The PCC’s governance review just became a lot more important

It has not been a good week for the Chair of the PCC. This is a shame because Baroness Buscombe seems like a smart woman who arrived at the PCC in April with a real intention of changing the way it worked.

The trouble started on Sunday evening, when Baroness Buscombe made her first major set piece speech at the Society of Editors conference. It was an odd maiden speech, made up of a mixture of party politics and truisms about press freedom in a democracy, with virtually no mention of press standards or future intentions. The type of speech you might expect from a working politician or a Tory peer in the House, but not from the recently appointed head of an ‘independent regulator’ (how the PCC now describes itself). Those papers that chose to report it, however, mostly did so uncritically. The Guardian was the exception. The editor of the Media Guardian called it ‘disappointing’ and suggested the new Chair’s perspective on self-regulation was ‘rose tinted’.

The following morning Buscombe appeared on the Today programme. Bizarrely, she chose to talk more about our ‘dysfunctional democracy’ than about her plans for press self-regulation. When asked directly about relevant issues – on the PCC’s position regarding the reporting of Gordon Brown’s private exchanges with Jacqui Janes – she refused to answer.

Worse was set to come. Before Buscombe’s Radio 4 appearance she released a written statement via the PCC implying that evidence given to the Commons CMS Select Committee by Mark Lewis, a lawyer for Stripes Solicitors, was false. Lewis had told the committee that DS Maberly of the Metropolitan Police had told him that around 6,000 people were involved in the phone hacking episode (though “It was not clear to me whether that was 6,000 phones which had been hacked, or 6,000 people including the people who had left messages” Lewis said to the select committee). Giving misleading evidence to a select committee was, the PCC statement said ‘an extremely serious matter’. The response from Lewis was fast and furious. Not only did he stand by his evidence and say he had two witnesses to corroborate it, but he noted that the PCC had not approached him before making such a serious accusation and had chosen to believe a ‘hearsay letter constructed on behalf of the Metropolitan Police rather than the first hand evidence that was given by me to the Select Committee’. This, Lewis said, ‘betrayed any semblance of impartiality’ the PCC might have had and he called on the Chair to resign.

Hardly had the ink dried on Lewis’ signature than bloggers were reacting to a report on the Independent website that Buscombe had suggested the PCC was considering regulating blogs. Ian Burrell wrote that the Chair had ‘said that after a review of the governance structures of the PCC, she would want the organisation to "consider" whether it should seek to extend its remit to the blogosphere, a process that would involve discussion with the press industry, the public and bloggers (who would presumably have to volunteer to come beneath the PCC's umbrella).’ Bloggers were outraged. ‘Very disturbing’, Iain Dale wrote: ‘I see absolutely no need for independently operated blogs to be regulated by the PCC or indeed anyone else. If they want to propose a voluntary system of regulation, fine. But the day they try to mandate it is the day I will give up blogging.’ Guido Fawkes subsequently blogged that she’d never said such a thing. But this did not stop a damning critique of the suggestion in a ‘collective letter’ from Unity at Liberal Conspiracy:

‘While we are grateful for your interest in our activities we must regretfully decline your kind offer of future PCC regulation. Frankly, we do not feel that the further development of blogging as an interactive medium that facilitates the free exchange of ideas and opinions will benefit from regulation by a body representing an industry with, in the main, substantially lower ethical standards and practices than those already practiced by the vast majority of established British bloggers.’

Before the Chair had time to calm a furious blogosphere, news came through that the International Federation of Journalists – the world’s largest organization of journalists, with more than 600,000 members in 100 countries – was commissioning an investigation into the PCC’s handling of its inquiry into the News of the World phone-hacking allegations.

Later that afternoon an even more serious problem erupted closer to home. Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, had been voicing significant disquiet about press self-regulation since the PCC released its report into phone hacking at the NotW. That report was, Rusbridger said, ‘worse than pointless, it's actually rather dangerous to the press… I believe in self-regulation because I cannot imagine a country in which the government regulates the press, or there is statutory regulation. But the press is in a very weak position today because its own regulator, its self-regulation, has proved so weak.’ When Mark Lewis’s letter was published online, Rusbridger tweeted it from his personal account.

Then, on Tuesday, Rusbridger announced he was resigning from the PCC’s Editorial Code Committee – the committee composed mostly of working editors that has responsibility for defining and adapting the press’ code of conduct. In his resignation statement Rusbridger made clear that this was not about politics or personality but borne out of substantive concern for the purpose and role of the PCC.

