Stephen Glover in the Independent yesterday was rightly concerned by the growth of free newspapers produced by councils. “State newspapers are rivalling the free press — right under your nose,” was the headline.

I am just as concerned with a council run website. But the arguments are similar to those of Glover:

Just when many local newspapers are fighting to stay alive, and the shares of some of their owners such as Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press are reaching new lows, this development threatens to finish off the weakest among them. Councils who publish their own propaganda rags are taking no risk, since local council taxpayers are effectively putting up the capital. If their giveaways don’t attract much advertising, and go on losing moderate amounts of money, that is hardly going to matter to them.

This is surely an abuse of state power, albeit on so small a scale that it has barely provoked any criticism, though The Newspaper Society, which represents regional and local newspapers, is up in arms. If the Government were to start producing publications to rival the national press, there would be an outcry; when the same thing happens on a local level it is deemed acceptable behaviour.

One Suffolk website is a partnership of the county and district councils, the police and a health authority and is Government funded. The about us page says:

onesuffolk is primarily a website providing local government services through the internet. However, a section of the site will be dedicated to the community, enabling parish councils, community and voluntary organisations to participate by contributing information about their particular area. We need everyone to be involved in contributing to what will be an innovative and exciting development!

The first purpose, providing local government services through the internet, is unobjectionable. That would be rather like Directgov which carries the tag line “Public services all in one place”.

But One Suffolk is nothing like that. Five items are highlighted on the front page:

1. A review of a touring company production of “We didn’t mean to go to sea” by Arthur Ransome,
2. A story about a new arts association in Hadleigh,
3. The monthly village feature, this month on Levington,
4. A plug for the free websites offered to local clubs and organisations by One Suffolk,
5. And a reminder that smells, abandoned cars and noisy neighbours can be reported through the site.

The last one is an example of the site meeting its objective of providing local government services. There are also “traffic alerts” but those all turn out to be information about where mobile traffic cameras are to be positioned. To find out about road works there is a link to Suffolk County Council where the latest information is dated July 11.

Finding out about many local government services is not easy. There are no obvious links from the front page, but a menu link to business provides options such as licensing, planning and abnormal loads. Clicking on planning eventually produces a search of the site for all stories with “planning” in them. There are no links to the planning departments of the various councils, let alone a combined database of applications.

There is very little evidence that One Suffolk is doing much to achieve the purpose of providing local government services. It is more like the plaything of some people who can set up a community news site without taking any risk.
That would not matter so much if getting traffic was not crucial to the future of independent local media.

While councils have a duty to make their services known to tax payers, it is not their purpose to provide theatre reviews and village features at the tax payers expense. That is the role of newspapers, parish magazines and independent community websites who do it without dipping into the public purse.

Peter Preston in his Observer media column today writes about the BBC’s plans for local on-demand web sites with up to 20 minutes a day of video and the opposition from the regional newspaper giants. “It is,” he says, “a baroque row.” Not sure about the adjective but I see what he is getting at.

He writes of “hyper-local internet video sites which conflict directly with the sites that Johnston and Trinity (among others) are creating as their own escape paths to a digital future”.

That is surely a part of it but it seems to me to be more about preserving the monopolies the big groups have built up over the years by buying daily and weekly newspapers across the land. The comments of David Newell, director of the Newspaper Society, the owner’s union, quoted in Hold the Front Page, bear this out:

The BBC should not spend public money duplicating local news services already provided by existing local media companies. This was acknowledged by the BBC when it withdrew its plans for ultra-local television last year.

The BBC’s 60 local websites already compete head-to-head with regional newspaper websites and its expansion plans, combined with its cross-promotional power, threaten to steal away audiences and undermine the ability of publishers to pursue their own digital development strategies, which are so important to the future of local media in the UK.

Nationally newspapers have competed with the BBC since the start of news on the web. The result is that we have some of the best news websites in the world. A little more competition in the regions would be welcome.

Peter Preston uses the term “hyper-local” while others have used “ultra-local”. The BBC itself uses an unadorned “local” for its plan to set up sites in 60 areas across the UK. They would serve, on average, populations of 1 million each.

