182 responses to the Freedom of Information consultation

Posted by Martin Stabe on 13 March 2007 at 20:46
Tags: BBC, Crown Copyright, Ethics, Freedom of Information, Guardian, Investigations, Journalism, Mashups, NUJ, foi, foia

The Government has received 182 responses to its consultation on the Freedom of Information Act fees regime.

We know about five of these so far. One submission is Press Gazette’s petition, signed by more than 1,250 journalists who oppose the Government’s plans. Another is the Guardian’s strongly-worded defence of journalists’ use of FOI. The BBC has also made its opposition plain.

FOI campaigner Heather Brooke’s submission is posted on her blog. It’s a forcefully-worded piece which is notable for introducing two very practical arguments to a debate that is usually dominated by abstract polemics about the public’s “right to know”.

First, Brooke assaults the Government’s frequent claim that Freedom of Information Act introduces a net cost to the public purse and the economy as a whole. Instead, she makes a strong case that FOI — combined with a more liberal system for the re-use of public-sector information — would boost the economy by fostering a stronger private-sector information industry like the one in the United States. More transparency would also save the Treasury money in the long run by making public record-keeping more efficient and exposing waste.

Second, and perhaps more interesting to readers here, she argues that a strong Freedom of Information regime would improve British journalism overall, by encouraging “responsible, informative journalism, leading to an informed and civically engaged electorate”.

First, Freedom of Information means more accurate, factually-based reporting, including analytical computer-assisted investigative journalism:

The polemical style of much British journalism is due in large part to the difficulty obtaining official information. It is noteworthy that the UK lacks any organisation devoted to computer-assisted reporting – a type of investigative journalism that is well developed in the US and Scandinavia where freedom of information laws are much stronger and well-developed. I have worked with several organisations to try and build up this type of analytical journalism in the UK but the difficulties are enormous. …

Regular readers will know that I completely agree with her about this.

Brooke also makes the interesting argument that greater access to legitimate sources of information would reduce the need for journalists to resort to dubious or illegal methods for obtaining data:

If the government wants to encourage legitimate reporting techniques then it needs to provide an efficient and timely mechanism to make this type of reporting cost effective. This mechanism should be the Freedom of Information Act. In the US, the federal FOIA combined with strong state FOI and public records laws means there is no demand for an information black market. Having worked as a journalist in the US for eight years, I never once came across a reporter who had used a private detective to gather information. There was simply no need. All the information needed was available in the public domain.

By contrast in the UK, trying to access information legitimately couldn’t be more time-consuming and difficult. Obstacles are constantly put in one’s way and everything the government does encourages the creation of an information black market economy. Now we are going to jail reporters who access information illegitimately, but a more effective solution to this problem would be to create incentives to use legitimate information gathering tools. The main way of doing this would be to make the FOIA more effective.

The NUJ made similar noises about encouraging investigative journalism through Freedom of Information in a Parliamentary committee on media regulation this week. Its own 10-page response to the consultation has also been submitted.

I look forward to seeing the other 178 submissions. I hope I don’t need to file a request …

Easter weekend ‘fake sheikh’ update

Posted by Martin Stabe on 18 April 2006 at 09:25
Tags: Guardian, Investigations, Journalism, News of the World

The controversy over the publication of pictures of the ‘Fake Sheikh’, News of the World investigations editor Mazher Mahmood, continued over the Easter weekend. Even the New York Times took notice, providing an outsider’s overview of a very British media squabble — and becoming only the third newspaper to print the pictures of the undercover reporter.

In the Independent on Sunday, journalism professor and commentator Roy Greenslade explained why he favours exposing Mahmood. The gist:

The reason is straightforward: Mahmood’s methods debase journalism. They often amount to entrapment and, on occasion, appear to involve the use of agents provocateurs. People have been encouraged to commit crimes they would not otherwise have conceived. As if that wasn’t enough, the public interest justification advanced for such activities by the NoW is almost always highly debatable.

The Guardian, meanwhile, reported on the the News of the Worlds’ version of events at the Dorchester Hotel, where MP George Galloway says he was the intended victim of one of Mahmood’s trademark stings. The paper specificially denies Galloway’s claim that its reporter tried to goad him into supporting anti-Semitic comments.

The News of the World says the undercover reporter is endangered by having his picture published and has asked rival publishers not to print the pictures distributed by Galloway even though they are widely available on the Internet.

One of the pictures is a passport picture of Mahmood; the other is a grainy shot of him wearing the famous ‘fake sheikh’ disguise.

The Guardian is the only British national paper to have run the disguised picture so far, and has defended its position. The East London Advertiser also published the passport photo this week, and the New York Times used both images on its web site.
In last week’s Press Gazette, we argued against printing the pictures because there is no public interest in doing so.

Who is right?