This is not, by anyone’s measure, a good couple of days. No doubt the rest of the press will, as is their wont went it comes to problems with press self-regulation, ignore it and hope it goes unnoticed. But though speeches can be improved and diplomacy finessed, the substantive issues will not disappear, not least because Baroness Buscombe launched a review of PCC governance in August that will run from now until next spring.

Yet, ironically, the last few days will increase rather than diminish the importance of this review. Not only will the review group need to gather evidence from a wide enough range of individuals and organizations to ensure the review's credibility, it will have to answer some of the critical questions asked by The Guardian. The Chair of the PCC then has the tricky task – if she accepts the recommendations of the review – of instituting the reforms. If she thinks this week has been difficult, it will be a cakewalk compared to that.

PCC report shows limits of organisation's remit

When the Guardian’s story about phone hacking at the News of the World broke in July, the Media Standards Trust called on the press to set up its own independent investigation. Only by doing this, we argued, could the press allay people’s fears that such practices were not widespread at the News of the World, or elsewhere in the industry, and sustain people’s faith in self-regulation.

The problem is, as we said at the time, the way the existing system of self-regulation is currently set up does not allow for such an investigation. The current system – as headed by the Press Complaints Commission – has not the resources, the time, or the remit to conduct the type of inquiry needed.

The PCC cannot call people for evidence, it cannot devote significant amounts of time to in-depth interviews or analysis, and it cannot search through internal emails and correspondence. It has to conduct its inquiries in and around the many other responsibilities it has. It is therefore not a surprise that the report the PCC then produces does not uncover any further evidence of wrongdoing.

This is not a criticism of the day-to-day job the PCC does. Quite the contrary. The PCC does a valuable job dealing with complaints from members of the public about misrepresentation, inaccuracy, harassment and privacy intrusion. Rather, it is a criticism of what the PCC does not do – and cannot do as it is currently structured.

Criticising the PCC in an editorial The Guardian writes that:

‘In reaching its conclusions, it appears the PCC did not interview a single witness or inspect a single document beyond those uncovered by police, the information commissioner or MPs. It did not question Andy Coulson, editor at the time (just as it failed to contact him at the time of Goodman). It did not make inquiries of five other NoW journalists or contractees who had direct knowledge of events – Thurlbeck, Greg Miskiw (who signed the contract), the junior reporter, Goodman or Mulcaire – or, indeed, any other NoW journalist employed at the time. It did not interrogate the bonus contract (News Group said it was confidential). It did not interview – though it said it tried – the detective sergeant or reconcile his remark with other police evidence. Indeed, the solitary successful serious inquiry the PCC itself appears to have made was an exchange of letters with the current NoW editor, Colin Myler, who was not at the paper at the time.’

These are not insubstantial criticisms. They point to an investigation that was limited to letter writing and secondary research (although from the report we do not know the full range of the PCC’s inquiries). An investigation that was, in many ways, similar to the 2007 inquiry following Clive Goodman’s conviction. An inquiry that was itself criticized for not pursuing any of the leads uncovered by the Information Commissioner as a result of Operation Motorman, or for questioning many of the key figures at the News of the World and elsewhere at the time.

The editor of the News of the World, Colin Myler, told the PCC that News International had hired a firm of solicitors, Burton Copeland, to investigate the extent of phone tapping at the News of the World. The newspaper said the firm was given ‘every financial document which could possibly be relevant' to the paper's dealings with Mulcaire, and they confirmed that ‘they could find no evidence from these documents or their other enquiries which suggested complicity by the News of the World or other members of its staff beyond Clive Goodman in criminal activities'. Yet one has to ask whether the public are best served by Burton Copeland conducting a private inquiry on behalf of News International, rather than the PCC (or an independent investigator) on behalf of the public.

Press self-regulation, as currently constituted, simply does not allow for the types of investigation necessary to reveal the sorts of privacy intrusion the Guardian alleged, or for giving the public renewed trust in the press.

Self-regulation can work more effectively, and needs to for the sake of the press and the public. The PCC has just started a review of its governance which will, we hope, recommend major reforms to the current system. The Media Standards Trust will be making a submission to this review in which it will set out how we think self-regulation can be made more effective. We would encourage all others who want to see self-regulation work – the Guardian included – to do the same.

hNews Microformat for News Adopted by AOL and TownNews

This blog was first published at PBS MediaShift Idea Lab:

We are on the cusp of something exciting. Thousands of news articles marked up with with hNews, a microformat for news content funded by the Knight Foundation, will soon start populating the Internet.

