hmmm

020 7269 1430

• Communication
• Legal Business
• Real Estate
• Wealth Management

To the zeitgeist, and beyond

February 26, 2010

What’s hot this Friday afternoon? Aside from our burning desire to down tools and say farewell to the working week?

Well, the Guardian avows that Zeitgeist is where the action is. Zeitgeist is a visual record of what people are finding interesting on guardian.co.uk at any given time, but it looks (and behaves) a bit differently from most other things on the Guardian site. Indeed, you could say that it takes Fleet Street’s embrace of social media a stage further. As they say at Zeitgeist: “While other bits of the site are curated by editors (like the front page, or individual sections) or metadata (like blogs, which display in reverse-chronological order), Zeitgeist is dynamic, powered by the attention of users”.  In other words, dear readers, you call the shots.

Zeitgeist’s creators say that it isn’t finished yet, but this work-in-progress will definitely be worth watching. Will it emerge as truly democratic, or prone to manipulation? We shall see.

Meanwhile, we learn from the good folk at RollonFriday that the Centre for Brand Analysis announced this week that The Law Society had come top of the legal sector of its Superbrands poll. The poll aims to measure the perceived quality, reliability and distinction of a brand and is drawn up from the opinions of 1,700 business professionals across the UK. Overall, the Law Society has the 75th best brand in the UK.

That’s pretty good going, and might make the vacant Commissioning Editor’s job at the Law Society Gazette all the more attractive. Who knows – perhaps whoever takes it will even propel the Law Society onto the Guardian’s Zeitgeist pages?

Have a good weekend, on the cutting edge, or otherwise.

MPs signify well, not much, really, on Press Standards

February 25, 2010

The recommendations of the Commons Culture, Media and Sport committee’s report on Press Standards have been greeted with praise in various quarters, not least the media. No wonder, for its recommendations add up to precious little.

MPs called for a new requirement that journalists notify the subjects of their articles in advance to be enshrined in the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) Code. They added that failure to do so in advance of a critical article being published should exacerbate costs in the event that the subject of a story successfully sues for breach of privacy. Well, that’s all fine and dandy, save for the fact that newspapers routinely ignore the PCC Code for the simple reason that its sanctions are all but non-existent and, such as they are, have no fiscal effect whatsoever.

How, indeed, is it envisaged that costs will go up if this watered down ‘prior notice’ provision (aka, ‘Mosley’s law’) is not met? By statute? No, for the MPs reject the idea of a privacy law being on the statute books (they also, quite rightly, give the lie to the absurd idea that Mr Justice Eady single-handedly ‘created’ our law of privacy). How then? By way of an addendum to the toothless PPC Code? And what of English law’s time-honoured adherence to the rule against prior restraint?

The above is but one element of a less than rigorous analysis of contemporary media law by the MPs. Another comes in the quaint idea that the burden of proof, in libel, should be reversed in cases of ‘corporate defamation’ so that companies have to prove they have been wronged. What, then, of the company’s chairman, whose individual reputation is intricately bound up in his company’s? Will a different burden of proof apply to a libel action he chooses to bring?

More on this soon, not least the superficially laudable notion that success fees awarded to claimant lawyers should be cut from 100 per cent to 10 per cent (as the Ministry of Justice has recommended). Have the MPs forgotten that we’re dealing with lawyers here? A cut in success fees has a simple quid pro quo - a rise in hourly rates. What would be truly radical would be a cap on the level of recoverable costs at various stages of proceedings. But then again, many MPs were once, or still are, lawyers themselves, so perhaps this is too shocking a proposition.

“Cheryl Cole to tell all on Jonathan Ross?”

February 25, 2010

So says the headline to this Digital Spy story. It got our attention, which is more than would have happened if it had said:

“Ashley Cole to tell all on Jonathan Ross?”

Perhaps, as he licks his wounds, Cashley might think about the PR consequences of his actions? Now that’d be a story.

Next Page »