The one they are planning for Suffolk, where I live, would be aimed at a population approaching 700,000. It is an area over much of which Archant has a virtual monopoly of print news. The BBC would aim at an area roughly the same as the circulation area of Archant’s East Anglian Daily Times.

The way the cost of the service is being presented in newspapers is typified by Preston’s phrase: “Ofcom letting the BBC spend £68m of licence fee money.” This is for a period of three years, and spending would reach £23 million in 2011/12. As journalists we play with phrases for emotion power. From my perspective, the sites would cost an average of £350,000 a year, the cost of a modest family home.

It is worth going back to the source material and looking at BBC’s proposal. Done properly, the scheme could help make local independent news websites more viable. Most of the local content would be made available for embedding (with BBC branding) in both commercial and not-for-profit sites to supplement their own coverage. The BBC also says it would link to coverage by other local news providers.

For anyone who is thinking of news sites which are really ultra-local this is promising. But I do feel their proposal to spend about £800,000 a year by 2012/3 on buying video news from external providers is not nearly enough. It works out at little more than an average £13,ooo freelance budget for each site: the price of a modest family car.

Last week a district judge in Norwich barred the press from printing the addresses of two police sergeants accused of failing to take proper care of a man who was rushed to hospital after a spell in the cells.

The Eastern Daily Press argued in the magistrates court that the order was contrary to legislation and case law and should not be used to protect the “comfort or feelings” of defendants. The judge disagreed, saying there was a serious risk that members of the criminal community would target the officers and their families.

The accepted use of the Contempt of Court Act to protect the victims of blackmail was mentioned in the EDP report. A few days later the Sunday Times reported that two men had been charged with blackmail and the target was a member of the royal family.

I wondered whether giving that fact would lead to a jigsaw identification. Very quickly another piece was put into puzzle with reports, sourced to Buckingham Palace, that the target was a junior member of the family who did not undertake official royal duties.

Inevitably the name of the member of the royal family was quickly on blogs and then in newspapers outside the UK. And, being just a Google search away, effectively published in this country.

Even if the royal connection was kept secret when the case came to trial it is difficult to imagine that it and the name of the victim would not have eventually come to light.

While I feel the increasing use of the Contempt of Court Act, as in Norwich, to restrict publication of court details is undermining the principle of open justice, I have always believed it is wrong to publish the names of blackmail victims.

The Crown Prosecution Service puts the case for secrecy in blackmail cases clearly:

Although rare, blackmail is one of the ugliest and most vicious of offences. Its victims are vulnerable because in order to bring the blackmailer to justice they must themselves make public the secrets the blackmailer is threatening to expose.

The Crown Prosecution Service will not hesitate to prosecute blackmail cases and we will always seek to protect the anonymity of blackmail victims. We recognise that victims may be reluctant to come forward and give evidence against a blackmailer unless such protection is granted.

As in rape cases the protection of the identity of the victim makes it more likely that criminals will be brought before the courts.

After reading the comments on Jay Rosen’s post attacking Michael Skube’s Los Angeles Times piece on blogging, I went out and bought a copy of The Cult of the Amateur.

It was probably only a few of the 339 comments that motivated me but they gave an overall impression of a bunch of people who simply hated traditional media. This was one comment: “There’s a war on for the minds of America, and the blogs are winning. The trad media is terrified, because they know it. Their pedestal has been kicked out from under them, and they just can’t stand that.”

And another: “YouTube is doing to TV news what blogs are doing to pundits. In a year or two CNN will be as parasitic upon the internet as we have even been upon the MSM.”

Most of the comments were responding to Rosen’s call for examples of blogs doing original reporting. Of course they do. But there was an overall tone suggesting it was about a battle between bloggers and traditional media. The commenters were not company I would care to keep.

Skube’s piece was a polemic emphasising and generalising to make its point. I was undermined by inaccuracy. Yet why did it being about an outpouring of vitriol?

It was clearly written to be provocative but concluded with a point that needs debating:

The more important the story, the more incidental our opinions become. Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life. Reasoned argument, as well as top-of-the-head comment on the blogosphere, will follow soon enough, and it should. But what lodges in the memory, and sometimes knifes us in the heart, is the fidelity with which a writer observes and tells. The word has lost its luster, but we once called that reporting.