Last week, hNews became an official draft microformat. Having been proposed as a new data format and then discussed within the microformats community, it is now in draft 0.1 at Microformats.org. This means it has reached a stage where the microformat community believes it is stable enough for widespread adoption. This also reaffirms hNews as an open standard, free for anyone to integrate to their news content, whether they're from big news agencies like AP, a non-profit like OpenDemocracy.net, or individual journalists blogging on WordPress.

We also learned last week that AOL is adopting hNews. Though AOL has yet to make a formal announcement, hNews is already live on a number of its sites, including AOL News. This article, for example, has hNews embedded in its source code.

Then, this week, TownNews announced it was integrating hNews into its content management system. TownNews provides technology to support the publication of newspaper interactive editions online. By integrating hNews to their CMS, they suddenly make it available to up to 1,500 news sites across the U.S. If these news organizations want to start making their news a lot more machine-readable -- or "semantic" -- pretty much all they have to do is flick a switch.

This news builds on the adoption of hNews by the Associated Press. AP has not yet made its hNews marked-up content public, but plans to before the end of this year.

Making News Machine Readable

These developments are the culmination of the first stage of our transparency initiative, a non-profit project jointly funded by the Knight Foundation (we won a Knight News Challenge Award in 2008) and the MacArthur Foundation. We have also worked with the AP in the latter stages.

hNews, for those unfamiliar with it, makes some basic, factual information about the provenance of an online news article machine-readable. In other words, it makes distinguishable a lot of information that is currently indistinguishable on the web (e.g. to search engines). [hNews is not the same as web bug, the data tag that Associated Press is attaching to its content to help track its use around the web, and allow it, as I understand it, to create a registry of news usage - who owns it and how you can use it. AP is layering web bug on top of hNews.]

The reason hNews is so useful to anyone producing journalism and to the public is that it helps to differentiate news on the web. At the same time, it should make news easier to find, give greater credit to the author (or help "ascribenation", as Doc Searls called it on LinuxJournal), link the story to the news principles it adheres to (if any), unlock some of the value of the news archive, and enable untold unintended consequences.

Currently, only some articles published by AOL, and a few hundred published by OpenDemocracy.net, the first adopter of hNews, are marked up. But within a month or so, there will be thousands and then perhaps hundreds of thousands of stories. Once that happens, we will actually be able to truly see how helpful hNews can be. The aim will then be to develop features and tools built on hNews, and begin benefiting from the marked up information. For example, this could be done via searches and APIs.

For us, the Media Standards Trust, the next stage will involve juggling many balls simultaneously. We need to communicate what hNews is and how it works to as many people as possible. This means making sure people realize that hNews is for anyone producing journalism, not just big news organizations. We also need to develop applications based on hNews in order to illustrate what it's useful for. And we need to keep evolving hNews to include additional (optional) semantic information. At the same time, we'll have to be flexible enough to cope with the unintended consequences.

We are still a little ways from seeing what impact hNews will have, but now we have the opportunity, over the next few months, to see how it can make news more transparent.

Free speech, press accountability, and the ‘wisdom of crowds’

This is a piece I wrote this week for the Guardian's Comment is Free (published under the title, 'Between the lawyers and the mob'):

Last week was a good week for those of us who support press freedom and at the same time believe the press should be made more accountable. But it also raised difficult and rather disturbing questions about free speech and the future of press self-regulation.

The Guardian's courageous decision to challenge the remit of the Trafigura super-injunction sparked justified outrage in the blogosphere and "Twitterverse" and led to a climbdown by Trafigura's lawyers, Carter-Ruck. Meanwhile, Jan Moir's deeply offensive piece about the death of Stephen Gately, which alleged – with no evidence – that there was "nothing 'natural' about Stephen Gately's death" – provoked an even greater response on Twitter. Many of those offended (more than 22,000 of them by Tuesday morning) then complained to the Press Complaints Commission, in part prompted by Stephen Fry, Derren Brown and Charlie Brooker.

The Daily Mail did not apologise, though it changed the title, and removed advertising from around the piece. Moir did not apologise either, but after the unprecedented public reaction released a disgruntled statement suggesting her piece had been misinterpreted and that the public response to it was orchestrated (which raises the question, was the public response to the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand episode not orchestrated?). The Mail also then published a follow-up piece by Janet Street-Porter that was critical of Moir. The case is now being looked at by the PCC.

