Gary Andrews

All last week, the excellent Darika Ahrens at Grapevine Consulting posted a series of pieces on why PR was losing the social media battle. They were an excellent analysis of why PR could be owning the social media space, yet continued to make basic mistakes.

Darika also asked me if I’d be able to contribute and, er, well last week didn’t happen mainly because I was excessively busy and also because it’s so hard to add anything to her excellent pieces.

One thing to briefly say, though, is while social media has moved on, and PR and brands are more willing to engage, general attitudes are still stuck in the past a little. If these attitudes can change, then we could see a real shift in thinking. But it requires organisations and senior people to face up to this and make a conscious effort.

The two biggest social media attitude problems, and they’re not mutually exclusive and can frequently be found it the same office, is that social media is an area of specialised PR that only need concern a few digital people, and that it’s quick, cheap, and easy. Often the first assumption informs actions on the second.

First off, social media may have been specialised once upon a time, while those of us beavered away understanding niche bloggers and communities, but it’s no longer part a different world.

Social media planning should be built into the start of any good campaign. If you insist on separating out digital from regular PR (and I personally think the lines are blurred enough for the distinction to be nearly meaningless) then for heavens sake, include the digital team from the start, rather than realising you’d quite like to do something on Twitter a few weeks beforehand. If nothing else, you’ll get a greater sense of what’s realistic.

And therein follows the second part. Any campaign that has poor social media planning often seems to throw things together late in the day. I still get “Can we push this out to bloggers” a week before hand, as do, anecdotally, many others, it seems.

Darika says she no longer takes short-term pitching to blogger projects, and you can understand why. These are the ones that are cobbled together at last minute, often with ludicrous targets and expectations, and invariably require so much work around them with so little return that they’re more trouble than it’s worth.

If you’re building a strategy around bloggers – and it’s also worth asking ‘what is a blogger’, given that so many mainstream outlets are just as likely to stick it on their blog as in the paper – then these things take time, money and no small amount of effort. You would throw together a major plan for print media the week beforehand. Why do the same with bloggers?

None of this is rocket science. And none of these need be done at the expense of other media coverage (another traditional mis-assumption). It requires the same thought and discipline as any other campaign.

It’s nothing that can’t be fixed but, as Darika says, we have a long way to go.

written by Gary \\ tags: fixpr, social media, social media PR

Mark Twain once said it’s far better to keep your mouth shut and let people assume you’re an idiot than to open it and confirm their assumptions. God alone knows what Twain would have made of blogging, but it’s a sentiment I can appreciate and, for the foreseeable future on here you’re all going to have to assume I’m an idiot.

Or, to put it less obliquely, I’m halting blogging. Indefinitely. I may resume a few months down the line. It may even be a few weeks. Or it may not. But, frankly, it’s probably better to write this than do a series of half-arsed posts, all of which that start with “apologies for the lack of updates…”, an opening that rapidly gets tedious by the fifth letter of the first word.

There’s no one particular reason for this, but if I had to point to one reason it would be a lack of time. That and being very busy at work. Yes, being busy at work, a lack of time and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope a lack of inspiration when the time is free.

Being busy, as Terry Duffelen said to me on Twitter earlier, comes and goes. But I’ve been hideously busy for around four months now, and I’ve been thinking about calling a temporary halt to blogging for about half that time.

It’s not just the amount of time that I don’t have – it’s the desire to do other things with this time when I’m free. I spend all day working with social media, reading blogs and other internet-related things, and I’m finding in the evenings I would rather not have to open my computer, but cook, watch TV, read, go to the cinema, go to the pub, go out for a meal, go to the gym. And when I look at that list, there’s not a great deal of that I’ve managed recently. Essentially, I need downtime to switch off. Blogging used to be that. It isn’t anymore.

Usually it’s only snatched time late at night anyway. As in common with most recent blog posts, this is being written after 11pm. Which means I don’t get as much sleep as I’d hoped. Which makes me a bit irritable the next day, which makes me less likely to blog. And so on.