Rosen has since responded in the LA Times.

Andrew Keen’s argument in The Cult of the Amateur is not so very different. In essence it is that our cultural values are being overturned. He puts it like this:

What happens, you might ask, when ignorance meets egotism meets bad taste meets mob rule?
The monkeys take over. Say good-bye to today’s experts and cultural gatekeepers — our reporters, news anchors, editors, music companies, and Hollywood movie studios. In today’s cult of the amateur, the monkeys are running the show. Wither their infinite typewriters, they are authoring the future. And we may not like how it reads.

Keen, unlike Skube, cannot be accused of not knowing or understanding the web. He has his own blog, has been involved in web start-ups and commentated widely on culture, media and technology. His central argument comes across in an interview on the Colbert Report:
He has sparked a serious debate including a fascinating exchange between himself and Emily Bell, editor in chief of Guardian Unlimited, which nicely demonstrates how the web can facilitate the development of argument and counter argument.

Jeff Howe put a strong argument for not ignoring Keen saying his arguments will “sound mightily persuasive to a significant constituency who do believe the Internet is primarily a repository of porn, spam and corrosive amateurism. Failing to recognize that the choir to which Keen preaches might just be larger than our own congregation is an arrogant, and potentially irreversible blunder.”

I read The Cult of the Amateur with growing frustration, feeling Keen wanted to put the genie back in the bottle. The chapter headed “Solutions” suggested he might have some answers. On newspapers his best shot is to comment that Guardian Unlimited has “managed to achieve some measure of economic success by effectively balancing its costs with its online advertising sales”.

That does not answer the shortfall caused when the loss of print sales and advertising revenue does not match the income from online advertising, which is doesn’t. Howard Owens is another who has engaged in the debate, in a series of three posts. In the third post he says:

The media train is hurtling forward, but journalists are not driving. Even the biggest traditional media companies are not at the wheel. In fact, there is nobody making sure we stay on the rails. The train is propelled by collective action — the action of ambitious entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and investors, technology researchers and engineers, computer programmers and amateur hackers and curious and demanding audiences, as well as some of us in the media, with our constant demands for new, different and better. All of these swirling forces create the turbulence that keeps the train on its collusion course with our collective destiny.

And I have no idea what that is, or if we’ll ever really get there.

Scary stuff, to be sure, but that’s the reality of the situation.

So it’s adapt or die.

That just about sums up our knowledge at the moment. It also takes me back to my starting point which is that there are a lot of people, confused and worried about the uncertain future of journalism who need to be a part of the discussion. Calling on Skube to retire or accusing Keen of Stalinism is not likely to make them feel there is a debate worth joining.

I hope there will be all opinions present when Andrew Keen takes part in a discussion moderated by Richard Sambrook at the Frontline Club in London on September 6. I would be there is I wasn’t flying to Spain that evening,

If any of those people who believe bloggers are a complete waste of time and that blogs are no more than rants from corner bar stools, happen across this post, they should should read the following. It will confirm their opinion:

My advice? Retire.

Commentary on Blogs: All the noise that fits by Michael Skube in the Los Angeles Times, Aug. 19, 2007.

Retire, man. I’m serious. You’re an embarrassment to my profession, to the university where you teach, and to the craft of reporting you claim to defend. It is time for you to quit, as you’ve clearly called it quits on learning— and reporting. Ring this guy up and ask him to go bass fishing or something. You’re not doing anyone any good— you’re just insulting your own bio. And when you’re done lecturing us on “the patient fact-finding of reporters,” tell the godforsaken LA Times they’re going to have to run a correction. The Post hasn’t won a Pulitzer for its reporting on Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Jeez.

The author is Jay Rosen, also a journalism academic, and one of the people who has done most to develop ideas about the ways blogs can facilitate pro-am journalism.

He argues his points well, although sometimes at too great a length, thoughtfully and influentially. Suddenly we get this example of everything the critics of blogging light on. So what made him take-off on this ill-tempered, inelegant post which does no service to his cause?

