British Press Complaints Commission slammed for its desire to regulate blogs
The last few days has seen an interesting standoff developing between the British press regulatory body, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), and the bloggers it may be seeking to regulate.
The PCC is a self-regulatory body set up and funded by a number of major newspapers and magazines published in the UK. Simply put, its purpose is to investigate complaints made against member publications on a number of grounds including accuracy, privacy, intrusion, portrayal of children, discrimination, financial journalism and the confidentiality of sources. (Read Wikipedia’s PCC entry)
On Monday, a report in the Independent newspaper suggested that the PCC’s chairman, Baroness Buscombe, would like to regulate blogs in the same way as traditional media.
In an interview with Ian Burrell, she said that “Some of the bloggers are now creating their own ecosystems which are quite sophisticated”, suggesting that the public may assume that blogs are official news sources, with the blogosphere being “the new newspapers”.
It’s wrth noting that these are very early days, but nevertheless she does seem interested in having some kind of public consultation, which would involve members of mainstream press, bloggers and the general public.
As you might imagine, the mere sniff of bloggers being regulated by a body that is widely seen as biased, toothless and extremely slow to act, has not gone down well with many.
The Guardian has reported on blogger Sunny Hundal’s letter, which he is inviting other bloggers to undersign, that sets out why any official regulation is incompatible with standard blogging practice.
The full letter can be read here, but the gist is that the PCC needs to get its own house in order — with particular reference to the practices of a number of tabloid newspapers — before attempting to regulate bloggers.
To give but one recent example of bad practice, of the many that bloggers have documented in over the last few years, an article published by the Tabloid Watch blog in October, documented, in some considerable detail, the tortuous process that one of its readers had to go through in order to get the News of the World to retract a manifestly untrue and inflammatory statement by one of its regular columnists, Carole Malone.
What we find most striking about the process documented by Tabloid Watch is the extent to which the PCC actively sought to facilitate the News of the World’s efforts to avoid undertaking practices that we, as bloggers, take for granted as being standard practice in our corner of the internet: i.e. the prominent publication of an honest and open correction of a factual error on the original article in which the error, itself, was made.
Instead, as we invariably find to be standard practice amongst, particularly, tabloid newspapers; the correction and cursory apology when it was grudgingly issued after what Tabloid Watch described as ‘two months of wrangling’ – appeared in a location other than that of Malone’s column in the newspaper’s print edition and on its website on a page utterly divorced from the article to which it relates, which was removed its entirety, and in such a way that only someone searching specifically for the retraction would ever be likely to find it.
To all intents and purposes, the retraction might as well not have been issued, for all that it would be apparent to visitors to the News of World’s website that it had ever been made.
This is but one clear example of a practice that would be unacceptable amongst established bloggers and one of many that bloggers who specialise in monitoring the national press for accuracy have documented in recent years.
For a blogger to engage in such practices, which include ’stealth editing’ of articles, after publication, to avoid owning up to factual errors and removing and/or refusing to publish critical comments from readers, especially those that highlight and correct factual errors.
For an established blogger to adopt such practices would do incalculable damage to their public reputation; this being, after all, all that we have to trade on.
It’s not the first time an organisation has called for a blogging code of conduct, and it surely won’t be the last. What I find interesting, though, is the localised nature of these attempts and the apparent refusal to believe that self-regulation is possible.
We know that the blogosphere can be quite a volatile place, but the fact is that most well-known, high-profile bloggers (and a lot of out-of-the-limelight bloggers, too) do adhere to their own ethical standards, and indeed they often seem higher than those adopted by established media.
Any attempt at regulation of blogs on a country-by-country basis is going to be very difficult to enforce. Blogs, far more so than printed publications, are international, and as such are difficult to govern under any one national law.
Until such a time as governments collaborate and pass international laws that restrict what bloggers can write, any oversight from the likes of the PCC will be totally voluntary. Even then, what organisation in its right mind is going to monitor millions of blogs to ensure they meet some kind of self-imposed journalistic standards?
Bloggers generally know how to take care of their own affairs without the need for external pressures (except from their readers, of course, which is how it should be).
I’m all for open, honest, ethical blogging, but I do tend to believe the best of most bloggers and think they can sort their own standards out.
What do you think?
Will Online Micropayment Systems Help Save Newspapers?
Newspapers are not dead. Even with the Internet providing free content on just about anything, people still do read newspapers for a variety of reasons. These days, though one big challenge faced by newspaper publishers is how to bring their mainstream business online while still being profitable and sustainable.
Newspapers–and other periodicals–are said to have a three-pronged approach when it comes to revenue streams. It’s comparable to a tripod, in which if one leg fails, the whole thing collapses. First is the subscriptions: the good number of businesses, establishments and individuals who pay a subscription fee to receive copies of a paper or magazine regularly. Second is advertisements: sponsorships are a lifeline of the publishing industry. Third is newsstand sales: these are people who are not regular subscribers, but buy off the stand anyway.
The argument here is that the three-tier revenue scheme provides a good check-and-balance system for the focus of the publication’s editorials and content. If one only relies solely on advertisers, then a newspaper stands to lose editorial integrity. If one relies only on subscribers, then content tends to be monotonous. If one relies only on newsstand buyers, then you tend to focus on sensational news to get people to buy each issue.
The challenge with bringing content online is that users tend to prefer “free,” and so a publication is therefore effectively taking out the newsstand revenues from the picture. There is therefore a heavy reliance on advertisements, and to some extent regular subscriptions. If newspapers find a way to bring the newsstand to online readers, then this might bring back the balance to its revenue streams. In a proposal by Google to the Newspaper Association of America, they propose a micropayment system that will allow users to purchase content.
Fast Company discusses the implications of this proposal.
As newspapers seek to generate new revenue channels by switching to online publishing, there’s a fabulous business opportunity opening as the provider for their payment systems. The micropayments system will apparently share revenue in a similar fashion to the iTunes App Store, and Android Marketplace, so it’ll be a profitable system for Google as well as the newspapers. The upshot for Google is that it will remain at the core of the process (a position it loves to be in) and able to monitor its user’s habits in the hope that it can glean more information about them–useful for tailoring its own operations, selling advertising and so on.
Google, after all, has been digitizing content for some time now, and therefore it is not new to the game of bringing us content from books and even old newspapers. But to the end-user, what makes this different from existing checkout or subscription systems, such as those powered by PayPal and the like? Perhaps it’s the trust factor that the Google brand brings in. Perhaps it’s Google’s ability to aggregate content from various sources and bring these together under one portal (think Google News).
And so with a system for bringing the newsstand right at your fingertips, do you think this will help newspapers thrive in the ever-competitive world of distributing content online? To me, if it’s a matter of paying a few cents to access a newspaper or magazine issue, then it will be all right. But the clincher here is whether it will be an easy enough process, and whether the price will be reasonable enough.
Then there are the pros and cons of having all your content in digital format. First, there are the green implications. Less paper means less trees cut down, less ink used for printing, and less material to recycle. Being fully digital also means I can access the content from anywhere–my computer, my smartphone or even an e-book reader. Content is now also more easily searchable than physically printed material. On the other hand, paper is sometimes more convenient to use, and there are people who prefer the actual feel (and sound, and scent) of paper.
For now, I’m still content with buying my weekday paper from the newsstand each morning when I drive the kids to school. I still read my share of online news from various sources. This means I get a mix of digital and print content in my daily consumption of information. The question is how easy will it be for me to fully make the move to digital?
