09/09/2007

If I have heard it once, I have heard it a dozen times: never has the newspaper and  magazine industry of the UK been faced with greater turbulence and uncertainty than today. Many believe that the very notion of newspapers and magazines is under threat or, at least, profound transformation.

Some are rising to the challenge with relish; others are  deeply concerned about the future of their businesses. Together, opportunity and anxiety stalk the land.   

As usual, it is technology that has created this double-edged sword, with the arrival of digital platforms and so-called media convergence. There are many prophets of this  Brave New World. But, in truth, none of us knows where exactly all this is going to lead.

Each time a new wave of technology washes over us, there is an assumption that it will sweep away everything that went before. After all, analogue has given way to digital;  video cassettes to DVDs; audio cassettes to CDs; CDs to music downloaded from the internet.

But this is not the invariable rule. Vinyl is alive and well because it is considered the  truest form of musical recording. Ink pens, I am told, are enjoying a boom. Printed books  – a fifteenth-century German invention - have never been more abundant; and that’s not just because of Harry Potter. Rail is making a comeback against air travel.

In the world of technology you are as likely to find co-existence between the old and the new as a Darwinian survival of the most modern. If I had to make a prediction, it would  be that newspapers and magazines will co-exist for years to come in their print and electronic editions. There will, of course, be casualties along the way. Some publications and jobs will disappear. Some digital innovations will crash and burn. But, overall, the  opportunities for employment and journalism – good journalism - will expand in unprecedented fashion.    

As the great American writer and journalist, Russell Baker, wrote recently: “Today’s reporter with a laptop has nearly immediate access to material that once required lengthy....searches....It should only make reporting and editing better.”   

It is obvious that the future of bodies which regulate the press is intimately linked to the future of the press itself. We at the Press Complaints Commission have given this a lot of thought in recent years. We don’t pretend to have all the answers. But we are determined to keep ahead of the curve.    If we are talking about on-line versions or replicas of the traditional newspaper, there is little problem.

For ten years or so, we have had jurisdiction over this type of publication. Our Code of Practice applies in exactly the same way as it does to print. When on-line  editions started to diverge from print with their own editorial content, and stories began to be broken without waiting for the next print edition, again there was little difficulty. 

The responsibility rested with the editor; and if he or she breached the Code, the PCC  would censure. If the breach occurred in both electronic and print editions, we would  expect corrections, apologies or our formal adjudications to be published in both.

Though the fundamental principles of self-regulation remain the same, the game is now trickier, with the importation onto newspapers’ websites of audio-visual content: that is,  moving pictures with sound. This can be bought in from outside, for example from established network news services; or, thanks to huge investment in digital platforms, it can be the creation of the newspapers themselves.

It is one of journalism’s – and the  PCC’s - most exciting challenges. It is already a commonplace that the growth in audio-visual content has begun to elide the traditional frontiers between newspapers and television. It has also placed a question mark over the way in which we in the UK organise the regulation of content across the media.

At present, it is a five-legged stool, with Ofcom, an agency of the state created by  an act of parliament, covering most broadcasting; the BBC Trust doing likewise for BBC content; the PCC regulating newspapers and magazines; the Advertising Standards Authority, a self-regulatory body like the PCC, monitoring accuracy and honesty in advertising in all media; and the judges backing and filling where the civil or criminal  law is concerned.      

This patch-work quilt of statutory, legal and voluntary regulation is typical British improvisation, stitched together piece by piece over the years as the need arose.

Some now argue that with media convergence it is increasingly artificial and unsustainable; and that, for instance, bodies like the PCC, or the 23 members of the Alliance of Independent Press Councils of Europe, who will be meeting in Edinburgh on September 20, are obsolescent relics from the pre-digital age.   

I would argue exactly the opposite. Ten, fifteen years from now who knows what the architecture of media regulation will look like in Britain. But, of one thing I am  absolutely certain: that in the digital age good journalism will need as never before to rest on the tried and tested principles of our system of self-regulation, governing how news should be gathered and published.

The reasons are philosophical and practical. At the PCC, we start from the proposition that, however accessed by the reader or viewer, it is in principle unacceptable, and  inconsistent with a fully functioning democracy, that the editorial content of newspapers  and magazines should be regulated by an agency of the state.

Technology does not  change that one jot. Another principle remains immutable. However, the content may be delivered – in  newsprint or on the screen – self-regulation demands clear lines of command and control. We have never allowed an editor in breach of our code to use the excuse that the story came from a normally reputable agency, freelance reporter or other outside source.