Michael Skube, who teaches journalism at Elon University in North Carolina, wrote an op ed piece headed “Blogs: all the noise that fits” in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday. The second paragraph read:

Bloggers now are everywhere among us, and no one asks if we don’t need more full-throated advocacy on the Internet. The blogosphere is the loudest corner of the Internet, noisy with disputation, manifesto-like postings and an unbecoming hatred of enemies real and imagined.

Rosen has provide ample evidence to support the final phrase.

Skube makes his case about blogs and presents his view strongly, writing:

One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more. The opinions are occasionally informed, often tiresomely cranky and never in doubt. Skepticism, restraint, a willingness to suspect judgment and to put oneself in the background — these would not seem to be a blogger’s trademarks.

Overstated, yes. But but there is nothing in the opinion that we do not hear everyday. A blog is like a piece of paper, you can write anything on it: some of it may be journalism, most of will not be.

Skube’s article does contain errors. The Washington Post did not win a Pulitzer for reporting on the Walter Reed hospital. That mistake remains unexplained.

He used the name of Josh Marshall, of Talking Points Memo in a paragraph about bloggers who are “insistent partisans in political debate”. In an email to Marshall, Skube explained: “Your name was inserted late by an editor who perhaps thought I needed to cite more examples …”

Some sloppy journalism has been happening at the LA Times but it does not justify the contentless diatribe launched by Rosen. He does debate a disservice.

So the picture that seemed to confirm a great white shark off the Cornish coast at Newquay was a hoax. It was all part of the silly season gift that began when a man on holiday at St Ives filmed a shark, claimed to be a man-eating great white. The Sun made a lot of it and, with varying degrees of scepticism, so did the rest of the media.

The Guardian today gets a bite at the space-filling cherry by devoting a whole page to the revelation that the picture of a great white from Newquay, further up the coast, was actually taken off Cape Town, South Africa.

The revelation came from the Newquay Voice which had had interviewed the man who had provided the picture to their rival, the Newquay Guardian. Kevin Keeble said: “I took the picture while I was on a fishing trip in Cape Town and just sent it in as a joke. I didn’t expect anyone to be daft enough to take it seriously.”

The tourist industry is happy that the story (BBC) has put Cornwall on the map and newspapers have filled the open spaces of August newsprint. As a reporter I tend to shrug at such silly season stories on the grounds that they are entertaining, few people really believe them, and they do no harm.

But do they diminish trust? Turn the page in the Guardian and we learn in an interview with Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, that it would conduct research into the public’s expectations.

He says: “Do people have different expectations from a piece of fiction to the news or a documentary? I think they do. And what do you do in that grey area in the middle where you’ve got mockumentaries and fictionalised history and so on. What are the standards that should prevail there?”

Few newspapers would welcome being so publicly under the microscope as the BBC is from its own regulator.

Can someone tell me the commercial, or even, potentially commercial value of MSM setting up in Second Life? Back in October last year Reuters opened a Second Life bureau staffed by reporter Adam Pasick.

Now, Journalism.co.uk reports, the Telegraph has moved in to build a recreation of the garden it sponsored at the Chelsea Flower Show. And  Sky News has built a version of its newsroom there. The BBC is to broadcast the Money Programme in Second Life.

It can’t be cheap to set up like this in Second Life with its six million registered residents, mostly absentee virtual home owners. And how many of these people are British? How many of those will be driven to do something which will earn the real world sponsors money, like buying the paper, taking out a Sky subscription or just seeing the paid-for ads on a website.

The whole thing looks like one of those "What about Second Life? We should so something there," ideas. Perhaps editors just want boast to their contemporaries: "I am bigger than you in Second Life."

Maybe I am missing something.

Roy Greenslade has picked up on Telegraph editor Will Lewis’s opening address at the 6th International Newsroom Summit and thinks it implies that the Telegraph group is going to follow other mainstream publishers into battle against Google.

According to ifra, Lewis called on newspapers to welcome transformation as a friend. The traditional business model would be replaced and he warned news organisations making the digital transition must both invest in training and be alert to attempts to cannibalise their material. He continued:

Our ability to protect that content is under consistent attack from those such as Google and Yahoo, who wish to access it for free. These companies are seeking to build a business model on the back of our own investment without recognition; all media companies need to be on guard for this. Success in the digital age, as we have seen in our own company, is going to require massive investment; [we need] effective legal protection for our content in such a way that allows us to invest for the future.