There’s also a lack of time to cover topics, and cover them well. In the last two weeks I’ve had about half a dozen topics, both football and non-football I’ve wanted to write about. But I wouldn’t have had the time to do anything other than a few snatched words.

What about something like Posterous, you may say? What indeed. I like Posterous a lot. I’ve had a play and think it’s a very nifty little platform. If I were starting out or starting anew, I’d definitely consider it.

But I either write for other blogs or try and offer some form of analysis on here, that a shorter scrap-book post on Posterous wouldn’t have been able to do justice to, even if I could post it on the train into work.

The bottom line is when I write, I research first. For every post, I’d say the amount of research done is equal to the time spent writing the piece, more so with the football articles.

I know what you’re going to say now – how did you ever work in a busy newsroom? Well I did, and I could again, no problem. But this isn’t a newsroom, this is blogging; this is something I do in my spare time, and something I rarely get paid for (certainly not on this blog).

There are so many bad bloggers – and journalists – who will knock something together in the blink of an eye without having done any research or checking any facts. Fine, this approach may mean I take longer over my posts but I’d rather be right than first, especially as this blog (and others) carry my name. I refuse to compromise on quality and accuracy for the sake of being able to knock out a couple of extra posts.

It’s not that the joy isn’t there – I still love words, and I still love writing and genuinely wish I could do more of it, or spend my days thinking of witty asides to drop into finely-honed articles – but as was said to me the other day, it’s like I’m trying to do two jobs on top of other things.

And ultimately, my priority is to my job, because they pay me. And I work hard, so throw in an extra job on top of that… well, I can manage it if I really want, but in honesty, I’d rather recharge my batteries, unwind and be fresh for the next day of work. Shoot me for attempting a work-life balance.

As much as anything, I think I needed to put this down so that I didn’t have the spectre of an unwritten blog hanging over me. The guilt feels far less when you actually announce you’re not blogging any longer. And that way people cant go ‘this is a bad example of a blog, he only posts once a fortnight.’

So that’s it. Me and blogging are done for the time being. That’s here, and with football blogging as well. You may see a few pieces pop up from me though – these will be ones I’ve nearly finished or have already committed to. After that, no more.

Well, maybe not that final. I simply don’t know if I just need to abandon blogging for a couple of weeks to recharge my batteries, or six months, or if I just don’t want to come back. I just don’t know.

This blog will remain as it is – it’d be a shame to delete it and I may feel the urge to blog gets too strong.

Oh, and if anybody even thinks about trying to use this blog and announcement as an example of how blogging is drying, I’ll personally take that lazy one-blog assumption and stick it… well, you get the idea. I’m just a blog. I’m certainly not, and never have been, indicative of any trend.

I’ll probably need to change my bio now as well…

Lights. Off.

written by Gary \\ tags: blogging

Funny, really, how many individuals’ blogs in my RSS reader are having more posts saying: “Sorry, been a bit busy, here’s what I’ve been up to.”

Funnily enough I was thinking of posting something similar myself. But it also got me thinking.

Part of this also stemmed from a colleague asking for a list of bloggers for area x earlier today. My list was a bit small. “That’s great,” came the response, “but, er, is that it.”

I checked. Yes, that was indeed it. And, what’s more, it was probably a bit smaller than the last area x blogger list I sent over.

Which neatly melds these two lines of thought together. This isn’t a sign that the blogosphere (sorry) is getting smaller, nor are people stopping blogging. But they are consolidating.

Plenty of people still have personal blogs, but it’s kind of inevitable that blog activity tails off at some point. It takes a lot of time to run and maintain a blog, especially if it’s just you running it.

You know those blogging advice guides that tell you to blog every day. Great, but you try blogging every day on your own blog, plus having a job, plus having a social life, plus having a relationship, plus writing for all those other blogs you promised people to. Why, you’d almost think blogging was a full-time job.

It’s one of the reasons I’m quite a fan of Posterous.

It’s somewhat inevitable that, if you’re any good, you’ll either try and flex your muscles and write for blogs for bigger audiences, or group blogs that carry more prestige. After all, it helps you get more writing and blogging work, and so on.

