The blogosphere and twiterati are looking self-satisfied and complacent about the variation in the gagging order against the Guardian which now allows the paper paper to report on discussion in parliament relating to a question in parliament. As Philip Virgo says in his When IT meets politics blog at Computer weekly:
Had Google and Yahoo not [...]
The Guardian is still forbidden by the terms of the existing injunction, granted by a vacation duty judge, Mr Justice Maddison, to give further information about the Minton report, or its contents. So, the ability to report Parliament is a small victory.
For any journalist reading the terms of that super-gagging order is frightening. It should [...]
There is a smell of revolution in the air and it gives British journalism its biggest challenge for a very, very long time. With parliament devalued to Zimbabwe dollar levels the debate about our constitutional future has to be conducted in the media.
Will a media which has long been a part of the Westminster village [...]
Am I alone in smelling a red herring being dragged through London newsrooms? The revelation that an ex-SAS officer, John Wick, was the man who hawked the MP’s expenses data just seems too contrived.
The story first appeared on Friday in the Wall Street Journal. It is all too easy to start developing conspiracy theories, but [...]
Every day, while some MPs caught caught trousering dubious expenses compete to sound as if they have just completed time in a soviet re-eduction camp, others mouth ritual condemnation of sensational media.
Yet the most cogent criticism of the of the media’s role in the current crisis comes not from and MP but a journalist. Martin [...]
Until today I had not noticed that the Guardian put on the web a month ago mapped data from the earlier, and limited, release of information about MPs expenses.
Charles Arthur in the Technology section today alerts us to the item he put on the Datablog on April 3. And his suggestion that there should be [...]
Its odd that members of parliament who approve of the police paying informers cry foul when a newspaper pays a supergrass for information that reveals their own misdeeds.
They moan about journalists who are paid more than they are, being gleeful about the revelations of the details of their expenses. Well some journalists may be paid [...]
Henry Porter has a nicely evocative piece in the Observer today about life on a regional paper in the 1970s and some important things to say about the importance of local papers. He writes:
All news starts off local. Without reporters dropping into a court case, pestering the manager of an NHS trust, sitting through an [...]
According to a rather unscientific looking poll in the Atlantic, media insiders say internet hurts journalism. It may be hurting great swathes of mainstream media but journalism is empowered by the internet.
We need someone, another King Canute, to convince these naysayers that the tide of the internet cannot be turned around. Even if all the [...]
Peter Preston puts forward the idea of a broadband licence fee to pay for jouralism in his Observer column today. Whatever the initial reactions — mine is favourable — it is something which deserves extensive debate.
How to pay for journalism in the future in the UK has become mired in the similar but different debate [...]
