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British Journalism Review
DOI: 10.1177/0956474807080945
2007; 18; 41 British Journalism Review
Kim Fletcher
Why blogs are an open door
http://bjr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/18/2/41
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Reporters always faced two hurdles on the death knock. The rst was
getting over the doorstep. The second was laying hands on the family album.
I never found the second as bad as the rst: if you could only get in the house,
it wasnt so hard to turn the talk to the physical appearance of the late spouse
or child and the question that followed: You dont have a picture, do you? A
few platitudes about the smiling face in the holiday snap and the big moment:
Could I borrow this? Then, with luck, you would be away, job done, trying
not to think about the pain left in your wake.
Nowadays its possible to pick up a picture without going out of the
ofce, thanks to the millions who present themselves to public gaze on the
internet. Helpful quotes are available too. The famous and the unknown put
up their lives for scrutiny on social networking sites such as MySpace and
Facebook, offering photos, diaries and descriptions of their interests and
their friends. If anything should happen that makes them interesting to a
wider public an untimely death, a reported involvement in a crime, some
injudicious email at work those self-portraits and life stories are available to
any journalist who trawls the sites.
This was the journalistic shortcut used after Seung-Hui Cho shot dead 32
staff and fellow students at the American university Virginia Tech in April,
as the media around the world discovered not only that local bloggers were
putting up graphic accounts of what had happened, but also that they could
pull details of some of the dead from the students own web pages, posted on
social sites. As The Daily Telegraphs Shane Richmond explained to website
readers: It should be part of every journalists tool kit. All of us should know
how to search Technorati, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace etc. But, as Richmond
also acknowledged, this initiative raises questions: is it safe to lift stuff off
Why blogs are
an open door
Kim Fletcher
Kim Fletcher; DOI: 10.1177/0956474807080945; [2007/6] 18:2; 41-46; http://bjr.sagepub.com
by per seus on October 31, 2008 http://bjr.sagepub.com Downloaded from
the web in this manner? Is it ethical to do so? Many who put the stuff up in the
rst place say it isnt, not least the actress Gillian Anderson, who was upset to
nd thoughts written for her ofcial website broadcast to a larger audience.
She wrote later: The fact is, I have not written to the site in a while because I
have quite frankly been afraid to. I was shocked or rather appalled that my
last entry of ramblings was published. What happened? When did
Everything and Everything become mass public consumption? Since when
have I been writing a BLOG!!??? What happened to PERMISSION??!! I am so
naive. So, needless to say, I am a bit aumoxed, ummoxed, autter? Angry,
about the situation and what is safe to write about anymore.
The tone is typical of the way people write on websites. And I should say
that I, too, am transgressing the rule laid out by Ms Anderson at the start of
her piece. It reads: NOTE: This message is exclusively for Gillians fans who
visit this web site. Please do not publish the contents (partially or in full)
anywhere else on or off the internet. It should be said that this is not a
warning calculated to work with journalists. But Ms Anderson is by no
means alone among web users in believing that websites should be accorded a
private status never granted to the published word elsewhere. The debate
will increase as journalists realise how much information is out there.
The likely suspect
We saw the dramatic effect of web material during the inquiry into the
murders of ve prostitutes in Ipswich, Suffolk, at the end of last year, when
police arrested a former special constable, Tom Stephens. He had already
attracted media interest, having described himself as a likely suspect in an
interview with the Sunday Mirror, and given an interview to the BBC about
his relationship with the dead women. Stephens was arrested shortly
afterwards, at which point there was joy among the media to discover his
entry on MySpace.
In the old days, reporters would have pieced together something of his
character by tramping round relatives and friends prepared to talk. They
might have come up with a few pictures, typically years out of date.
Naturally, the door-stepping began. But, thanks to MySpace, they had for
starters pictures of the suspect alongside the kind of self-description that
everyone knows spells serial killer: he called himself The Bishop, wore an
army combat hat and wrote that he was interested in keeping t. Conclusive,
except that Stephens was, of course, released by police shortly afterwards
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and another man is now awaiting trial. Context makes a difference. When
Stephens was under arrest his self-portraits looked just the kind a weirdo
would put up. Once he was released they didnt look much different from
millions of others posted by young men and women on the internet.
Was it safe to lift his prole off the web? Yes the Tom Stephens selected
from the various Tom Stephens on MySpace was the right one. There was
enough detail in his prole for there to be no doubt about that. Did his
website entry convey an accurate impression of him? Well, as accurate as the
media might have obtained from friends and acquaintances in the old days.
They were, after all, merely reproducing what he said about himself.
The point about identication is important, because not only are there
many people of the same name on sites such as MySpace, there are also
entries set up by people purporting to be others. Now that MySpace is owned
by News Corp, there are lots of spoof proles claiming to be the News Corp
boss Rupert Murdoch. Here is a typical one: I purchased Myspace for
$580,000,000 in July... but the news didnt really cover that story. I am worth
billions. Jealous? You can also quickly nd any number of George Bushes,
Tony Blairs and David Camerons. I think the site purporting to be that of the
Duchess of York is genuine. Certainly, the sites of those of her daughters,
Beatrice and Eugenie, were, until the media took an interest and reported the
contents. As a spokesman for the Duke of York told the Daily Mail: The girls
dont use MySpace any more. They think its a bit too open. They are now
using Facebook. Spoofs are easy enough to spot when they involve the
famous, but the young users of these sites are not above faking others entries
too.