So, I can either say: “Oh yes, I blog at Gary Andrews.net,” and people may expect a wonderfully daily updated site. Or I can say: “I write for Soccerlens, twofootedtackle.com, and Pitch Invasion. And I have my own blog.” Kind of sounds more impressive really.

If you’re really good, others will pick up on your work and you might even get a mainstream publication or two pick you up for occasional pieces. Plus you flit between half a dozen different blogs. Before you know it your personal blog is looking a little forlorn or serves merely as a place to dump everything you’re working on.

It’s not like it’s a surprise that blogging, and websites, and group blogs ape more traditional publications really. There’s only a small percentage of bloggers who have the time to consistently post, and these tend to be the ones who set up blog networks.

But this brings us to another point to briefly touch on – online PR. If blogs are consolidating, and bloggers are moving between online and offline publications, where does this leave your online PR specialist?

In times past, your non-online PR (no, I have no idea what the best name to label these as is) would take care of the press, the magazines, the TV, the radio and your online PR would beaver away looking for bloggers or cool websites.

But now your blogger is writing for the newspaper, and blogging as well, and that reporter you’ve got labelled as a star contact is spending more time updating his blog for the newspaper, while another journalist has set up an online magazine, yet the hot young blogger has launched his new news and opinion site for the same topic and, now you come to look at them, they look remarkably similar in terms of content. And they’re all on Twitter.

I’ll be shocked if online PR is still considered a separate discipline in five years. And I think I’m being generous in timescale here.

Yet you’ll still find people who insist online PR is a separate discipline; an area that only online specialists can deliver results. Yet, increasingly, your online and not-online PRs are pitching the same spaces and, if they’re doing it well, it’ll be in exactly the same way.

I’ve said many a time before, it’s not a mystery on how to pitch blogs. To that, you can add, there’s no point drawing up a long list of blogs and websites to get coverage on if you’re not going to see the benefits or the ROI.

You wouldn’t invite the Glossop Advertiser to a national policy briefing that has little relevance to Glossop, solely on the basis that it’s the same medium as the Guardian. Similarly, why would you want to pitch a blogger on a topic that has little relevance to them, other than the fact that, like Blog Y, they’re also based on the internet. Great, it’s been covered by 20 bloggers. But that’s not much use if it’s only relevant to the audience of 2 out of the 20.

There’s nothing mysterious about contacting bloggers, and there’s no shame in going for the biggest blogs in that area if they’re the most relevant. But it’s also worth remembering not to forget the smaller individual bloggers writing in the same area. After all, they’ll probably be editing the bigger blogs in a year’s time.

written by Gary \\ tags: blogging, consolidation, online PR

Let’s get this straight. Blogging isn’t some mystical power, knowledge of which can only be gained through years of immersion in the internet. Anybody can set one up. In the time you’ve just read this, I could have set up a new blog. But blogging well? That’s still a way to go.

It’s not an area where there’s necessarily a right or wrong answer either. Some incredibly – in my view – poor blogs are inexplicably popular, while there’s a handful of blogs in my RSS reader that were put in for content but are strangely hypnotic and compulsive reading, despite being dull as ditchwater. And, naturally, there’s some really good blogs out there that are only known in very small circles, which is a crying shame.

Like blogs, pieces on how to blog are ten a penny and usually come with one or two experts dishing out advice. So Lauren Fisher’s crowdsourced piece on advice to new bloggers at Simply Zesty is refreshingly interesting (despite having my opinion buried in it).

The long line of those queueing up to give advice is a long list of well-known names in blogging circles, all with their own opinions. And what’s fascinating is the theme that emerges in the advice. So much so that it would be easy to condense this into a few bullet points that could be distributed to new bloggers.

• Be yourself
• Don’t rehash the same stuff everybody else does unless you have something to add
• Engage in the community
• Enjoy yourself

And there’s really nothing more than that. Seriously, that’s all that’s needed as a basic starting guide.

