Attention has now turned to the role of the media in reporting on the Rothbury story and its influence on the unfolding events.

The past seven days have seen journalists from national and international radio, TV and print outlets descend on the small Northumberland town and its 1,700 residents. Mobile studios were set up around the village to report minute-by-minute on the search for Moat.

Rothbury residents were polarised in their response to the manhunt choosing either to stay indoors or going about their lives as normal. Those that did venture out were sought out by journalists to comment on the story.

Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter spawned discussions as the search for Moat progressed. Every aspect of the story was debated and discussed online.

Here’s the issue in my view: in an era were the media has an almost limitless capacity to publish content on the internet and almost anyone can create that content whether it be words, pictures or video, inevitably editorial boundaries are pushed far beyond any public interest claim.

And so a questionable phone interview with Paul Gascoigne was played live on air by local radio stations in Newcastle. User generated eye witness video footage showing the standoff between Moat and the police was published by the BBC.

Journalists themselves used Twitter to communicate with each other and their audience crossing a line, possibly for the first time on a major news story, between personal comment, speculation and reporting.

Media blogger Enemies of Reason has played out some of the possible scenarios that could have resulted from a heavy-handed media approach:

“There was the rush to the riverbank by photographers keen to get a key photo of Moat – maybe the deadly money shot, who knows? And those pictures of cops with guns, almost certainly telling the army of snappers to get away, for their own safety, and maybe so they didn’t by their presence provoke him into shooting anyone, even himself. If Moat had done something because he’d seen the advancing photographers, what then? Anything for a picture? Would it not matter? But what if a police officer had been shot dead because a photographer in the bush had looked like a sniper? Who knows. Luckily it didn’t happen. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have happened.”

The relentless round-the-clock reporting from Rothbury has led to the media being accused of becoming part of the story.

At one point on Friday evening Northumberia Police took the unusual step of directly asking the media to back-off, claiming that its presence was “impacting the ongoing operation.”

Rothbury is beginning to get back to normal.

But for the media the question remains. Do social media and round-the-clock news reporting threaten editorial integrity?

“[…] In this case, we would like to confirm that Paperchase bought the artwork in question, in good faith, in October 2008, from a well-known central London Design Studio along with a number of other designs. The illustrator who is making the allegation made us aware of her concerns in November 2009 and we duly responded to her in early December, since when we had heard nothing….until today. Back in November 2009, we spoke at length to the Design Studio in question and they categorically denied any plagiarism.”

Gather No Moss also released a statement via Paperchase.

“We have contacted Hidden Eloise by email and are hoping to talk with her soon. We carry the work of designers who like Hidden Eloise are all trying hard to make a living through their art. We would never knowingly sell a design that infringes the copyright of a fellow artist.”

These are robust responses. But Hidden Eloise remains unimpressed either by the tactics or the response from either Paperchase or Gather No Moss – and she has the mob rule of Twitter on her side.

Hidden Eloise’s blog post went viral this afternoon fuelled by the indignation of Twitter users. There is almost certainly a case to answer but the speed with which a story circulates around a network in a case such as this means that basic tenants of journalistic practise are frequently left in its trail.

The Handbook of Journalism published by Thompson Reuters seeks to uphold the highest levels of journalistic integrity set out in its Trust Principals. All major news publishers have similar codes. Reuters has a very clear position on stories sourced via networks.

“It is important to remember that Twitter and similar sites are not sources per se. It is wrong to talk, for example, about picking up Twitter. It makes no more sense to source a story to Twitter than to source it to the internet or an email.”

Reuters is also very clear that a story should have an original source.

“You must source every statement in every story unless it is an established fact or is information clearly in the public domain, such as court documents or in instances when the reporter, photographer or camera operator was on the scene.”

It also a well-defined approach to the principal of fairness when an allegation is made by a third party.

“The act of seeking confirmation of the news before publishing it can lead the organisation to front-run our story and announce the information before we have a chance to put our story out. This does not relieve us of the responsibility to give an organisation a fair chance to comment. […]”

The Paperchase story has followed the first two guidelines but not the third. A story about a third-party propagates through a network until it is directly countered. This is yet another example of how social networks are accelerating the news cycle and don’t necessarily adhere to journalistic standards.

It is telling that Paperchase had not set up a Twitter feed (@FromPaperchase) until today and that its response has been published not on a blog but on the contact page of its web site. Companies must engage in the channels used their customers. And for Paperchase that’s clearly social media.

We’re all aware of the issue; there isn’t anyone in the PR industry that hasn’t been guilty of spamming bloggers or journalists at some point in their career.

Research by Realwire claims that 1.7 billion irrelevant press release emails estimated to be received in total each year by UK and US Journalists alone

Mark Borkowski and Stephen Davies are also onboard from the PR industry alongside media distribution services and journalists. It would be great to see more PR agencies get behind the initiative and sign-up to its Bill of Rights.

Here’s what Russell has to say.

[…] writing about my neighbourhood worries me deeply. Because the people and shops and cafes are going to notice that you’re writing about them, and if you’re in any way critical they’ll know and glare at you, and you’re going to feel really bad.[…] There’s a difference between slagging off a restaurant you don’t intend to go back to and walking past the same place every day.

