Leveson: Fish and chip paper for a digital world?

IT’S been interesting to read, listen to and attempt to digest the huge volume of reaction from all sides to last week’s publication of Lord Justice Leveson’s Report into the ethics of the Press.

However, I’m the first to admit that spending the weekend reading the 2,000 pages of the report myself was never going to feature highly on my list of priorities.

Despite this, there has been enough written, tweeted about and broadcast over the last few days to analyse what its publication means for the industry.

For me, one of the major highlights has been to scrutinise what impact the findings will have for journalists like myself who publish material on the Internet. And quite frankly it hasn’t taken long.

Apparently Lord Leveson dedicated a single page of the Report to the Internet and those publishing news, blogs and contributing to the many social media channels now in existence on the ubiquitous platform.

And it is the symbolism of this single page that I think neatly sums up the findings. And that is a report focusing on a newspaper industry that is inexorably changing month by month.

These changes are, in part, as a direct consequence of Leveson as the tabloids back off from their murkier practices as the public view of phone hacking and other dubious news gathering methods continues to be one of abhorrence.

But the newspaper industry as a whole is changing rapidly as the printed word loses ground (and sales) to the immediacy of online.

Therefore, it was baffling for Lord Justice Leveson not to include the Internet more widely in his findings, which included the recommendation for new regulations on what the Press can write and how it gathers news, and focus on newspapers which are by their very nature losing ground to online news sources.

For example, would TheBusinessDesk.com have to comply with new regulations when they are introduced? Our 100,000-plus subscribers suggests we are no tiddler in the UK’s media scene but we are not a newspaper so would we count or be accountable?

What about the growing armies of tweeters and those in the blogosphere? Some bloggers – the politically charged Guido Fawkes springs to mind – carry significant clout and what they type on their keyboards can have major effects.

And if a newspaper ran a controversial story on its website but not on its printed pages could it be brought to book or not?

Time (and politicians coming to a concensus on the way forward) will tell whether or not the Leveson Inquiry will have a wider effect on digital platforms and, indeed, on the newspaper industry itself.

But as one national newspaper editor said in the immediate aftermath of its publication, there is a real fear Leveson could become tomorrow’s fish and chip paper.

What do you think on this issue? Please leave your comments below.