What’s equally as interesting is where the advice differs in places. Content is key is another undercurrent, but how best that content is delivered is another question. Should you blog regularly, daily even? Yes, no, and it depends are all valid answers.

Similarly, audience is an interesting question. If you’re doing a blog around a specific area or brand, then that’s easy to visualise your audience before you start writing. Something like a general personal blog, or a blog around a somewhat more vague area (how large is media for example) is harder.

I’ve always thought of start a new blog as somewhat akin to Sartre’s artisan creating a knife, and the definition of man, in Existentialism and Humanism. First the blog exists, then it surges forward and defines itself. And then continues to definite itself. Just because the writing has never touched on a certain topic, it does not mean this topic can never be broached.

Certainly this blog has changed drastically since it was first set up, and the early days were also worlds away from the first blog I ever created.

And that’s also the joy of blogging. You’re always learning, always developing, always reacting and always changing. Sure, there’ll be constants over time; the writing style, for one thing, will evolve into something recognisable (but this doesn’t mean it won’t stop evolving).

As such, there’s no such thing as a complete blogger, or anybody who completely knows blogging. It’s always changing. As Heraclitus may have said, if he’d been born thousands of years later and involved in the blogging scene, you cannot read the same blog twice.

What we can do is immerse ourselves in blogs and online culture. But the minute anybody lays down their keyboard and proclaims to be an expert on blogging, for whatever reason, they’re lying.

Essentially, in everything, you can either move forward or fall backwards. Standing still isn’t an option. Which is to say the blogger who knows it all will be tomorrow’s Luddite.

written by Gary \\ tags: advice to new bloggers, blogging, crowdsourcing

Earlier this week online blog network Shiny Media went into administration, which led to Techcrunch to declare the UK’s experiment with blog networks were over.

That’s probably going a bit far, but for all the growth and proliferation of blogging, it’s probably never been harder to set up and keep a blog network afloat in this day and age.

A few years back, when The World had generally decided that citizen journalism was definitely going to kill the mainstream media and blogs were the future, somewhere, somehow the misconception arose that blogging was the place to make money.

It was so easy; all you needed were a few clicks of a mouse a nice lick of virtual paint and, hey presto, your blog was up and ready to go, challenge the established order and make money.

Quite.

That really isn’t the case, you know. Some blogs do make money, but they’re often those who happened to be in the online space first, and were better than their competitors at the time. These blogs have had time to build traction, work on the USP and establish a loyal readership. These blogs didn’t just become success stories overnight.

The majority of bloggers I’ve met largely do what they do for fun, and in their spare time (and a few very professionally done blogs have really surprised me, given the resources they have behind them). A few make a bit of money from blogging, but generally not enough to give up the day job.

One comment on the Paid Content article from Robyn Wilder, one of the brains behind the Domestic Sluttery blog, sums this up neatly:

“Domestic Sluttery was largely set up by the editors as a work of love, and the writers joined in the same spirit. No one is relying on it to provide an income; we may get paid one day but that’s not why we’re doing it.”

Domestic Sluttery (while definitely not aiming at me as a target audience) is one of those blogs that could one day make money. It looks good, is well-written, and has a growing readership. But it’s definitely not going to provide a living for the editors and writers. Yet. One day, it might be worth a bit, though.

As for making money from blogging, the rates generally tend by be lower than the mainstream press when you compare wordcount, etc.  Certainly a lot less than the NUJ’s suggested freelance rate, although that’s sometimes not the point. I’ve taken on some blogging jobs for sheer enjoyment. That said, if I was completely freelance and didn’t have a day job, I would be a lot more money-orientated.

But that doesn’t mean that a blog network can’t be profitable, and I’d tend to agree with Katie Lee – one of Shiny’s co-founders (who left the company in February) – that Shiny could (or indeed should) have still been going strong and had the potential to be profitable.

There are significant gaps in the online market still in certain areas. Fill these and you’ve at least got an audience, although monetising them is another problem.

