story. (Many people have suggested this over the years. It works.)

The Counter-Plagiarism Handbook at this link…

(via StinkyJournalism.org)

HuffingtonPost: Writer donates $20,000 cheque for ‘magnificent’ New Yorker article

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What would you do if you were sent a $20,000 cheque for what the reader believes is an outstanding piece of journalism? That’s what happened to Atul Gawande, for a piece on healthcare in the New Yorker last summer. It came from investor and philanthropist Charlie Munger, business partner of philanthropist Warren Buffett. HuffPo reports that Gawande donated it to a hospital.

“[Gawande] had an article last summer that was absolutely magnificent,” Buffett said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Monday morning. “My partner Charlie Munger sat down and wrote out a check for $20,000 to him and he’s never met him, never had any correspondence with it, he just mailed it to the New Yorker and he said, ‘This article is so useful socially. He says,’ Just give this as a gift to Dr. Gawande.’

A rep for the New Yorker tells the Huffington Post that Gawande did not accept the money personally. Instead, he accepted it as a donation to the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Center for Surgery and Public Health for an international health project they are working on in coordination with World Federation of Societies of Anesthesiology and the World Health Organization. The project aims to “distribute oxygen monitors in developing countries with inadequate surgical safety equipment.”

Full post at this link…

ConservativeHome blogger granted lobby pass

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As noted on this blog last month, political bloggers are to be granted the same access to parliament as their mainstream media counterparts.

Who would be the first, we asked. Well, now we learn that ConservativeHome’s Jonathan Isaby is now a proud lobby pass holder – one of, if not the, first blogger members.

“It certainly felt that the case I made was a strong one,” Isaby, who formerly worked for the BBC and the Telegraph, told Journalism.co.uk. As a full-time political blogger, he felt he should have the same access as political journalists. “As a site we break stories that are followed up by the mainstream media,” he said.

Whilst some claimed that ConservativeHome, in which Lord Ashcroft is a majority investor, had too much of a political agenda, he argued that that hadn’t previously precluded other publications, such as the socialist Morning Star, from being part of the lobby. A blend of General tobacco and hints of tea, creating a snus with a slight spicy tobacco flavor. A little bergamot oil, a citrus oil mainly grown in Italy and North Africa, infuses general snus with its signature flavor. According to the instructions, only the best parts of the tobacco are used and the stems are avoided, the tobacco is left to dry naturally in the sun.

The police’s “narrow” approach to phone hacking: not a crime if message had been listened to first

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Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger raised what he said was a little known fact about phone hacking evidence, in yesterday’s press regulation debate in the House of Lords.

He had been told by Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Yates, he said, that the police only considered the interception of phone messages an offence if they hadn’t been listened to.

Once messages were stored after they were listened to by the recipient, subsequent access by a third party was not considered a criminal offence. The public should be aware of the “narrow definition” of phone hacking, the Guardian editor warned.

As reported in last week’s Culture, Media and Sport select committee report:

“The police also told us that under Section 1 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) it is only a criminal offence to access someone’s voicemail message if they have not already listened to it themselves. This means that to prove a criminal offence has taken place it has to be proved that the intended recipient had not already listened to the message. This means that the hacking of messages that have already been opened is not a criminal offence and the only action the victim can take is to pursue a breach of privacy, which we find a strange position in law.”

The committee recommended that “Section 1 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act is amended to cover all hacking of phone messages”.

“Narrow definition” line is a “convenient PR shelter for Scotland Yard”, argues Davies

The Guardian’s evidence of widespread phone hacking attempts contradicted police reports that only a ‘handful’ of victims had been targeted, so Scotland Yard is trying to “justify its position” by raising the narrow legal definition of the criminal offence, Guardian journalist Nick Davies told Journalism.co.uk.

Davies also challenges the legality of any kind of phone hacking:

“The narrow legal definition is highly contentious. The idea is that it is illegal to listen to somebody’s voicemail only if they have not themselves already heard it. This not written in the law at all; it was clearly not parliament’s intention. It’s an interpretation – not one that has been tested and accepted by a court, simply something that was said during a legal conference at the Crown Prosecution Service while the police were investigating the original case.

“It was said by David Perry, Crown counsel in the case, but he didn’t even produce a written opinion and never mentioned it in court when [Clive] Goodman and [Glenn] Mulcaire came up.” A future court may or may not agree with this definition, Davies added. “At the moment, however, it is a convenient PR shelter for Scotland Yard who are embarrassed by their handling of the case.”

Satchwell claims phone hacking case has ‘grey areas’; challenges Guardian’s proof

The liveliest part of yesterday’s House of Lords debate came when executive director of the Society of Editors, Bob Satchwell, challenged some of the Guardian’s claims and insisted there were “grey areas” in the case.

Journalist Nick Davies vehemently disagrees: the black and white is there, he later told Journalism.co.uk, but newspapers and the Press Complaints Commission don’t want to see it.

“Satchwell says editors don’t know the truth about all the material confiscated by the Information Commissioner’s Office from [private investigator] Steve Whittamore in March 2003 because the ICO didn’t investigate it. That isn’t correct.

“The ICO analysed all the material and produced spreadsheets – one for each newspaper organisation – and the spreadsheets lists all of the journalists who asked Whittamore to find confidential information, all of the targets, all of the information requested, how it was obtained, how much was paid.