Hooray, you say. Two victories in a week – one for press freedom and another for press accountability – what a result. Yet both episodes also raise worrying questions about press freedom, the current state of newspaper accountability, and the threat of mob justice.

In the Trafigura affair, it was striking that almost no newspapers (with the exception of the Guardian) spoke out strongly, despite the danger super-injunctions represent to press freedom. Indeed many newspapers remained strangely silent even after Carter-Ruck relaxed Trafigura's super-injunction. Nor was there a substantial reaction from formal bodies. The PCC did not say anything, despite in the past promoting itself as a defender of press freedom (even though, unlike its predecessor, it is not constituted to do this). Nor, outside Index on Censorship, were other industry bodies vocal.

The outrage at the Guardian gagging came from individuals, and was remarkably spontaneous and disorganised. Twitter provided the platform for people with common views to come together. This was exciting and tremendously heartening, but showed how few formal institutions there are to protect press freedom despite the significant and growing threats it faces.

The Moir case, on the other hand, illustrates how little accountability there is at some newspapers. If you were offended and wanted to complain, what options did you have? The Daily Mail has no readers' editor, and no formal complaints process that is publicly accessible in the newspaper or on its website. The only reference to the PCC on Mail Online is not linked to from any other page on the site and is therefore, to all intents and purposes, invisible. This is a newspaper whose editor is the chair of the PCC's editorial code committee and who sits on the PCC's appointments and funding body, Pressbof. Yet his newspaper lacks the most basic public accountability mechanisms.

And, if you escalated your complaint to the PCC, as thousands did, you would probably find yourself equally dissatisfied at the outcome. This is not the fault of the PCC's secretariat, who are diligently working their way through the largest number of complaints over one article in their history. Rather it is due to the rules that artificially limit the complaints they can accept, and the limited sanctions available to them. All 22,000 of these complaints can, according to the rules laid down by the industry, be rejected – since they are considered "third party complaints" (complaints not made by someone directly referenced in the article). In this case, the PCC has said it will consider the complaints and write to the Daily Mail for a response. However, when that response is a small apology tucked inside the paper, many will feel the Daily Mail has got off considerably more lightly than, say, the BBC after the Ross/Brand affair.

This means you are left with the wisdom of the crowd – also known as mob justice. It seem appropriate and proportionate when you happen to agree with it, as in this case, but will seem decidedly unjust if you disagree.

Unless newspapers take more responsibility for their own content, give people the opportunity to complain and respond adequately to those complaints, then they – and their journalists – will come under increasing criticism and attack from the blogosphere, the Twitterverse and other social media. Similarly, unless news organisations protest about the misuse of injunctions, actions such as Trafigura's will become even more difficult to prevent. We do not want to find ourselves in a situation where free speech is constrained by expensive lawyers, nor one where it is dictated by the mob.

Twitter, Trafigura, and the future of press injunctions

Goodness knows what it was like from the editors chair. But from where I sat watching the live twitter feed of #trafigura on Tuesday was utterly compelling. First there was the detective work – people trying to figure out, based on the sparse information in the Guardian’s initial article about the absurdly wide-ranging 'super-injunction' – which Parliamentary question the paper had been prevented from talking about. The key was 'Carter Ruck'. Searching through Parliamentary written and oral questions a few bright sparks alighted on Paul Farrelly’s question:

‘"To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura."

They then tweeted about this to see if other people agreed it must be the question, and within hours confirmed with one another this must be it.

From there twitterers started looking for the Minton Report. Again, thanks to the net this was available on Wikileaks – a site unthreatened by injunctions or super-injunctions because its ‘information is distributed across many jurisdictions, organizations and individuals’. As it claims on the site, ‘Once a document is leaked it is essentially impossible to censor’.

Then social media and the power of the ‘link economy’ kicked in. Hundreds, then thousands, of people started posting 140 character messages on Twitter expressing outrage at the injunction and pointing people to the Parliamentary question, articles about Trafigura, and the Minton Report.

Within hours #trafigura had become the number one trending topic in Twitter. In other words more people were tweeting about #trafigura than about anything else in the world. At one point four of the top five trending topics on Twitter were about this story (the fifth was ‘Google Wave’).

Then, shortly after 1pm, the editor of the Guardian posted a tweet saying Carter Ruck had backed down. They would not try to prolong the injunction, and the Guardian was free to mention the parliamentary question.