Firstly, the advertising market was tough enough before the recession. Now, it’s trying to climb the cliff it fell off a few months ago, and it’s as tough for the mainstream media as it is for online offerings. Bottom line, any blog network today should have an alternative stream of revenue to advertising. Build your business model on advertising and you may as well stick up a For Sale sign over your network.

Running a blog network also takes time, effort and, if you’re intending it to be a commercial venture, money. And the more blogs you have, the more time, effort and money it will take up (although I don’t know the ins and outs, my suspicion is this is one of the areas where Shiny fell down somewhat). Again, if you’re determined to pay your freelancers, the cash has to be coming in from somewhere. Otherwise, it’s low rates, or no payment at all.

There will be successes. There will always be successes. But these successes are exceptions to the rule, rather than the rule itself. And for all the supposed last rites of the media industry, mainstream and commercial publications are in a much stronger position than independent networks. And, as the Devil’s Kitchen points out, many blogs are dependent on such places for their content.

Come the end of the recession, it will be interesting to see what shape both the traditional and online media companies will be in. I suspect a few more from both will go to the wall, some of them high profile. At the end of it, some blog networks may survive, but these will probably be the ones with very clever sources of income.

It’s a shame Shiny Media has ended up where it has today. For a time being, it looked as if it might have been able to hold its own and even surpass traditional media in some areas. But for a variety of reasons, and a few bad decisions, it hasn’t.

Hopefully some of it can be salvaged. Some of the individual blogs still lead their field, and will as likely be worth a decent sum. It would be a shame to see the likes of Catwalk Queen and Shiny Shiny disappear completely.

And for all the problems that beset Shiny, it had some damn fine writers working for it, many of whom are now out of work, and that’s one of the saddest aspects. So if you happen to be reading this and have any space, please take pity on the ex-Shinies and give them some work.

[Disclosure: I've got to know many of the Shiny editors and writers, past and present, on a professional and personal level, and some are now good friends. Even many of the ex-employees have been caught in the crossfire on this. Hopefully it'll all work out for those affected who I know well.]

written by Gary \\ tags: blog networks, Shiny Media

Anybody not from Britain looking at the Twitter trending topics today would have probably been baffled to see Mrs Slocombe’s Pussy near the top. Thanks to the British sense of humour, the catchphrase from 70s sitcom Are You Being Served was all over the microblogging site in tribute to the death of comic actress Mollie Sugden [1]. Jonathan Ross was one of those responsible for getting the topic to the top of Twitter charts.

Sure enough, other countries were a bit puzzled by the trend, so much so that both Techcrunch and Mashable wrote stories complaining that Twitter was getting infected with spam again [2]. They were soon put right in the comments.

I’m not an overly big fan of the show, but this little Twitter trend and the reaction does appeal to my sense of humour. You’d like to think that Mollie Sugden would have found it funny as well. It’s a fitting tribute.

But among all this there is a serious point to be made, with regard to the old blogs v journalism arguments. Especially in light of TMZ’s Michael Jackson scoop, there seems to be a general reluctance to trust blogs ahead of traditional media, even if the blogs have a long and trusted record. Sadly, this little snippet gives the journalist a nice easy own goal.

As many comments in both articles have said, a very quick bit of research would have shown that this was a genuine trending topic and not a story, bar one of those ‘aren’t Twitter users funny’ filler pieces. As it was, both writers immediately jumped to the conclusion that they had a Twitter spam story on their hands and published, seemingly without any checks or approach for comment. Plenty of ammunition for the blogging naysayers.

[But then again some newspaper journalism can't claim to be a great deal better].

On the other hand, there is a lot to be said here for the fact that both writers visibly corrected their copy very quickly after being called to account, and were prepared to brave the comments. And that’s something you cannot imagine the many newspapers doing, period. Plus, it did bring up the small but interesting question of how Twitter blocks certain phrases from trending.

It doesn’t excuse the rather sloppy research (and desire to pull out a quick post) in the first place [3]. But it does show how news can be more democratic and accountable, and quickly corrected, and that’s got to be a good thing.