Once  the decision is taken about a publication’s editorial content, the buck always stops with  the editor, even if it is not possible for one individual, however diligent, to be aware of every nook and cranny in every edition.    

Incidentally, it seems to me that one of the reasons for British television’s getting recently into a series of scrapes and scandals has been precisely the absence of clear lines of responsibility inside programme making.    

What technology does do is to reinforce the practical case for self-regulation. The PCC’s traditional features have been its speed, flexibility, and independence, underpinned by the  buy-in of your industry. These features, developed and refined over the last sixteen years,  are even better suited to the digital age, where there will be a premium on adaptability and swift reaction, which, by the way, the courts will never be able to match.    

I am not at all surprised that the recent report of the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport came down firmly against a privacy law, the first time a parliamentary committee has done so.   

Most important of all, adherence in the digital age to our Code of Practice will address  head-on the fundamental issue of trust. More than ever, trust is the heart of the matter.     The internet gives us quantity not quality. To quote Russell Baker again: “The internet is basically an electronic version of the ten-year old boy on a bicycle who used to toss the newspaper on the front porch: an ingenious circulation device.”   

Online, we are bombarded by information from all quarters. Rumours sweep the internet, conveyed by web-sites, blogs, comments on blogs and goodness knows what else. It may be a great democratic forum; but, intrinsically, it is no more than a massively souped-up radio phone-in.   

What can we trust in this mass of material? That is the question. There is a crying need to be able to distinguish between what is rubbish and what is quality, between what is  fantasy and what reliable. Great British publications, with millions of hits on their websites around the globe, rightly rely on the high reputation and drawing power of their ‘brands’.

But, there has to be something more: something which tells you that what you are reading or watching conforms to a set of rules, objectively and independently enforced, that guarantees high journalistic standards; and that, if these high standards are not met, provides effective remedies.     This is the right ethically and it is right commercially; and it is precisely where the Code of Practice of the PCC comes in to play. The Code must become the quality stamp, the seal of good housekeeping for the on-line editions of British newspapers and magazines: in short, a brand. I hope the day is not far off when a small PCC logo will be visible in a corner of the screen on every electronic page of every British newspaper and magazine.   

This is the background to the decision taken by PressBoF in February this year – perhaps  the most important decision since the PCC was set up in 1991 – to extend our competence to audio-visual content.

It took almost two years of discussion with your industry. It was clear to us at Halton House that audio-visual material could not be left as  virgin, unregulated territory. That would have been to abandon it to another regulator. 

The standard of self-regulation had to be planted on this terrain as soon as possible. Editors and publishers had, of course, legitimate worries about the scope of their  responsibility for audio-visual material.

I recall making clear last year that the PCC’s  concern was with, to put it in shorthand, editorial material not user-generated content. That, basically, is how it has come out in the PressBoF guidance note of February 8.   

And none too soon. Within a matter of weeks, we received our first complaint about audio-visual material, as it happened on a Scottish newspaper’s website, with companion  complaints about stills taken from the same material published in two other papers. As is well known, we have ruled on all three cases. Scotland, the bold pioneer in so much of our island’s history, was once again at the cutting edge of events.    

But think how feeble and inconsistent we would have looked at the PCC, if we had been able to rule only on the stills and not on the audio-visual material. It would have been a  hammer blow against the credibility of self-regulation.     This is only the beginning; though I have to say that so far, contrary to the fears of some, there has not been a flood of a/v complaints. And this at a time when, if things continue  as they have been so far, we will by the end of the year have broken all records in the key categories: complaints received, complaints investigated, complaints resolved.    

Complaints about audio-visual material will doubtless throw up tough challenges. But at the PCC it has never been easy street. People are already putting to us all kinds of what-if  hypotheticals. Well, they will just have to be patient. We cannot now anticipate every case that will come before us. The devil will always be in the detail. Just as the PCC back  in 1991 started with a set of principles, on which it has since built an entire body of case  law, so something similar will have to happen with our audio-visual jurisdiction. Case by case, over the years, we will create a new jurisprudence. I am very confident that, as technology carries us over the far horizon into the unknown, with your support we will have the flexibility and resources to rise to the challenge.

Sir Christopher Meyer, chair, Press Complaints Commission, given to Society of Editors (Scotland), September 7 2007.