I’ve tried it and its not comfortable. There is no doubt hyper local media is viable and that local bloggers are able to provide the content and reach of a regional newspaper but the issues of personal anonymity and legal protection need be tackled.

Russell again.

[…] if hyperlocalism is going to work in the UK maybe it needs to be aggregated rather than authored (somehow, I’m not really sure what I mean by that) or it needs some imprimatur of professionalism that says “I’m just doing my job”.

The twin issues of personal exposure and the backup of a publisher need to be resolved if hyperlocal media is going to work.

I’ve explored this model before – journalists and editors as coaches to amateurs, sharpening content and acting as a filter. I’m a contributor to one such project in the North East.

Anderson is the managing editor of Wired, a publication that like many others has extended its online presence to include contributions from enthusiastic domain experts.

Anderson said that it’s not uncommon for stories contributed by bloggers to get more traffic than those submitted by journalists.

But Wired doesn’t typically pay its non-journalist contributors. Anderson reckons that the reputation and audience is reward enough. He said that he has never had any complaints and has plenty of people keen to sign-up.

It’s freeconomics in action. Except that it isn’t. It is simply exchanging one form of reward (money) with another (profile). As Broadstuff’s Alan Patrick says the contributor still needs a day job to pay their bills.

“The Day Job! Of course! Yes, the Day Job is what earns the Real Money. You then use your Free Time to make Free Stuff to sell on the Free World. But if your Day Job is making stuff that people that people are making for free, then what?“

This model works for now but it is wholly reliant on the editorial team as custodians of the Wired brand. As soon as standards slip the audience and contributors will follow.

My personal view is that journalism is misunderstood. Robert G. Picard, an authority on the economics of media says:

“It is not a business model; it is not a job; it is not a company; it is not an industry; it is not a form of media; it is not a distribution platform. Instead journalism is an activity. It is a body of practises by which information and knowledge is gathered, processed and conveyed. […]“

A trained journalist can turn their hand to any story. A domain expert is limited to their personal area of expertise. And then there are good writers and bad.

Education is a critical. Writing style is one issue, but beyond that few bloggers have an awareness of the more sensitive areas of reporting such as copyright, citation, court reporting, defamation, reporting death, fact checking and second sourcing.

By paying limited attention to these journalistic tenets, bloggers risk dressing opinion and speculation up as fact, or worst making a legal blunder. When errors inevitably attract comment or criticism, corrections are made on the fly.

This argument was played out in the New York Times in early June by Damon Darlin who accused bloggers of taking a publish-and-be-damned approach. He received a harsh rebuttal from the blogliterati including Michael Arlington and Jeff Jarvis.

Alan Patrick calls it real time news processing (publish in real time) versus the old model of batch processing (to hit a print deadline).

“[…] what is going on here is not journo vs blogger per se. After all, journos have a few news-churning ploys of their own. It’s more a shift of media, from paper to broadband.“

Jeff Jarvis celebrates so-called beta journalism and calls time on journalism as we know it.

“Online, the story, the reporting, the knowledge are never done and never perfect. That doesn’t mean that we revel in imperfectation. […] It just means that we do journalism differently, because we can.”

Journalism. But not as we know it.

The sheer volume of conversation taking place around the Iranian election result are cluttering up channels and making it impossible to hear voices that are coming directly from the country. On social networks from Flickr to Twitter messages of sympathy and support are generating huge volumes of noise.

Broadstuff’s Alan Patrick reckons that it’s a new type of spam:

[…] a new type of spam is born, “whuffiespam” where the aim is to jump on to a good cause and get social capital by being visibly (and risibly) more caring than thou.

An editorial function would separate the signal from the noise and rate the integrity of the source. It would also stop the nonsense seen yesterday from HabitatUK which has hijacked popular Twitter tags with promotional spam.

Alan reckons that this is the Future of Twitterspam. Better get used to it – or overlay an editorial model.

Story via Neville Hobson and Susannah Wyeth.

Have you signed up to Twitter yet? The hype is dissipating and you’ll find all of human life online. Every genre and sector of the media is represented on Twitter which has led PRs to scramble to the platform to pitch stories on behalf clients.

Journalists love it as it enables them to ignore and block spam pitches. And unlike email the 140 character format forces PRs to be succinct. Best of all they can choose who they follow, ignore or block.

Journalists on Twitter aren’t hard to seek out. Use Twitter search or a media directory that incorporates Twitter usernames such as Media UK. If you want to pitch a journalist you have earn their trust and be allowed into their network.

Speed is collating a series of case studies where we’ve used Twitter to seed and pitch a story. Ironically for all of the talk of digital techniques disrupting the PR industry, Twitter is bringing media relations back full circle to focus on direct relationships with journalists.

The country’s media is not allowed to report news that is critical of the ruling regime. Publishers initially responded by publishing blank pages (image via Jachin Sheehy’s Flickr stream) until closure threats resulted in state reporting.

News led blogs such as Coup and a Half, Fijigirl, Fiji Uncensored, Intelligensiya and Tears for Fiji are currently the only way of sharing uncensored news and have taken the place of the media.

Journalists outside of Fiji are left unsure as to how to separate news from rumour and opinion and we’re back to debate about the role of bloggers versus journalists but in the absence of a news vacuum in Fijian bloggers are playing an important role.