hmmm
I don’t care what you say about me. Just be sure to spell my name wrong.
Barbra Streisand, 1942 – present, American singer and actress.
Good News, Bad News
February 13, 2009
First, the good news. An online reporting restrictions database is due to launch in April. This will make life considerably easier for journalists, who, so long as they remember to use it, will know whether they can publish certain details without landing themselves (and their newspapers) in contempt of court.
Also in April comes another boon for journalists – they will be allowed to cover family courts for the first time. Good work by The Times, whose initiative this was.
But many clouds have their downpour. The bad news is that from next Monday, when section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 becomes law, taking photographs of police officers could be deemed a criminal offence. As The Guardian reports here, under section 76, eliciting, publishing or communicating information on members of the armed forces, intelligence services and police officers which is “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism” will be an offence carrying a maximum jail term of 10 years.
The National Union of Journalists fears that section 76 will be co-opted by the police so as to make life more difficult for photographers. As Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the NUJ, says: “Police officers … believe they have the power to delete images or to take editorial decisions about what can and can’t be photographed. The right to take photos in a public place is a precious freedom. It is what enables the press to show the wider world what is going on.”
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Knowledge Bank
In this article, Gavin Ingham Brooke and Rohit Grover of Spada examine the importance of marketing and PR in a downturn. This article was originally published in Solicitors Journal, Practice Management Supplement, 28 April 2009, and has been reproduced by kind permission.
Environmental Reporting: Trends in FTSE 100 Sustainability Reports
In the latest of our series of white papers, Spada Research examines trends in environmental reporting. The white paper is available for download here.
Now available for download here is Spada’s latest white paper. Entitled ‘The Laity Bytes Back’, the paper looks at Web 2.0 and the professions.
In this paper, published in the International Journal of Business and Economics, David Brock, Tal Yaffe and Mark Dembovsky scrutinise large law firms, their strategies and measures of their effectiveness.
In this article, Gavin Ingham Brooke, MD of Spada, looks at how US law firms should approach hiring a UK PR agency. The piece is reproduced from Strategies – The Journal of Legal Marketing by kind permission of the Legal Marketing Association.
Towards 2012 – The New Legal Landscape
Spada’s white paper on the impact of the Legal Services act is now available to download here. The research recently featured on the front page of the Law Society Gazette.
Information Inflation: Can the Legal System Adapt?
George L. Paul, a partner in Lewis and Roca, LLP and Jason R. Baron, Director of Litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, discuss the “new inflationary dynamic” of information in this article from the Richmond Journal of Law and Technology. How do vast quantities of new writing forms challenge the legal profession, and how should lawyers adapt?
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