BRIT NEWSPAPER EDITORS MORE LIKE BLOGGERS THAN THEIR US COUNTERPARTS
July 31st 2009 07:02
Unlike US newspapers, British papers don't appear to be losing scoops to the blogosphere. In fact, some bloggers are said to be selling scoops to British papers, which have few qualms about cheque book journalism. British editors "take risks" and are seen as "more like" bloggers.
The International Herald Tribune reports that “While Fleet Street is as hypercompetitive as ever, its relationship with blogs is more symbiotic than the parallel connection in the US, where bloggers portray the ‘mainstream media’ as the enemy or, worse, an irrelevance.”
One of the biggest recent political scoops in Britain was uncovered by a blogger who writes under the pen name Guido Fawkes, after the plotter who tried to blow up Parliament in 1605.
The blogger obtained e-mail messages in which an aide to Prime Minister Gordon Brown proposed a campaign to slur leaders of the opposition Conservative Party – by setting up a new blog.
Instead of running the story, he passed the information to News of the World and The Sunday Times.
British bloggers also have to contend with libel laws that are among the world’s friendliest to claimants. The mere threat of a lawsuit, no matter how baseless, sometimes causes British web host services to remove a blog.
Some critics of the British media would like to see Parliament further rein in Fleet Street, with a new privacy law. A Parliamentary delegation, worried that British journalists see the pursuit of accuracy as a fusty affectation of analogue-era newsrooms, like bow ties and green eye shades, in April sent a delegation to the US to interview American editors about things like fact-checking and ethics.
For now, British editors remain willing to work the gray areas.
“We have always been willing to take risks in ways that respectable American papers would simply not be prepared to do,” Tim Luckhurst, a former editor of The Scotsman and now a journalism professor at the University of Kent told the International Herald Tribune. “I think that makes British journalism a little more like blogging.”
Interesting also to note that the UK press is in better shape than the ailing US press
The International Herald Tribune reports that “While Fleet Street is as hypercompetitive as ever, its relationship with blogs is more symbiotic than the parallel connection in the US, where bloggers portray the ‘mainstream media’ as the enemy or, worse, an irrelevance.”
One of the biggest recent political scoops in Britain was uncovered by a blogger who writes under the pen name Guido Fawkes, after the plotter who tried to blow up Parliament in 1605.
Instead of running the story, he passed the information to News of the World and The Sunday Times.
British bloggers also have to contend with libel laws that are among the world’s friendliest to claimants. The mere threat of a lawsuit, no matter how baseless, sometimes causes British web host services to remove a blog.
Some critics of the British media would like to see Parliament further rein in Fleet Street, with a new privacy law. A Parliamentary delegation, worried that British journalists see the pursuit of accuracy as a fusty affectation of analogue-era newsrooms, like bow ties and green eye shades, in April sent a delegation to the US to interview American editors about things like fact-checking and ethics.
For now, British editors remain willing to work the gray areas.
“We have always been willing to take risks in ways that respectable American papers would simply not be prepared to do,” Tim Luckhurst, a former editor of The Scotsman and now a journalism professor at the University of Kent told the International Herald Tribune. “I think that makes British journalism a little more like blogging.”
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