Defamation overview.

Defamation is one of the most common causes for action to be taken against a journalist therefore it is important to be aware of it and well informed about it. When something is printed about somebody that may damage their reputation in the mind of right thinking members of society, this is defamation. It must be seen to lower peoples estimations of the person in question, it must be published to a third party and the person must be clearly identified.

Defamation can lead to people being shunned from society or avoided, it can discredit people in their trade or profession and it can expose people to ridicule and even hatred. We must look at these phrases to decide if somebody has been defamed.

Defamation is not necessarily bad . In many circumstances, defamation is in the public interest and needs to be reported. For example if a newspaper was to report that a public figure was sent to prison for murder, it would be damaging his reputation, however if it was true and can be proved, this is called justification. A journalist can still be sued if the story is true, this is why it is important to always have absolute empirical evidence for anything written. Privilege is another defence for journalists, if the news is in the interest of the public. This defence is slightly more risky however as it is often hard to define public interest. Defamation does not tend to be something that a journalist should worry about too much when reporting from court, in court, everybody has 'qualified privilege', the right to report what is said in court. AS LONG AS IT IS FAST, ACCURATE AND FAIR.  This also applies in parliament and in local council meetings.

If a Journalist was to defame somebody without justification, it is possible that they could correct it to appease the victim. They can include a correction in the newspaper stating that what they said was incorrect and often apologising. (This will be small, near the back of the newspaper and will rarely be seen.)

Purposefully saying something in order to damage a reputation or something that you know to be untrue is known as malice. This is illegal and should be avoided at all costs in journalism.

WINOL 2

After the success of 'from bongs to gongs' I was asked to take on the role of Headline writer for the bulletin, as well as my role of web editor. On the web side of things, I had decided, with Jason, my web development editor, that we should move away from 'Joomla' the content management system that we had previously been using for WINOL. We both found it hard to use, and hard to develop the website in the way that we wanted it to look. Wordpress seemed like the best option so Jason went bout redeveloping the site in Wordpress. In the meantime, I made sure that everybody was registered on Joomla and was able to put written stories on the site. In previous years I feel that everybody had seen written stories (and the website as a hole) as an afterthought to the bulletin. I wanted to change that so insisted that every bulletin sotry had a written story to go with it by 5pm on a Wednesday. This worked out well and for the first time in a long time, we had a busy, live looking site, as well as a bulletin.

In terms of headline writing, our top story was regarding the scabies outbreak at the University. I decided upon "scabies gets under the skin of Winchester students". We also had a story about the worlds coldest beer that was being sent to the arctic. I immediately wanted to go for 'polar beer', but it didn't fit the format of the headlines, so I had to "kill my babies" instead opting for " a warm welcome to the coolest beer in the south" thanks to a little help from Chris.

BJTC Awards + WINOL 1

The BJTC awards now seem like a distant memory, but my blogging has not been up to date this term, so I'll go through a recap of the day, and the role that I played. I took on the role of managing editor, slightly different from the web based role that would become familiar to me.  My role basically consisted of making sure that everybody was in the right place at the right time and knew exactly what they were doing, this included the rest of the production team, and all guests. I assigned members of my team to certain guests, Ben and Alex waited at reception for students and nominees, whilst Jason took care of Alastair Stewart. I arranged details with vice chancellor Joy Carter for her arrival. This all went as planned and general organisation was very good, the only problem being latecomers having to be refused entry once the event started. They were understandably upset, but unfortunately this was unavoidable. The event was a great success and a great way to advertise Winchester Journalism to other journalism students from around the country.

The following week was the first edition of WINOL, and I had the responsibility of taking the BJTC award footage and editing it into a package. Henry had helped me with the ordering of our shots, so I wrote a voice track for the piece. I decided that I needed to make Alastair Stewart the key focus on the news package, although we wanted to make something of the fact that we won awards, the real news story was having a celebrity presenting the awards for us. I wanted pictures of Alastair Stewart in his more familiar setting, presenting the news, so took some from Youtube, I was allowed to do this as it was only around 4 seconds, so counted as fair dealing, we showed the clip to a copyright expert and he said that it was safe, although we were slightly pushing our luck, because it was't being used for purpose of review, but it was, in a way being used to tell the news. I wanted a catchy opening so went with "from bongs to gongs" incorporating the big ben bong sound that is so well associated with ITV's ten o' clock news.

I was fairly happy with this package, it was the leading story in the bulletin and the intro seemed to work really well. I also felt like I'd written to the pictures quite well throughout. the main problem I faced was the sound quality. I had recorded my soundtrack using a gun-mic in an empty classroom, and  it didn't sound as good as it could have.

www.winol.co.uk

Law notes: prejudice and contempt

Prejudice and contempt

Contempt – criminal act of breaking rule

Prejudice- influencing the impartiality of the jury. Publishing info that could lead to unfairness at a later stage.

