Paper Monitor
11:04 UK time, Wednesday, 17 June 2009
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Yesterday in a High Court ruling, the Times won a case against the secret policeman blogger known as NightJack. The blogger had been seeking an injunction against the paper, which wanted to identify him publicly, but the Times fought the case and won. The judge ruled that blogging was essentially a public thing to do rather than a private thing.
NightJack was an acclaimed blog - indeed it won the Orwell prize for political writing - but now the author (who we may now know as Detective Constable Richard Horton) has deleted it as he faces disciplinary procedures.
An odd position, one might think, for a proud newspaper to find itself in, where it could be seen to have been responsible for identifying someone who is publishing sometimes inconvenient things about a public authority. One senses this dilemma goes quite a long way into the Times - its blogger-in-chief Daniel Finkelstein has written a short piece in today's paper in which he stops some way short of robustly defending his paper.
"Although the journalist part of me applauds any insight provided into the secret world of the police, there is a large part of me that sees why they would want to close NightJack down... It may have been been entertaining and informative to blog about current cases and police action. But was it ethical? Or loyal to your colleagues? Those, however, are issues for the author and his employers to sort out. For the rest of us, well, NightJack was superb. To me, blogs which build a picture of real life are the king of our form."
Deconstruct that!
And even weirder is the fact that DC Horton has written an article in today's Times as well. There seems to be no bitterness, no daggers drawn despite the dispute, just an acceptance that "it was decided that the public right to know about me outweighed any claim to personal privacy".
A link at the bottom of the column points to "a longer version of the article" being available on the Times website. The that even after the blog won the Orwell prize, none of the newspapers or TV stations which reported on the blog "seemed to want to publicise who was behind my blog".
He adds: "Then one morning I heard a rumour that the Times had sent a photographer to my home. Later in the afternoon came the inevitable phone calls from the Times, first to me and then to Lancashire Constabulary asking for confirmation that I was the author of the NightJack blog. That was easily the worst afternoon of my life."
Sadly there wasn't room for those lines to make it into print.
In any case, Paper Monitor has to ask him- or herself, why would a blogger really want to be anonymous anyway?
PS. The Daily Express is today offering a free packet of Waitrose economy essential tea bags. The cultural dissonance still makes Paper Monitor's brain hurt.
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