Mark Hillary discusses recent events affecting press freedom in the UK, including press scandals involving illegally hacking voicemail. He examines recommendations from the Leveson inquiry to regulate the press through an independent oversight body. However, Hillary argues regulation is increasingly difficult given the changing nature of journalism online, with anyone now able to publish globally and citizen journalism breaking major stories. While censorship is now impossible, traditional press brands struggle to survive and define their role in an online environment where the most popular news sources are blogs and social media.

1. DiaInternacionaldaLiberdade de Imprensa 2013
USP São Paulo : 15 de maio de 2013
Safe to Speak: Securing Freedom of
Expression in All Media
Mark Hillary

2. This talk…
• Recent events in the UK… press scandals
and inquiries
• What is the press today?Can the press be
regulated or controlled and what does this
mean for the freedom of the press?
• Digital journalism

3. What is the press for?
“…Now the girl let the fat man touch her
Vodka fumes and the feel of a vulture
The driver waited in the embassy car
The fat man's trap was set for capture
So the girl let the thin man touch her
Mixing questions, drunken laughter
The ministry car was waiting there
A minister knows his own affair
The people must have something good to
read on a Sunday…”
The Clash ‘The Leader’
To
inform, entertain, ex
pose, educate?

4. UK Parliament
• In 2009 The Daily Telegraph published
uncensored details of the expense claim of
every British Member of Parliament – going
back years
• The claims detailed abuse and fraud alongside
legal – but extravagant – claims
• Several MPs were forced to repay money and
some went to jail
• The Telegraph paid £110,000 (R$300k) for the
information, other publications turned it
down, yet the source has never been revealed

5. News International
• News International journalists in the UK were
accused of illegally hacking into the voicemail of
celebrities and politicians from 2005 to 2007
• By 2011 it became clear that journalists had
been accessing the voicemail of dead
soldiers, murder victims, and victims of terrorist
attacks
• Not only did the public feel
outraged, advertisers shunned the NI title ‘News
of the World’ – a Sunday newspaper that had
been published since 1843. Rupert Murdoch
closed the newspaper in 2011

6. Leveson
• In 2011, British Prime Minister David Cameron
asked Lord Justice Leveson to explore the
culture, ethics, and practice of the British press –
as a reaction to the News International scandal
•Leveson published his inquiry report in
November 2012
• The most important recommendation was the
creation of an independent body to oversee the
press – to replace the ‘toothless’ Press
Complaints Commission

7. What’s wrong with Leveson?
• Nude photos of Prince
Harry were viewed 25m
times before any UK
newspaper printed them
• In over 1m
words, Leveson mentions
the Internet only a few
hundred times
• A million words talking
of how the press used to
be, not how it is

8. Why does it matter?
• Regulation still matters while there are
professional journalists
• It provides a set of guidelines for reporters and
editors – reporters are protected by professional
guidelines and ethical standards
• But there are examples like the UK
parliamentary expenses scandal where the
information was clearly stolen – was it unethical
to pay for stolen information even if the public
supported the end result?

9. What is the press?
• The Huffington Post has more readers than
the BBC, The New York
Times, Fox, NBC, Reuters…
• It’s a blog

10. What is the press?
• Over 1m readers check
TMZ every day for celebrity
news and gossip
• It’s better and faster than
any traditional media
source
• Mail Online had 50.1m
unique readers in Oct
2012, the most popular
news site in the world

11. What is a journalist?
• Anyone can publish globally.. 24/7 and even
from a phone without visiting an office or
checking with an editor
• Video, photos, blogs, tweets… all forms of
publishing can be shared, copied, distributed
and if a story is of enough interest it will
attract the attention of the ‘majors’
• This is Citizen Journalism

12. What is a journalist?
• Occupy Movement
• Egypt Revolution
• Hurricane Sandy
• Plane crash in the Hudson
river
• People have
phones, cameras, video, Int
ernet, in their pocket…
citizens broke all these
stories first

13. Can it be controlled?
• Short answer is no
• Brands can adopt ethical standards and
codes of practice and employ professional
journalists – readers still value brands
•But anyone can start a blog… how popular
does it have to be before it is considered a
part of ‘the media’ – our most popular news
sources are already blogs and social media
not the traditional media

14. Think of it like this
• You create a news site focused on stories
about Brazil… an online Veja
•You write the stories outside Brazil (in
Portuguese) and host the server outside
Brazil – is it a Brazilian magazine?
• The readers are all in Brazil, but the writers
and content are all based outside Brazil… the
laws of Brazil have no relevance to this
journal, or do they?

15. Is this positive?
• The positive aspect of the Internet and the
democratisation of publishing is that it is
almost impossible for a government to now
suppress access to information
• Censorship in the traditional sense is
impossible – see Wikileaks for proof
• But… what do we lose?

16. Is this positive?
• Professional writers can cut through the noise
and focus on what matters
• Ethics and accuracy still matter to brands
• Traditional print journals still don’t know how
to survive in this world… some are entirely free
and some are insisting on paywalls – nobody
agrees on the right approach to online
publishing of news
• It is harder to launch a career in journalism as
the industry itself struggles to understand the
future – nobody starts on a local paper today

17. The topic is not really freedom…
it is now survival
“…Could it be an
infringement
Of the freedom of the
press
To print pictures of women
in states of undress…”
Billy Bragg: ‘It says here’

18. Mark Hillary
twitter.com/markhillary
j.mp/markhillary
mail@markhillary.com