It would seem to be an obvious step for publishers to follow those who have reached agreements with the secretive Google company. It is difficult to build a picture of what is happening but Lewis’s speech follows one earlier this month by Samuel Zell, new owner of the huge Tribune group in the US .

In a speech (Washington Post) at Stanford Law School he said newspapers could not economically sustain the practice of allowing their articles, photos and other content to be used free by other Internet news aggregators.

He asked the question: “If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?” and provided his own answer: “Not very.”

Associated Press has an agreement with Google and a copyright case brought by Agence France-Presse was settled recently. In Belgium cases have either resulted in settlement or a finding against Google.

As Greenslade points out these are piecemeal agreements and, “Globally, publishers and news agencies need to get together to reach a sensible, comprehensive, macro agreement with Google and Yahoo.”

It will certainly be a big fight. As Business Week pointed out recently: “Google is ground zero in a battle among traditional media and tech industry leaders and startups alike for the hearts and minds of the world’s consumers—or at least their eyeballs and wallets. ”
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Every big story that affects a community has brought complaints of press intrusion by reporters who descend on the place or use the phone searching for accounts and opinions. It has always been so and is again with the Virginia Tech killings.

Yet there is a difference: the internet. Not only are people blogging and putting personal accounts and pictures on social media sites, but the numbers of reporters looking for a piece of the story is multiplied.

What we will never know is how many people complain about intrusion and how many welcome the chance to tell the world of their experiences. Some reporters behave insensitively pushing people who clearly do not want to talk.

The new issue is the use of blog and social media material and the cyber-doorstepping that goes with it. Once you had to be there, camped outside a house but now now anyone can do it.

Papers and broadcasters covering an overseas story had to wait for whatever their own staff and agencies could provide. If it was big enough a fireman would be flown in.

One of the people looking for new information from a computer terminal in the UK was the BBC’s Robin Hamman. He has reflected sensitively on what he did both on his own blog and in comments made to Media Guardian which devotes two pages to the debate today:

BBC new media journalist Robin Hamman discovered a blog entry, claiming to be an eyewitness account, and was asked to verify its accuracy. He chose to approach the author by instant message, but as the day wore on many journalists - including one from the Guardian - simply added comments saying “talk to me, please, here’s my number”.

The onslaught angered many other surfers, who saw the torrent of media requests as invasive. The reaction made Hamman reconsider his objectives. “My approach was, I think, professional and sensitive,” he said. “But now, after seeing the way the press descended upon him, I wonder if I should have made that approach, primarily for confirmation purposes, at all.”

The Media Guardian spread asks: “Were reporters were right to solicit information from students’ web pages? Patrick Barkham answers “Yes” in the first part of the web story followed by Jeff Jarvis saying “No”.

Barkham, a Guardian feature writer, justifies the approaches writing:

In terms of invasiveness, asking questions on a blog is the equivalent of a reporter approaching a group of people having a conversation on a street by the site of a tragedy. A blog is not a private home; posting questions or invitations to talk further is not as intrusive as knocking on a victim’s door.

Many bloggers don’t realise that the fundamental reason for asking questions on blogs, or on streets, is to better establish the authenticity of eyewitness accounts. There are plenty of fantasists and hoaxers in the real world and online. Sometimes witnesses agree to talk to us; at other times we retreat in the face of these familiar “vulture” jibes.

And he concludes:

To those bloggers, I’m sorry: big media is here to stay online - for as long as audiences want information created by the rigorous questioning and testing for truth undertaken by responsible professional journalists.

Jarvis, who is a journalism professor at New York’s City University as well as a Guardian columnist and blogger, believes the journalistic wish to verify will become increasingly impractical in the new architecture of news where anyone can publish. He writes:

Increasingly, they will share what they know on their own sites - often intending not to publish to the world but simply to inform their family and friends. Because this is on the public web, we get to listen in; we learn more.