[1] For anybody not familiar with the sitcom, it was a running joke where Mrs Slocombe, a very prim and proper lady, would constantly refer to her pet cat in a variety of ways laced with innuendo.

[2] Although it’s easy to forget that pussy has much stronger connotations in the US than it does here.

[3] And I’m writing this as both a fan and a regular reader of both blogs. I think they’re better than a lot of traditional news sources. But when they do mess up, it’s a lot more public.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: Mashable, Mrs Slocombe's Pussy, Techcrunch, trending topics, Twitter

Earlier today, Mr Justice Eady [1] ruled that the author of the NightJack blog could not stay anonymous. This will probably mean nothing to most people, but could be a significant case law ruling when it coming to blogging and, potentially, whistleblowing.

If you’ve never heard of NightJack, he’s a policeman who blogged anonymously and candidly about his job. It was an eye-opener and a great read that made you emphasise with hiss job. The blog won an Orwell Award for the quality of it’s writing.

That blog is no more and the author has been disciplined after The Times ‘outed’ NightJack. One of their reporters worked out the bloggers identity, the blogger took out an injunction, the Times challenged that injunction and today’s ruling is the end result. Bloggers cannot expect anonymity.

The Times says of the ruling: “Today newspaper lawyers were celebrating one of the rarer Eady rulings in their favour.” I’d beg to differ. It leaves me with a slightly sick feeling in my stomach and a slightly bitter taste in the mouth.

Let’s go, if I may, on a slight tangent before getting back to the case in hand. Generally speaking, for both blogging an the internet, I think moving away from anonymity is a good thing. We’re moving to an era, especially with social media, where identity is more open and the internet is all the better for it. It cuts down on trolling for a start.

I’m also a big fan of openness and accountability. If somebody asked me about starting a blog, I’d suggest they do it under their own name, or at least made it clear who they were. It clears up any misunderstandings from the off – setting out your stall so people know who you are.

Let’s also be clear, when we’re talking about anonymity, we’re not talking about identities created around blogging here. NightJack was very different to the likes of Devil’s Kitchen, Chicken Yoghurt, Doctor Vee, Bloggerheads or many of the other well-known bloggers. They have their online identity which sites alongside their real name. Anybody can find out who they are in a matter of seconds – their pen names are their blogging personas.

Moving onto the judgement, I can see why Mr Justice Eady came to his eventual judgement. It’s still a bit of a mess but can be fitted into the letter of the law, by and large (although, and this is one of the wonders of the vagueries of the English legal system, you could easily have seen him ruling the other way).

But the judgement: the reasoning, the logic and the whole lead-up to this just doesn’t feel right. As Paul Bradshaw says:

“… this is a ruling that has enormous implications for whistleblowers and people blogging ‘on the ground’. That’s someone else’s ‘public interest’.

And that last element is the saddest for me.”

Let’s leave aside the judgement itself for a minute (the judge can only really rule what’s in front of him) and look to The Times and their role in unmasking NightJack. This is the part that leaves me uneasiest of all.

Their journalist pieced together who NightJack was and then went to publish. And the question I have is why? [2]

NightJack is a public servant, true, but in the grand scheme of things he really isn’t that important. Certainly, going to all this effort to unmask him seems a little, well, excessive.

He’s a blogger. A well-read blogger, yes, and an award-winning one. But is it really in the public’s interest, as opposed to being merely interesting to the public, to know who he is? If he were a Chief Constable, a high-ranking BBC employee, an MP or a civil servant, I could understand this. But a Detective Constable in Lancashire? It’s hardly a high-level scoop is it? Or, indeed, a high-profile and significant victory for openness, as they portray the judgement.

[The other thing that sits uneasy with me here is The Times have previous in this area when they unmasked Girl With A One Track Mind for no other reason, seemingly, than they could. That, more than NightJack, seemed like a particularly pointless act for the sake of a story].