Much whooping and cheering on Twitter. Stephen Fry, comedian and uber twitterer, tweeted, "Carter-Ruck caves in! Hurrah! Trafigura will deny it had anything to do with Twitter, but we know don't we?".

But was it Twitter wot won it? And if so, what does this mean for press freedom and the future of injunctions?

Well, if it wasn’t Twitter then one can safely say it was not the other mainstream media outlets. Almost all other newspapers, and the BBC, remained silent during the course of the morning, prevented from publishing by the ‘super injunction’. The Telegraph broke the silence in the late morning but only to report that ‘Trafigura tops list of Twitter trending topics’. There was no mention in the article of the Guardian, Paul Farrelly, or the injunction.

Newspapers are still relatively easy targets for lawyers. They are institutions, they have their own lawyers. They have editors and journalists who can be sent to jail if they break the law.

Twitterers are a far less easy target. They (or rather ‘we’, since I twitter and was twittering on Tuesday morning) are mostly individuals, not institutions or outlets. To stop twitterers Carter Ruck would have to take on thousands of individuals – many of whom are tweeting pseudonymously. To use a military analogy, it’s like an army fighting a guerilla rather than a conventional war.

Yet will these guerilla twitterers have any substantive impact on the law? Well, if they can do another #trafigura with the next injunction then injunctions may be seen to be increasingly ineffective. But this is unlikely given the Guardian took a risk publishing as much information as it did about this super injunction – and probably only got away with it (if indeed it has got away with it) because the injunction appeared to prevent the paper from reporting on Parliament – a privilege held for over 200 years, since John Wilkes’ famous battle in the 18th century (Carter Ruck subsequently denied they tried to gag Parliamentary reporting). Whether or not a Parliamentary gag was intended, one would certainly hope MPs will now put an end to the so-called ‘super-injunction’.

Most injunctions are not about issues that may be debated in Parliament, and therefore do not raise issues of parliamentary privilege. The Guardian perhaps hopes it can use the Trafigura case as a lever to crank open the whole question of injunctions. Maybe. But Private Eye has been making a lot of noise about injunctions for a long while, yet there use appears to be increasing rather than decreasing.

Moreover, there is an understandable public interest in some injunctions. When a media storm grew around the 13 year old ‘baby father’ in February the family court stepped in and issued an injunction to prevent harm to the children involved in the story.

For commercial injunctions, history has shown that people cling most closely to things they are about to lose. So it is likely to be with these injunctions – at least 12 of which have already been served this year against the Guardian (presumably more against other outlets, though we don’t really know, since they are – by law – secret). Over time, and following similar #trafigura incidents, such injunctions should become less and less effective. But the Carter Rucks of this world will keep doggedly serving them up until it costs their clients more than the benefits of buying a temporary silence.

Still, the twitterati should take heart. This was a victory for press freedom, and a victory won by the power of collective voices.

Does it pay to challenge prevailing wisdom? Ask the Mirror

Rupert Murdoch is stepping off a tall building and is asking the rest of us to join him. So said Matt Kelly, Associate Editor of the Daily Mirror, about Murdoch’s commitment to construct paywalls across his sites. Kelly was talking at a panel he and I were on at this week’s 2015 Newsroom conference in Prague. Yet going by what Kelly subsequently said, the Mirror appears to be taking a similar – if perhaps slightly less suicidal – step into the unknown.

Newspapers should stop judging their online success by their number of unique users and by their page rank for stories on Google, Kelly argued. Focusing on these gives a false impression of the importance of their content to the audience. Even though the unique user figures of many papers now resemble financial bailout numbers – slightly under 30 million uniques at the Mail and the Guardian, for example – these figures have not translated into income.

This is because, if you break them down, you see that the vast majority are promiscuous and occasional users. Most people come to the site maybe once or twice a month, stay to look at a couple of stories and then go. The site is only a destination for about a third of its users. Another third come via Google and the final third from referrals.

With this amount of passing traffic it’s no great surprise that it’s difficult to monetize. Advertisers are skeptical enough about whether people take any notice of ads on sites – and if those ads are targeted at a mass, undifferentiated audience then it’s no wonder it’s considered to be of low value.