“The ICO and police worked together to prepare three court cases: one led to four convictions, the other two collapsed for technical reasons. You really can’t say that there wasn’t an investigation. Furthermore, when the new information commissioner, Christopher Graham, gave evidence to the media select committee, he said he would not publish the spreadsheets, but he clearly indicated his willingness to talk to any editor who got in touch in search of detail.”

No editor has asked for extra information from ICO
“I checked last week with the ICO as to how many editors had now got in touch to ask which of their journalists are named in the spreadsheets and also to ask whether the PCC had approached them and asked for information,” said Davies.

“The answer was that no editor and nobody from the PCC had asked.” Furthermore, Davies said, he had written detailed stories about the contents of the spreadsheets.

“So, if editors are still in a grey area on all this, it’s because they refuse to look at the facts in black and white, even though the facts are there for them.”

Election 2.0: ‘The internet is not national, it’s not local, it’s everywhere’ says Google’s DJ Collins

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As reported elsewhere on Journalism.co.uk, last night we supported City University London’s ‘Will 2010 be the first new media election?’ event, hosted by the Media Society and also supported by the Media Trust.

  • Listen to Evan Davis talking to Journalism.co.uk at this link: the BBC Radio 4 Today journalist posed, rather than answered the ‘how much influence will social media hold’ question, but said both new and media forms have their merits. “What might be quite interesting is the way they interact: the way old media results get amplified through the new media and the way the old media events are interpreted through new media.” Both these events will have more resonance together than they would on their own, he said.

Finally, here’s Rupa Huq, blogger, socialist, Labour supporter talking to City University student Heather Christie (@heatherchristie) about getting carried with the “brave new world of new media”:

Catch up with the other Journalism.co.uk coverage here:

Event: Will 2010 be the first new media election?

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Tonight Journalism.co.uk is pleased to be supporting City University London’s event to mark the launch of its new political journalism MA, ‘Will 2010 be the first new media election?’ The charity the Media Trust is also partnering the event, organised by the Media Society. Chaired by the BBC’s Evan Davis, it also  features:

  • DJ Collins, Google/YouTube’s Director of Communications and Public Affairs, EMEA
  • Prof Ivor Gaber, City University London
  • Rupa Huq, blogger
  • Matthew McGregor, Blue State Digital (Obama’s social media/web advisors)
  • Nick Robinson, BBC Political Editor

For those wanting to follow by Twitter, the tag is #cityvote.

Alan Rusbridger: ‘Weak press self-regulation threatens decent journalism’

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“Once again weakness by the regulator has led to people calling for tougher sanctions against journalism,” Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger argued at today’s press self-regulation debate in the House of Lords.

The failings of the Press Complaints Commission explained the Culture, Media and Sport select committee’s call for a renamed self-regulatory body with the power to make financial sanctions, he said.

The panel gathered at Westminster for the Media Standards Trust event (at which no member of the Press Complaints Commission was present, despite being invited) were united on one point: that increasing the PCC’s powers of penalisation was not necessarily the right way forward.

Geoffrey Robertson QC was adamant on this point: redress of grievances should be done through the courts with juries, not via the PCC; Bob Satchwell, chairman of the Society of Editors, was firmly against any governmental direction of press regulation: it should come from the public and the industry, he said.

Robertson, who has previously called for all newspaper editors to step down from the body, said the PCC was a “confidence trick that now fails to inspire confidence”.

Private Eye’s Ian Hislop was the “most trusted editor in Britain “by not having anything to do with the PCC” Robertson said, adding that most its inquiries were “utter jokes”.

Bob Satchwell, loyal defender of the mainstream press and the PCC, said that suspension of publication (one of the recommendations made by the CMS committee last week) had “absolutely no place in democracy”. “In the end the real arbiters should be the readers,” he said.

The PCC had changed a “cavalier” and “arrogant” press of yore, Satchwell said. The level of control should be up to the public and the readers, he added – not organisations like the Media Standards Trust, or the government.

Rusbridger, who laid out the phone hacking saga as a case study of PCC failure (over which he resigned from the editors’ code committee) said the body needed to either admit it couldn’t conduct proper inquiries, or undergo serious reform.

“It may be that it’s flying the wrong flag [and might be ] better to rebrand itself as a media complaints and conciliation service and forget about regulation.”

Over phone hacking and the new evidence presented by the Guardian in July 2009, the PCC had “showed a complete lack of appetite to get to the bottom of what had happened,” he said.

It inquiries into phone hacking, had been inadequate, Rusbridger said. The PCC had explained privately “that they didn’t have the resources to do proper investigations and it wasn’t within their remit. [It said] they were not set up or financed to do proper investigations”.

“To which the answer is is fine, but then don’t pretend to do investigations which are then used to exonerate people or organisations. By doing so you bring self-regulation into disrepute.”

Rusbridger argued several points in particular:

  • He claimed that either former NOTW editor Andy Coulson or News International executives were lying, in light of the Guardian’s allegations that four “criminal” private investigators had been hired by the News of the World in the past. It was either the case that Andy Coulson, currently director of communications for the Conservative party, was lying and knew about the activities of these private investigators, “criminally obtaining information which led directly to News of the World stories”; or, Rusbridger said, individuals within News International “knew about them and paid them [private investigators] … but protected the editor from knowing what was going on, in which case News International executives have been lying”. Those seemed to him, he claimed, the only two explanations for recent revelations.