Providing you have the right person, the journalistic rule surely must be
that you apply the same journalistic standards as you would to any other
inquiry. Even when they are writing about themselves, people do not
necessarily tell the truth. Just as journalists weigh the evidence of friends and
neighbours rather than report it as a matter of fact, so the material on
websites might not be as accurate as it appears. Or, seen in the cold light of
day after the death of the person concerned, it may take on a greater
signicance than is warranted. There was evidence of that in another case
where journalists trawled the internet for information about a young
student, and to report the comments of his friends. Here, there was little to
distinguish the MySpace entry of Gavin Britton, a rst-year student at
Exeter University, from those of other students who boasted that they liked
to drink heavily. Like them, he posted pictures of himself with glass in hand.
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When he was found dead after a student party last autumn, the Basingstoke
Gazette quickly found his entry on the site:
Gavin boasted of his drinking on the Net and died on party night, ran
the headline. The story provided more detail gleaned from MySpace: One of
the comments he had left on the page was: If youre not living life on the
edge, youre taking up too much space. The website also contains pictures of
Gavin drinking, including one in fancy dress, from a wine bottle.
There was an angry reaction from many of his friends, whose comments
remain on the Gazette website: It disgusts me that a couple of images on an
internet prole site, and some off-the-cuff comments posted on said website,
have gathered so much media attention. It is a known fact by all MySpace
users that anything said on such a site should be taken with a pinch of salt or
as light humour. But was the Gazette really taking the dead mans light-
hearted comments about drinking out of context? After all, he did die after
drinking. Perhaps if the information had been gathered in the old fashion
way, friends would have qualied their accounts of his drinking with the rider
that he was no different from many other students. But wasnt the
juxtaposition of website entry and manner of death irresistible to any
newspaper story? I suspect that Brittons friends would have reacted against
any story that raised his boasts about drinking, but the fact that the Gazette
reached for his own words appeared to exacerbate criticism. There is a view
among those writing blogs or using these social networking sites that,
despite their easy accessibility, they are not actually public.
Blogs are public places
In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre, for instance, there was
anger among many who had written blogs about the event, or entered
comments on other sites, that the mainstream media had reproduced
information from sites or posted comments on site in an attempt to solicit
further information. The implication was that these sites were open to be
read, yet were not in the public domain or not in the public domain for
journalists, at any rate. In the words of Guardian journalist Patrick Barkham,
who worked on the Virginia Tech story: Incredibly, some bloggers dont
seem to grasp that blogs are public places, where people go of their own free
will to publish and share information, understanding that their comments
will be read around the world.
Journalists do grasp that point, which is why they have started to use
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these social sites as a means of publishing information that they could not
otherwise nd a way into. The News of the World presented a colourful piece
about a girlfriend of Tony Blairs oldest son, Euan, justifying the information
and pictures by explaining where they had come from: The News of the World
discovered hundreds of photographs of 19-year-old Suzanne on the internet
all posted by herself on student networking site Facebook.com. You can
imagine the happiness in the heart of the journalist when he looked at those
pictures, conscious that the Press Complaints Commission could not touch
the paper on privacy grounds.
The Mail, following up the story next day, also took trouble to emphasise
that this was in the public domain. Writing under the headline: How Euans
girl revealed her wild side on the web, it wrote: The Facebook.com photos
were posted on an area of the website accessible to all Oxford University
students. The nature of the website also means that anyone with an online
friend at Oxford was also able to access the pictures. The subtext was clear:
dont try coming after us on this one, Number 10. We are in the clear.
Blogs do indeed tend to be open to the world. So do many areas of the
social networking sites. When you create an entry about yourself on
MySpace, anyone who visits the site can nd you, unless you change the
default position in order to make your site private. When you post a piece on
Facebook, which has a huge following among university students around the
world, it is not open to anyone, but there is not much point in being on it
unless you make it open to groups of contemporaries and once it is open to
those groups, it is pretty much open, full stop.
That ease of access became clear to the Mail on Sunday in May this year
when, to its irritation, pictures of Jeff Chevalier, the gay lover of the former
BP chief executive Lord Browne, appeared in newspapers around the world.
The Mail had signed Chevalier on an exclusive deal and worked hard to
protect its asset. Unfortunately, it seemed unaware that the former male
prostitute had posted photos and words about himself on an entry he
maintained on Facebook. How many journalists had been keying the name
Chevalier into social site search engines?
A walk around the web reveals furious commentary from those who
believe the press have no right to seek information in this fashion and from
others who think it would be remarkable if they did not. L J Ulrich, a
columnist on The Daily Athenaeum, the newspaper of West Virginia
University, writes: Like it or not, Facebook is a perfect starting point for
investigations. The system is literally a treasure trove of information: names,
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addresses, cell phone numbers, political afliations, interests, hobbies, link-
charted contact networks and countless photographs. This type of
information makes journalists drool not just because it is readily available
and easy to nd, but it has been voluntarily broadcast into cyberspace.
Anything found on Facebook is well within the public domain. If its posted,
nobody can cry about how its used.
This gets to the heart of it. These internet sites full a fantasy many of us
have had from our rst days as cub reporters. Suddenly no one shuts the door
in our face; no grey-faced, grief-stricken relative tells us we are ghouls and
makes us think worse of ourselves. Now there is no need for that awkward
speech of introduction. The door is wide open and a friendly gure is
beckoning: Come in, come in. Make yourself at home. I dont know if any of
it is any use to you, but you will nd lots of pictures and some last words and
several tributes from friends. Just help yourself.
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Kim Fletcher is a former editor of The Independent on Sundayand editorial

director of the Telegraph group. He is the chairman of the board of the National
Council for the Training of Journalists and a member of the BJReditorial board
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