Yet it’s doubtful that these witnesses will want to - or should have to - field challenges from scores of reporters, each exercising his journalistic duty to vet, or his business reflex to negotiate exclusives.

He continues:

It will become increasingly difficult to vet every story, link, or source. And it’s rather anachronistic to believe that the press can verify and edit all news, when the public can and does go around the press to find sources directly - via links and searches - on the web.

He advocates linking to blog posts which have not been vetted. I find the Jarvis approach disturbing. It is consistent with his belief that readers will become media literate enough to find their own way though large volumes of unmediated material.

Last week when I challenged his view that exclusives were no longer important, he responded that I was “looking at this from the perspective of the journalist rather than the readers.” On the verification of material from blogs I also take the perspective of a journalist. It is that while some readers may wish to plough though unchecked raw material, most still want news which has been vetted by a trusted media organisation. To start linking to web sites with the warning “We have no idea whether this person even exists or whether what they say is true” would only confuse the readers and viewers and undermine trust.

Coverage of events like the Virginia Tech shootings, the London transport bombings and hurricane Katrina would not be complete without a rush to predict the end of news as we know.

Robin Hamman at his Cybersoc blog put it like this yesterday:

The past few days have pointed to a future where audiences are likely to look first to blogs and other forms of participatory media for first hand accounts of emerging stories before turning to the mainstream media. Of course mainstream media will still have a role to play - confirming those stories, providing thoroughly researched facts, and gathering comment from credible sources.

Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media, did not switch on his TV until the evening on the day of the shootings in Blacksburg. Instead he “used the online media — including the major news sites — to get the latest information, sifting it, making judgments about credibility and reliability as I read and watched and listened. That, too, is the future in many cases.”

He points out that the “citizen media” component is not new and writes of the home movie footage of the shooting of President Kennedy which became an essential part of the historical record. He continues:

In 1963, one man with a camera captured the event on film. In a very few years, a similar situation would be captured by thousands of people — all holding high-resolution video cameras — and all of those cameras would be connected to high-speed digital networks.

That is different.

Gillmor says, “We will still need journalists to help sort things out” and concludes:

We used to say that journalists write the first draft of history. Not so, not any longer. The people on the ground at these events write the first draft. This is not a worrisome change, not if we are appropriately skeptical and to find sources we trust. We will need to retool media literacy for the new age, too.

Giving everyone with an internet connection access to much of the raw material of news is new and changes things. It opens up traditional journalism to more, valuable scrutiny and challenge.

But I find it difficult to believe that the mass of people will turn first to blogs, YouTube and Flickr as first sources of news. This takes me back to Pew Research’s latest report on what What Americans Know (figures below are taken from the questionnaire) released this week.

One of the options in the question about sources of news, was “Read online blogs where people discuss events in the news”. The figure asnwering “yes” was 11%. Only listening to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show scored lower(8%). By contrast 55% read a daily newspaper, 46% watched nightly network news and 39% CNN.

I doubt very much whether people en masse will ever choose to go to unmediated material as their first source of news. It is simply too time consuming and too difficult to make sense of it.

The work of journalists covering any big story is essentially to find, aggregate and select. It is work that requires a team of people, reporters, photographers, news editors, copy tasters… It is not just the reporters on the ground but those in the office who hit the phones trying to find eye witnesses, experts, officials, friends, relatives and anyone else who might contribute to the story.

Added to that mix we now have blogs, YouTube and flickr which produce dramatic stories and pictures. They help to build up the overall picture. Unlike the traditional reporter’s interviews everyone has direct access to the material.

Mainstream media’s websites are also soliciting videos, stills and personal experiences of major events. This “participatory media” is certainly changing the way journalists go about assembling the story.

But that does not mean it is going to take over. Journalists have always had to try to make sense out of the noise of conflicting information, multitudes of sources and confusion. Now there are more sources and that makes the job tougher yet.

It was hard enough when the volume of material was restricted by the capacity of the teleprinter feeds. Then electronic transmission to desktop computers increased the volume and now the internet produces even more material to be read.

Dan Gillmor as a journalist, has the experience to sift information and make judgments on credibility and reliability: most people do not. Neither do they have the time.