Understand the risk of prejudice!

Contested facts that will be prejudicial

Case becomes legally active when somebody is arrested/warrant given for arrest.

Detention without charge: police have 24 hours to question, senior officers can extend by 12hrs, magistrates can extend to 36 hrs, cannot exceed 96 hours, terror suspect limit 28 days.

Pre trial hearings: pre trial reports 7 points:

1.     names, age, addresses and occupations of defendants

2.     Summary of charges

3.     Name of court and magistrates names

4.     Names of solicitors/barristers present

5.     Date and place to where case is adjourned

6.     Bail arrangements

7.     Legal aid?

Categories of offence:

·      Indictable offence: 5+years (murder, robbery, rape)

·      Either-way: Can go to crown or magistrates court

·      Summary: Stays with magistrates (drunk and disorderly)

Magistrates power

·      6 months jail, fines up to £5000

·      Suspended sentence

·      Conditional discharge

·      Community orders, binding over

·      ASBO

Key stages of Trial in crown court

·      Jury sworn in

·      Prosecution opening

·      Key prosecution witnesses

·      Defence opening

·      Judge’s summing up

·      Jury sent out deliberation and verdict

·      Sentencing

Court reporting rules

·      FAST

·      ACCURATE

·      FAIR

·      Contemporaneous

·      No recording

Children and young people

·      Legally juvenile until 18

·      Under 18s get anonymity

·      Beware of accidental identification (Jigsaw identification)

The Bible (How to correctly put your written stories on the website)

Here is a basic step by step guide to uploading your written stories onto the new WordPress website.

1. Go to www.winchesterjournalism.co.uk/winol/wordpress/wp-login.php

2. Your username should be your first and last name, separated by a space, e.g Sam Ashton. Your password has been sent to you by Jason. It's been sent to the email that you registered to Joomla with, if you don't know this, ask me or Jason.

3.  Once logged in, you should realise that the layout is fairly similar to that of Blogger. On the left sidebar, select 'Posts - Add New'.  This is a pretty good place to write your story, but if you have written it elsewhere, paste it as Plain Text (option in the inventory above text box)

4. At the start of your story, you should write the date in bold, followed by a Full stop, and then your name and job role in italics followed by a colon. Like this:
  23/10/2012. By Sam Ashton, Web Editor: 

5. Make sure that your headline doesn't 'bust'. The style at the moment allows the headline to run over two lines, to ensure that you don't go over this, give your headlines a 35 character limit. Between 25 and 35 is usually a good length. Headlines should be in capitals,

6. The first sentence of your piece should summarise the story, and entice readers into reading more (much like the link to your story in the bulletin. After writing this first sentence, select the 'Insert More Tag' button from the inventory above your text box (this looks like two rectangles separated by a dotted line). After selecting this, a dotted line should appear underneath your introductory sentence.

7. With the format of the new site, pictures are extremely important. All written stories need a picture with them, ideally take these yourself, if this is not possible, take an appropriate screen-grab from your package, or find something using creative commons.

8. Before uploading your pictures, please make sure that they are 200x200. (Will take 2 minutes in Photoshop, fireworks etc.)

9. To upload the picture, select 'upload/insert' above the text box. Select your image and make sure that 'alignment' is set to left. The picture can sit next to your opening sentence.

10. Scroll to the bottom of the page, and select 'Set featured image' on the right hand side. Once again choose your picture, this is to create a thumbnail with your story on the homepage.

11. Also on the right hand side, make sure that the 'category' is set to 'news', and the 'format' to 'standard'. Feel free to add some tags.

12. Preview your piece, make sure it all looks right and reads well. Make sure that the status is set to 'pending review' so that it can be subbed. Then you can select publish.

That's how to upload a written news story, sorry if any of it seems obvious, just trying to make sure I've covered all bases. If you're unsure of anything, please ask me, and if I've forgotten anything, remind me.

Thanks!

Winol website changes etc.

After some discussion today with Chris and other members of the news/production team, it has been decided that we will be making some pretty major changes to the web side of Winol this year.

Firstly, I'm sure most of you will be very happy to hear that we are moving from Joomla to WordPress, and we will still be able to keep the winol.co.uk domain name. We're hoping that this will be easier to maintain and keep constantly up to date, like any news website should be. We are effectively starting fresh.

Winol will no longer be broadcast 'live at 5'. We often struggled to keep this deadline last year, and we can't ever afford to send the bulletin out late. From now on our viewers will be getting their 'news fix at 6' (until we can think of something a bit less awful.)