This is why the Mirror, following part of Jeff Jarvis’ now famous dictum – ‘do what you do best’ – has launched two entirely new sites based on some of the most popular and sticky elements of its content. 3AM.co.uk is a celebrity gossip and fashion website based on the highly successful double page spread in the print paper (though sharing almost no content). MirrorFootball is, as it sounds, a football site based around the Mirror’s extensive archive of stories and pictures (20 million photographs in its archive – 300,000 of which have so far been digitized).

Each of these sites deliberately ignores current measures of success. They are not ‘search engine optimized’ (SEO). They do not, in other words, construct the headlines and first paragraphs such that people searching under specific keywords will find them first. In the case of 3AM the sections are about intriguing readers rather than search engine robots (the tabs are, in order: Ooh…, Gasp!, Grrr!, Phwoar!, TeeHee!).

Kelly argues that these sites will develop a real relationship with their audience. They will not need great SEO because they will be destinations. Already, he says, 90% of the people coming to 3AM come to the site directly, rather than through search or referrals. And, once there, people read an average of seven stories, rather than the traditional one or two. Kelly was reluctant to give out any specific audience figures yet.

This deeper relationship – with a much more focused audience – will, the Mirror believes, create much richer revenue opportunities. It will be easier to sell premium advertising because the Mirror will know more about the audience and their behavior. They will be able to sell unique merchandise – particularly in the case of Mirror Football thanks to the archive. And they can sell tickets to exclusive events.

But will this strategy – to build a destination more analagous to a television channel than a traditional news website – work? I’d say 3AM has a decent chance of success but am much less sure about Mirror Football.

3AM is about access – access to celebrities, to gossip, to parties and to nightclubs. Going to the site is like being part of a club. And interest in one part of the club (Peaches Geldof, say) is not mutually exclusive with interest in another (Mischa Barton). Exclusivity is consistent with this and therefore in its favour. One can see how, if the Mirror’s smart, it can extend the brand into events, fashion and spin-offs.

It will be harder to monetise Mirror Football. Though the Mirror has a tremendous football archive it does not have exclusive access to football clubs, or to footage. For this reason alone it is hard to see why it would be a primary destination above the site of the football club itself. Most football fans will have greater affinity to their club than to news organisations that cover their club.

Then there is the conscious decision not to adopt the second half of Jeff Jarvis' dictum - 'and link to the rest'. The Mirror will not, Kelly said, make it a policy to link to lots of other sites, but try to keep them on its own as long as possible. Again, this flies against some conventional wisdom about the link economy.

But both strategies – 3AM and Mirror Football – are consistent with the move towards specialization. For many commercial news organizations this is a natural step. Find what you’re good at, where you have a competitive advantage and where you see a focused audience, and focus on that. It’s a strategy very familiar to the consumer magazine industry.

Of course this further accentuates the bigger question - what happens to the general news? – but that's for a separate discussion.

Certainly, the Mirror has made a brave decision that ought to be watched carefully by its competitors.

See also Greenslade blog, 'Mirror's website supremo: forget unique users and build a loyal audience instead'

Paywalls, Dogmatism and my Hansel and Gretel Theory

Arguments about paywalls around news content are becoming increasingly dogmatic and ideological. As a result, lots of sensible ideas about how to make money from new models of journalism are being obscured. Not least, how to add value to existing content so it becomes more identifiable, more searchable, and helps lead people ‘back home’ (that’s where the Hansel and Gretel theory comes in).

On one side of the fence you have pro-paywallers, led by the Murdochs, for whom paywalls seem to answer the question, ‘how are we going to solve the economic crisis in news?’. They’re in the process of trying to convince a great swathe of big news organizations to stop providing their content free at the point of delivery. By doing this, the theory goes, they will enhance the value of news content by reviving scarcity and convince a new generation to start paying for news. The ‘freeniacs are wrong’ writes Nicholas Carr, ‘Charging people for news, even online, is by no means an impossible dream’.

On the other side you have the anti-paywallers, led by a growing and increasingly coherent group of technologists, liberal educationalists, and bloggers for whom paywalls represent a complete misunderstanding of the new era of information abundance. To them, the construction of paywalls is a frantic attempt to recover a 20th century era of constrained media by a generation that ‘just doesn’t get it’. Building paywalls is ‘desperate stuff’, writes Stephen Foley, ‘It won't work, and if newspaper executives on both sides of the Atlantic follow Mr Murdoch's apparent lead, I predict we will witness the collective suicide of scores of news organisations in the US and elsewhere’.