Justin McKeating makes a very good point with regard to The Times’ victory today: that of anonymous sources for journalists. They may not be bloggers, but you can see where Justin’s coming from – the principle is very similar (and apologies for copying a large chunk of his text here, but it helps place his argument in context:

Would I be wrong in thinking that anonymous sources, insiders and friends are conducting the business of democracy in the media with the willing collusion of journalists? If nothing else, it’s in direct contravention of the ‘different type of politics’ promised to us by Gordon Brown – a politics promising a ‘more open and honest dialogue‘.

It would seem to me that some kind of public interest challenge in the courts is in order. Imagine the story in The Times…

Thousands of ’sources’, ‘insiders’ and ‘friends’ churn out opinions daily — secure in the protection afforded to them by the cloak of anonymity lent to them by obsequious journalists.

From today, however, they can no longer be sure that their identity can be kept secret, after a landmark ruling by Mr Justice Eady.

The judge, who is known for establishing case law with his judgments on privacy, has struck a blow in favour of openness, ruling that democracy is “essentially a public rather than a private activity”.

What could be more in the public interest than that?

This comes back to Paul Bradshaw’s earlier point about whistleblowers and ‘on the ground’ bloggers.

When it comes to the majority of bloggers, it probably doesn’t matter too much whether they’re anonymous or not. It’d be nice if we knew who they were, as I said earlier, but, at the end of the day, most of the time it’s not really a huge issue.

But those bloggers who write detailed and informative posts about their profession are much rarer and are worth treasuring. Blogs like NightJack, PC Bloggs, Dr Crippen and The Magistrate’s Blogs are essential reads.

They are candid and often eye-opening and enables you to get a better idea of the problems facing our police force, judiciary and NHS. They lift the lid, often a very small lid, on the inner workings of these professions. If anything, they give the public a remarkable insight into the inner workings. And to my mind, this is largely a good thing, as Tom Reynolds points out:

“What bloggers do is humanise and explain their section of the world – public sector bodies do well to have bloggers writing within them, after all these are the people who careabout what they do, about what improvements should be made and about where the faults come from. They highlight these things in the hopes that, in bringing this information into the public consciousness, they can effect a change that they would otherwise be powerless to bring about.

Anonymity provides a protection against vindictiveness from management who would rather do nothing than repeat the party-line, or lie, that everything is perfect, there is no cause for concern. Having seen management do, essentially illegal things, in order to persecute and victimise staff – anonymity is a way of protecting your mortgage payments.”

You can understand why they are anonymous [3]. The blogs probably contravene the terms of their employment. Yet, in their own small ways, they are important for the public to read, more so than the person writing them (in all honesty, the writer of NightJack could have been any Detective Constable). [4]

There are very few bloggers for whom anonymity is a near-necessity, and if it stops others coming forward to give their insights then the internet will be poorer for it. And for what purpose. One article that doesn’t really amount to much.

Not everybody will agree with this. David MacLean makes some very good points as to why NightJack shouldn’t remain anonymous, although even he calls The Times’ decision to publish “a tough one”.

In the grand scheme of things, The Times’ unmasking story by itself really isn’t overly big. The legacy of if could well be.

[1] A name familiar to anybody who’s studied media law.

[2] Anton Vowl asks the same question.

[3] Not all are. Tom Reynolds from Random Acts of Reality, who has some fairly strong words about this case, and Suzi Brent from Nee Naw are more public examples. But I’d wager they’ve had some awkward conversations with their line managers at some point.

[4] One of The Times’ arguments was NightJack was committing Contempt of Court with his posts, and there is an argument here. Certainly if the blog had collapsed a trial there would be little argument against naming the author. That said, the internet is a hideously grey area when it comes to contempt. A reasonable amount of time on Google would probably produce enough to piece together extra information on any significant trial covered in either the national or local press. You’d probably have to do a fair bit of work to piece together events from a trial and link them back to the blog, and the level of threat the blog posed to a fair trial… possibly minimal. It doesn’t make it right, but I’d be surprised if anything NightJack wrote would have led to a trial being abandoned.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: anonymous blogging, blogging, journalistic sources, NightJacker, public sector blogging, The Times, unmasking bloggers