Social media will be a big part of Winol this year. Thankfully we have a role assigned to keeping on top of our social media and promotion, this is Hannah's job and she will be primarily in charge of the Winol Twitter and creating a Winol Facebook page. We will be trying to make sure that the Twitter ticker is always working and looking good.

Our main inspiration for the website will be the Daily Mail's 'Femail' section. Largely due to the big lead feature, surrounded by smaller features (which for us will be a mixture of features and news stories.) We will be able to make our page look busier than it does now, because we will have more news stories thanks to a bigger news team. Sport will have it's own dedicated homepage, probably with a similar look to the main site.

We discussed a 3 o' clock deadline for all written stories, I think this is realistic in 90% of situations, as most VT's will have been submitted much earlier in the day, then written stories can be online long before the bulletin. Written stories will, as always, need a still image with them.

Finally (I think), we will be trying to introduce HTML5 rather than flash, apparently this is generally better and more modern but not something that I am particularly confident with yet, so may be something that Jason will be primarily taking care of for the time being.

Let me know what you all think, give me more suggestions and tell me any problems that we haven't thought of.

THANKS!

The New Journalism. Seminar Paper.

The New Journalism

The new Journalism is an anthology of Journalism put together by Tom Wolfe in 1974. In it, Wolfe writes about a change in the style of the journalism that was being produced at the time. This style of Journalism changed the standard journalistic technique of ‘telling’ to ‘seeing’, describing the scene and allowing the readers to form an opinion based on the descriptions that they were being given. Journalists began to make themselves part of the action as opposed to staying in the peripheries of the story as narrators. This led to objective pieces of journalism being left behind, to be replaced by subjective, dialogue led pieces of writing, and literary devices not dissimilar to fictional novels by the likes of Charles Dickens. Dickens would be able to tell his reader a lot about the backgrounds and personalities of his characters using physical descriptions and traits alone.

Wolfe explains how the new journalism works using four points.

1.Scene by scene construction:

This requires the Journalist to actually experience events rather than just recounting them from other sources. It also involves more detail than a typical account of an event, really allowing the reader to fully understand everything that is occurring.

2. Dialogue in full:

Dialogue needs to be recorded as accurately as possible, to give the reader a full understanding of the character, this may include writing transcribing what somebody says phonetically if for example they have an accent, or a speech impediment. When reporting what other people are saying, the reader should be reading it in their voice, not in yours.

3. Use of the third person

Pretty self-explanatory, this really helps to give the feel of a story being told.

4. Status Details

Wolf describes the 'social autopsy' that should take place when describing somebody. A description should involve small details that say things about their place in society. For example, if a journalist were describing an encounter with David Cameron, they may mention the brand of socks that he wore, and find out how much those socks cost, as to potentially portray him as wealthy.

Hunter S. Thompson, author of fear and loathing in Las Vegas, is widely regarded as a founder of ‘gonzo journalism’, a key aspect of the new journalism. In Fear and Loathing, he details a trip to Las Vegas to cover the Mint 400 motor race, with a car full of mind altering drugs and alcohol. His writing focuses on his personal experiences exactly as he saw them when intoxicated, making himself the main character in the story. Wolfe mentions that doing this can be annoying for the reader, but by involving dialogue of other characters, it ensures that the story is still told fully. Thompson constantly uses dialogue to detail the conversations that he has had with others or overheard in his surroundings. Even through his drug addled fusion of fiction and reality, Thompson manages to convey a damning social commentary of Las Vegas and America as a whole at the end of the 1960s. 

Around the time of both Wolfe and Thompson’s writings, America was undergoing huge political and social upheaval. JFK’s was seen by many as a symbol of hope, and his assassination in 1963 highlighted the problems that America was facing. The Civil right movement was in full flow, racial tensions were high and the war in Vietnam was still being fought and seen by many as an unnecessary and unwinnable war. Muhammad Ali refused to go to war and is famously quoted for saying : “I ain't got no quarrel with the Vietcong.“ There was a general anti-establishment feel attitude around the country; this was buoyed by the student protest movement and the sexual revolution. In Journalism, objectivism from officials, particularly in government was starting to be questioned. The use of LSD was common and helped finding different ways to view things. Liberation and change were the 'geist' of the time These cultural characteristics of America are all clear in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, just through Hunter S. Thompson’s description of his experiences.

Today, the new journalism can be found everywhere. TV documentaries often use gonzo journalists such as Louis Theroux to look into the lives of controversial people or organisations; TV makes this form of journalism easier, as the desired message can easily be achieved through a series of cleverly selected shots. The new journalism is also seen in fly on the wall documentaries, where there is little to no narration, and the story is told entirely through the dialogue and pictures that are chosen by the editor. Newspaper articles on a daily basis feature aspects of the new journalism, celebrity interviews and human interest stories tend to rely on minimal exposition.