Both sides are becoming more and more trenchant in their beliefs and ramping up the rhetoric. But, as with the fight between the Big-Endians and Little-Endians in Gulliver’s Travels (about which end to crack open your egg), this ideological dogmatism is distracting us from the more difficult questions. And it doesn’t get us much closer to working out long term ways in which to enable journalism to pay for itself.

The pro-paywallers need to acknowledge that paywalls are not the Holy Grail that will solve all their economic woes. They should listen to polls – like the PaidContent Harris poll this week - indicating that most people would leave their favourite news site if it started charging , in favour of a free site elsewhere on the web. They should accept that it will not be possible to close the digital Pandora’s Box that is the internet and recreate the constrained published content environment of the twentieth century.

The anti-paywallers should concede that there will be areas of content where paywalls work. Paywalls do not have to cordon off all - or even the majority - of information on a site. The Racing Post has a smart and sustainable hybrid strategy of offering significant amounts of content free, and only charging for that which it knows its readers highly value (as reported in the Independent earlier this week). For £7.50 a month members get a horse racing TV channel streamed live to their computer (for which 3,000 people signed up in the first week). For £9.50 a month members can receive a ‘premium tipping service’ and for £199.95 a year they can get ‘ultimate membership’ with access to tips, races and the Racing Post database. Equally, the antis should acknowledge that journalism – as we’ve grown to understand it – is far from free to produce.

Mired in ideological silos, the pro and anti-paywallers are also missing some of the most important aspects of the debate. How do you add value to the content itself such that people will be more willing to pay for it? A question made more urgent for the Murdoch camp by the fact that most content becomes ‘invisible’ as soon as it goes behind a paywall.

Here’s where my Hansel and Gretel theory comes in. For those that don’t remember the Grimm fairy tale it goes something like this. Woodcutter’s wife convinces woodcutter they can’t afford to feed the children. Woodcutter therefore dumps children in the forest. But clever children find their way back by leaving a trail of pebbles. So woodcutter dumps them in forest again. This time, with only a breadcrumb trail, they can’t get home. They then get imprisoned in a gingerbread house by an old witch and… you can read the rest here.

News stories have been, up till now, a little like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. Spread by news organizations round the web, they quickly attract an audience, but that audience gobbles them up and rarely follows the breadcrumbs back home. What if, instead of breadcrumbs, journalists and news organizations dropped pebbles? That way people wouldn’t eat them and there would be more chance they could lead them back home.

The difference between a breadcrumb story and a pebble story is metadata. Embed some good consistent metadata in a story and it turns something ephemeral into something much more solid. People suddenly know, for example, where it came from. A story can have the equivalent of an address and a zip code built into it, so people follow it back – by whatever trail they want.

Metadata has the significant added benefits that it is visible and malleable. It can be identified and picked up by search engines and aggregators. It can then be displayed such that people have enough information to know if they want more. A little like seeing the front page headlines on the news stand before deciding to put your hand in your pocket for some change. It can also be used for cross referencing stories, for digging through the archive, for building mash-ups.

Google has an example of how, using metadata, it can display more information about a site in its ‘search snippets’. Similarly, we (the Media Standards Trust) have been working out how to best integrate metadata in news through our Knight / MacArthur Transparency Initiative.

The ‘great paywall debate’ is not going to end anytime soon – but needs to be a little less polarized than it has been to date. Working out how to leaving a trail of pebbles would be a good start.

Transparency in journalism - a new meme?

There’s momentum gathering around the importance of transparency to the future of journalism.

I’m no expert on how ideas move from the margins to the mainstream. Or indeed how or when an idea becomes a ‘meme’ and starts to take on a life of its own. But I get a strong sense that transparency is gaining traction in journalism; that it is changing from a theoretical construct to a practical requirement.

Three academics, one from New Cross, one from Dortmund, and one from Karlstad, each gave fascinating and compelling presentations about the growing importance of transparency in news at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff last week.

‘[E]stablishing new standards of transparency could help protect professional reporting in the new, networked era’ Angela Phillips, from Goldsmiths (New Cross), argued in ‘Transparency and the new ethics of journalism’. Klaus Meier (University of Dortmund) put it even more strongly, suggesting that ‘at the centre of the reasons for the demand for transparent journalism is the concern for the survival of journalism, because journalism is under threat from a crisis of credibility and a changed role in the digital age’. And Michael Karlsson from Karlstad, Sweden cited specific examples of news organizations that had experimented with aspects of transparency.