‘Fake sheikh’ gag order lifted

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 April 2006 at 17:41
Tags: Blogs, Ethics, Injunctions, Investigations, Journalism, Media Law, News of the World

At 4pm today, the News of the World’s injunction against publishing pictures of its undercover investigations editor, Mazher Mahmood, was lifted.

MP George Galloway promises to publish the photograph on his web site, and many others have, as well. The Guardian has published the pictures, distributed by Galloway on Tuesday, it on its web site.

But even before the injunction was lifted, the image was widely available online. A number of bloggers received the Screws’ writ, but some chose to ignore or satirise it in one way or another. Tim Ireland created a video game, Sheikh Invaders, using with the image. Some bloggers published the image in other jurisdictions.

One bloggers who openly violated the injunction, Guido Fawkes, today reflected:

Guido wonders can gagging injunctions work in a world with millions of citizen publishers? Secrets are difficult to keep when one person can broadcast to the world. Interesting.

Another blogger, one of a number who pledged to violate the injunction even if the Screws had pursued its planned appeal to extend the gag, is less than impressed with us in the MSM:

I was riled enough when our supine press wouldn’t publish the Danish cartons … as I felt it was a sad reflection on the belief systems adopted throughout journalism: exceptions to the rule as ever but we have a dead-tree media that relies on famous people for nothing stories, photo’s and tittle-tattle gossip to sell their publications.

The NOTW has successfully requested an injunction forbidding the publication of photographs of a man who makes money from dressing up and elicting information under false pretences. That ‘newspaper’ and its sister titles should be boycotted for being so spineless. They are continuing to pursue Guido and Galloway.

Another blogger was outraged into posting several Mahmood pictures when he received a rather firm e-mail allegedly from Zak Newland, the News of the World’s Night News Editor:

There is currently a High Court injunction in place banning the publication of the photos of Mazher Mahmood which you have posted on your webpage. I have passed the link to your webpage on to News International lawyer Tom Crone.

One blogger defending Mahmood and disagreeing with other bloggers’ decision to publish his picture was journalist Paul Linford.

Linford says the campaign to out Mahmood was “spearheaded by an unholy alliance of George Galloway, the most ridiculous man in British politics, and Roy Greenslade, the most ridiculous man in British journalism.”

Galloway and Greenslade, Linford argues, “want to neuter investigative journalism and remove the threat that it presents to those who abuse their positions of privilege and power?”

“This attack on Mazher Mahmood is nothing less than an attack on journalism and an attack on freedom,” Linford says.

Is it?

The tyranny of online advertising

Posted by Martin Stabe on 14 March 2006 at 14:05
Tags: Craigslist, Investigations, Journalism, Online

Speaking at South by Southwest Interactive film festival in Texas, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has said newspapers should invest more in investigative journalism.

This echoed similar sentiments Newmark aired in an interview a fortnight ago, during which he was asked what he would do if he were the editor of a newspaper dependent on classified sales. Newmark said: “I’d be moving to the Web faster, hiring more investigative journalists, engaging the community and speaking truth to power.”

But is it really that easy? Nicholas Carr, a former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, has a thoughtful response. Newmark’s sentiment is all very nice, Carr says, except that the disaggregation of newspaper content on the web makes investing in expensive forms of public-interest journalism very difficult:

Traditional newspapers sold bundles of content. Subscribers paid to get the bundle, and advertisers paid to have their ads in the bundle, where those readers would see them. In effect, investigative and other hard journalism was subsidized by the softer stuff — but you couldn’t really see the subsidization, so in a way it didn’t really exist.

And, besides, the hard stuff contributed to the value of the overall bundle. That whole model has been slowly unraveling for some time, but the web tears it into tiny little pieces. Literally. The web unbundles the bundle - each story becomes a separate entity that lives or dies, economically, on its own. It’s naked in the marketplace, its commercial existence meticulously measured, click by click. … The economic incentives created by the web model are very different from those of the old print model - and it’s economic incentives that ultimately determine business decisions.

In another post, Carr offers an example of what the different economics of online journalism could mean for the types of stories that publications are incentivised to run:

Let’s say you’re an online newspaper. You do a long, complex story about the relationship between political strife and disease in Africa. It’s a good story, and it’s an important story, and it’s expensive to produce (you have to send a reporter and a photographer overseas). But it’s not a story that gets readers to click on ads, and it’s not a story that lends itself to the kind of keywords that advertisers bid a lot of money for. You also do a brief review of some new high-definition TVs coming on the market. It’s a cheap story to produce. And it produces loads of high-priced clickthroughs by readers.

The loss of some classified advertising revenue to sites like Craigslist is only part of the problem for online newspapers: The disaggregating effect of the Internet and the much greater detail with which advertisers can monitor which stories generate page views is another. As Carr says public-interest investigative and foreign reporting has always been subsidized by fluffier, more advertising-friendly content. But online, this system of invisible invisible subsidies is far more transparent and will become more difficult to sustain. In the long term, this is a much more serious problem than classified advertising revenue.