It seems the House of Lords Communications Select Committee will be conducting an inquiry into the state of press regulation in the UK. Naturally, I’ve sent the clerks the link to my Leveson (As It Should Be) project, an HTML version of the Leveson Inquiry report. Hopefully that will streamline their research and inform the debate.
Continue reading “More on #Leveson (As It Should Be)”
The Leveson Report (As It Should Be): An explanation of the project
Here is the short essay originally posted on my Leveson Report (As It Should Be) project site, explaining my reasons for initiatin the project.
Continue reading “The Leveson Report (As It Should Be): An explanation of the project”
The Leveson Report (As It Should Be)
Its about time I publicised a project I’ve been working on in my spare time:
The Leveson Report (As It Should Be).
No, this isn’t a rewrite of the report where I change all Sir Brian’s recommendations to suit my politics! Rather it is
An open, linkable, HTML version of Lord Justice Leveson’s report into the culture, practices and ethics of the press
Over on the project website I have published a short explanation of why I initiated this project. In short: I think in a modern democracy, publishing accessible versions of public documents is essential. Having a simple HTML edition of a crucial text such as the Leveson Report means that more people can read and engage with it.
I hope the site is easy to navigate. To view a particular chapter of the report the site visitor simply has to type the part and chapter number after the website address. So to visit chapter 2 in Part B, you would type:
http://http://leveson.robertsharp.co.uk/B/Chapter2
In a similar manner you can jump straight to a particular section or even a single paragraph in the report. Full instructions are available on the project website.
My hope is that other people can take this project and run with it. All the HTML pages that make up this version of the report are available on GitHub, so anyone can download the files and host their own version of the report (here’s a handy ZIP file). I confess that the underlying markup (i.e. the raw code of each page) is not completely perfect, and I would welcome any help in polishing the pages. On GitHub, anyone can ‘fork’ the project and begin making alterations.
I have set up a mailing list. If the Leveson Report (As It Should Be) project is of interest, please consider subscribing. There are options to be notified of every change to the site files, or just major changes and developments with the project.
For fun, I’ve created a Twitter account, @LevesonAISB, which is automatically tweeting links to various sections of the report. I’d love it if someone helped me set up randomised Tweeting of sentences pulled from the document.
This is not the my first project on the subject of making public documents more public. See also The Defamation Act: Complete & Unabridged, Get Yourself A Cheap #Leveson Report, and Tracked Changes In the Defamation Bill.
Hacked Off: Unwitting support for self-censorship?
There was some controversy last month surrounding free speech group Index on Censorship. They’ve appointed Steve Coogan as a patron, but he is famously a part of the Hacked Off campaign which supports press regulation policies that Index does not. Both Nick Cohen in the Spectator and Richard Pendlebury in the Daily Mail have written angry responses to the manoevre.
I’ve heard a couple of people express dismay that Hacked Off are being described in such reports as a “pro-censorship lobby”. Through my work at English PEN 1, I’ve met three of the people who run the group—Brian Cathcart, Martin Moore, and Dr Evan Harris. If you have read their countless articles, heard any their speeches, or read their tweets on the issue, I do not think one can seriously suggest that they are in favour of “censorship” as the word is commonly understood. They are at pains to point out that they do not endorse any kind of pre-publication curbs on the press.
Continue reading “Hacked Off: Unwitting support for self-censorship?”
Questions for the Impress Project, part II
Thinking more about the Impress initiative, I think the main issue with the idea of a ‘Leveson compliant’ regulator is that Sir Brian’s principles might not be the most appropriate way to solve the problems which prompted his Inquiry in the first place. Continue reading “Questions for the Impress Project, part II”