I’m biased of course, since we (the Media Standards Trust) have been leading a non-profit ‘Transparency Initiative’ in news for about 18 months, joint funded by the MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation, which took a big step forward in July when we launched ‘Value Added News’ and the Associated Press announced they would be integrating hNews – the Value Added News data format – into their articles from November.

But there is a compelling intellectual case for transparency, as these academics emphasised:

It enables differentiation – in the digital world, where information is infinitely and infinitely replicable, being transparent about provenance and sourcing helps distinguish journalism from other content on the web

It puts a premium on original reporting – if you know when a piece was first published and by who, then it’s a lot easier to see who got their first – even if the story is replicated ad infinitum. ‘If every time an original story is produced it is properly credited and points traffic back to the source, then it will also, albeit at the margins, help to stimulate greater differentiation of content’ (Phillips)

It incentivizes journalists to behave differently – ‘‘If the news pool is to be retained (even in its current much reduced form) then news organisations need to have some incentive to interrogate and investigate at every level of society (not just when there is a big story to cover) and journalists need to feel some kind of investment in standards which set them apart from casual users of the internet’ (Phillips).

It demystifies journalistic practice and clarifies journalistic values (from Meier) – by making clear, as much as possible, where a journalist got their story from and how they put it together

It enables evaluation - ‘Transparency permits quality evaluations by the audience and thus can strengthen credibility (Neuberger, 2005, p. 327)’

It reinforces trust – most news organizations are still relying too much on their news ‘brand’ to ensure trust. Yet in a digital environment the brand is necessarily diluted – partly because there is so much more content on news sites (and much of it UGC), partly because people tend to come via search engines not, as in the print version, from the front page. Therefore, as Meier writes, ‘evidence of trustworthiness must be given repeatedly: Every newsroom, and basically also every single story must show why they deserve more trust than dozens or even hundreds of others on the same topic’ (Meier)

It encourages diversity (from Phillips) – by creating a premium around independent, original reporting

It helps enable networked journalism – ‘If the ‘public’ is to act as a corrective it needs to be aware of where the information originated’ (Phillips).

There are lots of different ways to make news more transparent. You can make clear the process by which news is gathered and published. You can show people editorial decision making in practice (e.g. filming editorial conferences). You can open up the whole method by which news is produced to involve the public. Karlsson called this last one ‘participatory transparency’, in which people are given an opportunity to participate in the news process (as additional sources, as critics, as monitors, as promoters); as opposed to ‘disclosure transparency’, in which a news organization / journalist discloses how they put a news piece together.

There are also obstacles to making news transparent. Meier cited three: that it may be considered ‘a waste of time, energy and other precious resources’, that ‘too much information about a complex body of source material could divert attention “from what is really important”’, and that it might even represent “a potential threat to autonomy” of a newsroom. He could have added a fourth, that news organisations are often extremely anxious not to give anything away that might help their competition.

These obstacles have prevented transparency having much impact so far. As this research showed, transparency is still a minority pursuit. This is also because there is little tradition of transparency, particularly in European newsrooms. Historically it has been considered a sign of vulnerability for news organizations not to give an impression that they know everything.

But transparency is the logical way to go, and listening to these academics this is starting to become accepted. According to Meier:

‘It is not just newsrooms in different parts of the world with different journalistic traditions that are talking increasingly about transparency and experimenting with it in their daily work (Deggans, 2006; Smolkin, 2006; Elia, 2008). Journalism scholars are also focusing more and more on this topic: It has been incorporated into textbooks on media ethics (Craft & Heim, 2009; Meier, 2009a), is the subject of conferences (Ziomek, 2005) or of theoretical approaches (Plaisance, 2007). Especially in articles dealing with the changes in journalistic roles and values brought about by the Internet’ (Meier)

Transparency is not the Holy Grail of news. Making clear where your article came from doesn’t matter much if the article is no good. Nor can transparency solve the economic crisis in funding original journalism. But it must be a pre-requisite to finding a sustainable solution.

The three presentations / articles have not yet been published. They are ‘Transparency and the new Ethics of Journalism, by Angela Phillips (Goldsmiths); ‘Transparency in Journalism: Credibility and trustworthiness in the digital future’ by Klaus Meier (University of Dortmund) and ‘Rituals of Transparency: Evaluating online news outlets use of transparency rituals in the US, UK and Sweden’ by Michael Karlsson (Karlstad University).

You can read more about the Media Standards Trust’s Transparency Initiative, and see how to make your news more transparent, at http://valueaddednews.org.