The recession aside, the two biggest threats to newspaper journalism as we know it are:
- The rise of the ‘blogosphere’ and citizen journalism.
- The increasing prominence of European privacy laws in UK courts.
As I’ve said previously, with breaking news on the 7/7 London tube bombings and the Buncefield Fuel Depot explosion coming from ordinary people with mobile phones, digital cameras and a blog or Flickr account, some people have begun asking, “Who needs journalists?”
European privacy laws have given the press a further knock, with huge awards to Naomi Campbell, Caroline Von Hannover and most famously Max Mosley.
NOTW editor Colin Myler, after the Max Mosley judgement, said: “Our press is less free today after another judgement based on privacy laws emanating from Europe.” How right he was.
The 1998 European Convention on Human Rights forces UK courts to balance an individual’s Article 8 right to privacy with the Article 10 rights of people to freedom of expression when making case judgements. But Myler said recent court judgements “dangerously tipped the balance away from press freedom.”
MediaGuardian editor Jane Martinson writes in this week’s three-page Andy Coulson special:
Among broadcasters, there is barely disguised glee at the mess the press has got itself into without the sort of burdensome regulation the poor loves struggle with.
She later writes:
There is no appetite among newspapers, including this one, for laws that make holding wrongdoers to account even harder. Yet many are also uncomfortable that the public interest privileges we enjoy are being used to dig up dirt on the postnatal depression of an actor or the liaisons of a football manager.
If you are going to argue for unregulated freedom of speech, in my view it has to be applied universally, not just to the ‘highbrow’ titles. The very nature of freedom of speech is that people are allowed to say what they like – even if other people might disagree with it.
The only constraint on freedom should be freedoms that directly impose on the health of other people.
When Lilly Allen was pursued constantly by the paparazzi to the extent that one of them allegedly even crashed into her car, the courts were quite right to grant an injunction to protect her from harassment. They were quite right to reduce the stranglehold of the paparazzi on Amy Winehouse’s life by granting her an injunction to protect her from harassment.
But it is a tight rope to walk.
If there are too many ‘burdensome’ regulations, like those imposed on broadcasters from OFCOM, people will have no more reason to read quirkier, more in-depth and often brand-targeted newspapers rather than just watching the TV news.
If there are too few, people will have no reason to pay for an authoritative news provider, when they can get all their news from citizen journalists and the blogosphere.
